Elddis Xplore 544 caravan

A new Xplore fixed bed caravan for 2010

Elddis Xplore 544 caravan

Xplore, now under the Elddis brand, come into 2010 with a brand name that brings them up-market, allying this budget range with the more expensive ones that the company offers, with more specification. They all have two things in common, though. 

One is the Elddis’ high build quality. The other is something new: a six-year water ingress warranty, giving the ranges a simple statement of confidence in longevity. 

The Xplore 544 typifies the range in its new styling. But it’s the layout that makes the news. It brings fixed-bed luxury into the range with the lowest prices.

Here’s your guided tour from the door. Turn right and you see a generously-sized cabinet. That’s your ideal television place. There’s also room here to use the surface for kitchen work. That’s important, as the surface space in the kitchen itself is seriously small.

Before you step into the bedroom, you’ll notice this layout’s major plus-point: plenty of space right in the centre of the caravan.

The bedroom gives you a sprung mattress. In the offside corner you’ll find the loo, just forward of it is the shower. 

That’s important, because the fact that you step through the shower towards the loo works far better than Elddis’s similar-layout Odyssey 544, which has its loo forward of the shower area; you have to climb over it to get to the shower.

Kitchen storage amounts to very little outside the fridge but you have a cupboard in that superb sideboard opposite. With a surface of about a metre and a half in length, treat this as part of a two-sided galley kitchen and it becomes workable. 

If you were giving marks out of 10 for the new Xplore range’s interior look, you’d want to give it 20. That’s because its refreshing colour scheme and pattern makes it look like a caravan far above its under-£12,000 price-tag. 

Plain fawn seat bases make the caravan look larger than it is. And the seat backs have deep, rich, red-terracotta circles against the background of the seat-base fawn. 

Spec extends to a Sony CD and radio unit with i-Pod and MP3 connectivity. Anything lacking? We’d go for the option of the Winterhoff hitch-head stabiliser in the interests of safety. 

We’d certainly recommend you go for the most important option of a spare wheel and carrier. 


Specification
Axles: 4
Berths: 4
MRO: 1151kg
MTPLM: 1350kg
Width: 2.2m
Headroom: 1.91m

If you associate fixed bed layouts with luxury you’d always be right. But to most, fixed bed equals rather more money than £12,000. The new Elddis Xplore 544 now gives us that luxury layout without the higher specification that puts up the price. 

It looks great, it feels great and, provided you budget for the spare wheel that’s so essential, and think carefully about affording the hitch-head stabiliser also, you have a fantastic caravan here.