Project Details

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Flat Pack Van and EV Camper Conversion Fixtures

Company: Creative Persistence LLC d/b/a Seneca Woodworking

Major(s):
Primary: IE
Secondary: ME

Non-Disclosure Agreement: NO

Intellectual Property: NO

Seneca Woodworking is a startup that designs and manufactures precision woodworking tools and markets them worldwide through our ecommerce store and an international retailer network. We're always interested in solving unique problems, and this project will allow us to use our current manufacturing capabilities to launch a new product line, possibly under a new brand name. The Recreational Vehicle industry has been trending upward significantly over the last decade, and this trend was amplified during the Covid pandemic as more people were able to travel long term as their jobs transitioned to remote positions. As part of this trend, building homemade RV’s has also become more popular than ever. While “Travel Trailer” style towable RV’s can be purchased for less than $30,000, similarly equipped “Class B” style camper vans often are priced over $150,000. Because of this large difference in price, many people choose to buy cargo vans and retrofit them into camper vans. Part of the challenge in doing so is cutting and fitting fixtures such as cabinetry, seating, and a bed platform to the complex interior curves of a vehicle. We have identified a market opportunity to create interior kits to make this process easier. Plywood fixtures could be designed to fit the interior of a vehicle, then CNC cut and ‘flat-pack’ shipped to the customer for assembly inside their project vehicle. This would greatly speed up and simplify the process of building a camper van, while still saving the customer a significant amount of money compared to buying one of the commercially built camper vans on the market. There are a relatively limited number of variations in commercial van platforms from major manufacturers that are commonly used for these conversions. Flat-pack camper fixtures could be made for other common conversions too such as school busses or even “overland” vehicles where people commonly sleep in the back such as pickup trucks and SUV’s. We believe there is a significant market for making this kind of fixturing for the Tesla Model Y and the bed of common 5/6ft bed pickup trucks. Many of the customers we currently serve own cargo vans or pickup trucks that they use for work purposes. Another potential opportunity might be creating fixtures that aren’t just modular, but also easily removable, allowing someone to give their work vehicle a secondary purpose as a RV on the weekend. The main deliverable for this project would be a CAD design for a flat pack interior of one of these vehicles, and then to CNC cut and test one of these interiors in the vehicle it was designed for.