📷 Photo by Kevin Schmid on UnsplashA short history of the camper van
From the horse-drawn caravan of the 1880s to Airstream, the VW Bus, Winnebago and Hobby: how living on the road became an industry.
By CampingSpirit Editors · September 15, 2026 · 4 min read
The camper did not have a single inventor. It grew out of several ideas that met in the twentieth century: a home that moves, a car that is reliable enough to carry it, and holidays that people could afford. Each step was shaped by the roads and regulations of its time, which is why American and European campers developed in noticeably different directions.
The dates below come from company histories and reference works. Where sources disagree on exact days, only the year is given.
Horse-drawn beginnings
Travelling people had lived in wagons for centuries, and the decorated Romani vardo reached its heyday between the mid-1800s and the early 1900s. The first caravan built purely for leisure is usually credited to the Scottish doctor Gordon Stables, who commissioned a horse-drawn wagon called the Wanderer in the mid-1880s. The Caravan Club was founded in Britain in 1907, and powered caravans and motor vehicles with living quarters appeared around 1900, including steam and petrol models in France.
America: trailers and the aluminium shell
In the United States the motor car and the long road made the trailer a mass idea in the 1920s and 1930s, and over 400 manufacturers started up before the Second World War. Almost all disappeared. Airstream is the survivor: Wally Byam, who had conceived a travel trailer in 1929, opened a factory in Culver City, California in 1931 and built the Torpedo, a teardrop-shaped trailer with sleeping space, sink and ice box. The riveted aluminium body that made the brand famous followed in the later 1930s, and production moved to Jackson Center, Ohio, in 1952, where it remains.
Byam sold blueprint sets through magazines such as Popular Mechanics so that buyers could build their own Torpedo, and in 1936 introduced the Airstream Clipper, essentially a reworked Bowlus Road Chief with better aerodynamics. The Wally Byam Caravan Club later organised owners into convoys. Airstream’s silver shell reached public attention when modified trailers served as a mobile quarantine facility for returning Apollo astronauts, an association the company still uses. Today it belongs to Thor Industries.
Germany: the Bus, Westfalia and Hymer
In Europe the defining vehicle was the Volkswagen Type 2. The Dutch importer Ben Pon sketched the idea in April 1947, and series production began in 1950 as the Kombi and the van. From 1951 the coachbuilder Westfalia-Werke in Rheda-Wiedenbrück converted them into campers with a fold-out bed box; about a thousand of these Camping Boxes were built up to August 1958, when Westfalia launched its special-equipment models. Westfalia conversions continued until 2003, and the Type 2 itself stayed in production, in Brazil, until 2013.
Caravans followed their own path. Hymer was founded in 1957 in Bad Waldsee by Erwin Hymer and Erich Bachem, building on a family repair workshop that dated from 1923; the Eriba-Troll caravan went into production in 1958. Hymer’s first motorhome, the Caravano, appeared in 1961, though series motorhome production under the Hymer name began only in 1971. Hobby followed in 1967, when Harald Striewski founded the company in Fockbek in Schleswig-Holstein with the aim of finishing one caravan a day; it now builds between 13,000 and 17,000 vehicles a year.
Winnebago and the American motorhome
In the United States the self-propelled motorhome became an industry through Winnebago. John K. Hanson founded the company in February 1958 in Forest City, Iowa, partly to revive a struggling town, and named it after the county. The first Winnebago motorhome left the line in 1966, priced at roughly half the cost of competing models, and the brand name became a generic word for any large motorhome. Roughly 85 per cent of American recreational vehicles are still built in Indiana, centred on Elkhart County.
Counterculture and the vanlife era
In the 1960s the old Type 2 became a symbol of hippie and surf culture. It was cheap, easy to repair, carried a group, and took a coat of psychedelic paint well; it appeared at Woodstock and on record sleeves. That image outlived the people who created it. The current wave of vanlife, driven by compact panel-van conversions, remote work and social media, is a descendant of the same idea: a small, adaptable home that costs less than a flat.
In the United States, October 2021 saw record output of about 58,000 recreational vehicles in a single month during the pandemic boom, a reminder that interest in mobile living rises with the cost and uncertainty of other forms of travel. Seen across 140 years, the pattern is consistent: whenever travel became cheaper, more flexible or more private, a new kind of home on wheels followed.
If you are tempted by a classic
Anyone considering a vintage camper should plan for practicalities rather than nostalgia. Rust in sills, floor and roof joints is the main condition risk, spare parts availability varies hugely by model, and the payload of older vans can be small once water, gas and passengers are aboard. City low-emission zones may restrict old diesel and petrol vehicles, and some insurers offer separate classic policies with mileage limits. A test weigh on a public weighbridge and an independent inspection before purchase cost little compared with a repair. Modern campers trade charm for safety equipment, efficiency and insulation, which is the main reason most travellers still choose them.
