One of the loudest complaints I frequently hear about the RV industry is that manufacturers often demand house-level money for a camper that might not even last a decade. There are companies out there marketing camper vans that cost half a million dollars, and the companies are totally serious about it – but it doesn’t have to be that way, because some manufacturers have realized that affordability is a sizable concern with RV buyers today. There’s a new king of cheap in January 2026, and it’s the Coachmen Clipper 12RD. This pint-size camper costs just $9,999, and it doesn’t just have hard walls, but every single feature you’ll need for a fun and affordable weekend away from home. Somehow, it’s half the price of the cheapest new car in America.
Now, you might be wondering why I’m even bothering to compare the cost of a travel trailer with the cost of a car. These are very different kinds of transportation devices built to vastly different standards for different uses. However, this is nominally a car site, and I find it interesting to compare the cheapest versions of different vehicles. It’s fascinating to visualize how cheap a new Hyundai is, and think about how you can get something that you can sleep in and use the bathroom in for a whole lot less money.
What I also find rather enthralling is that, as the price of the cheapest new car keeps creeping up seemingly every year, the RV industry keeps figuring out ways to keep the cheapest traditional travel trailer hanging near the $10,000 mark. I’ve been writing about the cheapest camper of the year for a while now. It used to be that these campers cost far less than the $16,695 Mitsubishi Mirage. Then, they were a fraction of the $17,190 Nissan Versa. Now, the cheapest highway-legal new car has surpassed the $20,000 mark. The Hyundai Venue is now the cheapest car in America at $20,550 before a $1,395 destination charge.
The RV industry is not immune to escalating prices. I give fair play to both expensive and cheap units in my reporting. I just wrote about running hot laps in a Wingamm Oasi 540.1, a Ram ProMaster-based motorhome that runs $192,500. If you thought that was expensive, you haven’t seen anything yet. Living Vehicle will sell you a 39-foot travel trailer that weighs 16,500 pounds and costs $495,295 to start. Redtail Overland sells what it calls the Skyloft Van (below), which is sort of like a Westfalia on steroids. Its price? $565,000.
If you haven’t fainted yet, brace yourself, because things get even more expensive. 27North will sell you a Ford F-550 with a camping box on its back for between $750,000 and $1.2 million. I haven’t even gotten into the price of bus-based motorhomes yet, which do tick over $2 million if you’re loaded enough.
Over the past few years, however, I have noticed that many mainstream brands are beginning to focus more on affordability. Absurdly expensive flagships are great at grabbing headlines at Robb Report and travel blogs, but relatively few people can actually buy them. There are a lot of buyers who just want a plain and functional camper with some basic safety and amenities to tow behind their crossover. They just want to have some weekend fun with their kids, not buy something as expensive as a house.
The RV industry still has a race to the bottom, which has resulted in a slew of fully-featured travel trailers for well under $15,000. In 2024, one of the cheapest hard-sided campers was the Dutchmen Coleman Lantern LT, which was only $13,000. Last year, the champion of cheap was the Keystone Coleman 13B, which was sold by Camping World for $9,999. This year, the 13B costs $400 more and lands at a still cheap $10,399.
But it loses the crown to the 2026 Coachmen Clipper 12RD. At only $9,999, it’s half the price of America’s cheapest new car. The thought of that is sad. But you’re also probably wondering how the RV industry has been able to keep the price hovering that low for at least a few years.
The story of Coachmen is not unlike many old RV brands that have survived into the modern day. In 1964, brothers Claude Corson, Keith Corson, and Tom Corson opened Coachmen Industries in a 5,000-square-foot factory in Middlebury, Indiana. The facility built 80 truck caps, 12 travel trailers, and one truck camper that year. The business grew in production and scale, adding pre-fabricated houses as well as modular houses to its roster of products.
Coachmen was one of the victims of the Great Recession, and in 2008, it sold its RV division to Forest River. The remainder of Coachmen changed its name to All American Group and managed to soldier on until 2016 before going out of business. The RV side of Coachmen is still alive and under Forest River control. In recent times, I have featured affordable Coachmen trailers in my reporting, as well as the Coachmen Euro motorhome.
I’ve also written about Coachmen’s Clipper series, a value-oriented trailer line that Coachmen says is one of the best-selling single-axle trailer brands in America. The 2026 Clipper 12RD comes from Coachmen’s 3K Series.
Coachmen says that means it has a BAL NXG frame with a powder coating and huck bolt assembly, a TPO rubberized roof, and an easy-lube axle. In other words, it’s a very typical travel trailer. This is your standard wood-framed camper with lauan tropical plywood, aluminum exterior siding, and an interior filled with the cheapest of everything. It doesn’t have Azdel composites, slides, or anything even remotely fascinating. Here’s the underside:
In a way, I adore this camper’s simplicity. The lack of fancy features means that there isn’t a whole lot to break. There’s just a simple frame, a single axle, one propane tank that’s not even covered, only two manual leveling jacks, and an old-school crank for the tongue jack.
Yet, to Coachmen’s credit, there are a few clever features, like a diamond plate up front to protect the trailer from rocks kicked from the tow vehicle and an aerodynamic front cap. It also has a set of those really sturdy entry stairs. I’m also a fan of the aluminum siding. It’s a classic look, and I think it tends to age better than fiberglass siding, which sometimes gets bubbly or severely faded. The exterior of this trailer even manages to have a power awning with a built-in LED strip for that $9,999, which is pretty cool.
The simplicity gets aggressive once you pop open the one and only door. The Clipper 12RD has a body length of 12 feet, and the trailer makes sure to use every inch of that space. Everything fore of the entry door is the open bedroom, which features a 54-inch by 74-inch camper queen mattress (a residential queen mattress is 60 inches by 80 inches). There’s also some minimal storage here, and most of it is open. After all, adding doors would cost money.
Something that I was pleasantly surprised by was that, despite the rock-bottom price, Coachmen gave this trailer a cohesive kitchen.
It’s common for super cheap travel trailers to have mismatched appliances, sinks, and faucets. Sometimes you’ll get a stainless steel stove, but a plastic sink and a black microwave. The Clipper 12RD sports a black and silver two-burner stove, a black and silver single basin sink, and a black and silver microwave. Even the 3.2 cubic foot refrigerator matches the rest of the appliances.
Being excited over matching appliances may seem silly, but honestly, mismatched stuff in a cheap trailer is so common that it was a genuine surprise. The only equipment that did not match was the 13.5k BTU air-conditioner on the back wall, which is one of those white units that you might place in an apartment’s window.
The rest of the camper is fairly simple, featuring a dry bath with a flushing toilet and a dinette that turns into a bed.
This camper is so bare-bones that you have to wash your hands in the kitchen sink when you’re done using the toilet. But that’s fine, this trailer has everything that up to three people will need for a weekend away from home. You even get a 20k BTU furnace, a 38-gallon fresh water tank, a 37-gallon gray water tank, and a 27-gallon waste tank.
As for quality? Well, it isn’t great. The GE appliances seem decent enough, but everything else is as cheap as it can be. The dinette table feels like it can be demolished by a stiff wind, and the walls around the bathroom give the impression of being constructed from one-ply toilet paper. Slam the cupboards, and you might break the doors. Okay, I am exaggerating a bit, but it’s absurdly cheap in here. You don’t even get a proper backsplash for when your cooking goes wild.
Other notes about this interior include a thin bed, thin cushions, and a generally rough look to the boards that make up the furniture. Quite a few of the boards in the interior don’t even have decorative trim on their edges, and bare their ugliness for everyone to see.
I also would not expect much in the way of insulation. While I applaud window-style air-conditioners for repairability, the way this one was installed was amusing. I could very easily see light coming through all sides of the camper. These gaps were small, but not tiny.
As to my question of how the RV producers still have a $9,999 camper? Well, that seems to come down to downsizing while keeping to about the same cheap quality. Last year’s $9,999 camper had a 13-foot cabin. This one is a foot shorter.
The 2026 Coachmen Clipper 12RD is 16 feet long overall, weighs 2,544 pounds empty, and has a 325-pound hitch weight. When loaded, it’s all of 3,968 pounds. That means a wide variety of crossovers could haul this without breaking a sweat. If you keep the weight down and don’t load it up with cargo, you can even tow it with a properly-equipped Ford Maverick!
I’m told that your best bet to buy one of these for $9,999 is to find one being sold by General RV dealers. You may also have to negotiate that price if the dealer isn’t actively advertising some sort of automatic discount. Otherwise, you might pay closer to $11,000. Which, hey, that’s still pretty darn cheap. This was the same sort of catch that came with the Coleman 13B last year. Camping World was the dealer chain advertising the $9,999 price back then.
Normally, I would say that buying a trailer like this is like rolling the dice. However, given the trailer’s rock-bottom price, I have no complaints. It’s only $9,999. You know you’re buying one of the cheapest new campers on the market, and you will be under no illusion that you’re getting something built like a Scamp or an Airstream. This is a trailer that’s cheap to buy, could be reasonably serviced by a single person, and in the worst case, you don’t lose that much money.
Honestly, I see this little trailer as a neat little rig for a family to just get out there and enjoy travel trailer camping without a huge investment. I have no doubt this thing will last at least a handful of years, or at least long enough to create some great memories. Then, when it does fall apart, you buy another cheap camper and keep building memories.
Top graphic image: Mercedes Streeter
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Overall, I like it. I actually don’t mind honest cheapness. Expensive campers built cheaply bother be a lot. But a cheap camper being cheap, I’m fine with that. At this price I expect to fix things and kinda finish the job with little things like sealing up that window AC properly.
It’s a little too small for us. If it was 2′ longer with no changes but a king size bed up front, it would be perfect for my wife and I. We’re both too big to fit in a 54″ wide bed together.
At these prices I would probably be looking at some used units with a bit higher build quality. But overall, I think they did a good job on layout, appliances, it’s just the build that suffers to me.
This is exactly what I’m looking for minus the bathroom. I’d take more living space over a tiny bathroom.
A potential source of some homelessness relief at the price, without the need to sleep in your car.
This is one of the nicer layouts I’ve seen on a cheap camper, and the finishes and appliances look nice enough. I’d advise anyone buying to look it over well and get a tube or two of Sikaflex RV Sealant and make sure everything looks water tight. The build quality will certainly be lacking (but it’s lacking on the expensive ones too.). At least with simple systems and lots of manual stuff, there’s less to go wrong. I was surprised to see propane too.. It seems like many of the low end trailers are going all electric to save costs too.
My thought as well – a couple tubes of sealant, some weather stripping, and a few bits of trim from the hardware store take care of the egregious issues for under $100. If I need something that will last 10 years of being on the road 50% of the time, I’d go buy a fiberglass camper. If I need something for a few camping weekends a year, this should last at least 5 and then I can go get another one.
For my family of three (plus a rottie), this is pretty much exactly what we need. Minimal foot print with all the amenities my Princess-ass desires.
My wife wants to hit provincial parks and would gladly do so in a tent or a 13ft Boler.
I, however, am over tents. I want a real bed and a bathroom.
I’m trying to find a used fiberglass unit, but damn if this isn’t tempting as a point of entry. Especially picking one up lightly used in a year or two.
These are great until people have to move, someone goes outside for that to happen. Plus with the lack luster build quality, I would spend two to three times more to get a better one with room.
For a single user who wants more than a popup and will not spend much time in it, this could work.
I can confidently say I don’t know much about camping trailers, but I was surprised to hear at this price that this one has air conditioning and a bathroom at all, let alone a dry bath! I guess I thought campers were more compromised than they really are. Sure, the materials are cheap, but if something breaks, it looks easily replaceable. There’s something to be said about exposed fasteners and the lack of decorative trim.
Honestly its pretty impressive for the price. I was also very surprised at the dry bath in a trailer this size. Virtually all the compact trailers, regardless of price, trade off the convienience of the dry bath to grab a bit more floor space and/or storage. Personally, I’d rather have the dry bath. Also the fixed bed is better in my opinion than the murphy that also sees alot of duty in smaller trailers. I don’t need a crappy sofa in my trailer, I just want a bed that I don’t need to fold up every morning then unflold and set up every night lest I have to climb over it to get to the door during the day. I’m supposed to be camping, I’ll sit outside under the power awning, which is also a nice surprise a in this end of the price pool.
I mean yeah, the build quality is probably crap and the materials are low rent, but this thing is so simple repairs shouldnt be too bad and really there isn’t all that much to go wrong anyway. And with a dry weight of under 2500 and a maxof less than 4k this can be towed by almost anything with a real tow rating. I say NP.
With A/C and a washroom, this is still fancier than the camping trailer my family had when I was young (Starcraft Galaxy 8).
Hey, a dry bath at this price is nothing to sneeze at. I’d rather wash my hands in the kitchen sink (which is closer to the toilet than the toilet and sink are in my bathroom at home) than shower with my toilet.
My thought always goes to the hot, humid summer camping we’ve done the last couple of years. There is no way a wet bath would ever dry out. The second we touch the shower, we not have a wet room and wet toilet for the rest of the trip.
Yeah, when I camped as a kid/teenager in humid Pennsylvania, we never cooked or showered in the trailer. The trailer was for sleeping and emergency/middle of the night toilet use only. If it rained, we’d eat sandwiches. These days, we’d heat up leftovers in the microwave but cooking inside makes such a mess.
An interesting consideration in the cheapest vehicles thought experiments would be how cheaply you can actually tow a camp trailer. What is the cheapest new vehicle capable of properly towing this camper? Is it a Maverick, as you mentioned? It seems likely, but does the tow package on it end up optioning it higher than, say, the cheapest crossover that tows that much?
I also wonder about the cheapest self-propelled RV vs the cheapest equivalent size camp trailer/tow vehicle combo. I’m not in the market, but I feel like that is a comparison that would be helpful to some folks who are.
Unfortunatly on the Maverick, at least the ’26 Hybrid which I was playing around with on the Ford build site, to get the Max Tow package (4k) you need to add the Ford 360 package which adds the cameras, lane departure, etc. So the $700 to package ends up costing about $2400. Disapointing. Just because I want to tow doesn’t mean I want the annoying lane departure crap.
Yeah, I had messed around with the configurator a few times, and I always found myself pretty much maxing out the packages to get a couple things I want. That’s part of why I’m not doing the dive into these comparisons–just too many variables on each vehicle when getting tow packages and things. I am not looking for a tow vehicle or trailer, so it’s just idle curiosity.
To be fair, the CoPilot360 package (at least on the 22-24 Mavericks) included blind spot monitors (nice to have) and the lane departure was easily disabled and stayed off.
I don’t think the CoPilot is a needs, but I see it as a feature that a future owner would certainly want as all that becomes standard across the board.
That layout is a winner in my book. A fixed bed leads to a better mattress (once you upgrade from the factory garbage).
Lose the microwave and wall A/C for more storage and add a rooftop A/C.
It’s fair for what it is, but I’d pay a grand more if it meant I wasn’t looking at unfinished lumber and particle board.
Or bite the bullet and pay a few bucks to install the trim they cut corners on. It isn’t ideal, but it’s better than spending an exponential markup on trim…
I will say that that does appear to be about $10,000 worth of new camper, its a fair product for the price. $10k for something you can cook, sleep, and poop in isn’t terrible in this day and age, and I do like that it has a propane setup – makes it much more usable, lot of cheaper campers delete that
Yeah, in my climate AC is a “nice to have” and heat is a requirement if I’m ponying up to buy a camper. Requiring shore power to use the little electric “fireplace” thing to heat the camper is a deal breaker.
I love that these exist. I still can’t afford one but maybe in 7 years I can dream of a used one.
“Somehow, it’s half the price of the cheapest new car in America”
Well, it has no engine, no transmission, no steering system, no airbags, no complicated welded unibody, and it’s made of fiberboard, staples, and hope.
Somehow, it costs half the price of the cheapest new car when it feels like it should cost a quarter the price.
I know, economies of scale. And that said, it’s not a bad little floorplan for the size.
I dunno about a quarter of the price, but I do know it would be a lot cheaper to make a car sleepable/campable than to somehow make this self-propelled.
But, given the camper market, I like this. I don’t have a need or room for a camper, but this is the sort I would be looking at if I were interested in one, I think.
I see this as one step up from a pop-up. You are sleeping in a nice dry bed (maybe get yourself one of those memory foam mattress toppers) and you’ve got climate control. You’ll do your cooking outside, and probably camp somewhere that has public restrooms. And that’s just fine! This is all you need.
I love the vastly larger floor and bed space of a popup, and the 360-degree view out the windows. Until it gets cold. And windy. Then the top goes skrunka! skrunka! skrunka! all night in the gusts and feels like it will rip off or permanently bend and then refuse to telescope back down again.
I am familiar with the noise you are describing. And pop-ups aren’t great if it’s too hot or too cold. But they are a step up from a tent, I suppose!
They keep the price low by cutting the quality more every year
Thank you for putting the mattress size in this. The main problem with any of these are they are not made for tall people at all. Like you have to be under 6 ft to fit in any of the beds.
That’s pretty dang nice for the money. We paid $6k for a clean 25-year-old truck camper with a new roof. And then discovered the dry rot.
Note: anymore, it’s actually pretty hard to find truck campers for 8′ beds that fit flush with the back so you can tow, so I’m not too peeved about overpaying.
I’ve been casually looking for a pickup camper for my late father’s F-350 that I inherited. It seems like they either fit a 6ft bed, are massive (12+ft) and heavy or are still $10k+ despite being 20 years old. I just want a modern one that fits an 8ft bed that doesn’t cost a ridiculous amount. It’s infuriating.
The cheap older ones come up on Craigslist just before deer season around here. People even call them “hunter’s specials.”
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