Converting a heavy-duty bus/coach/truck into a motorhome (page 61 of 161)

😉Hi everyone, thanks again Patrick for your help😛 The blog and Nicquel, don't change anything with Seb... it's great as it is I'll join the blog as soon as I get my computer back with some photos, a few plans, etc... 😎

ciao

Hey everyone, oh yeah, good point about the blog—at least it’s clear now. No more wandering between pages, everything’s there. Patrick, huh, not practical 😮

😉 ; Thanks to both of you for this blog—it was missing. Super Junior, keep up your tech builds; they’ll always be useful, even for those who check them out in the shadows (not crazy enough to post for fear of being called nuts, but the more, the merrier for learning!).

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the blog I just visited—just one word: tip-top. 😉 Fab

The blog is sooooooooooooooooo cool! No doubt, it's a huge step forward in how we share info! Big thanks to both of you. See ya, Seb

Sorry, but I don’t agree with the quality of the blog!

It’s the photo that’s off:

Having seen Patrick and Seb in real life, they’re way better looking than that.

Hey there, neighbor! I just realized you live near me—I’m from Givors. Here’s my email: regis.mortier@laposte.net. If you need a hand, no problem—just call.

😉 Hi,

How's your Setra Gasmobil coming along??? Hope it's awesome😎 Keep us posted

Damn, go watch Al Gore’s movie on global warming. Stop the madness with your buses and RVs. The diesel consumption, its cost, and the amount of CO2 you’ll emit with your old buses—thanks for our lungs and thanks for our kids! STOP! No more dreaming, it’s too late now. Berz

Wow, this guy’s a real character...

But in our Saviem buses running on used fryer oil, we consume less than the kerosene dose of a single airplane passenger... and at least we’re not spilling our precious cargo all over the highways in tanker trucks that contaminate the water tables...

Truth is, we’re a minority brave enough to actually pull off this project, so I don’t think we’re making much of a dent in pollution levels.

And if I think like others on the forum who’ve taken this on, we still have an "eco-friendly" mindset—it’s a whole lifestyle:

I know my bus pollutes, so for my other trips, I prioritize the train, for example. Even though they offer me a company car, if I need to go to Paris and back, I’ll take the train or try to carpool with colleagues. Just so you know, many of us on this forum are aware of the issue too.

Plus, as a campervan owner, you must know that a classic RV tends to drive like a car—meaning the van’s on the road every day of the vacation, burning through 10 to 15 liters of diesel daily. Its consumption is around 10–15 L/100 km (while a lightweight bus like a Saviem averages 20–22 L/100 km depending on driving style).

Out of curiosity, could you roughly tell us (for stats) how much you consume and how many kilometers you’ve covered on one of your recent trips (like a 15-day/3-week itinerary)?

Hello there,

My 8.60m coach barely uses more fuel than your camper van (just 3L more on average) but carries 9 people plus bikes and a Dutch trailer for the little one and supplies. It's equipped with a Bosch injection system, brand-new air filter, and injectors (so max efficiency) and set to 190 bars from the factory to fill up with HVO in Germany or Portugal = zero pollution... sorry, can't lump all motorhome buses into the same category as camper van owners.

By the way, what’s your camper van? Are we doing a CO and CO₂ study per person transported?

I’ll start: using fuel sold in France and legally usable, in mixed driving I average 18L for 9 people and 3 tons of gear—that’s 2L per person and per 333.333kg transported per 100km. 😎 Can you do better? 😏

Otherwise, I also have a Master L3H2 2.8L DTi that averages 11.5L, climbing to 15L when loaded on the highway, and a long C25 averaging 9L to 11.4L when loaded with a 2.3T van trailer! That’s between 20.5L and 26.4L for 3T of gear and only 6 people, so you’d need to add a Mercedes 300TD (9 to 12L/100km), bringing the total to 29.5 to 36.4L/100km for the same volume, weight, and number of people. 🤪

😉 Easy—I’d already thought this through, which is why I invested in a coach TO SAVE FUEL.

First, you do your research, ask questions, compare, and ONLY THEN can you complain with full knowledge—otherwise, you’re just talking nonsense 😠 or need to add some nuance.

Seriously... I could just as easily generalize and say there’s nothing more polluting than a camper van owner because they take their giant rig to do their shopping, go to the local flea market, and block two parking spots—it’s easy. Yet I know people who don’t do that and will be frustrated reading this. 😠

As for global warming, I’ve been calling it out for 25 years already—YES!!! My answer today? Take it up with your government for refusing to let us use biofuel, or with the US and China for refusing to cut their emissions.

Food for thought...

Well, China can still be excused since they have every right to catch up (they're like we were 50 years ago), but still...

My coach isn't ready yet, but I'm working on it slowly.

hahahahahahahahahahaha..........

Hey there...

Alright, let's take it easy....😉

We need to make a clear observation, and I agree with you that it's worth discussing.

Let's set aside campervans (light or heavy vehicles) under 5 years old, which are mostly unaffordable for most of us in terms of cost, as well as vehicles running on vegetable oil, which are still quite rare.

A truck engine runs very slowly; this point is important. Indeed, apart from fuel, other polluting elements come from engines, like oil (which lasts much longer in a truck than in a light vehicle, due to the engine's efficiency) and filters (same goes for those). Tires get a second life in Africa, while those from light vehicles end up in incinerators!

As for fuel, I won’t go back over GX 47’s convincing explanation! For me, things are a bit different; I’ll consume a bit more than you (3 liters per 100 km!) on the route that takes me from home to my vacation spot, okay. But once there, I’ll consume a third of what your motorhome does with my little Toyota Yaris (4.2 liters per 100 km!), as soon as I’ve taken it out of the back of my bus!

When you do the math, I’m sure I consume less fuel than you over a full vacation cycle (trip, stay, and return), even if the bus is used for some trips during the stay!

Here’s an example: I leave from Valence (26) for the Arcachon Basin with the bus. Once there, we go to the beach, to restaurants, sightseeing, etc... with the little car. We decide to go from Arcachon to Vieux-Boucau. A quick hop with the bus, and life resumes with the little car that consumes nothing, while you’re driving around looking for parking spots without height barriers every time you want to buy a baguette or access a beach!

And since I have the car, I won’t necessarily try to be as close as possible to the beach or the city-center parking lot I want to visit (and thus drive around trying to park a 7-meter-long, 3.3-meter-high truck. I know, I’ve had one before switching to the bus! And I’ve driven kilometers to find those barrier-free parking spots or long-enough spaces... oh! Biarritz and its motorhome parking 4 km from the city!)

Do the math properly to see who consumes more fuel!

Add to my explanation the kilometers you drive to find service stations. With a light motorhome and my 3 kids, it was every 2 or 3 days, running around with the *Camping Car Magazine* guide, and everyone watching out the windows ("Dad, I see it, it’s there!").

Come on, let those who haven’t been through it act all high and mighty....

With my bus and its 950 liters of water, services will only need to be done once a week, or even every 10 days, so that’s fuel saved from not driving around looking for service areas! (And for me, if it’s once a week, it’ll likely be highway rest areas, even if it means taking a toll before or after the rest area, given the number of equipped areas and that tourist buses use them!)

At first glance, you might be right!

But like Bush in Iraq and his weapons of mass destruction, or the story of Peter and the Wolf, you shouldn’t shout statements that are spread by public rumor as sure and proven facts....

You have to make up your own mind.

And besides, if you take your argument to the extreme, a polluter is still a polluter! So take your ideas to their logical conclusion! Sell your motorhome, donate the freed-up funds to Greenpeace (or another org!) and switch to biking and tent camping! For vacations, some will tell you it’s a great solution, and by far the most ecological!😉

No animosity or aggression toward you—my response is to be taken with all the humor and passion of a topic I love!

Cheers,

PATRICK26

Rapeseed fields? Even if all of France were turned into rapeseed fields, there still wouldn’t be enough to fuel everything that rolls and smokes on our roads.

My truck’s fuel consumption? Way too high! Between 12 and 14 liters per 100 km. Sardinia this summer with diesel at 1.29 € per liter blew my budget.

But that’s not the main point.

My intentionally aggressive stance is also a way to warn you about the dangers we’re facing in the medium term. By 2060, Al Gore tells us, if nothing is done, there will be no more ice at the poles. The collapse has already begun. You’ve all read or seen those stories about polar bears found drowned because the ice can no longer support their weight. You’ve also heard about that Inuit village that needs to be relocated because the ice isn’t thick enough to hold them anymore. But you probably haven’t seen those photos of glaciers taken years apart, disappearing... inexorably. Or those freshwater rivers flowing through the ice sheet, breaking it apart.

This is just the beginning. We’re in the situation of the guy falling from the World Trade Center who, at the 50th floor, thinks: "So far, so good." Except we know the ending—he doesn’t (though he might suspect it; and in his fall, is he dreaming of a golden parachute?).

So? Should we keep dreaming of improbable, wheezing, polluting buses to explore the planet? Or try to start today to fundamentally change the way we do things, our lifestyles?

Note that the guy saying this almost became President of the United States. He’s not some random crackpot. He bases his arguments on very serious studies and uses his status as a former presidential candidate from the world’s biggest oil consumer to say: "STOP." I know: he still takes planes. But to give conferences around the world and sound the alarm, he figured a bus would take too long...

Go see this film quickly—it’s a slap in the face, one that might just save us... it all depends on us.

And don’t forget to turn off the TV before going to bed...

Berz

😉HERE'S A PHOTO OF OUR BUS, IT'S AN SAVIEM S53R FROM '86 ALL THE PHOTOS I HAVE ARE TOO BIG TO POST MORE I'M GOING TO PICK IT UP ON THE 12TH

BERZ, I’ll give you a straightforward answer;

The biggest CO2 emitter on the planet is... the melting permafrost!

And it’s unstoppable!

On its own, it accounts for 40/100 of the CO2 released into the atmosphere. It’s already too late.

Its melt is causing rivers to swell and flow into the North Atlantic, and all that freshwater pouring into the Gulf Stream has already slowed it down too much to prevent it from stopping!

Our only chance is... that it *does* stop!

Because that would trigger a rapid new ice age, which would refreeze the permafrost very quickly (yeah, but that’s not Al Gore’s problem, or Alaska’s with their oil drilling—it’s *ours* in Europe!)

That’s the only way to avoid completely halting the Gulf Stream.

But if this topic interests some of you, there are great discussions about it elsewhere... Here, we talk about converting buses/coaches and trucks into motorhomes!

Sorry to close this super interesting but off-topic thread .

PATRICK26

And another madman!

A really nice bus, very clean (the roads can't often be icy in Morbihan given how clean the lower bodywork is!)

Right, back to work!

PATRICK26

THANKS,

There are a few rust spots, nothing too serious.

here, we're discussing converting buses/coaches and trucks into motorhomes!

thanks for closing this thread—really interesting but off-topic

Not sure I'm off-topic. I think I'm actually right on topic here. But you're right, I don't want to come across as a troublemaker or killjoy. Good luck with your respective projects. But don't skimp on diesel filter quality! Berz