Renegade Classic Mountain Ride Along - 2023 Renegade Classic 38CSB

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to Transwest truck trailer RV in Frederick Colorado I'm Brian Ritz today we're going to have a little bit of fun and we are going to take this brand new 2023 Renegade classic 38 csb on a road test So the plan right now is we're going to take it from the dealership to Golden Colorado in Golden Colorado we're going to jump on Highway 6 which is going to be a nice two-lane windy mountainous Road up to Blackhawk Colorado from Blackhawk we're going to jump onto I-70 we're going to bring I-70 eastbound across a couple mountain passes show you what this coach is going to do going uphill show you what it's going to do going downhill and just overall a good driving experience of the 2023 Renegade classic thank you guys so much and we'll get started shortly [Music] foreign so let's talk about the ride of the Cascadia P4 chassis now I've driven super C's literally thousands of miles across Colorado into Utah Oklahoma all over the country really uh you just don't get a ride like you do in the Cascadia P4 chassis so right now we are probably on the worst part of this drive we're on I-70 just about to the base of the mountains where they don't like to do road work for some reason we've got Bridge seams we've got massive dips in the road plus traffic plus rain snow wind so just a bad part of the ride but as you can see from looking at me this coach this chassis handles it like a champ really I don't have to fight this thing I can just kind of point it in a direction and it's going to go there I don't have to White Knuckle it and hold on to this wheel at all times it really helps with that driver fatigue especially for those of you who are going to be doing long haul drives on a regular basis this is the chassis to have for those drives so we just came through Golden Colorado we're heading for I-70 we're going to start our Ascent up into the mountain starting with Floyd Hill now Floyd Hill's a pretty fun one it's a very long not the steepest grade in the world but it is a long pole up that hill it's really going to show us what this dd13 is capable of so we're excited to get started on that so during this video I've said quite a few times that this coach is built on the Cascadia P4 chassis but let's talk about what a Cascadia P4 chassis actually is so it is a chassis built by Freightliner is their best selling over-the-road heavy duty chassis it's probably the best selling chassis on the over the road truck market right now uh this particular one is equipped with the dd13 which is a 505 horsepower 1850 foot-pounds of torque which is going to be fun to show you guys while we're going up and down these Hills now where this is going to separate us from our m2s which you see on most of your most super C's are going to be built on m2s is we get this Cascadia cap now in my opinion this cab is a lot more comfortable and a lot more ergonomic than what you get in those m2s this Wing Dash to the mic gauges and everything are looking at me rather than me having to look over at them really helps a lot it makes my situational awareness better because I can look down see what I need to and have my eyes back on the road in just a quick second we are on the first climb on I-70 West heading up into the mountains here so while we're doing this video I just want to make a disclaimer here I am not a professional driver by any means I'm not a driving instructor I'm just a guy who's driven a lot of coaches across these mountains uh so in some of these videos you see of test drives things like that you see guys saying that you need to manually shift these units which you can absolutely do if you want to I'm not going to Kid myself and think I'm smarter than the engineers at Allison Transmissions who have designed this transmission to perform at its peak level no matter the road conditions so here's how I do it when I drive across the mountains when I hit the base of these Hills I make sure my cruise control is set and I just let the chassis do its thing I let that engine and transmission work together they are very well tuned together and I just let it do its thing am I going to reach the hill at the same or the top of the hill at the same street that I started at no probably not now in one of these smaller units with a big engine we do pretty well so I set the cruise at 57 58 miles an hour We're climbing the hill it's turning about 1200 RPMs right now and we're at 55 miles an hour but driving these coaches I'm not in a race you know I'm 34 000 pounds as I sit right now I don't need to be going 65 75 miles an hour up this hill so I don't see a reason to shift this thing by myself [Music] still climbing the hill here into the mountains and this coach has done an amazing job at maintaining 55 miles an hour all the way up without me doing anything other than on the cruise control set now I've driven class A's across these mountains quite a few times as well and some of the things that I really like about super C's over class is is one we've got safety here so if I were to get in a front-end Collision right now there is that engine there's frame rails there's bracing up in front of me that's going to beat me to the accident the other thing I love about them is it's a lot more natural feeling to drive especially for those of us that drive pickups on a daily basis you know it feels like I'm just driving a pickup I'm not sitting in front of my axles um you know I'm sitting kind of back I've got nice big mirrors that let me see everything around me just feels more like a pickup rather than driving a bus now the other thing and this is my opinion uh but I think that they actually ride a little bit nicer when you get into these bumps class A's are great for that kind of Highway flat driving I think supersedes when you get into this rougher roads and mountains I think they drive nicer I think the more planted on the ground because of the weight on this front end and then when we hit these bumps you don't get that rebounding shock that you get on Class A chassis with uh air ride front suspension so we're going to do a little test here so we are doing about 30 miles an hour right now and it's not because that's what we're limited to we're stuck behind some trucks climbing at six percent great now there's going to be a break here in just a second and we're going to get over and we're gonna go around these trucks so from 30 climbing six percent we're up to 34 37. 39 40. and again I'm not doing anything just uh other than just accelerating hitting the gas so six percent grade from 30 we're rolling through 45 47 50. and I'm going to go ahead and set the cruise at 50. now we're going to continue climbing this grade so this might be kind of a boring segment here but I just want you guys to see kind of what this dd13 is capable of so I set the cruise control at 50 and we're just going to climb cruise control set and see how far we drop while climbing this hill I don't think we're actually going to drop it off but it's a good test I don't really know how else to show it um you know if I had an M2 video I'd send you over there to see that where we would drop probably five to ten miles an hour pretty easily climbing up here now while we're doing this and I have some time I wanted to bring up something that I forgot to mention when I was talking about Detroit insurance package and that is going to be a blind spot assistance over on my passenger side now something that's a little funky about driving the Cascadia chassis is we're so tall up here that seeing out the passenger side directly down is a little tricky now we have a couple ways that we mitigate this or the dangers there one we have the hood mirror on the right side now that hood mirror gives us a great view of the entire bottom side of the right side of this truck we also have a mirror over on the passenger side window that looks basically straight down at the road okay I'm just to interrupt this for a second we're cresting this hill and we're still doing 50. we never lost a mile an hour there but anyways the other thing we have is a blind spot monitoring on the passenger side of this vehicle so there's a little triangle built into the a-pillar there now that a or that triangle lights up when there's someone in that blind spot now also if I were to turn my blinker on and there was someone over there I would get an audible warning alerting me that there's someone there and I need to be careful and look before I merge so great safety feature there all right we're going to go ahead and just start descending the hill so again I'm going to do my little trick here engine brake on medium and then shifter down into fourth gear and we're just gonna let it slow it down and let the engine brake slow us down as we descend this hill now this one's a little bit steeper going this way than the other way so I'm actually going to kick us on the engine brake on high also started a little faster than I normally would have but again you can kind of see my knee over here it's nowhere near a brake pedal now 55 miles an hour is where we're at right now slowing down we're at 54 and it's just gonna slowly but surely slow us down and it's going to do it smooth enough to where it is a comfortable deceleration rather than a very abrupt one and we have reached the bottom basically so we went from 60 to 50 down a hill just by shifting down into fourth gear and leaving it on a high engine brake now I don't get to drive a whole lot of coaches with dd13s there's just not a lot of them out there usually they're going to have a Cummins ISL or an ISX so this is a little bit of an experimentation for me but from what I've kind of learned while driving I don't think I really even need to shift this particular coach down I think that the engine brake on this dd13 is powerful enough that I don't have to worry about it and I don't think I've even mentioned it yet but this is a three-stage engine brake so you get high medium and low high in terms of flat ground and just regular driving is probably a little bit on the excessive side for what our normal users are going to be doing if you're towing big trailers then yeah it's absolutely worth it but that Medium seems to be just a kind of happy spot where you get good deceleration but not excessive to the point where you have to hit the gas again to speed back up so a question we get asked a lot as salesmen is when it comes to these bigger coaches the big super C's the big class A's with the GVWR of above 26 000 pounds with air brakes and air ride suspension all this stuff do I need a CDL a commercial driver's license to operate one of these now it's kind of a yes and no answer in Colorado there is no special license required to operate an RV you can do it with just a standard driver's license no endorsements no CDL no anything now there are certain states that require you to get a CDL or an air brake endorsement or just there's a couple different kinds of licenses that you can get and it's all on a state-by-state basis so you can add or you can Google it on your state you can ask your DMV that's going to be the best way to get that answer now even though the majority of states do not rec or do not require you to get a CDL I still absolutely recommend going through some kind of driver training even if it's just an old retired truck driver who is going to do a two-day course for you who has been in the mountains who has driven coach or trucks and big vehicles with big gvwrs and air brakes you know learning how to deal with emergencies learning how to slow these things down how does it uh maintain speeds doing all this stuff it is absolutely crucial that you learn how to do it before you're in a situation where you have to and have no idea what you're doing so long and short of it no CDL required in Colorado some states require them um but get your driver training in it is absolutely worth it save yourself and save the other people on the road with you so another thing to consider when you're buying an RV especially For Us Colorado guys who are going to be driving across the mountains in the potential driving across the mountains in the winter when there's snow and everything now in Colorado Crossing I-70 from September all the way until March I believe maybe in April commercial vehicles are required to carry snow chains in the event that you need extra traction now technically this is not a commercial vehicle but you're still going to want to have some kind of assurance now personally I would not put snow chains on an RV the potential for them to come off and cause damage to your undercarriage damage to your body panels that kind of stuff uh would be enough to make me not want to do it and I would go for snow socks so snow socks are kind of the same idea as snow chains but they are kind of a soft clothy material with some metal wiring in between or built into them so they provide you that extra traction without having to worry about them coming off and damaging the exterior coach now on these super C's we do have the option to put auto chains onto them and that's going to be an actual mounted chain system that's underneath the coach you would flip a switch in here and basically they drop down and they just spin around really fast and they catch your tires as you tires spin really mitigates the risk of them coming off I've done it on a couple super C's and we just do it right there at our Transwest shop in Frederick Colorado [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] so one thing I love about the super seas that we carry being the new Mars and the Renegades is they use proportional wheelbases to the length of the coach so what that means is depending on the length of the coach is going to determine what length of wheelbase we're going to get now we just showed you a right hand turn I don't have to swing this coach out really really far to avoid running my rear wheels over you know a curb or if there's no or a curb or if there's you know a pothole or something I don't have to swing real wide and I don't have to worry about a massive tail swing that can come around and strike something on the opposite side of me now we just got off of I-70 West and we are going up into Central City or Blackhawk Colorado so this is kind of a cool older mountain town it was a mining town at one point in its life now it's kind of a tourist attraction we've got a couple casinos and things like that up here but this is a fairly fun part of this drive it's a nice windy mountainous Road kind of a constant grade going up I'm not going to push this truck too hard I'm just going to give it a little bit of gas I'm maintaining 40 miles an hour it's a 45 Zone nice big curve here now in Mountain driving and motorhomes what I've learned is slow and steady wins the race smooth is fast um just kind of anticipate what you're going to have to do come around these curves don't make any sudden movements and you're going to be just fine especially you know today I'm not too worried about ice but the road is wet you know there's always a potential for ice to be up here it is only 29 degrees so just smooth winds um and it keeps your passengers comfortable and you comfortable keeps you from really having to hold on tight to the steering wheel or hit the brakes quickly all right guys so we are in Blackhawk Colorado like I mentioned earlier it's just a little old mining town um not really a whole lot to see here it's just kind of a fun drive to get up now we do have a couple casinos and stuff that you can visit when you come pick up your coach there is actually a KOA Campground up here as well so you could drive your coach up here stay up here explore the mining town you're in the mountains you get some great view views get to see some wildlife and then all along this little Main Street we've got cool little shops restaurants um just kind of a fun place to come visit that is not too far from the dealership like I said earlier we've been driving for maybe 45 minutes and here we are the Renegade Explorer has a 52 degree wheel cut so we're gonna make a left-hand turn fairly narrow area here now there's no shame in using all the space available when it comes to driving these coaches through small areas on test drives and when I'm out with customers I always tell them if the space is there use it if you have to swing into another Lane and it's safe to do so why risk damaging your motorhome to save your pride so we're climbing out of Blackhawk here um now this is kind of one of my favorite ways to drive super C's and it's just kind of this low and slow crawl climbing out these steep hills in the mountains we're heading back towards I-70 and we'll show you some more kind of upgrade or uh climate Hills going downhills just some more references for you while you're doing your shopping and research on what these coaches are really capable of when it comes to climbing Hills and going downhills [Music] so I mentioned earlier that I do not shift these coaches when I'm trying to climb Hills now going down the hill I have a completely different method that actually works very well for me and this is just something I've kind of learned over time driving across these mountains so when I'm coming down these big steep grades so right here we got a sign that says six percent grade next mile now I don't want to sit here and ride my brakes and heat them up and risk them failing and that is a big potential when you get hot air brakes so what I like to do is downshift this coach into fourth gear and then I ride on the Cascadia chassis with a dd13 I put my engine brake in medium now what that does is it sets me right at about 45 miles an hour and I can sit here and maintain this without doing any work I'm just letting the engine Slow Me Down letting the transmission Slow Me Down I'm not hitting the brakes and I'm gonna ride 45 miles off 45 miles an hour all the way down this hill six percent grade without ever touching the brakes now 45 seems slow but on these big Hills where we've got sharp curves at the bottom slow and steady wins a race I'm still maintaining the flow of traffic not of the traffic you know vehicles but of trucks that are passed or coming down this hill they are limited to 45 miles an hour so I'm maintaining that without working myself or putting myself in a stressful situation where I need to brake hard when I come to these sharp curves still running around these curves I had a 45 mile an hour curve and now it's a 50 mile an hour curve and I have not touched the brakes yet just a little bit of advice and something I've learned it works in both class A's and super C's just a great little trick or trick for driving down these Hills in the mountains going back to kind of safety and just operating vehicles in the mountains especially with air brakes and just being familiar with procedures and emergency stuff drivers training so when we're coming down these big hills in the mountains um engine brakes are just the best thing in the world because it prevents your brakes from heating up and failing on you so all the way down these Hills though you're going to see signs for Runway truck ramps now a runaway truck ramp for those of you who are not familiar with mountains is basically going to be some kind of cut off off the road very very well marked and you're going to hit either very very deep sand very very deep gravel there's usually some barriers at the end that are going to have more sand or water in them and basically what's going to happen is if for some reason your brakes failed so like right now we're going down a six percent grade for six miles if I sat here and rode my brakes the entire time odds are they'd be on fire by the time I hit the bottom of the hill and they'd be absolutely useless to me so they give you run away truck ramps as an emergency situation I wish I had a way that I could demonstrate one without probably trashing a 2023 RV um but basically for those of you who are not used to driving to the mountains become very familiar with where your runaway truck ramps are they're going to be on your large grades going downhill and know that if you have an emergency you always have that option to hit one so another great feature of this Garmin navigation system that these Renegades come standard with is it really improves your situational awareness so I'm just driving along here and I get a little beep from the dash and I look down at the radio and it tells me steep grade ahead now isn't that crucial no because we have a lot of road signs but if I'm on an unfamiliar Road and I have a little bit of a warning and an opportunity to start slowing down prior to hitting the crest of that Hill it really helps great safety feature by Garmin standard on our 2023 Renegades all right guys going back to this Garmin screen and all the things that it does um so just driving along got another audible warning out of the speakers and now it is telling me that there is a lateral wind ahead so basically what that means is at some point here I'm going to get hit by a CrossFit great situational awareness given to us by that Garmin navigation screen really helps me know what to expect and when to expect it foreign [Music] so guys when you buy a coach from Transwest truck trailer RV in Frederick Colorado within 45 minutes you can be looking at scenery like this in your new motorhome now it's even more fun in the winter but if you come and pick it up during the summer you don't have to worry about ice and snow and rain and all that fun stuff just a really really cool experience I can tell you a dozen places to go camping within an hour of the shop so you can come out pick up your coach take it on a few day trip up in the mountain somewhere do some fishing do some hiking whatever you're into and then if you have any problems while you're out you can swing back by the dealership we'll take care of them and Away you go okay so we made it out of the mountains we're coming down this last little uh descent here back onto I-70 eastbound make it back to the dealership here in just a little bit now we'll do a couple more things before we make it back to the dealership but overall uh driving this coach through the mountains is probably one of the most pleasurable coaches I've ever driven great power uh engine brake works like a champ and just smooth and steady now another thing that this Cascadia has over the m2s is it actually has a bigger set of tires on it now I didn't really think about this going into this video but I noticed on these rutted mountain roads I get yanked around a lot less with this big these big Cascadia Tires over those smaller M2 tires just kind of things that I've observed while doing this drive and we'll get you some more information shortly okay so this is kind of exciting we just thought about doing this but we're just going to show you some of Transwest facilities so there's two buildings right here those two big white buildings and there's actually a third one getting ready to go in now that is attp all truck and trailer parts and trans lease which is a big leasing company we do for commercial leasing in uh trucks so attp is a huge Parts Warehouse okay so we have everything from a belt to full Motors sitting in that warehouse that way if our customers ever have an issue we can generally Source parts and have them at any one of our dealerships within an hour or two to get you back on the road and I'm when we get back to the dealership we'll talk about some of the other cool stuff the Transwest does that benefits you okay so this is Transwest facility number three now this is our two HQ buildings so this first one on the right side here we have the Transwest trailer division now this is where we sell commercial trailers for semi trucks the other thing that happens there is we actually have a body shop that is capable of working on trucks RVs trailers basically anything can be handled in our body shop there this next door is the actual service department so this is a massive Freightliner and Western Star dealer we're gonna go ahead and pull in now little known fact about Trans Bus well we are a very big dealer we are still family owned we still have uh the two owners who work here basically six days a week and this is our main headquarters building so we have a couple of different service departments here as well as uh Truck Sales Fleet Truck Sales all sorts of different things going on around here so we're kind of pulling around to the medium duty service department now for our RV customers you won't ever really come to this facility the facility that we actually sell RVs out of well not as big has all the same capabilities that this one has so before we continue on with this driving we wanted to talk about kind of the Transwest culture as well as just Freightliner in general so Transwest actually started as a Freightliner dealership prior to being an RV dealership so we aren't just some mom and pop RV shop that can't work on anything we have to Outsource all of our chassis work no we are a true One-Stop shop we can order you this coach which is a 2023 Renegade classic when it gets here we can do a full PDI on it if it's got a check engine light we can check it we can fix it at any one of our service centers we can do anything from changing the oil to changing a motor and that is one big benefit that you get as be for being a Transwest customer I mentioned earlier in the video attp we no kidding have brand new Motors sitting in crates there just waiting for a customer to need it now generally our RV customers aren't the people who need it it's our truck customers but Transwest has that unique capability of being able to have a brand new motor for this coach in less than two hours so I'm personally a huge fan of Freightliners um whether it be a Freightliner Cascadia M2 Columbia Coronado some of our older stuff we still get those coaches in on trade all the time and even some of the older coaches are just still incredibly built and they drive better than some of the new chassis that we see rolling off from other manufacturers now just while we're here and have a little bit of time I just want to talk about that Detroit Assurance package that is standard on our Freightliner Cascadia from the Renegades so we're going to start over on our right side I mentioned that blind spot monitoring while we were driving that is going to be this black box right here now guys I just drove this coach 125 or so miles in Wind rain and snow so it's not clean right now but this right here will guaranteed save you from at least one accident because you can see how tall this window is up here I'm six feet tall and it's over my head by quite a bit if there's a small sedan sitting right here and you're in that driver's seat you will not be able to see that car here that is why we have this blind spot monitoring the hood mirror and then this mirror that points down from up above moving forward to the front of the coach we've got this little black Square rectangle right there that is also part of our Detroit Assurance package so that is going to be our adaptive cruise control as a reminder that adaptive cruise control does go to zero so you can actually use it in stop and go traffic unlike most adaptive cruise control systems and then last but not least on that Detroit Assurance package up in the windshield you're going to see a small camera lens that camera lens is your lane departure warning system so basically that camera is reading your distance between the lines on the road and if you get too far to one side or the other it'll go ahead and give you that audible warning now while we're here we're just going to go ahead and open this Hood up and take a look at this dd13 I know I've said it a couple times but 505 horsepower 1850 foot-pounds of torque so another benefit to Super seeds I mentioned it earlier is safety having all this structure and frame rail up in front of us so we're not going to be the first one to an accident serviceability though for us when we start to do a pre-trip we want to track and make sure that we have transmission oil there's our transmission oil dipstick your air dryer right up front here that is going to be a maintenance item you don't do it often but you do have to change that out and being able to do it yourself rather than pay a technician really makes the rving experience a lot more fun coming around to the driver's side I mentioned pre-trips so before you take off on any long journey you want to check all your major fluids right so very easy to check my power steering fluid we've got a clear container there with marked lines of where it needs to be engine oil dipstick right there coolant right there huge coolant canister there or container there um with clearly marked lines of where the fluid level needs to be and then engine oil fill if we need it so that's basically your pre-trip not including things like checking your tires now this coach does have tire pressure monitoring built into it but I still recommend before you take off on a trip just go hit them with the air gauge make sure you're good to go [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] all right guys so that is pretty much gonna wrap up my driving test of this 2023 Renegade classic 38 csb um honestly one of my favorite floor plans we're going to follow this video up by doing a live walk through and I'm going to walk you through all the storage all the features everything that we covered in this video and more in a full video walkthrough I've said it many times in videos but if I was buying a motorhome you could guarantee that it was going to be a renegade in one of my videos I even did one specifically because I was trying to convince my wife to let me buy a renegade but it was a 2004 and uh yeah I just I just absolutely love them the 2023 Renegade Classic on the Cascadia P4 chassis drives just incredibly um one of the more pleasurable coaches that I've ever been able to take out on a test drive I want to thank you guys for your time thank you for taking the time to watch this video if you have any questions please feel free to give me a call again my name is Brian Moritz with Transwest truck trailer RV in Frederick Colorado my phone number is 303-482-6375 thank you guys so much and we will see you next time

Channel: Transwest Truck Trailer RV of Frederick

Views: 19,759

Keywords: Test Drive, Super C, RV Review, Driving Video

Id: I11R1mMh3mQ

Length: 33min 21sec (2001 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 19 2022