Airstreams history with aerodynamic design and commitment to aerodynamic
improvements really goes back to the start of the company.
When Wally named the company Airstream, he said he wanted to design a travel trailer that would
flow down the road like a stream of air.
And that's a commitment that we maintain here even 90 years later.
Hi, I'm Bob Wheeler and president and CEO of Airstream Incorporated.
Our founder, Wally Byam, was influenced heavily back in the thirties by some of the streamlined
design of the era. You think about some of the great products that
came out of that decade. Like Raymond Loewy's fantastic locomotives and
Chrysler airflow cars and even Art Deco design. All of those went into the design of the
original Airstream shell.
Beautiful, timeless, but also very slippery in the wind.
And that's really where we got our start.
Even though we're a 90 year old company, we're still looking forward.
We love being innovators. How can we bring aerodynamics even further into
the future? My name is Karla Paul.
I am the Director of Engineering at Airstream. I'm in charge of a team of designers and
engineers that are the dreamers and innovators behind a really great product.
We are here at the World Class Auto Research Center in Indianapolis,
Indiana, and today we're conducting aerodynamic testing in their wind tunnel.
We already know our Airstreams are aerodynamic, but we're out to prove what other improvements
can we make to an already great product.
So where we started with the A.R.C team was generating computer animated models,
see what areas of the travel trailer we wanted to test inside the wind tunnel and improve upon.
We then made a quarter scale model to test out in the wind tunnel.
By working at quarter scale, we can make quick changes and rerun the tests so we could quickly
compile our data and see how the units were performing.
One of the great things that came out of this big aerodynamic study was that we really
confirmed what we already knew. Airstreams are beautifully towing travel
trailer, very efficient in their own right.
But there's always room for improvement.
So why do aerodynamics matter? You know,
people want to get better fuel mileage, of course, and if they're towing with electric
vehicle, they want more range. But really, it's about freedom and independence.
We want people to be able to hit the road and not have to worry about resource use or resource
consumption. If we can stretch those boundaries, it
allows them to travel farther on a tank of gas, travel farther on the charge of the battery.
And that's about getting them to where they want to be.
With as few interruptions and detractions from their trip as possible.
Some of the most aerodynamic parts of the trailer that we've seen are curves.
We're in love with our curves. We have been for years.
It's part of our D N A.
During World War II, Wally shuts Airstream down and goes to work in the aircraft industry.
And when he comes back to pick up where he left off, he changed the design to make it more
aerodynamic. Then, decades later in the 50s and 70s,
we've continued to take a look at aerodynamics. How can we improve the product?
Many people may not know that Airstream did a major aerodynamic study and towing efficiency
study in the 70s, where we proved out that we were 20-25% more efficient than a traditional
square box trailer.
We felt it was really time to take another look at that work and see where can we go to the
next level? All the data we're collecting here today — I will
take back to my team of engineers and designers, and we'll break it down.
What improvements? What continuous improvements can we make to an
already great product? So we're looking at ways to smooth or
streamline those areas and still keep the components intact.
We know that every incremental improvement we can make and how cleanly this Airstream slips
through the air is just going to provide a better user experience for our customers.
This current recommitment to focusing on aerodynamic improvements is driven by a number
of things. Look, there's economics.
First of all, we want Airstreams to be less expensive to tow and more efficient to tow and
use less natural resources, lower carbon footprint.
But one of the big drivers for us here, that's coming up very,
very fast is the advent of electric tow vehicles.
This is something we weren't even talking about five years ago,
and now every week there's a new car company saying they're going to commit to most or all
of their fleet at some point in the future to electric vehicles.
Well, how do we respond to that?
We have to be prepared for that onslaught and leading the charge as part of our commitment
that Airstream has always been an innovator. We've been leading the industry.
That's our commitment to continue to push the boundaries in that respect.