Facebook-f Youtube-square Vimeo-v Instagram
Play Video

Show 2020-14

On this week’s show, we bring you the RVBusiness Magazine RISE Awards, honoring the most innovative new OEM and aftermarket products introduced for 2020.

Norcold Frig

RVBusiness and Rollin' On TV

RVBusiness RISE Awards

On this week’s program, we bring you a special presentation of the “RVBusiness Magazine RISE Awards,” honoring the most innovative new OEM and aftermarket products introduced for 2020. “Rollin’ On TV” is sponsored by Carefree of Colorado, celebrating over 45 years of RV awning innovation.

Rick Kessler, from RVBusiness magazine, hosted the show for RVBusiness and Rollin’ on TV.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of innovative ideas and new technology being built into today’s RVs. Some of those are pretty obvious: solar panels, for example. Others tucked behind walls or underneath the chassis, they’re just not so visible. 

If you think about it, innovative ideas have been around since, well, the first RV hit the road. 

That’s why we’re here at the RV Hall of Fame and Museum in Elkhart, Indiana, where we’re surrounded by vintage RVs and vintage technology.

Take this 1915 Model T, for example. Right here is the camper. It slides off the back end, and then you unfold this outdoor kitchen. Brew up your coffee, make some eggs, get your milk right out of this refrigerator. Now, of course, back then, outdoor kitchens were really unheard of because you did most of your food prep and your cooking right by the campfire. But I bet today you’d be hard pressed to find any RV that doesn’t have an outdoor kitchen.

All of which leads us to this year’s RISE Awards. RISE stands for Recognizing Innovation and Supplier Excellence, and the awards were developed to recognize those products that the supplier companies brought to market that are the best and most innovative of the year.

We have two categories in this awards. The OEM category are those products that were installed at the factory, and the aftermarket category are the products that you and I can buy and install or have installed from our local RV dealership.

New and innovative products have been around since the first RV hit the road. “High tech” wasn’t even in the vocabulary back then, but that’s certainly not the case today. Current OEM and aftermarket products have taken that “high tech” term to a whole new level as is evident with this year’s two top winners.

It’s time to announce this year’s top two RISE Award winners. 

DriveTech System from Freightliner Custom Chassis

And coming out in first place in the OEM category is the DriveTech System from Freightliner Custom Chassis. With us is Megan Hiland from Freightliner. Megan, thank you for joining us.

At Freightliner Custom Chassis, we put a lot of work into the design of this system and bringing this to market for all of our customers.

In the diesel motor-home industry, for many years, the chassis was designed like a truck chassis. So we worked for many years to design this new system to bring all that to the forefront for the customer. The new ergonomic steering wheel, the  column-mounted controls, and more are paired with our OptiView digital gauge display.  We’ve added Bluetooth pairing for our digital gauge display. So if you have a telephone call come in, they can answer it through the steering wheel just like they do in the car.  

Better Weigh Mobile Towing Scale by CURT Group

And coming out in first place in the Aftermarket category is the Better Weigh system which is a newer technology to give the user a much better way to weigh their vehicle and trailer combination. In many cases, users don’t know their gross vehicle weight and the gross trailer weight. So you can purchase the Better Weigh CURT product, plug it into the OBD-II port in your vehicle and run through a quick calibration, you get your combined gross vehicle weight along with your trailer weight. So that provides the user with an opportunity to really fully understand the total weight of both vehicle and trailer to provide a much safer towing experience. 

So there’s, obviously different types of  towing scenarios and this is just a very easy way to get your weight ratings through an app on your phone.

And I think the videos that we’ve done and everything that we’ve put together to make it easy has really helped lead to a successful launch, and if you look at reviews in some of our e-commerce sites and even our own site, people are happy with it. 

One thing with CURT, we’ve really been on this tidal wave of new products and innovation under the roof here at CURT, and you know, in the top of our minds, we already run our Tested and Proven Safe campaign, and the Better Weigh actually falls right into that scenario perfectly because that’s what we do here.