A prototype travel trailer developed at Honda’s U.S. R&D center includes a shower, a kitchenette, and a fold-out futon-style bed. It can also be fitted with a lithium-ion battery pack to deliver zero-emission power at even the most remote campsite.
With more and more Americans heading off-road, Honda wants to enter the towable trailer market and today revealed a prototype of the Base Station package it’s working up.
Developed at its Los Angeles R&D center, the Honda Base Station Prototype is intended to be a lightweight, flexible, and affordable alternative to existing options, such as the Scamp Lite, Airstream Basecamp, and Taxa Cricket, Honda said.
“Base Station is a perfect example of what can happen when you let a team of researchers, designers and engineers pursue bold new ideas to create new value for our customers,” Jane Nakagawa, vice president of the American Honda R&D Business Unit, said during a preview GearJunkie recently attended at the automaker’s U.S. headquarters in Torrance, Calif.
‘Democratizing Camping’
Base Station is small enough to fit in most American garages or parking spots, but offers plenty of space and features when opened up. Meanwhile, weighing in at less than 1,500 pounds fully equipped, it would be readily towable by a Honda CR-V, Honda Pilot, or even downsized models like the Honda C-HR.
The key to the design is its flexibility, explained program leader Dylan King, with space to plug in as many as five different modules that can include features like a kitchenette and shower.
The prototype Honda showed off an interior layout featuring a foldout queen-size futon. An optional kids’ bunk bed would allow the camper to squeeze in an entire family, Honda officials added. “The goal is to democratize camping with a light, towable camper you can tow with a compact crossover or EV,” King explained.
Power to the People
Base Station’s pop-up roof stretches to 7 feet, making it easy to move around inside the camper.
The prototype has solar cells on the roof to provide power wherever it might be parked during the daytime. And Base Station has been designed to provide space for a modular lithium-ion battery pack to keep things powered up even at night. The pack design in the prototype would provide enough power, even without the help of the solar array, “to get you through a long weekend,” said King.
Significantly, Base Station is designed to allow owners to easily change out different modules, depending upon what they might want on any particular adventure, using “no power tools,” said the project leader.
A Growing Market
“COVID got a new generation interested in camping,” Nakagawa said. Honda research estimates as many as 80 million Americans will go camping at some point or another, a figure that’s grown by 15 million over just the last 2 years.
“We wanted Base Station to be for everybody,” she added. And while Honda hasn’t locked down production plans, it expects a commercialized version of the camper to come in at a price competitive with existing options. That runs from around $17,000 for a stripped-down version of the Scamp Lite 13-foot model to more than $54,000 for a well-equipped version of the Airstream Basecamp 16X, Honda noted in a comparison.
Honda officials declined to put a timetable on the project but privately said the project is moving forward and, with a strong public response to the Base Station Prototype, will be added to the company’s lineup. Honda has a long history of rolling out near-ready prototypes before entering new market segments.
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