First Drive Review
Every so often, the recreational-vehicle industry finds our number at the bottom of some filing cabinet and calls to offer a vehicle to test-drive. When the phone rang recently, we quickly established the “what” part of the call, which is to say, the new $95,544 Airstream Avenue, but it took us much longer to figure out the “where,” which is always the difficult thing when an RV is in play.
An RV is basically a one-bed, one-bath condo on wheels, which makes it ideal for visiting any spot in the “One Nation under God” that is accessible by a paved road and offers septic dump facilities. Just keep hosing in the gas—lots of gas, because the bigger RVs usually return single-digit mileage—and America is your oyster.
Can You Get a Warranty on a Used Tank?
Somewhere down the line, I read that Phoenix’s Papago Military Vehicle Show is the largest military-vehicle collectors’ meet in the United States. As we found out later, the whole “largest in the U.S.A.” aspect might have been something of an exaggeration, or faulty memory. Either way, if you haven’t been to a military-vehicle show, you haven’t seen the Second Amendment in its full glory, which means privately owned tanks. And helicopter gunships. And armored cars, army ambulances, jeeps equipped with .50-cal. machine guns, and so forth. This spectacle seemed as good a destination as any, so the wife and I (plus our two parrots) saddled up in the Avenue and joined the Friday afternoon cattle stampede out of Los Angeles on Interstate 10.
The Avenue is, by RV standards, small. As you can see from the pictures, it’s based on an extended 155-inch-wheelbase Chevrolet Express 3500 work van (base price with the 6.0-liter V-8: $32,285) of the type driven by plumbers and HVAC repairmen. We soon discovered this has its pros and cons.
On the plus side, Chevy vans are banged out by the tens of thousands to a quality level that is current with car-industry standards, unlike larger RVs that often rely on less-common, more-expensive, and more-problematic components from the heavy-truck world. An Avenue would be easy to have serviced at any Chevy dealership, and absolutely nothing about its mechanicals is exotic, from its 323-hp, 6.0-liter L96 V-8 to its Hydra-Matic 6L90 six-speed automatic. (Other van-based RVs exist, of course. Airstream and many other converters build them using the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, and at least Sportsmobile plans to make RVs from the new Nissan NV.)
On the downside, the acres of primer-gray plastic that form the dash and door trim might be fine for Larry the Cable Guy, but they seem overtly cheap in a $95,000 RV, even given the rest of the interior, which is quite flatteringly trimmed in leather. The radio is the kind of base, tinny unit you’d expect to find in a work van, where the employer figures it has to provide its workers with something to listen to or they’ll quit.
Also, making a workaday van into an RV—complete with a bed, toilet, shower, kitchen stovetop with cabinets and refrigerator, fresh- and gray-water tanks, pumps, onboard generator, satellite television, and more—raises its curb weight to 8100 pounds. That’s fairly close to the stock van’s 9600-pound gross vehicle weight (the Avenue can tow almost 8000 pounds). By necessity, Airstream fits firmer springs and heavy-duty shocks to support the load, as well as high-pressure truck tires. The resulting ride can seem rather brittle after hours of travel on America’s highly imperfect interstates.
The First Overnighter
A late departure out of L.A. meant a stopover in the remote desert just west of the Arizona border. We steered well off the highway to a quiet spot in the sandy alluvial fan of the crumbly Chuckwalla Mountains, which is one small corner of the vast latte-colored emptiness you fly over on the standard approach to LAX.
Like a small sailboat, the Avenue is a self-contained domicile, and there is no wasted space. Storage cabinets elegantly trimmed with a sort of dark, vaguely wood-grained Formica fill every available nook. Above the front seats and hidden behind the flat-screen television is another large storage area, and several underbody storage boxes are accessible from the outside of the van. Recessed lighting is ample, and the zones are controlled by various switch panels. The bed has a pair of reading lights.
