My initial concepts and benchmarking focused on having as much room as possible to take as much stuff as possible. With that in mind, I was fascinated by the GXV Pangea lifting roof units. These things eschewed the US RV industry standard slideout rooms favor of a slide out roof! Traditional slideout rooms in normal RV’s are a weak link in my mind. THey give you a lot of space, but the mechanisms are inherently chintzy and typically cheap junk. THe seals work most of the tie, but all ow for dust and water intrusion in short order, and they inherently make the box weaker and less stiff by compromising the inherent stiffness of the full box. So most XV manufacturers don’t use them typically. But the roof, now that’s an idea!
They do add another level of complexity to make sure it’s robust enough to survive the rough roads and world travel and still stay synchronized and go up whenever you need it to. There’s definitely something to it, but I’m now of the mindset that with a raised subfloor a la Shachagra, there wouldn’t be enough headroom to also have a lifting roof model before the overall height of the rig exceeds 13′ as my maximum height while driving.
The other feature that I really liked was to include some sort of dinghy to my land yacht. That is it would be great to have some type of transportation once you get to your destination to explore the local region from. Action Mobile came out with a unit which actually stored a small car inside! Check out this video below:
The mechanical engineer in me fell in love with the above video. THat was one of the coolest things I had ever seen! The seamless function of that mechanism to completely conceal that car inside the belly of the beast is simply amazing! Here’s another gallery of other options for stowing your dinghy!
So in my first concepts and sketches that I created back in 2014 I included both of these concepts of a lifting roof and an internal garage. Here’s my Mark 1 design as a Solidworks sketch.
Now that would be pretty epic! But unfortunately it’s just too stinking big for not enough interior room. But it’s a start!