Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
19-03-2024
OXNARD: Most US recreational vehicles those behemoths of the roadway often resembling box cars that accidentally wandered off the rails roll out of gritty factories in the gray environs of Elkhart, Indiana, and aim to satisfy the wanderlust of largely middle-income customers.
Then there’s the Bowlus, a very expensive travel trailer that can be towed by a Porsche sports car, no pick-up truck required.
Produced in the beach-front community of Oxnard, Calif., sporting 100 more days of sunshine in a year than Elkhart, it breaks most of the RV norms with a curvy 1930s design that sweeps back to a pointed tail, a minimalist interior, and a price tag for its top-end model at $310,000 that is equal to 80% of the cost of a typical single family home.
Bowlus shows that rich people really are different, at least when it comes to spending habits. Wealthy Americans have helped keep the US economy rolling even as the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates to curb inflation, spending heavily on cars, houses, and travel.
Demand for the Bowlus surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, along with all RVs but as RV sales skidded shipments of travel trailers plunged nearly 40% last year as the health crisis eased, according to the RV Industry Association Bowlus kept selling every trailer it could make.
Now the company is expanding by offering a lower-priced version and selling through dealerships for the first time.
The mood of households in the top 25% of the income distribution has consistently run ahead of lower-earning groups since the start of last year, according to the University of Michigan’s closely watched sentiment gauge. In the latest fourth quarter, it stood at 71.3, while the comparable figure for the bottom 25% was 59.6.
“We also didn’t overproduce” during the pandemic, said Geneva Long, Bowlus’s CEO, when asked why her business held up while so many other producers struggled. One problem for the RV industry is that most factories hiked production during the pandemic to an unsustainable level and were then stuck with parking lots full of unsold trailers when demand suddenly cooled.
To be sure, it would be hard for Bowlus to overproduce. The factory, tucked in the back of a manicured industrial park here, only has room for 10 trailers on its main assembly line. (Int’l News Desk)
