WHY IS COUNTRY COACH SO GREAT?

country coach started in the early 1980s when i started a country coach i was 191th employee hired by country coach they started by bob lee who was building campers in his garage he was doing it for his friends and he started building a couple of them and they really liked what he did from a quality standpoint bob lee one of the co-founders of country coach and still into every employee there if it's not good enough for your mother it's not good enough originally they were called country camper and then that name you know when you start building motorhomes you don't need the camper name anymore so they changed their name to country coach i think in late 80s pretty small company at that point in time and then you learn about the rv industry as you're growing up in the industry and that the pride of which the employees had here to make the world's greatest motor home was really unbelievable to begin with as a young man you're going i can't believe how much passion these people have for what they do on an everyday basis bob lee who started country coach he came from the aerospace industry and he took a lot of their ideas of building quality airplanes obviously into building motorhomes and i think that's why country coach did so good throughout the years and why they still 11 years after they went bankrupt are still a one-after motor home it's the quality of their coaches are still second to none there's still people buying 09 country coaches and trading in 2015 coaches for them country coach is one of the unique companies where you have the schematics of all the wiring in your owner's manual there's not too many manufacturers that you could say did that you had production lines and they had like 30 stations and each station they would do a quality control inspection at the end of that station before it would go to the next one they wouldn't let the coach move until it finished that quality control inspection most manufacturers what they do is they just do their inspections at the end of the line so country coach had a different philosophy they were engineered and built to last a long time and they do country coach was also well known for their chassis you can see the picture behind me that's a semi monocoque chassis and basically that's basically just taking all the stress off the two center rails and letting the whole underbay take the stress giving you more storage down below but also giving you safety and just spreading the weight throughout that whole area rather than relying on two rails is huge so it's more of a bridge construction transferring weight the reason nobody did that in the industry is the cost of it you don't have a rail running down the coach and you just bolt to a different section you have jigs set up for every single one of them and you make a middle section different for each and every single one of them it's as a chassis manufacturer as a freightliner or something like that you can never do that you just cost it would eat you alive you can never make money at that their side walls are all steel yeah they're not using aluminum and when they would build the chassis they would come over here and they would lift up this side wall and they had actually welded to the chassis and then they would come over and then they would weld the roof to the side walls so basically you got a cradle of steel for a chassis and the side walls and the roof as a as a coach manufacturer that wasn't a very high end but didn't make a lot of numbers you could you could do something like that and it really made the coach i mean like i said the chassis was designed for the coach not that you had a chassis and you go and put a box on top of it much much different um manufacturing techniques to do that there was a guy that had a i think it was a 1990 country coach affinity that was in guatemala and he had an accident he went down an embankment 50 feet the coach completely flipped over it took two days and two tow trucks for them to lift up that coach that affinity and they drove it from guatemala to junction city oregon wow there's really not too many coaches that would be able to withstand that punishment and again it gets back to not just being the semi-monocoque but all this other steel that's on the coach no aluminum or anything like that the drivability factor has always been a huge thing for country coach we spent a lot of time from a chassis perspective designing that to drive very well do you have any advice for someone that's shopping for a new motor home that's never bought an rv before any advice for for anyone it's a it's a lot easier to buy pre-owned in my opinion because you know i like my money a lot and uh you buy brand new and that depreciation is pretty steep and i think that's what a lot of people are seeing is they're not seeing a lot of coaches that were made very well from after 2010 to today's world absolutely um you know you're not finding solid wood inside coaches you're not finding that semi-monocoque chassis that we've talked a lot about there's a tremendous value in a country coach that was retailing in 2008 for 750 thousand dollars of magna that you could buy today you know asking prices are somewhere you know from 240 to 200 depending on the condition of the coach and that's what you see out there is condition of coaches some are good some need a lot of work and that's why you'll see on the internet prices are somewhat different between you know the years of the coach absolutely for us it's all about the quality and the condition of the motorhome absolutely and any advice at how folks should look for a condition or do you guys inspect motor homes if uh if someone's buying a motor home or anything along those lines well the good thing is we're kind of spoiled because uh for us we know what to look for but yeah for the average person out there they have no idea what to look for there are things to ask and there's definitely certain people to talk to to find out if that's a good year or a bad year because each model of a country coach you know you don't know if it was the beginning year of a new body style or something like that where they you know you want to get that run going where they had built at least 50 coaches or whatever and then you start seeing the changes of that product yeah as far as advice i'd say yeah you always want to get a third eye to look at it that really knows that product yeah but the good thing is that we hand select our inventory and there's a lot of times where i get disappointed and i go look at a motor home and i just be honest with the people and say hey this just isn't for us you might want to take this to someone else to sell it so you know when we go it's usually me unfortunately that gets to go look at these and i got to drive a long ways to go look at them so i want to make sure it's going to fit our image and what we want to sell and in this world that we live in most of these people were that was their dream they worked a long time to build a purchase one of these new and to watch them get that dream and to watch that come to reality for them it was just really um you'd go home with a smile on your face you just felt like you were it was it was a good thing i think for us right now we're just trying to keep the name going um you know a lot of us that work there for so many years we take a lot of pride in the name of the company we're all worked there for so long and we believe in the product we're just trying to keep that name where it should be which is the best of the best

Channel: RVing with Andrew Steele

Views: 32,132

Keywords: rv, country coach, class a rv, diesel pusher

Id: QsPwz0LJAWU

Length: 7min 25sec (445 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020