Went to the RV show in Sacramento, CA, today. Honestly, we had a great time, didn't find any super pushy salespeople and saw most of the gas Class A's we wanted to. Why am I saying this? To get a little feedback from others and to maybe let someone like us whose looking for a Class A know what we thought.
Tiffin Allegro - Awesome MH! We both loved it. Easily the nicest gas coach at the show...and easily the most expensive. They had a 32 SA on sale for $143k. Out of our budget
Let's move on.
Thor A.C.E. - We were really surprised. We'd read lot's of stuff like the FR3 stole the idea and did it better, the FR3 has better quality, etc. We really like the A.C.E. We saw the 30.3 and loved the floor plan. I actually like the dinette and I hate dinettes. Lot's of interior storage. Way different than what we'd seen before with the stupid round kitchen sink and some of the early stumbles. We liked it depite being an entry level coach. Barrel and pin hinges, fair amount of plastic, laminate counter tops, etc. Also, not a huge amount of CCC. Not horrible but not as good as some others on larger chassis. But might have been our favorite of the show, though not necessarily the best or what we'll end up with.
Winnie Vista/Sunstar (26HE, I think) - A small step up from the A.C.E. and FR3 quality and material wise. The outside storage has better doors and latches. Had MCD shades instead of accordion shades. Better hinges on the cabinets. But the Winnies have odd floor plans in our opinion. We actually went to Camping World after the show to see a few models that weren't at the show. TV's in weird places, strange layouts, etc. We like the 30T and 31KE and maybe the new 32YE but the rest...meh! Generally significantly bigger tanks than FR3 and A.C.E (and others like Georgetown (which we didn't look at because of the tank sizes...but A.C.E. doesn't have any bigger. We might need to look more at them).
Winnie Vista/Sunstar LX (35F) - Now this is a step up. Corian countertops, residential hinges, MCD day/night and black out shades, etc. Really nice rigs. Also more money, but in budget, and also significantly more CCC in the 35' models with the 22k chassis. We don't really like those floorplans though. We did like all the upgraded features, however.
Forest River FR3 (30DS) - Admittedly, this was our fav headed in...on paper anyway. In person, we liked the A.C.E., it's direct competitor, better. The FR3 has similar cabinet hardware but no pistons to hold up doors. Instead they just drop down and hang. Then there was significantly less interior storage. Tiny doors, short drawers (like really short despite what appeared to be plenty of room), etc. Weird. No fans, either. Just vents. Weird. But there was a lot to like too. Another winner dinette. Nice floor plan. King bed. Huge rear storage area. But after reading all this stuff about FR stealing the A.C.E. idea and improving it, we didn't see it. Maybe if we dig deeper or maybe Thor caught back up in the entry level arms race. FR# have dropped to near the bottom of our list.
Jayco (several Alante and Precept models) - Jayco takes the cookie cutter construction idea seriously. They all looked the same. Same dinette (which sucked), save bed slide (wish was too deep and too narrow and sucked) and same strangely functional kitchen with pull out counter/drawers and stuff. The bed in that super deep and skinny slide plus the horrible dinettes were deal killers. Next!
Overall impressions? The A.C.E. and FR3 weren't the rattletraps we've been led to believe. But the devil is in the details. Low end shades, hardware, etc. may not look bad but might become an issue or cause us to make changes or repairs that raise the actual cost down the road. But they weren't that bad either and both have a lot of nice features...and some glaring shortcomings when compared to more expensive coaches. I'd say the difference between the Tiffin and these two were more like Chevy vs Cadillac than they were like Yugo vs Bentley, however.
The Winnies seem to have floor plans for the sake of having floor plans. The A.C.E. and FR3 are really straight forward but Winnie seems to like experimenting and in our humble opinion, many of those experiments failed. But both the standard and LX models are upgrades and in our price range.
Cargo capacity is limited in the 18000 lb frame and generous in the 22000 lb frame. Is 2000-2500 enough? Certainly, 4000-4500 is. Then again, lot's of Class A's seem to suffer from low CCC.
We also stopped into a very small class C on the Mercedes chassis. Small, yes. But oddly intriguing. Wish I could remember the brand but we might do a little research on these sort of MH's. We probably wouldn't go with a traditional class C since a class A isn't much more money but you get so much more but the small size coupled with the Mercedes chassis is interesting.
Finally, we aren't settled on new but we do like the idea (heard all the cons, thanks
). For us, any of the class A's we saw would do the job and not bust our budget (heard all the reasons we can't full time in anything short of a 45 foot DP, thanks
). Seeing the MH's in person, helped us understand the shortcomings better and whether we could deal with them. Now we just need to digest all this and mull it all over.
Reply away!
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