RV AFTERMARKET
The Best Control System is the One You Forget You Have
Get this right, and the owner won’t have to think about the control system at all.
By David Kindt
Photos courtesy of Firefly Integrations
A common joke about millennials like me is that a manual transmission doubles as an anti-theft device. Even though I’ve driven a manual as my daily, I still enjoy the humor. Operating a manual transmission takes practice, coordination and constant attention. While some believe the engagement is worth the effort, most drivers would rather relax and let an automatic do its thing.
Ironically, automatic transmissions are far more complex devices. When they work well, they fade into the background, shifting so seamlessly that drivers hardly notice them. But when they don’t, every harsh shift and delayed gear change becomes impossible to ignore — and the repairs are often as painful as the driving experience.
From this we can see that technology, done well, makes complicated things simple. And as Steve Jobs famously observed, “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
This metaphor aptly describes RVs as well. Combining a trailer with a house is complicated, more so if we need to add an engine. And if that weren’t already enough, consider the incredible number of features the modern RV comes with: multizone HVAC, generators, smart batteries, solar controllers and inverters, to name a few. Will my RV be cool when I get back from my hike? Will I run out of charge while I watch the game? Will I wake up the neighbors if the generator runs into quiet hours?
And this isn’t only about keeping your customers happy — though it does that, too. It’s about what happens after the sale. A coach that keeps coming back to your service bay for issues a smarter system would have caught early is a coach that ties up a bay, eats into warranty reimbursement and shows up on your CSI scores.
A coach that rarely comes back — or comes back with the problem already identified — is a coach that makes you money twice: once at the sale, and again every time that owner tells a friend how easy it’s been to own.
RVing isn’t intended to be stressful or challenging — it should be relaxing and easy. We don’t go RVing to experience more of regular hurried life. We go RVing to get away from it all. This is where a unifying control system can significantly enhance the user experience. Specifically, there are three ways it will do this for the end user:
1. A Unified Experience
When evaluating the latest control systems, dealerships should look beyond superficial feature checklists. These are an easy way to compare products, but they do little to truly define the value a control system can bring to a user. Instead, consider how unified the controls experience is for the end user. In many cases, an owner must juggle four or five separate apps and disjointed manual switches just to adjust the climate, check tank levels or manage power flow. This requires lots of training and creates a disjointed aesthetic for the coach. Further, it limits controls techniques that transcend each of the individual systems. The time required to learn these systems and keep up with them is onerous. In the end, the best control system is the one you forget you have.
2. Predictive Maintenance
There are few things as annoying as planning a trip in your unit only to discover that one of the components has failed. Suddenly, relaxing time away becomes a crisis management situation requiring quick online searches and phone calls looking for the broken part. A great control system should tell the user when and how the coach is having issues, before those issues present themselves. A great control system can predict when a water pump will fail, when the generator needs maintenance, and when the tire pressure is low.
What’s more — in motorized units, the control system can create notifications on the user’s device for the engine as well. Getting ahead of these issues keeps RVers doing what they want and not struggling with inconvenient downtime in the middle of a vacation.
3. Diagnostics
Finally, a powerful control system must act as a digital road map for technicians and owners alike. There is no profit or joy when a technician spends billable hours crawling under a chassis to hunt down a loose wire — and there is certainly no vacation joy when an owner is forced to do the exact same thing at a campsite. The system should explicitly isolate the root cause, such as differentiating between an overcurrent and an open circuit on a water pump, before a toolkit even opens. By instantly identifying the precise point of failure, dealerships and owners can verify and order parts immediately rather than wasting days on a teardown. This proactive approach to resolve component failure avoids costly time waiting for parts to arrive so that repairs can be done.
More Than the Sum of Its Parts
Circle back to that automatic transmission for a second. The best ones ask nothing of you — no thought, no effort, just smooth forward motion. A great control system works the same way: it just works, quietly, in the background. The moment you have to think about it, something’s already gone wrong.
You’ll see that same pattern walking the lot at a trade show. Two coaches can carry nearly identical spec sheets — same batteries, same generator, same HVAC — and still hand the owner two completely different lives. One coach is a single, unified experience the owner barely has to think about. The other is five apps and a wall of switches nobody remembers how to use. One warns the owner the water pump is wearing out weeks before it quits. The other waits until they’re standing at a campsite with no water pressure and no cell signal. One points a technician straight to the loose wire. The other has him flat on his back under the chassis all afternoon, running up a bill nobody wanted to pay.
That’s the real test, and it’s the one worth running before you ever write a check for inventory: is it unified, does it warn you before something breaks and does it tell you exactly what’s wrong when something does? A feature checklist won’t show you that. Walking the show and asking the right questions will.
Get that right, and the owner won’t think about the control system at all — not on day one, and not three years down the road. They’ll be thinking about the fish they caught or the sunset outside the window, while the system quietly does its job in the background. That’s not a small thing to sell. That’s the whole reason people buy an RV in the first place.
5 Questions To Ask on the Show Floor
Before you write a check for lot inventory, get the rep to show you — not tell you — these five things:
- “Pull up the tank levels and battery state from your phone, standing outside the coach.” If they have to walk you inside to a panel, that’s a red flag.
- “Turn off the Wi-Fi. Does it still work?” Most campgrounds don’t have a reliable signal. A control system that needs the internet to function is a control system that fails at the worst time.
- “How many apps does it take to run this coach?” One is the right answer. Three or four means you’re selling a headache.
- “Show me what a real fault looks like on the owner’s screen.” You want plain language — “water pump losing pressure” — not a blinking light or a code number nobody but a technician can decode.
- “If something breaks, how fast can your service department find out what it is?” This is the difference between a 10-minute fix and a coach sitting on your lot for a week.
David Kindt is the vice president of engineering at Firefly Integrations. Bringing nearly two decades of technical leadership from Honeywell and General Electric, he focuses on designing reliable mobile automation systems that simplify operations for manufacturers, field technicians and RV owners across the industry.
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