They would rather buy hundreds of thousands of motorhomes than pay one or two hundred parking fees

Text/Shi Ruoxiao

The epidemic has changed people's consumption habits, and people's thinking has gradually changed from "extravagance and waste" to "can save and save". Problems that were used to being thrown at service providers such as tour guides, drivers, and hotels are now all coming by themselves.

In this deep shift in thinking, the motorhome seems to be a perfect landing point.

Relevant data show that on the short video platform, in the two keywords of caravan and caravan travel, the total number of related video plays has exceeded 20 billion times. Last year, the total number of RVs in China was 15,731, with a growth rate of 27.85%, a significant increase from the 1.2% growth rate affected by the epidemic in 2020.

In the eyes of many people, the motorhome is not only a means of transportation for short trips, it can even be an extension of the concept of "home", but also an endorsement of a new way of life.

Sitting on the caravan, the four seas are home, quite a romantic sense of "chasing grass and desert in all directions" in the theme song of "The Legend of the Eagle Hero". But is motorhome really a good business?

People who live in motorhomes

The actor Ma Li became a caravan user in March last year, because of the increase in rent prices in Beijing.

At that time, Ma Li received a play, filmed in Hengdian, Zhejiang, there were many scenes, the shooting time was nearly a month, on the other hand, the house he rented in Beijing was also about to expire.

So he faced a classic dilemma of a renter in the north: if he renewed his rent, not being at home next month would be equivalent to paying the rent in vain; if he did not renew his rent, he would have to find a new house when he returned to Beijing.

When he was hesitating, the landlord notified the rent increase of 300 yuan. In Beijing, the money seems insignificant. But there is always a straw that will crush the camel. At that moment he made up his mind: buy a car.

Horse rate China News Weekly calculated an account, the cost of towing the caravan is more than 100,000 yuan, parking costs range from 500-600 yuan per month, because the internal space of the caravan is too narrow, bathing and toileting are inconvenient, so he did a monthly card in the gym near the parking lot, the group purchase price is more than 100 yuan, and it can also meet the fitness needs. In contrast, Beijing rents at least 4,000 yuan a month, and if he lives like this after graduating from college, he can save at least hundreds of thousands of yuan.

Actor Ma Rate and his motorhome. Photo/Courtesy of respondent

Saving money is on the one hand, and even creating revenue: he recorded his RV life and posted it on the short video platform, perhaps the novelty of the actor's identity superposition, and now his number of fans on the short video platform has approached 500,000, and even has advertising and goods revenue.

Under the traffic effect, the probability of receiving the drama has also become higher.

More than a year later, the horse rate has fully adapted to life in the caravan. Although the film and television industry has been impacted during the epidemic and there are fewer scenes that can be received, fortunately, the caravan life in the past year or so has cultivated his hands-on ability, but it has given him a sense of security and is no longer trapped in the anxiety of future uncertainty.

Compared with the "thoughtfulness" of the horse rate, Ke Weiliang's caravan trip is quite hasty: one day in March this year, because the Shanghai epidemic caused the community to be closed, only in and out, after walking around the community, he patted his thigh and suddenly made a decision: rent a caravan to survive the closure period, and then send the relevant content to his car self-media account, and as a result, within a few days, he found himself on the top of the Weibo Shanghai hot search in the same city.

For professional reasons, Covelian had also test-driven a motorhome earlier, but had never been with it 24 hours a day like he does now. Unlike the horse rates that often wander around the suburban set, Covillian has been circling around the city, and the first thing he encounters is parking problems. Initially, based on a sense of familiarity, he chose to park under the company, but because the body was too high to go to the basement, he had to park in the surface parking lot. In the middle of the night, a security guard came to try to drive him away, and after some discussion, he finally stopped for one night.

Covillian in the motorhome. Screenshots/videos

At first, he also held a kind of "performance art" idea, deliberately wanting to stop near the most expensive neighborhoods in Shanghai, but it turned out to be quite difficult to practice. Not only passers-by look sideways, but also always can't find the toilet to catch water. After traveling to a few places, he finally went to the caravan camp driven by a friend and began filming and editing the video in "Absolute Solitude".

"One flower, one world, one nucleic acid per day, one person and one caravan, day after day." In the video, he humorously laughs at himself.

After more than half a month had passed, the community where Covelian lived was unsealed, and this short experience was also announced. He roughly calculated that if it were not for the professional and friendship discounts, all the costs of car rental, refueling, parking and so on would be calculated in full accordance with the market price, and the total cost would exceed 20,000 yuan.

Hydroelectric anxiety

Compared with ordinary family cars, RVs seem to have become more spaceable, you can sleep at any time, everything is very beautiful, but to this day, RVs are still niche commodities in China.

According to the data of The Journey Network x caravan shop, by the end of 2021, the number of comprehensive caravans in the mainland is estimated to be 192,000 (including camp caravans, special vehicles modified RVs, commercial RVs and self-modified RVs, etc.), and the annual growth rate of the expected ownership is about 27%. This data is still at a low level compared to the world's RV industry: in 2021, the total number of RVs in the United States is 13.5 million, and the Number of RV markets in Europe is more than 6 million, an increase of about 4%. Considering the demographic gap, The number of motorhomes in China is not high.

Development for many years is still niche, its use of high threshold is on the one hand, daily maintenance is involved in a series of lifestyle changes.

For motorhome users, as long as they are on the road, they will face a series of plans every morning when they just wake up: how far do you need to drive today? Are there gas stations on the road? Will I hit the height limit bar? Are there motorhome sites to park at night? How much power is left in the car? Is there a place for water and charging in the parking lot? Where does the black water (excrement) and grey water (water used for washing and vegetables) in the car drain out? ......

Hydropower reserves are the biggest anxiety point for every RV user. Even if the battery water tank is all modified and enlarged, the roof is fully covered with sun panels, and it is not enough to live in the car for a long time. Water can also find a place to connect, encounter cloudy days, lithium battery storage is usually only enough for daily boiling water and lighting use, encounter bad weather want to open the air conditioning, either external power supply, or burn diesel. The former restricts the range of movement, and the latter raises the cost of use, which is contrary to the original attributes of the caravan. If you encounter a system failure, the experience is even worse.

Figure/Figureworm Creative

Therefore, how to allocate resources rationally is a problem that Ma Li and Covelians are thinking about every day. In fact, the young people are constrained by wealth, time and even living habits, and the use of RVs is mostly driven by impulse consumption or occupation for the purpose of early adopters, and they are essentially unable to learn from each other.

After China News Weekly joined several social media caravan group, it was found that the highest proportion of car friends in the group is always the high-net-worth people who have retired, and many of them have an average annual number of kilometers of more than 20,000, and even on the road every day.

In the view of this group of people, most of the difficulties and solutions encountered in the use of RVs, such as installing lithium batteries, adding inverters, repairing and replacing solar panels, adding wind turbines, installing and repairing RVs washing machines, DC air conditioners, diesel heaters, freezers, etc., are a kind of adjustment to boring urban life.

In addition to lifestyle, price and policy restrictions have also discouraged a considerable number of people from buying impulses. At present, RVs are mainly divided into two categories: trailer type and self-propelled type, and the holding cost of the two is slightly different. The former is cheaper, priced at 100,000-300,000, imported in 500,000-800,000; self-propelled caravans are more expensive, domestic cheap B-type caravans start from 200,000, C-type RVs are generally between 400,000 and 600,000, involving imported chassis is not capped, millions are common.

Liu Zhicheng, the founder of the first caravan, told China News Weekly that domestic self-propelled caravans are more favored because the previous policy of dragging caravans on the road was not clear, and there were technical difficulties in driving. However, in the "Regulations on the Application and Use of Motor Vehicle Driving Licenses" implemented on April 1 this year, new provisions on the increase in C6 driver's licenses have been added, and policy issues have been gradually solved. However, due to the fact that the front car still needs legal traction qualifications, and then counting the cost of buying a tow rope and a trailer car, the overall is not much cheaper than the self-propelled.

On April 28, in Kunming, the driver received a C6 driver's license. On the same day, the first batch of 13 drivers in Yunnan Province who increased their C6 driver's licenses successfully passed the test in Kunming and officially received their licenses. In order to meet the needs of the public to travel in RVs, the newly revised Regulations on the Application and Use of Motor Vehicle Driving Licenses by the Ministry of Public Security on December 27, 2021 was officially implemented on April 1, 2022, adding a new "light traction trailer" (C6 quasi-driving type). Photo: Photo by Liu Ranyang, a reporter of China News Service

According to the data of The Road Network x caravan, in 2021, the total sales of domestic self-propelled caravans will be 12457, while the sales of trailer-mounted caravans will be only 3274, and the volume of the latter will be only about a quarter of the former.

"The enthusiasm of domestic caravan manufacturers for trailer RVs is not high, and many manufacturers produce trailer RVs for oem work abroad, and they are not sold in China at all." Liu Zhicheng told China NewsWeek. In contrast, self-propelled RVs are much more convenient, as long as they are standardized products and do not involve illegal modifications, C-class driver's licenses can be opened, and the license will not face too many policy restrictions.

But even if the mind, body, and wallet are all prepared, there will still be many unexpected difficulties in the future.

Camps that don't make money

For example, you can't find a suitable motorhome camp to park.

RVs travel far and wide, and everywhere you go, you need to find a dedicated motorhome camp to park and recharge in time. To some extent, this seemingly inconspicuous downstream industry is more important than the upstream auto parts manufacturers, and has even become a key link restricting the further development of the industry.

Zhou Yang, a former employee of Xin lu caravan, told China News Weekly that although the caravan seems to have become a major outlet due to the epidemic in recent years, the supporting industry of the caravan camp has not been able to get a good operation and expansion, taking the surrounding area of Beijing as an example, almost all the existing camps are on the verge of loss or closure.

In Zhou Yang's view, this is related to the fundamental logic and even subconscious of the caravan user group. For most RV users, the meaning of driving a RV is different from that of ordinary driving trips, which is equivalent to extending the concept of "home", so even with consumption habits, it will be biased towards the careful calculation of time at home, which can save money. After traveling and finding a suitable parking place, all activities such as cooking and washing revolve around the motorhome. The result is that motorhome camps have nothing to gain other than a low parking fee.

RV camp in Yueqing, Zhejiang, Yandang Mountain, Yueqing, Zhejiang, August 15, 2021 (drone photo). Photo/Visual China

In response, the operators of the caravan camp have tried various ways, but none of them have worked. Traditional projects such as catering and accommodation overlap with the use attributes of the caravan itself, and some operators have tried to hold activities such as roasting whole sheep or even music festivals, trying to collect additional tickets, but few people should have been able to continue in the end.

In addition to this, there are climatic and geographical constraints. As the temperature drops in winter, the cost of using heating inside the caravan rises sharply, coupled with the high center of gravity of the caravan body, it is easy to slip to the icy road, so many car owners will not choose to travel every winter. "The south is relatively better, such as Hainan and other warm places, can operate for 12 months a year or at least 10 months, the cost can be spread." But northern cities, such as Beijing, operate for at most 7 or 8 months a year, and it is difficult to make money. Zhou Yang told China NewsWeek.

Li Dong, founder of favorite resort camps, told China News Weekly that most of the camps he originally had are no longer open to motorhome users, but are only occasionally used to entertain familiar friends.

"Now most RV users have the mindset that they'd rather pay for hundreds of thousands of cars than pay for one or two hundred parking fees." Li Dong said.

Li Dong told China News Weekly that he has camps in famous scenic spots in Sichuan Province, such as Mount Emei and Dujiangyan, and the geographical location is excellent. However, compared with ordinary parking lots, the cost of caravan campsites is much higher, not only involving the leveling of the plot, but also connecting water pipes, erecting charging piles, dredging sewers, the farther away from the urban area, the higher the related costs. After spending a lot of money to complete this series of foundation works, it is obviously extremely uneconomical to use it as a camp.

"Considering the loss of the line, pull a special line to a very remote place, if there is still a certain distance from the township, a transformer will be more than 300,000." According to the current national standards, an acre of land can set up several (RV) parking spaces at most. So how much should I charge? I charge the owner forty or fifty dollars, which is a kind of harm to me. Li Dong felt helpless.

In contrast, if the same area of land is used to operate a hotel or restaurant, the benefits are immediate. However, as mentioned earlier, not only is the parking fee extremely low, but users are often unwilling to have any economic interaction with the local area, "at most buy something to fry a dish". In the end, the account was obviously at a loss, so no one in the market was willing to do the upfront investment related to the camp, and only individual ski resorts in northern cities would open a small area for caravan parking, but the parking spaces were also extremely limited, most of which belonged to the additional services provided to VIPs, not the main business.

April 19, 2022, Xiangyang City, Hubei Province, Yuliangzhou caravan camp. Photo/Visual China

The cost and benefit do not match, the camps have been shut down, the owner can not find a suitable place to park, receive water, charge, can only temporarily supply sewage in the highway service area, ordinary parking lots and other places. Individual car owners are afraid of trouble, and will secretly discharge black water and gray water everywhere, and after stopping overnight at dawn, they will leave a large pile of kitchen waste to leave. In this way, a vicious circle has emerged, and even the ordinary parking lots of many popular tourist attractions have a great resistance to the caravan user group and are resolutely not open to them.

In 1968, the American ecologist Garrett Harding extended the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" in the journal Science - there was a herder on the public meadow, and every shepherd wanted to make more profits, so a shepherd brought a large number of sheep to graze, although he knew that the overgrazing of the grassland might not be able to bear it, but still profited from it. All the shepherds followed suit, and eventually the grass was exhausted.

This happens because each individual seeks to expand the resources available to him, but the cost of resource depletion is passed on to all those who use them. In this way, the result is, as Aristotle said: "What is shared by the greatest number of people receives only the least amount of care." "It couldn't be more appropriate to apply this concept to motorhome camps.

Uncertain future

Because of the cost benefits and even the change of nature of the land, it seems that only the government can solve the problem. In fact, the early investment behind many existing camps in China also comes from cultural tourism platform companies under the local government. In the past few years, the relevant government departments have indeed issued many policies to promote the development of the caravan industry, but the effect is not obvious.

On November 15, 2018, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and 17 other ministries and commissions issued the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Sustainable Development of Rural Tourism", which includes a clause in the opinions: "Guide the construction of self-driving caravan camps and transportation stations to extend the distribution to important nodes such as characteristic villages and towns, scenic corridors, etc., and regularly release products for rural tourism self-driving tour boutique routes; support the reuse of abandoned industrial and mining land, wasteland and other unused land to develop rural tourism", which is regarded by many people in the industry as a good benefit for the caravan camp industry.

Not long ago, the General Office of the State Council issued the "Opinions on Further Releasing Consumption Potential to Promote the Sustained Recovery of Consumption", which mentioned "establishing and improving the management mechanism of the automobile modification industry and accelerating the development of the automobile aftermarket", some car friends believe that this sentence should be interpreted in two parts, the first half of the sentence is for the specification of the modified car market, and the second half of the sentence is for the caravan camp. The implementation of the policies related to the C6 driver's license in April is also considered to be a linkage with the spirit of the opinions.

However, the government's lead in making upfront investment in any industry is limited by a basic logic: can it pull the output value of the entire industrial chain and increase fiscal revenue and employment? From this logic to consider, the current caravan industry is not only quite limited in output value, but also has serious characteristics of decentralization and non-standardization. Statistics show that in 2021, there will be a total of 182 caravan manufacturers in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, 300 domestic caravan modification enterprises, and nearly 200 caravan modification announcement enterprises, each of which is difficult to form a scale effect.

On July 16, 2021, the nanjing caravan camping expo site. Photo/Visual China

"To put it bluntly, a small caravan factory, which can produce one or two hundred units a year, may be able to count as a certain weight in the industry, and the output value and tax payment are still not much, and there is not much attraction to the government." And many things in it are not highly technical, it is nothing more than a process of processing and assembly. Li Dong commented on China News Weekly.

"Decentralization" and "denormalization" are interactive. Zhou Yang told China News Weekly that caravan users are often not satisfied with the same standardized models, and after the car is obtained, they will often find someone to reinstall the circuit, water pipe and bracket, change it back and forth, and the final result is often "only the chassis is standardized", and there is often a lack of certain qualifications so that the road is stopped by the traffic police.

In the final analysis, camps, policy restrictions, or industrial dispersion are all externalized manifestations of internal contradictions that have not yet been accepted by the masses. The only thing that can resolve this contradiction is time.

During this vacuum period of consumption habit formation, the car rental market filled a part of the gap, but even the car rental platform had a difficult time. Taking First-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai as an example, the daily rent of a motorhome is usually about 1200 yuan, more than 5 times that of an ordinary car. In the case that the price difference of the vehicle itself is not far away, the extra rental difference basically comes from the extremely low turnover rate and extremely high maintenance costs. A car rental company employee told China News Weekly that motorhomes are less than half the annual occupancy rate of ordinary family cars, but the cost of maintenance and cleaning is more than double. Although the rental volume of RVs has been improved due to the epidemic last year, the efficiency of reckoning is still extremely low, so the company will not use it as the main category, and will not expand the inventory of RVs because of the rise in demand at this time.

"After my video was released, a lot of friends in the comments section were talking about wanting to buy a motorhome or something. My advice is not to suddenly get hot and buy one. The operation is fine, the key complex is the set of supporting use scenarios and logic. You really have to go out in a motorhome, and your lifestyle has to change. Covillian told China Newsweek.

In addition to the aforementioned water charging, looking for parking spaces, Covelian also listed some small, easy to ignore details: the height of the body is not enough, getting up to go to the back to get things is always accidentally hit the head; everything in the car, such as pots and pans must find a fixed position, in case of accidental forgetting to fix, the car starts to move, because the self-weight is too large, a rush and a shake, everything will fall to the ground and fall; due to the lack of standardization and supporting facilities of related components, When fetching water, the water pipe interface is always not on the outside faucet, and you can only hold the hose hard to put up...

"It is recommended not to be impulsive, rent for a few days first, see if you can stand it, and then make a decision." Covillian said.

(At the request of the interviewees, Ke Weiliang is a pen name, Zhou Yang is a pseudonym)