Why the heck are Airstreams SO expensive?

why would you want an Airstream we're going to talk about the pros and cons of these iconic travel trailers next welcome to the channel I'm Liz and I have an exciting video for you today because we're going to talk about airstreams and are they worth it do you know that brand new airstreams travel trailers go for over two hundred thousand dollars I really love airstreams I think they're eye candy I love looking at them I love meeting neighbors with airstreams and taking a tour of them but I have to say as a full-time rver myself I just don't think that I could full time in one so I will go over the cons but first let's talk about the good things about Airstream now to help me since I don't own an Airstream I have interviewed full-time rvers Karen and Carl they have been full timing in their Airstream since May 2020. they will answer all your questions and that interview will be later in this video now Airstream if you don't know has been around since the 1930s they are made right here in the U.S have always been made in the U.S and were founded by Wally buy them and he contributed to the Mystique way back in the 1950s by doing some Airstream Caravans around the world now Airstream also makes Class B Camper vans this video is only going to be about the travel trailers in general the travel trailers range from 16 feet to 33 feet long and they're not very tall nine feet six inches including the roof air and the interior height ceiling height is only about six feet six inches number one it is a good design these are beautiful inside and out they seem absolutely Timeless there's lots of Windows they often do theme designs like Pottery Barn or Tommy Bahama all kinds of different ones that just really make them beautiful to look at the thing about an Airstream since the longest one is 33 feet they can pretty much go anywhere they can go in most of the national parks and they're also great for boondocking they're very Nimble Karen and Carl who you'll be hearing from soon are in Alaska right now they boondocked most of the way up in their Airstream and the Airstream seems perfect for this big adventure I love the low clearance by the way because you don't have to worry about low bridges or any height restrictions low branches that kind of thing and they are half ton towable that means you don't have to buy a great big truck the smaller ones can be towed by an SUV I think the cons to an Airstream are pretty serious the first one is lack of storage because they're built so low there's very little outside storage it's generally pretty small compartments and inside again because they're so low your lower storage you actually have to go around the wheel well so the wheel well cuts into what storage you could have at the lower parts and there's not a lot of overhead storage either and what you do have you're limited because of the rounded sides of the Airstream your cargo carrying capacity is quite low if you're going to full time the highest cargo carrying capacity you can find is about 2 000 pounds the little 16 foot Bambi you only have 500 pounds cargo carrying capacity so that's not a lot and your cargo carrying capacity includes your water tank and your propane tank even batteries which of course can weigh quite a lot if you're going solar plus the weight of the solar panel so what happens is most people end up using their truck bed as storage I think that's a fine solution and that may be the answer for you the next con and it's a biggie is that airstreams are expensive I mentioned that brand new ones can go for over two hundred thousand dollars even the used Market they're going pretty expensive seventy five thousand eighty five thousand and you have to go pretty old to get down to Thirty or forty thousand dollars so if you take that money and you look at other travel trailers in that price range you're probably going to find newer more bells and whistles a lot more storage and slides so you'll have a lot more space now I know it can be done I just don't know how how do families full-time in an Airstream even a couple without having the slides it just feels like it would be claustrophobic you know you just are living in this tube and I think that would be really challenging with a family and kids or even as a couple it seems like if one person stood up the other person would have to sit down because it would be hard to have two people in the aisle at the same time I've had two separate neighbors tell me that the Airstream air conditioners on the newer airstreams are not robust enough in fact I had neighbors who gave me a tour of their Airstream a couple summers ago it was 85 degrees outside and it was about 82 inside I will let Karen and Carl answer the air conditioning question and really answer all your questions about Airstream they've been full timing for over three years and they'll also share the mods they made to make their Airstream work for them I want to give a shout out to RV mattress by Brooklyn Bedding for sponsoring this video if you're buying a youth camper no matter what it is a travel trailer fifth wheel Airstream motorhome whatever you will definitely want to replace that mattress also if you're buying new a lot of those mattresses are like cardboard so another reason why you will need to replace that mattress I actually cratered the mattress in my brand new 2020 Grand Design fifth wheel a couple years ago and it took me only three weeks to Crater it I have now been sleeping on a Brooklyn Bedding mattress for a year I absolutely love it I wake up pain free now what I have is the Aurora Luxe it's a tall mattress and it's kind of heavy I would recommend for an Airstream to not go for that but to go for something lighter like the dream foam series and did you know that you can get a Brooklyn Bedding mattress in your home they are not limited to just RVs this is wonderful if it's time to upgrade your mattress or if you're waking up with aches and pains definitely check them out Brooklyn Bedding gives you 120 night sleep trial there's a 10-year warranty and there's free shipping the Brooklyn Bedding Factory is in Arizona so they come pretty quick they come in a box they can be a little heavy so you might want to get some help when you unroll it they puff up which is fun to look at I really love my mattress and if you are interested in getting a mattress for your camper or your home don't pay full price I can get you 25 off just go to rvmattress.com Liz amazing and then put in the coupon code Liz amazing and you'll save 25 the Airstream is our first and only camper so far I love the windows and the skylights and the amount of natural light that we get in when we would go to RV shows and walk in other RVs and then walk into the Airstream you could actually feel the difference in quality you know the quality build of them and and the iconicness of it because the Airstream had been around for quite a number of years and it's I mean we still get people go oh nice Airstream or wow cool Airstream in a lot of parks we're the only ones in there the other thing too is there's a little bit of a romance to it Wally by him who started Airstream back in 20s or 30s or whatever over the RV Caravan that he started he's a legend and it was all these airstreams going to Egypt and going down the South America and you've given nostalgic and romantic about it when you learn about it and want to kind of become a part of that an Airstream Club still does Caravans that's a 2005 30-foot classic it's a two axle trailer we were trying to find a 27 but they're they're just hard to find because they didn't make a ton of them and we looked at the smaller 25 Footers but the way it was laid out in the bedroom you were sleeping beside the bathroom that would be problematic our unit actually has the shower and the we have a composting toilet so the shower the sink and all that is in one area and then the other area is a big closet where some of them have the shower on one side and the bathroom on the other side which makes a little bit for scalter for me but we do have a queen size bed look around with the door which is really nice he took the dinette out which gave us more space to do what we wanted to in here we don't have any slide outs but we find that we have enough space for the two of us slide outs would be nice but they're heavy and the slides are problematic as most people that have slides will tell you if they haven't had a problem if someone because it hasn't happened yet but it will happen at some point the 30-foot length gives us a plenty of space inside I mean we have the kitchen area we have the front couch dining area then you have the separate bedroom bathroom area in the back so it's it's almost like you have three distinct areas I would say a downside down some rarely have people come inside like if it's raining outside four of us could not we could but it would not be comfortable to sit in here and talk whereas when we've hung out with people who have larger RVs with slide outs and everything if it's not the greatest of days or if it's getting into the evening and you just want to hang out at inside because of bugs or whatever they have a nicer big space for the four of us to sit comfortably and enjoy a nice conversation I mean we don't have space for a washer dryer like some of the larger air RVs have we do have a small compact washing machine you know that we store in the shower we only use it occasionally we don't use it regularly like for regular laundry we do use the back of our pickup truck for as our garage for a lot of storage although what we need on a daily basis we have plenty of space in the Airstream for our daily basis stuff for you know extra tools and things that you don't use very often we really don't have cargo space for that that goes in the back of the truck well I have to say I wish I could be an Airstream person I'm always fascinated by them they're so beautiful but the stopper for me was the cargo carrying capacity have you weighed yours do you know that you're underweight or at weight or like a lot of people don't want to go there I've waited several times on the CAT scales now hooked up to the truck with the weight bars on it I'm scaling about 8 300 and my and my Max is about 8 600 last year we actually changed out the axles because they were 20 years old so when we did that we actually upped the capacity from a 4300 to a 4500 axle so we actually increased our capacity to more keep it in line with where we're at we're we're heavy I mean I mean when we're full of water and you know all this stuff everybody's heavy typically though we're not riding around with full tanks of water up here in Alaska we are because we're doing a lot of things do you think the Airstream is well suited for boondocking especially us because we're outfitted with 600 watts of solar on the roof and then I have a 335 watts of solar on the top of the truck and we have two 230 amp hour lithium batteries so we replace the the regular toilet with a composting toilet because we knew we wanted to do boondocking literally we have not been plugged in for over a month yeah up here in Alaska wow almost two months actually I'm going on too much we have a 2005 2005. we're older we're older on the walls they actually it's not metal there's metal on the walls but you don't see the metal it's actually it has a code it has it almost looks like a carpet type material on it also overhead the headliner has a quarter inch or better of foam almost like a car headliner so you've got that foam and then the vinyl inside there and so we don't get so much heat transference like the new ones and I've been in the new ones in cold and hot you can put your hand on the wall and you can feel the heat you put your hand on the wall of ours even on a side that has sun coming in and it feels warm but it doesn't feel excessively warm we have a 15 000 BTU heat pump and we were in the Airstream International rally in Doswell Virginia in 2019 it was a 103 or so degrees out there and we were in a field with no shade and I mean it was 80 degrees but it wasn't bad because the air conditioning system was able to keep up and maintain and it was comfortable now we have you know we have a 30 foot and it's it's an older Airstream we only have one air conditioning unit for the entire Airstream we have not had we've used it we have been fine with it the newer airstreams have two AC units on them one usually over the bedroom and then one up in the living area and the reason why is because you've got metal and you've got a three inches of insulation and they use fiberglass insulation which is not the best and then metal so you get a lot of heat transference across there it's just thermodynamics if somebody wanted to get an Airstream and they wanted to get one that's Better Built they should buy before what year do you think right before 2020 they were moving the factory but they were kind of going through the changeover and then coveted hit so that really screwed things up a lot of talk on the forums about cabinets falling doors falling just all kind of problems with these newers and the other thing and this is probably true with any any RV is we totally recommend that someone buy a used Airstream first of all the cost factor is going the airstreams cost a lot already brand new so they're a little bit more affordable when you buy a muse but when somebody buys something new they go through all the warranty stuff and get all the stuff that needs to be fixed fixed so if you buy something that someone else has owned for two three four years they've already fixed all the issues and then you get the Airstream and it's already fixed and at a lower cost and at a lower cost so I mean we've had to fix some things since we bought ours but ours is almost 20 years old we've had to replace the refrigerator and we actually went from the lp the the Dual the dual fuel type to the the basically the DC type which most all the newer units are doing that anyway we have the little auxiliary cooler it's DC powered it's about probably a 48 quarter so when we were thinking about okay when you're full timing and what's important to you first of all they never build these RVs with places to have trash we like to have a regular sized trash can we also recycle so we wanted to have one for recycling and so when we took out the dinette we created space to have a trash can a recycle bin and the 12-volt cooler and it didn't take away from our living space at all because we weren't going to use the dinette do they depreciate differently than other trailers yes when we bought ours in 2015 we could sell it now for more than we paid for it the airstreams kind of depreciate slower anyway because of the crazy events of 2020 the shortages and all that stuff our unit basically went up from 30 000 to 60 thousand dollars so we could actually double our money on it if we sold it but I'm not selling we were in actually in California sitting in a Walmart parking lot and we had two cars come up within 20 minutes and asked if we wanted to sell it and this was back in 2020. if we were to switched out this unit what would we get and I'll tell you what it's you know when you're an Airstream owner going to something else is well this is as Airstream owners for to us all the other brands are called sobs some other brand if you've enjoyed this video please like subscribe and share and let me know if the Airstream is for you or not for you I would love to hear it as always these are exciting times to push past fear build confidence and live amazing

Channel: Liz Amazing

Views: 91,592

Keywords: RV life, Fulltime RV living, Brooklyn Bedding, mattress, Airstream, Airstream travel trailer

Id: qDE2kOoAJ5k

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023