As we attend the 2019 RV industry shows, a few things have become apparent, and that is that RV designers and manufacturers are getting bolder and more creative in their thinking, thus giving us some exciting new RVs to choose from.
One of the most obvious changes is in the exterior colors, and we’re not talking about the trim color. We’re talking about the unit’s overall color.
For example, this year we’re seeing a lot more black and gray RVs, along with some other very unique colors, and if you notice, many of these trailers are a solid color without stripes and decals. Is this the look of the future?
When it comes to RV interiors, we’re seeing more designers leaning toward the yacht or European style and look. Gone are the wood-panel walls and wood-finish cabinets. Instead, we’re seeing clean-looking white or off-white walls and cabinetry with occasional wood trim for accents. I think the best way to describe this new look is clean, luxurious, and practical.
Another trend we’re seeing is increasing the living space with the use of canvas pop-ups and pop-outs, along with full-room extensions.
We saw many examples of these canvas extensions on everything from camping trailers, to Class-B motor homes, and even Jeeps.
As we look around at all the new units being introduced this year, one thing that stands out is the number of camping and travel trailers with that rugged, off-the-grid military look.
In some cases, the look is strictly cosmetic, and in others are, in fact, designed for rugged off-the-road use. Either way, it’s an interesting new look.
As long as we’re talking about extensions, of course, we can’t forget our four-legged family members. How about this cool pet extension we saw just this past week?
Aram Koltookian of KZRV: “This is a Sonic-X, and we were challenged to build something new and exciting for the RVX here in Salt Lake City, and got the team together, and I had a dream of “Let’s build something that’s gonna work any time you wanna go camping,” We saw some different samples, you know, a little while back, of some carbon fiber from Lamilux, and I said, “Man, we’ve gotta make this thing carbon fiber,” so that’s the most dramatic thing.
When you walk up to this coach, the carbon fiber exterior is absolutely stunning, and kind of morphed from there. We said, “How would you go camping–” or “What do we want this coach to do? When you say you wanna go anywhere, anytime, what does that mean?” So that’s when the wheels started spinning. I’m an off-road enthusiast. I’m an outdoors person, and a lot of our team are, so we just got together and it just kept building, and the hardest thing about building this coach was saying, “No,” ’cause we pretty much said, “Yes,” to everything.
The outside of this coach is completely unique. From the ground up, obviously, the carbon fiber is what you see first, when you walk up to it, but you also see the real aggressive off-road stance. We put torsion axles on it with 30-inch tires, off-road tires, to give it a nice, high ground clearance. It also gives you a great entrance and departure angle, so that was all part of the design that we said, “We wanna go anywhere.” We meant it.
As you look around the coach, there’s actually nerf bars completely surrounding the coach, 360 degrees. With carbon fiber, you wanna make sure that you protect, you know, a valuable asset like that, so we wanted the nerf bars to take the hit. As you kind of walk around the coach, there’s a lot of nice things to take a look at. Up front, we have a custom, fully adjustable BAL bike-rack system that will carry four bikes up front, and then on the back, we have not only a place to carry wood or your coolers, but you can carry two kayaks on the back, so four bikes and two kayaks, plus extra coolers and gear on the coach, you immediately notice that right away.
One of the things that you don’t really see right off the bat are the solar panels. We have nine 110-watt solar– flexible solar panels up top, feeding down into a completely controlled nine lithium-ion batteries in its own compartment, so this thing has virtually endless power. So if you wanna go out at night, you wanna keep your lights on, you’ve got more than enough power to go days, even in partial sunlight. The thing will keep charge. It’ll charge whether you’re pulling it down the road with your car, it’ll charge if you plug it in or into a generator.
The other thing you’ll notice in the back is actually we did an Infinite Water System, which is kind of neat because what we wanted to do is, we put two 40 gallon holding tanks in it. Normally a coach this size, you know, would have a 40 or a 45. We wanted it to have more than that, so we’re carrying nearly a hundred gallons of water, and if you’re dry camping for a week, “a hundred gallons” sounds like a lot, but it’s not that much, so we put in an Infinite Water System that allows you to take a hose, put it into a stream or lake, a bucket of water that you got from somewhere else, and refill your water tanks. And a lot of people are thinking’, “What? From a stream?” Well, if you just wanna fill your water tanks for flushing your toilets or anything like that, it actually has a five-micron water filter system that can be expanded to any type of water system filtration that you want, so no matter where you are you can find some water, and get it back into your coach and refill your tanks, so that was a real important aspect of it.
You know, as an outdoor person, one of the things that you’re gonna be doin’ is you have gear with ya, and sometimes gear breaks, so on the front and on the back, each, on the front there’s two 40-inch, and on the back, there’s two 40-inch LED lights that are producing over 64,000 lumens of light, so we wanted to really light up the back or the front of the coach so that if your truck breaks down, if your bicycle breaks down, or if your fishing rod needs to be repaired, you’ve got enough light to sit out there under the stars and get it done.
We had a lot of fun on the inside of the coach. Not only does it have a Murphy bed, which has been done. We do that in our current Sonic lineup, but all of the furniture is custom-made. We worked with a boat furniture manufacturer to really make the furniture soft, custom density foams, but it’s also very, very durable–you know, it’s meant to be out on a punting boat that can just withstand sun and spills and everything– with midnight black accents, which tie into the, you know, to the exterior, so we wanted to be really comfortable so that, if you are a couple and then you got some friends out in the tent and you have a bad couple of days of rain, you can get in, you can watch a movie. You can watch a movie on the outside as well.”
Like we said, the Sonic-X is an experimental prototype, but who knows? We just may see it or a version of it in the near future. Learn more about KZ-RV here.
