Going To An RV Trade Show Was An Adventure More Fun Than An Auto Show

I’ve been spending the past couple of days out in Elkhart, Indiana, mingling with RV makers, dealers, and suppliers in a massive trade show. I have so many stories to tell you over the coming days, but as I’m about to head home, I want to reflect on just how fun this whole thing was. Playing with RVs for a couple of days has been even more fun than going to an auto show.

I had no idea what to expect when I started driving towards the RV Open House. The Open House is a show meant for dealerships. At the Open House, the nation’s largest RV manufacturers all roll out their best campers for dealerships to explore and play with. And the big guys aren’t alone, as they’re joined by small and independent companies also trotting out their best. The goal? Get those dealers to buy those campers so they can sell them to people like you and me.

Until now, I’ve only been to shows that eventually become open to the public like the Chicago Auto Show or the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. And of course, this year I went to the humongous and amazing EAA AirVenture Oshkosh fly-in.

But I haven’t been to an RV show. So this is new. I left home with a gameplan to work it like an auto show, visiting each brand, collecting information and pictures along the way.

One huge difference between this RV show and a car show is scale. At Detroit, I found under 200 cars, and many of them were the same car, but in different colors. When I took the pictures for Jason’s article on the average car face, I was able to knock that out less than a workday, exploring a single floor of a convention center.

It’s a similar deal in Chicago, America’s largest auto show. You can knock it out in less than a day and not miss anything. But this show? It was something very different.

The RV Open house is known to pull in some 500 or more camping units. And they aren’t all in one place, but scattered all over Elkhart. THOR Industries and Forest River are the two largest conglomerates at the show. I got into THOR Industries’ display and quickly learned that my gameplan was going to take far longer than expected.

THOR has a huge number of brands under its umbrella from Airstream to Jayco and Dutchmen. It took me over an hour just to make it a good distance from THOR's entrance.

I spent Monday and some of Tuesday in THOR's goliath display, but I also made sure to do a full sweep of the small brands and independents, as well as other giant brands like Winnebago.

Read the full article from The Autopian here.