In 1999, Feng Xiaogang's "Lunar New Year Trilogy", the second installment of "See No Evil", was released. Liu Yuan, played by Ge You, is an "old American drifter" who lives in a slightly messy RV. The humor and stubbornness of the character, coupled with the absurdity and freshness of the caravan life scene for the audience at that time, made this scene the laughing point of many people.

At the turn of the century, accompanied by a seemingly unintentional dialogue, the caravan this new species began to enter the vision of Chinese consumers. 2001, the first self-developed, legal on the road, self-propelled caravan off the line, a caravan era of the curtain was formally opened.

Today's market and audience are more aware of the caravanning life and are more eager for it.

On platforms such as Jitterbug and Little Red Book, thousands of caravanning bloggers are gradually emerging - people's impression, playing caravanning is no longer exclusive to "grandpa", such as 996 Internet people, young actors running around and other more youthful and diversified player roles! The role of more youthful and diversified players, such as 996 Internet people and young actors running around, has gradually become the center of the topic in front of the camera.

Jittery platform, # caravan # caravan travel two topics, related video playback has totaled more than 20 billion times. On major social media, the cry of "I want to travel in a caravan" is even more overwhelming. Caravan travel and caravan "snail" began to get more and more young users' attention and interaction.

In the field of travel and lifestyle, the last time such a hot industry or exquisite camping. Behind this "caravan fever", is the caravan life really as good as imagined? Under the clamor, how is the real performance of the caravan rental and sale market, and will Vanlife be the next exquisite camping?

Caravanning: more than just "poetry and a faraway place"

In the first month of the new year, actor Ma Rui set off from Beijing in the middle of winter and drove his RV to the warmth of Guangzhou, heading to his next shooting location.

On the Internet, he is better known as "Haihai's Caravan Life". A month ago, he was just on the top 1 of the Jieyin Hot Spot list, and the topic #North drifters don't rent rooms and live in RVs# brought him more than 44 million views. In the three months since his Jieyin account was launched, he has already gained 310,000 fans and 1.64 million likes.

"I think of the RV as home. That's why my RV life is still a bit different from RV traveling in the traditional sense." Ma rate recalled to Phoenix Travel that due to the special nature of the work, the caravan life for nine months, his real sense of caravan travel only once.

With "caravan snail" to describe this life may be more intuitive.

In the video posted by the blogger "Art's RV Snail Dwelling", the RV seems to have become the key to reducing her commuting time and improving her sense of well-being. As a "worker" in the workplace, Jade parks her RV in a parking lot near her company and returns here every weekday after work. In addition to daily rest and life, this place also serves as a place for Jiao and his colleagues to have dinners and go camping.

Compared to many RV bloggers who emphasize on travel, Ma Rate, Brother Jutsu and others who have been living at a snail's pace in their RVs for a long time are still a minority. This kind of lifestyle, which most people are curious about but don't have the courage to try, is perhaps one of the factors that have brought Ma Rui and Jie to the limelight.

RVing represents poetry and faraway places, but it's not all about poetry and faraway places. The emergence and popularity of related content also seems to release a signal to the supply and demand sides of the caravan market - from the point of view of the use of the scene, the caravan is breaking through the traditional boundaries of the scene of travel, camping, and so on, to extend the imagination of more possibilities.

Data show that a total of 182 caravanning companies in China declared 567 new models in 2021, including 449 self-propelled caravans and 118 trailer-type caravans. Meanwhile, in the first 11 months of 2021, the number of domestic self-propelled RVs sold soared from 7,760 in 2020 to 11,360, a year-on-year increase of 46.4%.

The epidemic that lasted for two years has somehow become a driving factor for the continued high heat of content attention in the RV industry.

Peripheral tours, local tours, self-driving tours, etc. are becoming mainstream, which is a reshuffle and an opportunity for the culture and tourism industry. The return of outbound tourism consumption and the rise of exquisite camping industry also bring part of the demand release for the caravanning industry. The characteristics of mobility, independence and privacy make caravanning trips and caravan life a new hot spot of tourism consumption.

Vanlife: an adventure or a dream?

At the end of every short video released by Ma rate, a similar monologue is left: this is the caravan life of a northern actor, free, happy and full. In most cases, the word "freedom" is arranged in the first place.

"I preferred the free, outdoor life from the beginning." Ma said that he had quit his job after graduation and had traveled to many countries in the meantime. In fact, the first time he saw an RV campground in Vancouver, he couldn't understand this lifestyle until he actually started his RV life.

"I don't feel like I'm 'living at a snail's pace.' For example, when I towed my car to Weihai for work, although my caravan area is only 11.5 square feet, as soon as I get off the car there is a fine soft sandy beach under my feet, and outside the car window there is a blue sky, white clouds, and ocean waves and sand. At that moment, I would feel that even the closest sea view house is not as close and beautiful as my caravan."

No "RVer" would deny the desire for freedom.

When RVs first appeared 110 years ago, or in the early days when gypsies tried to "live on the move", the seed of exploring the world and enjoying freedom was already planted in people's hearts.

Wang Jidong, founder of 21st Century RV Network, introduced to Phoenix Tourism that the concept of Vanlife can be traced back to the 1960s in the United States, when Vandwelling was already very popular and loved by carefree hippies.

The concept of Vanlife varies greatly from time to time and from place to place.

For most people, the original idea of vandwelling was probably a desperate attempt to find a place to live. Since then, Vanlife has evolved from a lifestyle that flourished in the last century to a cultural and lifestyle concept favored by contemporary young people, becoming a way to escape the city, embrace nature, and experience travel. On TikTok, the #Vanlife topic has received more than 4.9 billion views.

As for the domestic market, both Vanlife and Glamping (wild luxury camping), which will become popular in 2021, mean freedom, spirit of adventure, and out-of-the-box lifestyles behind the attraction of young people in China.

However, for most people, Vanlife may just be a good wish. "The social fundamentals and environmental basis of Europe and the United States determine the development of the caravanning industry," admits Wang Jidong, "I think the interaction between the people of Europe and the United States and nature, as well as the state of reverence for nature, is inconsistent with our current domestic caravanning enthusiasts."

If Vanlife is like a dream, a "yearning life," then when the Netflix filter is removed, the B-side of RV life is also little known.

A caravan blogger has lamented in the video, the caravan space is small to live for a long time depressing, adding water, charging, pouring black water (toilet feces) need to do it yourself. Ma rate also told Phoenix Travel, "I just started RV life, all kinds of operations do not know, such as water and electricity supply, indoor and outdoor equipment maintenance, as well as to find a suitable parking lot, etc.. It wasn't until the 6th month of living that I became more comfortable."

BUSINESS: RVing has never been a cheap game

Even with the multitude of details that need to be handled personally, the average RV life is still not a cheap endeavor. The domestic environment also seems to make it difficult for RV living to turn into a cheap game.

In 2019, an article titled "Under the high price of housing in Silicon Valley, those who "use their cars as their homes" caused a sensation on the Internet.

In this highland of the technology industry adjacent to San Francisco, the huge number of employees of giant companies and high salary levels have made the problem of rising rents and housing shortages extremely prominent. Low-income people in this area are forced to live in a "car as a home".

Blogger Ma Rui has also publicly stated on several occasions that the monthly cost of living is much lower when compared to renting an apartment, after living in an RV. Much of Ma's experience is based on the specificity of his profession and the fact that he already owns a car that meets the qualification requirements for front-end towing.

For most people, is "RV living at a lower cost" a real need or a false proposition?

Senior car reviewer, professional traveler Han Lu told Phoenix travel, in Europe and the United States to play the caravan only two kinds of people, one is really no fixed abode, no fixed income of a class of people; the other is the money and leisure, love to travel the consumer groups. And in the country, the latter almost in the caravan players occupy the majority of the weight.

In 2020, the main consumer group of caravans began to appear polarization trend, 40~60 years old people as the traditional main consumer group, always active in the caravan purchase market, the price is relatively high, leisure and convenient communication of self-propelled caravans are fond of.

On the other hand, in the past two years, young communities such as the 80s and 90s are more willing to accept new things, pay for leisure travel and entertainment, and under the orientation of the new media environment, among them, the number of consumers who utilize RVs for self-publishing is also beginning to increase. Young consumers in the model began to prefer the use of flexible, relatively low-priced trailer caravan, the market starting price of about 100,000 yuan. However, the trailer caravan requires consumers to have a qualified tractor trailer, otherwise it will also incur an additional expense.

Outside of purchasing, more young people have started to try RV leasing out of a balance between purchase price and frequency of use and maintenance costs.

Jin Xiaofeng, general manager of Beijing Bestcomp Tourism Management Co., Ltd. shared a set of data with Phoenix Tourism, from the perspective of the main consumer groups of caravan rental, young couples and young families aged 25 to 45 years old groups, and the consumption ratio of silver-haired people aged around 50 to 60 years old, about 7:3 ratio or even higher, the rental consumption per unit price price basically ranging from 600 to 2,000 yuan.

"The rejuvenation of RV rental consumption, can see some trends from the data." Jin Xiaofeng talked about, a lot of old and young young families will start from the lease to experience the caravan consumption, to start a short-distance family trip or even a long-distance self-driving trip of more than 500 kilometers, to form a certain high-frequency demand.

Outbreak: Is 2022 the golden age of RV?

Whether it is in the form of leasing or purchasing, it cannot be ignored that the market is accelerating its consumption and enthusiasm for the caravanning industry empowered by the new media context.

Data show that in 2020, China's caravan ownership has grown to 218,000 units, with an average annual growth rate of nearly 50%. There are views in the industry that the caravanning industry will usher in a real outbreak in 2022, but due to the short development time, the industry is still relatively new, Phoenix Tourism and Wang Jidong, Han Lu, Jin Xiaofeng and other industry front-line people in the conversation found that the further development of the caravanning industry is still faced with a few aspects of the constraints:

First, the number of standard RV campgrounds that can provide professional water and electricity supplies is scarce, and the constraints of network effects have not been formed. The 2018 China Caravan Camping Market Research Report shows that as of 2018, there were 1,273 campgrounds across the country, but among them, there were only less than 300 professional caravan campgrounds equipped with professional water and electricity piles or transfer power supply equipment across the country.

Compared with the tens of thousands of RV campgrounds in the European and American RV markets, the number of domestic RV campgrounds is still insufficient. This also directly leads to the fact that it is more difficult for RV consumers to discharge the gray and black water produced during the journey, and it is also more difficult to connect to municipal electricity, which makes it impossible to meet the demand for air-conditioning in the state of stopping the vehicle, thus creating a very bad RV experience.

Jin Xiaofeng, General Manager of Beijing Bestcomp Tourism Management Co., Ltd, pointed out that the basic contradiction of China's RV camping industry at this stage is "the contradiction between the people's growing demand and aspiration for a better life in the form of RV travel, and the serious insufficient supply of tourism public service infrastructure such as RV campsites and the extremely imperfect service network". ".

Secondly, in the 20-year history of domestic RV development, RV-related policies are still to be formulated and improved, including but not limited to restrictions on motor vehicle licenses and restrictions on road access for trailer RVs.

This also indirectly leads to the upstream and downstream industry scale is limited, the market plate did not develop to a larger body to enter, manufacturing standardization and product consistency can not be guaranteed. This leads to product parts can not achieve large-scale iterative optimization, half still need to rely on imports, which is also one of the factors of the cost of floating.

Finally, it is the domestic paid leave system is still to be improved, resulting in the low utilization rate of the caravan. Relative to the European and American market employees convenient annual leave system, as well as linear, coherent distribution of travel time nodes, most of the domestic caravan travel can only be concentrated in the summer, National Day, Spring Festival and other long holidays, caravan travel time is a dot matrix distribution. Concentrated demand often results in "hard to find a car", off-season idleness, peak season busy death has become the norm for most of the caravan leasing enterprises.

At present, the constraints on the development of the caravan in all aspects of the factors are gradually "untying", such as the rise of young new groups of customers, the C6 driving qualification was introduced clearly, as well as SAIC Datsun, Yutong, Chery, Chang'an and other more and more brands of the host plant marking the layout, etc., all so that the industry is full of expectations for the outbreak of the caravan in 2022.

In fact, as early as 2016, it has been proposed that the caravanning industry ushered in the development of the "first year". But the golden age of the caravan belongs exclusively to the caravan, perhaps it will take 5 to 10 years to really come.