Caravan build quality

[RogerP]

I'm thinking of changing the van so I'm interested in what people say about different brands and their quality.

Today I went to a localish dealer to get some new awning pegs , whilst there I decided to browse the new Bailey Series 7s on display.

I didn't really take much notice of things as it was a fleeting visit and I was really just dodging the downpours!

Anyway noticed the finish quality of some of the vans was dire and especially in a Loire.

Theres a divider between the kitchen and bed where you can place a TV and I noticed a series of screws that were very badly placed and not uniformly screwed down. It all looked very cheap and poorly finished.

For a new much shouted about range I'd have expected better. Needless to say Series 7s now crossed of the list

 

[Themass31]

I went for a new one a couple of years ago instead of second hand and wish I had stuck to a second hand one,I have had nothing but trouble from it, and now I have found that in the rear bathroom there is a gap between the floor and the back pane, this would have gone unnoticed if it was not for the fact the carpeted box section was not screwed down properly and came off, anyway I have been told by my dealer that when they have had experianced of this before the makers of the caravan (S)by the way have said it's because it has been overloaded.

All i can say is that I must have been traveling with a hell of alot of weight in the rear of my twin axel and making it unstable.

craig

 

[ProfJohnL]

Hello Roger,

I have monitored the forum over the last few years and it seems that virtually all the UK manufactures have at some stage been criticised by forum members about quality issues, and by the same token most manufactures have been given praise from time to time.

My conclusion is there is little consistency in UK manufacturing and delivery standards, and no one manufacture is consistently providing products with zero defects, and further no manufacture stands out as being significantly better than the overall pack.

I am not at all surprised by what I read here, and sadly much of the industry suffers from what the BL cars suffered back in the 1970's.

There is a general feeling that foreign manufactures and especially the German ones do better, but I am not convinced that this is a true reflection. We do here of some problems with foreign manufactures, but as the total sales are much smaller than UK made vans the picture is not perhaps as rosy as they would like us to believe.

My advice is to look at second hand vans, where the bugs may have been sorted, and only purchase a caravan you have had the chance to inspect thoroughly.

 

[RogerP]

John

I totally agree with your comments and thats why I'm taking my time to find the right van.

We dropped really lucky with our current van , it was new , being sold as seen as it were. i.e we got the van we looked at instead of ordering and waiting for a different one to arrive. We were also lucky that it had litterally just come into the dealer and it hadn't had prospects crawling all over it. We took our time looking over it , noted anything we were not happy with (which was virtually nothing) and agreed with the dealer either a reduction or for him to fix before we parted with cash.

What amases me is that the Series 7 is new out and I guess the vans on the forecourts are primarily demo vans. With that in mind surely its in Baileys interest to make these vans look the business to attract buyers.

When you've got ill fitting doors and screws sitting proud of the surface , or screwed in too far that its damaged the hole surround you start to think if I ordered one of these what else will be wrong.

I know people have raised these issues on this forum and others and its nothing new. But what do we do (as buying customers) to get the makers to improve.

I think all too often we are too quick to take delivery of a new van and accept faults when we should actually reject the van.

Afterall would you accept a new car if there were parts missing or the boot wont shut properly , probably not. So why do we do it with caravans?

Is it because it takes longer to make the change , i.e finding one first , then you have to take your current van to do the change. Do people think I've had all this hassle to swap I cant be doing that all over again?

Until the buying public harden up I think makers will get away with it , after all once you buy the van the relationship is with the dealer not the maker. You only have to read the thread 'Dogs Breakfast' to see where that leads.

 

[nrdonnelly]

RogerP

You are completely right to take your time looking for a caravan that conforms to your expectations when it comes to build standards. I agree with John L when he says that the problem is consistency. Some people have a caravan which gives no problems at all, while another customer can get the next van off the production line and have nothing but grief.

I think it's very hard to make meaningful comparisons between the caravan and car industries however, unless you are talking about specialist, small scale manufacturers. If you cast your mind back to when TVR were making cars for example, the quality of them was pretty variable and reliability for some owners was well short of what modern car buyers expect. Many car factories turn out more cars in a week than a caravan factory does in a year, and with small amounts of manual assembly. I can't see small scale manufacture ever being that consistent, but I do honestly think that standards are improving.

As I'm sure many of you have seen, we have been gathering information on caravan reliability both in the magazine, and with a form on the homepage of the Practical Caravan website. We've had well over 1200 responses and once we've crunched and collated the data, we'll be publishing the results in the magazine, and awarding the best performing company with a reliability award. We expect to make this an annual award and see it as a way of guiding consumers to the best performing brands, while indicating to manufacturers how their customers feel about the caravans they have purchased.

If you haven't yet filled out the survey, it will be available on the site until the end of the July.

Regards

Nigel Donnelly

Editor

Practical Caravan

 

[Michael_5123947]

RogerP

You are completely right to take your time looking for a caravan that conforms to your expectations when it comes to build standards. I agree with John L when he says that the problem is consistency. Some people have a caravan which gives no problems at all, while another customer can get the next van off the production line and have nothing but grief.

I think it's very hard to make meaningful comparisons between the caravan and car industries however, unless you are talking about specialist, small scale manufacturers. If you cast your mind back to when TVR were making cars for example, the quality of them was pretty variable and reliability for some owners was well short of what modern car buyers expect. Many car factories turn out more cars in a week than a caravan factory does in a year, and with small amounts of manual assembly. I can't see small scale manufacture ever being that consistent, but I do honestly think that standards are improving.

As I'm sure many of you have seen, we have been gathering information on caravan reliability both in the magazine, and with a form on the homepage of the Practical Caravan website. We've had well over 1200 responses and once we've crunched and collated the data, we'll be publishing the results in the magazine, and awarding the best performing company with a reliability award. We expect to make this an annual award and see it as a way of guiding consumers to the best performing brands, while indicating to manufacturers how their customers feel about the caravans they have purchased.

If you haven't yet filled out the survey, it will be available on the site until the end of the July.

Regards

Nigel Donnelly

Editor

Practical Caravan

Nigel

Personally I don't think that your magazine does anything like enough to drive up standards and highlight extremely poor performance vans. the cynical side of me thinks that advertising revenues play a part here.

There was a post some weeks ago where someone had listed an absolutely horrific list of faults. If I was in charge of the magazine I would have sent somebody there to verify the fault and then printed the post in full in the next issue. I would then interview the MD and ask him some serious questions along the lines of 'is this the standard of quality that you are proud to associate your company with' etc etc. If they refuse to be interviewed just tell us so that we can draw our own conclusions.

Rather than some backslapping awards don't you think it would be better to have a monthly article called ' The most appalling build quality issue of the month' or 'For goodness sake don't buy this van because this is what you will get'.

Bottom line is you are either a hard hitting, tough journalistic campaigning magazine or you're not. Unfortunately, we both know the answer to that one.

 

[Michael_5123947]

Nigel

Personally I don't think that your magazine does anything like enough to drive up standards and highlight extremely poor performance vans. the cynical side of me thinks that advertising revenues play a part here.

There was a post some weeks ago where someone had listed an absolutely horrific list of faults. If I was in charge of the magazine I would have sent somebody there to verify the fault and then printed the post in full in the next issue. I would then interview the MD and ask him some serious questions along the lines of 'is this the standard of quality that you are proud to associate your company with' etc etc. If they refuse to be interviewed just tell us so that we can draw our own conclusions.

Rather than some backslapping awards don't you think it would be better to have a monthly article called ' The most appalling build quality issue of the month' or 'For goodness sake don't buy this van because this is what you will get'.

Bottom line is you are either a hard hitting, tough journalistic campaigning magazine or you're not. Unfortunately, we both know the answer to that one.

 

[nrdonnelly]

Michael,

Thanks for your comments.

I've been editing Practical Caravan for six months, and in that time have been trying to put my stamp on things. One change that I always wanted to implement was a reliability survey and that is now in place.

The reason for it is simple. I'm not prepared to take one van as an example of generally poor build quality any more than I'll take a good one as a sign of excellent build. Only by surveying lots of owners can we draw conclusions about the standard of a manufacturer's work. That's why we want as many people as possible to fill out the survey form, as this will ensure the data and the conclusions are as complete as possible.

Once the survey results are published, then we can start to question manufacturers what they are doing to improve specific issues or faults that the survey has highlighted, and monitor improvements. As I've said, we're looking to make our reliability survey an ongoing concern, but I'd ask for patience as we put things into place.

One other thing I would add, although I'm sure a few of you will disagree is that the majority of caravans are basically free of serious problems. Evidentally, there are some horror shows, but these remain in the minority.

In either case, Practical Caravan's survey is the first step for us in monitoring product reliability.

Nigel Donnelly

Editor

Practical Caravan

 

[rob_jax]

Hi, I'll mostly agree and also disagree slightly with the other posters.

From the Caravan Club reliability surveys, I think you can see that there is a substantial and measurable difference in quality, underlying design and absence of manufacturing faults between the UK and German volume manufacturers.

OK there are cultural differences between UK and German buyers - in general the later being more aware of the engineering basis to a product. Doors that won't stay closed or "Dogs Breakfast" shelving wouldn't be acceptable, and I get the feeling that more and more Brits find this unacceptable too - good.

But the quality of a product doesn't start with the dealer PDI - the Dogs Breakfast story neatly illustrates that it's primarily the design team at the factory that is responsible for a robust, well thought out product that is also easy to assemble in an error free manner.

Shelves that won't hold any weight aren't the best example of a well engineered, quality design.

But even in the bad days of ten years ago - 4 out of 5 UK made caravans were considered OK by their owners (not perfect - but acceptable) and things have improved - and I trust they will continue to improve.

Robert

 

[ProfJohnL]

Hello Nigel,

Please accept that I am rather cynical about the prospect of a magazine that relies heavily of commercial advertising from the trade it is investigating to be able to produce a truly impartial result. I am willing to proven wrong so please try.

Retuning to your first response in this thread, you question my comparison between a caravan manufacture and the car trade of the1970's. It is my reading of the industry that you can draw some parallel conclusions between what happened in the car manufacturing businesses of the 1970's and current caravan manufacturing.

Poor design. (Some even say bad design)

Poor quality control.

Poor production line supply logistics.

Work force on piecework contracts.

Manufactures indifferent to customer complaints.

Dealer network inconsistent in handling customer issues .

Under investment to correct non conformances.

Failing to adopt best practice.

Sounds familiar doesn't it.

The elements processes that go to manufacture a successful product are common regardless of the size or scale of production, so there is validity in comparing the production of caravans to the production of BL cars.

 

[nrdonnelly]

Dear All,

I appreciate the concerns about how impartial a magazine funded by advertising can be, but I'd point to magazines such as our sister title What Car?, which accepts advertising from the car industry, but due to its market leading position, can still report the facts.

The industry ultimately benefits from direct customer feedback and I feel our caravan survey can provide this. It may be several years before this style of reporting can start to improve the end product, but I feel that by taking a long view and committing to the process, we can help caravan buyers and manufacturers equally.

I get to look around a lot of caravan factories and I truly believe that caravan manufacturers are getting cleverer when it comes to production. Investment in design, manufacture and assembly is ongoing but I'm as aware as anyone else that there is plenty of room for improvement.

Best Regards

Nigel Donnelly

Editor

Practical Caravan

 

[Steve L]

As an engineer with mass production motor industry experience and also being involved in smaller production runs, and also being a hardened caravanner, I think I can add a few comments of worth.

First of all though not deffending poor build quality in any form as you the customer expect the best and should rightly get the best. The manufacturers are constantly driven by market demands to build better vans but keep the prices down. So where you had in the old days one van built at a time, you now have a production line.

Production lines bring their own issues with training. You no longer have to employ a team of people who have all the skills to build an entire caravan, it can be broken down to skilled, semi-skilled and operator trained tasks. So you still have a gas plumber hooking up the cooker and heater, but a trained operator might screw it to the floor and run the pipes to the appliance. Thereby, saving money to be passed to the customer.

That is just a basic example of what happens in manufacturing.

As for nigel and his team, they do a good job of balancing the balls of press, so that they neither appear to be negative to the manufacturers or disrespective to us the caravanning public.

I must admit, that I'd never buy a brand new car or caravan. The first year or two of them is plagued with "snagging". Next of coarse is the depreciation as after two years they have lost upwards of 30% of their resale value.

All manufacturers have had their problems, some have weathered the storm well such as Lunar, while others just stick a plaster on (rectify the singular complaints)and hope that only a few of the model run suffer problems.

I'm afraid you the buyer must ignore the salesman tempting you with this that and the other discounts and look very subjectively at your prospective purchase. After all you'll have to live with your choice for a few years.

Steve L.

 

[CameronBurns]

i wouldn't even consider a bailey. the last one i went in had sawdust under the bunks and in the cupboards and had rough edges to the bed slats.

 

[Alan_374342797]

As an Engineer I looked long and hard to choose my new Coachman Amara Festival from Glosop's. I had a new Coachman about 12 years ago and had it for 4 years including every weekend on a static pitch prior to buying a new static, and nothing when wrong it was faultless with 4 years hard use from a family of 5.

We still have the static but I wanted a new small van i could keep on the drive, and I looked at all ranges and read the warrenty small print, and came up with the following info.

Coachman test all the electrics for 24 hours, as an Engineer I know 90% of all electrical failures accure in this period, so this is to be commended.

Coachman also test their prototype vans yearly on the ALKO pave test track in Germany, again this would highlight fixings and strengh in the van, I did hear they are the only UK manufacturer to do this.

They are generally heavier, and it show's when you walk inside, they use additional cross supports in the floor and body generaly and the construction is as near to hand built as it comes these days, with the highest persentage of quality inspecters in the industry.

They are not perfect but from what I have seen with my new 380 Amara and people who visit the bar on our static and touring site, they all seem to rate coachman.

Glosop's were not good at the hanover with loads of issues with their workmanship fitting mover and upgrading my tyres from 165 to 195, where they fitted 3 different tread patters/sizes would you believe.Just hope they perform better at the first service, but I will still check everthing myself.

We met a couple with a new Avondale from them and they were having a nightmer with them and the manufacturers.

So i would not touch an Avondale, and the parts warranty is only a year even if the front panel cracks like all Avondales seem to do.

Bailey warrenty is only up to

 

[CameronBurns]

i agree with your views on the avondale. they used to boast quality, but they no longer do. some of their caravans look really cheap and have silly designs like making the caravan so lightweight and then putting a 4/5 cm in diamiter table leg which weight too much. i looked in a new dart the other day and it wasn't finished off properly. it didn't even have wheeltrims. i have heard of people too who have had problems with avondale's, one case their bed went through in the middle of the night!

 

[colin(bridgend)]

Nigel - rather than have manufacturers/dealers supply you with a van to test wouldn't it be a better idea if the magazine were to employ "spies" - typical husband and wife who would innocently visit dealers on the pretence of buying a new van and rate the quality of manufacture of vans on offer and the service given by the dealer. This would give Joe Public a good idea of the overall quality on offer out there to the unsuspecting public. Obviously the vans at present being offered to your magazine for testing would have had a damn good check over prior to you receiving them so that there would be no manufacturing fault. The service I am thinking of would be similar to the "spy" who reports in the Saturday edition of the Daily Mail on hotel accommodation and service.