The Florida RV SuperShow & Self-Driving RVs?!?

We’ve been in Florida during winters before when the big Florida RV SuperShow happens in Tampa. Being averse to crowds,  we had never made attending a priority.

I honestly hadn’t really even looked at the dates to realize we’d be in the area until an e-mail showed up that basically said:

Would you like to ride-along in a self driving RV at the Florida RV SuperShow next week?

Well, that got our attention!

Let’s not go all alternate facts here – the words ‘self-driving’ where in the e-mail from Spartan Motors, but it was in context of their new APS (Advanced Protection System) being a major step towards self-driving RVs.

The new (to RVs) technology is debuting in the 2017 models of Newmar and Entegra.

And we were being invited to ride-along in the first public demonstration. The dates lined up perfectly to file in a hole in our ‘snag a cancellation’ approach to finding campsites.

Serendipity, score.

Playing Bumper RVs

We arrived on Tuesday afternoon for ‘Industry Day’ (before the show opened to the public), picked up our Media credentials (ooo.. fancy), wandered through the show without the crowds and then headed over to Spartan’s bumper RV course sectioned off in the parking lot.

We arrived just in time to witness a demonstration already going on – a 45′ motorhome intentionally speeding up to the bumper of a moving car in front of it, and automatically coming to a stop before there was a big ole KABOOM.

During our ride we’d be experiencing their Collision Mitigation (ie. we too would be trying to hit things) and Adapative Cruise Control at highway speeds.

Here’s a short video we took after our ride with our thoughts (where Chris gets a wee bit excited about the future of self-driving RVs) with some footage during our ride-along:

Overall, a very fun, if not terrifying, experience – I have a pretty strong preference for NOT speeding towards other objects. The EEEEEP factor was pretty high.

This is of course nothing groundbreaking in the automotive industry – these features have been around for years in cars and trucks. It is however a pretty huge step forward in improved safety of driving these beasts down the road and can potentially save lives.

Are we rushing out to buy one? Nope.

We’ll keep our electonics-free 55+ year old bus for the foreseeable future. It’ll take some other spiffy features like lane keeping (which Spartan says they are NOT working on) and maybe auto-backing into camp spots to get our attention.

The Florida RV SuperShow

I don’t know how we managed to survive nearly 11-years of full time RVing and never been to one of the major RV shows. Sure, we’ve been to rallies, Quartzsite and some of the smaller shows, but nothing to this scale.

It was kinda cool to check out the vast variety of RVs all in one place. While we’ve toured hundreds of RVs over the years visiting friends, seeing so many side by side really impressed upon us the sheer range of quality available.

From units you can push a finger through the walls to million dollar coaches that feel rock solid.  From super tiny RVs like what we started our full timing adventure in to 45′ beasts.

We filmed a little take-away of the experience, from appropriately – a T@b clamshell similar to our first nomadic substrate:

We stayed onsite at the show, where there was never a shortage of parking.

Since we arrived before the official start of the show, we were placed in the rally staging area the first night, and then had to get up at the butt-crack of dawn to be moved over to the fairgrounds parking lot. That did reward us with essentially rockstar front row parking.

Overnight dry camping was just $20/night, plus a one-time parking fee of $18 for RV and toad.  Entrance to the show itself was $10 per person, which our media passes exempted us from.

Once the show opened, it was CRAZY busy. The parking line off the interstate and the ticket lines were apparently each over an hour long.

Which makes us super thankful for our early entry & media credentials to skip that chaos. I’m not sure we would have endured it otherwise.

(By the way, we didn’t have to show any proof of being actual media to get our credentials, and anyone can arrive on Industry Day. Just sayin’.)

While it was cool to see so many RVs in one spot, the vendor floors were basically the same-ole-same-ole BBQ grill mats, massage chairs and jewelry booths sprinkled in with the occasional RV-specific vendor. We’ve seen them all before at rallies and shows like Quartzite.

But if you’re shopping for an RV there’s no better place to see so many options in one place than one of these large scale shows. Just be prepared for walking away with a splitting headache after inhaling so many off gassing fumes.

I think we’ve had our fill of large RV shows for the next decade. After all.. our next adventure is boats.

If you are shopping for RVs or boats, the archive of our webcast the other evening on ‘Shopping for RVs & Boats – Houses that Move’ is also now available on YouTube.

Time with Friends

Coming to Tampa allowed us to rendezvous with our dear friends Ben & Karen, who have been hanging out in the area awaiting the completion of their bus conversion.

Ben was the first ‘working aged’ fellow RVer we met way back in 2008 when he still had his fancy Prevost, and Karen joined him a couple years later. We’ve missed road adventures with these two since they sold their RV in preparation for vintage bus life.

He actually can be blamed for inspiring us towards Zephyr as we were privy to his research in acquiring the Creative Cruiser. Which should finally be done this spring just a mere 6 years later since he purchased it and began this project.

It’ll be an amazing masterpiece for sure, but we’re super thankful to have learned from his example and just finding a bus we were pretty happy with from the beginning and could make modifications to along the way.

What’s Up Next?

We only stuck around for 2-nights at the RV Show, as we had existing plans to attend Looper-Palooza in Fort Myers – a gathering of fellow Great Loopers at various stages of their journey.

We’ve been hanging out in the area since at a lovely campground overlooking Looper boats going through locks along the Okechobee Waterway.

And in an exciting step to fulfilling our own Great Loop goals, looks like our weeks ahead just got super busy. We’ll fill you in later. 🙂