Jayco Hummingbird
RV Business
With the spring launch of the teardrop-style Hummingbird travel trailer, Jayco Inc. has entered a niche market occupied by, among others, the R-Pod from Forest River Inc., the T@B from Little Guy Worldwide LLC, and, more recently, the Winnie Drop from Winnebago Industries Inc.
According to John Fisher, Jayco’s senior product director for fold-downs and lightweights that includes the White Hawk and Jay Feather brands, the Hummingbird launch has been hugely successful.
“With the feedback we’ve gotten so far, overall the dealers are happy and the customers are happy,” Fisher told RVBUSINESS.com. “From the start it looks like we’ve hit what we were looking for. We couldn’t ask for the launch to be any better. The product turned out exactly as we had anticipated.”
Fisher added that his team sought out the 1970’s-era Jayco Wren for design inspiration. “It was more of a boxy trailer, like those old trailers were back then, but we liked its front end and the back end, which were kind of tapered.”
“Back in the day a lot of the RVs were more linear, so we wanted something linear and we wanted it to have a little bit of a retro feel and clean lines,” he continued. “The logo almost has a ‘50’s diner’ feel to it and the chrome effect around it really sets it off. We couldn’t have been more excited.”
The Hummingbird, which retails from $15,900 US into the low $20,000’s US, currently has three floorplans, each with a street-side slide. Fisher said a fourth model is in the works.
All three models – the 17FD with a front U-shaped dinette up front and galley slide, the 17RK with a rear kitchen and refrigerator/dinette slide, and the rear bath, galley slide 17RB – are 19 feet, 9 inches long, 97 inches wide and 109 inches tall (including the standard 13,500 Btu low profile A/C) while offering 6 feet, 6 inches of interior height. Tank capacities are 25.6 gallons for fresh water, 25.4 gallons for black and gray, and six gallons for the water heater.
All feature a queen bed, standard convection microwave, standard power awning with integrated remote control LED lighting, available Astro-Foil enclosed underbelly, and 4-inch tubular steel bumpers that can accommodate three accessories at the same time, such as a spare tire, bumper-mount grill and front bike rack. Other highlights include a 26-inch entry door with frosted privacy glass window, aluminum entry step, folding table with a dedicated interior storage compartment, and an available Baja package with 15-inch mud tires.
The fourth model, the front dinette, non-slide 16FD, will have a prototype ready for the fall shows, but production won’t begin until mid September. The other three models have been in nearly continuous production since April.
“We might do one to two more floorplans at some point, but right now we’re going to settle down and let dealers get some stock, get the retail sales going and get into the retail RV shows next spring and just let the product go,” said Fisher, adding that he’d always wanted to design a product for the teardrop market.
“I don’t want to call it a cult, but it really is a niche market, and those people have their own club and they just kind of stick together,” he said. “They’re a unique camper and they really like their teardrop trailers so we were ecstatic to be able to enter the market and launch a good product. We had over a thousand orders before we could even shake our heads. There are still dealers who are just landing their first ones, but from everything I’ve gathered the ones from our first production run in late April were retailing as fast as they were getting them.”
Originally published here.