Motor Homes From The Historical Perspective...Motor homes have been a part of the American landscape for decades, virtually from the beginning of the motorized age. While they have taken many forms and sported a variety of features, motor homes have proven to be an enduring and practical aspect of traveling in the USA. Why do these homes on wheels continue to capture our fancy year after year? We will need to look at a little automotive history. When cars and trucks first took to the road, Americans were able to cover more distance in less time than ever before. But one issue remained unchanged from the horse and carriage days. Where do you sleep at the end of the day? Since roadside inns were not as plentiful as our modern motels, the motorized travelers often found themselves in the middle of nowhere at nightfall. Sleeping in the car seats or bringing along a bed roll and sleeping under the stars were the first solution to this problem. But Ford, even back then, had a better idea. They marketed a foldout canvas covered frame that fit over the Model T interior, with a special slot cut for the steering wheel to peek out. This provided fairly comfortable sleeping for two, providing one was short enough for the drivers side. This innovation was one of many early steps towards the motor homes of today.
But the true motor homes of today, fully self contained motorized vehicles, would remain a rarity for many years. Creating or investing in a vehicle suited only for traveling was too uneconomical for the frugal natures of the largely agrarian US population. For the most part, early motor homes were the vehicles of choice for those who truly lived on the road. People like salesmen, circus and carnival performers, railroad and oil workers, or anyone else who needed needed to take their living quarters and means of livelihood from town to town. But as America grew up, so did our appetite for convenience. The travel trailer had been the standard of mobile living quarters for nearly 50 years. But trailer rigs are hard to handle, and America's demand for larger and more elaborate mobile living spaces only made this worse. Thus motor homes, once an oddity, began to increase in popularity. Some of the earliest motor homes were called campers. These tributes to our ancestral frugality were self contained units that were strapped into the bed of a pickup truck. This gave the consumer what seemed to be the best of both worlds, ease of handling while still being able to run the truck by itself when not traveling. As good as this sounded, the constraints of the truck bed seriously limited the size and configurability of the camper unit. So the true motor homes emerged. One of these pioneer vehicles were motor homes made by customizing the Volkswagen mini van. These icons of the hippie age were a monument to engineering and ingenuity, packing a lot of living room into a tiny space. Other worked this problem by creating custom bodies for existing vehicle frames. Thus, size and configuration became less of an issue for motor homes. Small ones could be built on compact trucks, medium on van and full size truck frames, and monsters were on the back of tour buses. Several models are built from the ground up, making motor homes with frames, engines, drive trains, and bodies created exclusively to maximize comfort, convenience and efficiency. Now, whether tiny two person honeymooners or massive family homes on wheels, motor homes are still providing a fun and comfortable way to travel. |
