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Hello Campers!
3 years ago
A camper van should be a staple at any good music festival
Yet I’m strangely drawn to them, especially when it comes to music festivals. Now I hold steady with Duane Eddy on the music choice, the twang’s the thang, but my father used to take his camper to Glyndebourne, which sat well in the car park alongside the Bentleys and Rolls-Royces at the top people’s opera fest.
Eclectic taste has led me to the End Of The Road (EOTR) festival at the Pitt-Rivers Lamer Tree estate on Cranbourne Chase, held at the beginning of September. In my mind it represents four days of great al fresco beer, grub and music, mostly the right crowd, decent weather and unbelievably horrible loos, which you try to forget before you book the next year.
Worth supporting, too, as Covid, along with rising energy and fuel costs, plus the cost-of-living increases, means that, according to the Association of Independent Festivals, more than 100 music festivals have been lost since 2019, with just under 500 being hosted this year.
"Campers is big business right now; it certainly had a good Covid as folk tried to get away from it all. The market is confused, with a lot of different types and sizes, but one estimate suggests there’s a solid seven per cent growth trajectory in Europe between 2021 and 2027, when it will be worth an annual $13.5bn"
I snaffled Volkswagen’s Grand California for the occasion. It’s a bigger camper, based on the Crafter van, with its own wet room and toilet so I could hopefully avoid the last item on the list. Even so, I was risking family ridicule, gunshot wounds from my daughter, and the exquisite denouement such as that suffered by caravan-hating Jeremy Clarkson when photographed emptying a chemical toilet on a caravan site.
I got on and loaded the van, which I found strangely uplifting. Failing to locate the childhood culinary joys of Fray Bentos pies, Angel Delight and Batchelors Savoury Rice, I was pleased the VW has a monster 70-litre freezer/refrigerator as well as its wet room. Gas stoves and lamps, spare gas, sausages and bread, beer, cider and wine, expensive double sleeping bag, copies of the Observer Book of British Birds and William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, pots and pans, string in various lengths, a variety of dubious festival hats, strong torches, stout boots, field glasses and clasp knives; my list read like a chapter out of The Alcohol-Dependent Famous Five.
Then we set sail for Shaftesbury, the nearest large town to EOTR. On the way down, I received word that Ford had announced its plans to reinvigorate the camper market with the new Nugget.
“I could smell the composting loos brewing up over the tasty whiff of sausages cooking for breakfast. I resolved to try the wet room, although the wisest camperiste becomes an expert in shock-cord engineering by erecting their own portable chemical-loo tents pitched downwind of their machines”
Take a beat here. ‘Campers’ is big business right now; it certainly had a good Covid as folk tried to get away from it all. The market is confused, with a lot of different types and sizes, but one estimate suggests there’s a solid seven per cent growth trajectory in Europe between 2021 and 2027, when it will be worth an annual $13.5bn. But Nugget? Is this a suitable name for a camper? And how many times have I heard Ford express a desire to take the camper market by storm? I’ve lost count.
I also lost count of the number of Volkswagen Campers at EOTR festival, which might indicate the Blue Oval’s got a hill to climb. I’d tallied over 50 by the time the dew had leached into my boots. Of the rear-engined VW campers, there weren’t many Splitties (1950 to 1967) – perhaps they’re too valuable to park in a field these days – but a good number of Bays (1968 to 1979) and T25s or shovel fronts (1979 to 1990). It was the front-engined VWs that really ruled the roost, however, with T4s (1991 to 2002), T5s (2003 to 2015) and T6s (2016 to date). Drawn into not particularly even or serried ranks on a (mostly) sun-dappled grassy field, there was but one Ford Transit-based camper. Based on the Mark I 1966 Transit, it was a lovely thing, but hardly much of an inspiration for Ford’s marketers.
Besides, Volkswagen has given Ford a hospital pass over its new agreement known as ‘Project Cyclone’ to share the basis of its commercials…
Light vans have been joint projects since forever, but the tie up between VW and Ford is unprecedented, representing badge engineering on a grand scale. VW builds the small van Caddy and Ford’s Tourneo, Ford builds the Ranger and VW Amarok pickup trucks, and in the one-tonne panel market, which provides the basis for most campers, Ford has netted the spoils with the Transit Custom and VW’s Transporter T7 morphing in a couple of years into a Turkish-built Ford vehicle with VW badging.
Volkswagen has brand equity in the modern camper market that Ford can only dream of
A measure of just how lucrative the Camper conversions can be comes when you look at the current prices for VW’s T6.1 Transporter and California ranges. The former basic panel van starts at £33,189 for a T26 SWB, and even if you go mad and specify a powerful 2-litre TDI with a DSG gearbox and four-wheel drive, you can’t spend more than £45,531. California prices, however, start at £61,322 for the base front-drive 2-litre Beach Camper, rising to £81,068 for the all-the-bells-and-whistles 4×4 Ocean version.
Nice work if you can get it, but VW Campers also depreciate slower than almost any other modern vehicle on the planet. One estimate reckons you’ll get back well over 60 per cent of the value after three years and 60,000 miles.
You can imagine Ford managers must have scarcely believed their luck when they thought they might get VW’s California base to underpin future Nuggets, but VW did a whoopsie on their strawberries and revealed that the replacement for the current Type 6.1 California range will be based on the MQB Microbus platform, which is shared by the cars, so Ford won’t get its stickies on it at all. VW was never going to share the lucrative camper bonanza it has enjoyed since Westfalia-Werke did the first camper conversions in 1951.
Back at EOTR, I could smell the composting loos brewing up over the tasty whiff of sausages cooking for breakfast. I resolved to try the wet room, although the wisest camperiste becomes an expert in shock-cord engineering by erecting their own portable chemical-loo tents pitched downwind of their machines. Most also have svelte awnings, which extend the rain-proof space by two or three times, some even staying erect should you need to drive around a bit.
The stuff you can get for these campers zonks me out: breathing covers protecting the fabric sides of the lifting roof in heavy rain (yes it did), wi-fi hot-spot dongles, satellite TV aerials, solar-generating arrays, swing-out kitchens, extra beds, novelty curtains, Camper-themed air fresheners, storage nets, ladders, washing lines and t-shirts (yes, I did).
Our loo remained unused for fear of the emptying process. Instead, I located a set of proper chemical loos barely a yomp away, but less used and more fragrant, if such a word can even be used in this context. I can see why some might opt for the on-board bit, but I was kept busy by a refrigerator fault that required me to actually drive the darn van around on the road for half an hour a day to keep the auxiliary battery charged.
And the music, well remember that age where you wanted to run away with the circus, when you loved that girl or boy with every breath in your lungs, when you could hum your favourite tunes all day and somehow fill in the bass guitar line in your head, when… Well let’s just say a festival allows you to live that dream for a few days and the VW Camper is your ticket to looking and acting ridiculously for the period, but also having a decent, watertight bed – which is priceless.
"VW Campers also depreciate slower than almost any other modern vehicle on the planet. One estimate reckons you’ll get back well over 60 per cent of the value after three years and 60,000 miles"
Like many festivals, next year’s early bird tickets were on sale the day after it closed its doors. For a moment, I thought about exercising the plastic and borrowing my brother’s Type 2, but then I remembered the loos and wrote an ode instead…
Queuing for the loos; a chemical poo
Composting khazis are better
For the whales and bears,
But whiff that toxic miasma and who really cares?
But what if you dropped something special and chic?
A ring from a loved one, an iPhone in rose pink?
Plop it would go, into the fearsome stink
Would you follow it down in pursuit of your bling?
An exquisite dilemma, but I’d leave it to sink…
