(No Longer Built) Winnebago Micro Minnie 2405RG

5,800 pounds, almost on the nose. This is something very different. And I'm really eager to see what people think about this. So please, as we go through the video, leave us a little bit of feedback, guys. This is a 2405RG Winnebago micro mini fifth wheel here at Haylett RV of Coldwater, Michigan. And this is something that is truly half-ton towable. Fifth wheels keep getting bigger. Even the ones that claim half-ton towability are rarely, truly, comfortably half-ton towable. And then along comes Winnebago. And they decide, we're gonna buck traditions. Forget everything you know about a fifth wheel. What if we redefine this thing? And it is made to be smaller, lighter, made to be towed with half-ton vehicles. Although, they did make sure that the platform height was correct so that you can hook it up to like three-quarter and one-ton trucks. But the thing is, guys, it only weighs 5,800 pounds, it has less than 1,100 pounds pin weight, and it's only seven foot wide. So it's not this big, heavy, intimidating beast behind your truck. One of the first questions I had was, okay, can I get through it when the slide is closed? Is it turtle friendly? And I was very pleasantly surprised to find that, yeah, yeah, it is. Now, when you see a smaller body camper, but a big, deep slide like this, they don't always play nicely together. And I'm not gonna tell you that you just walk through like a stroll in the park. I was doing a sideways travel trailer to step through here. But the fact is, other than watching TV, I can basically get to every bit of storage in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, without needing to open the slide out. So not only, well, what's funny though, is I don't know if it really matters because this thing is so darn small that if like you're at a travel stop and you're within a parking space, if you park with the door side close to the line, you can pretty much fully open the slide anyway. So this is one of the most traveling friendly fifth wheel floor plans I think I've ever seen. And there are some that are very good. And this one is just, I don't know, the next step up, extremely good. Whatever moniker you wanna apply. Really, the recurring trend here is that this is just built smaller, not cheaper than the rest of the Winnebago's. Now, if you're really familiar with Winnebago's lineup, this looks similar to, but not exactly the same as, two other offerings. First is the 2401RG Travel Trailer in the Mini Series. And then second is the 25RKS Mini Plus Fifth Wheel. It's different though. This is a purpose-built, lightweight, half-truly, half-totable, small fifth wheel couples camper with a little bit of guest capacity. So a couple of key things here though, things that are found through the rest of the Mini Series, and the Micro Mini Series specifically, is the carpetless, pet-friendly nature of this thing. How even in the dinette floor in the slide area, you see that they trimmed all that flooring out so that they could still put carpetless stuff in there. As a tiny step up, not enough to really make a difference though. There are also not heat vents in the floor. This is made to be a spring, summer, fall camper, or with the optional weather package, you could get an extended season camp out of it, where if it's going to dip below freezing overnight and then come back up during the day, this camper is going to be just fine with the weather package. And what that includes is a layer of radiant barrier insulation in the roof, the nose, and a double layer in the floor effectively. It's a very common sort of treatment package that a lot of RVs seem to go through nowadays. Doesn't make it some kind of four seasons thing. People don't realize that foily insulation stuff doesn't make something four seasons in and of itself. This is made to be an extended season RV, like most small campers. But what's great is what they've accomplished here in the kitchen and general storage of it, pretty darn good for a little rig. Before I get started on the storage though, you might notice above the kitchen cabinets, there is some indirect lighting up there. That's something that I forgot to switch on initially. I realized that I was looking at it, I'm like, oh yeah, there's extra lights up there that I forgot about. And it really is indirect lighting. They actually put a little piece of trim in front of it so that when you're walking down the steps at night, you're never getting hit in the eyes with, you know, beads of LED light. Now you've got all the same cabinetry here as the rest of the Winnebago mini series, where you've got, you know, hardwood cabinet door frames, you've got pocket screwed cabinetry. So this thing is made for towing and going. It is made for getting down the road and off the beaten path. Now over here next to the sink, you do have a tilt open window so you can get some good airflow there. And another detail thing I want to point out, well, a couple of them actually, because this camper is all about the details. You've got both back and side splashes surrounding that recessed stove top there. And it does have a tempered glass cover on it. So you legitimately can use that for extra counter space. Now that rear corner there, you can see how there's easy reach appliance outlets there, as well as to the right of the sink on the kind of the side of the cabinet. Well, that means that you don't have to have extra long appliance cords or extensions or anything like that. Cause like you shouldn't be plugging things like a coffee maker into a power strip. It's too high draw of an appliance to be doing that kind of stuff. You'll also find that all of the countertops, whether it's here in the kitchen, the dining area, the bathroom, they're all a pressed membrane. Now it does seem like more and more RVs are going to this and that's a good thing. So really you should be questioning the ones that kind of haven't yet. Now, as always, this is a very material premium trailer. And that's really what I've been pointing out thus far is a lot of the material upgrades here versus I think what you would expect from a small fifth wheel. As a culture, we equate small to cheap and they don't have to be. Small can be nice. And that's really who Winnebago has or what Winnebago has done to really kind of forge their success. And they have grown considerably cause there's a lot of people like, look, I just want a small camper, something I can retire with, something that's not going to land me in the RV repair shop constantly. That's exactly what these guys are. Like you've got the rollaway drying rack here and the sink cover, but they're kind of covering up that nice stainless sink right there. So like I said, even in those areas, we do have material premiums. Extra little, I'm going to call this a shoe garage below the refrigerator. Although that could be just about anything you'd like. Now, next to that refrigerator on to the right of the fridge, there's a tall thin door. That's effectively your control panel, but isn't it nicely masked where you don't feel like you're, you know, looking at buttons and whistles and switches and stuff in your kitchen area. It's just nice and cleanly executed. Now from here, I want to move on to the living area. And where I want to start is by looking at the door side windows of this RV. And that is something that so many RVs lack today because most slide outs are located on the driver's side, which means putting in a small RV, putting windows on the door say it's hard because usually the kitchen is over here. Well, in this one, the kitchen's on the back. So they had room above that sofa and below that cabinet, but a huge door side window and notice how it does slide open for airflow. We have pleated shades for privacy, but we also have a full viewing window in the entry door itself. And it does have its own little privacy shade right up here. Let's see if, yeah, there you go. Decent little look. You can see the little lip on it. So if you do want to flip that down and kind of privatize things a little further, get some sun out of your eyes, you can. Now, just like above the kitchen, we've got nice indirect lights above the sofa seating as well. And these cabinets are nice. I love that they didn't waste the space. I also love all the little intentional radius work they've done and all the woodwork around the kitchen and living area. They didn't just throw rectangular square shaped boxes on the walls and call them cabinets. They did something to them. They gave them a treatment and it's not expensive. It's not flashy, but it also doesn't look raw. It doesn't look forgotten. It doesn't look haphazardly slapped up there. It is very much by intention. Over here, this is great. This is like a refrigerator sized bonus storage, cabinet, closet, whatever you want out of it. So as it sits right now, you can see how it's kind of open in there. It's very easy to kind of build your own storage solutions or go to the big box store of your choice and get the little, you know, like either tiered trays or sliding drawers or whatever works for you. But the fact is if you need a place to store a broom or a Swiffer, because again, we got a carpetless camper here, even up in the bedroom, which we haven't seen yet. This thing is very easy to keep clean. Below the big door side window, I wanted to show you, I mentioned it had pleated shades. I'm like, hey, why not show people while I'm taking a second to set up here? But we've got our, you know, quilted back bifold sleeper sofa that can effectively jack knife down. But there is also storage below it. Speaking of storage, Winnebago is finally doing something I think, and I think a lot of people think, they should have done a long time ago. And that is include doors on the bench ends. And that will be done on all Winnebago dinettes moving forward, whether it's a micro mini travel trailer, a mini, a mini plus, whatever, you're going to start seeing bench end doors on these things so you can very easily get to the storage down there without having to take the cushions and the plywood bases and everything off that. Now, in a way, I have to remember now, I have to be a little more diligent in showing you folks some things because I used to take a second to peel the cushions off when I was getting that storage and show you that three eights plywood that you're sitting on there. But I suppose I can just as easily lift that up and do it. Remember again, we do have a sealed edge on that dinette base right there, but kind of like the sofa, you can also fold this down into an extra sleeper. So if it is just the two of you and you have an occasional guest, or you just want an extra horizontal space to be able to store cargo while you're in transit, the dinette here can fold down. Now, what is neat, a lot of times when you're in a narrow body camper, you might not get a full four person dinette, but they made this a very deep slide so that you actually do have a full four person dining area. So the idea is you get roughly the same living space when you get there, you just don't have to tow as much of it on the way. Now, I mentioned that this is a bi-fold sofa. One of the first questions we're gonna get is can we do something else with it? At the time of this filming, no, this is what you get, but this is why you got it. Because the base of that flops down and the bottom can kind of flip up as we're seeing. If you don't fold it all the way into the sleeper position, you can create and easily access a very large storage compartment here that does have outside access. We'll take a look at that later. Now, if we put a full on tri-fold sleeper sofa in this thing, when the sleeper sofa opened up, it would almost touch those dinette bench ends right there. So it would basically cut the camper right in half. And I think a lot of people would be annoyed by that. Now, another thing people are gonna say, well, can I put a theater seat in it? You can, but if you put a theater seat in it, organically, this is all you're facing right here. You're not going to be able to easily turn and face the entertainment center like you can in its current state. Speaking of which, we've got a nice little HDTV like most things have. We've got a Bluetooth DVD stereo like most things have. So it's kind of, it makes sense in how they have it appointed for a little trailer. But a couple of little more detail sort of things that you might not be seeing here, they're using the same nicer air conditioner system here that they're using on their bigger RVs. So our air ducts can actually turn and close. The technical term for that is both vented and louvered, meaning turning and closing. So there you go, you learned something today if you didn't already know that. Over here by the antenna, they're still using the nicer King Jack antenna system. And what you can't see because I don't have any power on currently is there are actually indicator LEDs up here in the decal itself, behind the decal. So that as you're turning the antenna, it will light up to show you how much signal you are receiving. So you only have to turn it one time. You only have to channel scan one time and there you go. Moving up into the bathroom, there is a traditional sort of middle deck bathroom here, which is kind of a necessity in an RV this small to be able to gooseneck up to a truck height. They did have to put this mid step in here, but what it's creating is a very space effective dedicated middle bath area. Now, just like a lot of the newer, Winnebago mini travel trailers and micro minis, they're using a shower pan, not a tub. And this is plenty tall, even for a taller person like me. And they are still using a nice radius bar on that shower sort of sliding door thing, not like curtain door. I don't know what you want to call it, but it does give you some extra elbow room. As I spin around here, one thing I want to point out is all of any true doorway in a Winnebago, it's always fully framed out so that it maintains square every time and it's strong and has good integrity. For a small bathroom, we've got pretty decent counter space here. And you can see how they still have a stainless sink next to that foot flush toilet right there. Again, we are carpetless, we are ventless in the flooring. So we are easy cleaning and we are pet friendly and they didn't just glue a mirror against the wall. It still has a nice purpose-built corner medicine cabinet. Now we do have a sliding privacy door here in the bedroom. And this is one of the very interesting things where I think they made some very tough but very smart design decisions. So the bedroom right here, like right under this bed, it's where the RV basically goosenecks up. So there's not a lot of space right under that. And I'm going to lift the bed in a minute so you can see what I mean. But what they did is they left a step around the bed off to the side. And before someone asked, yeah, you absolutely have to have that step there. You can't build something this small and try to make that work. But what they were able to do is they left you a big space right here where even a tall person like me can still stand up and still get dressed. Now here's another big thing. It's a little camper. Does it have a little bed? The answer is no. It has a normal size bed, which is nice. And you can see above the bed how we have USB plugs on that shelf for all your phone charging needs. They left you a vent above the bed so that if you wanted to put some kind of like max air vent fan or something in there, you very easily could because you're not very far from a power source. These lights, you know, you can just piggyback off the power of that. And here's another neat thing. It's just a little touch sensitive switch. So there's nothing mechanical that you can click and break. Well, when there's nothing that you have to constantly click and there's no springs to wear out, it's just gonna last longer. Think about it. They also did something very smart here. They put in the largest windows they possibly could in this little bedroom to make this thing look and feel as big as possible. If you do choose to add a TV, you do have hookups over there. You could attach something to the wall. But I also like how they angle mounted the cabinets, the hanging wardrobes on both sides of the bed here because it does make it look and feel a bit bigger. And then, like I said, as promised, I'd lift this right up so you could have a better idea of what I'm talking about. It's not that the mattress is like dead on the floor. There is a six inch gap down there so that, you know, you're not sleeping directly against a steel frame. But you can also see how, since you're effectively close enough to what is the gooseneck floor, you could very easily have your CPAP machine beside you and plugged into the household outlets. Now, once again, even where they're not expecting you to look, they're still doing a plywood base and you do have those struts for easy lift. So getting to anything and everything in this is great and they're using good materials to keep this thing in good working order for longer. I think as soon as you see something smaller like this, a very fair knee-jerk level reaction is, okay, so they built it smaller. It's less money. Is it built cheaper? And the answer is no. They are building this on the same Norco bal chassis, the hook bolted, high strength, low alloy steel frame, like a Z frame, that I talk about in all the Winnebago trailers and the mini plus fifth wheels. They have the exact same T60 gel coat fiberglass here that we talk about in all the other Winnebago's. It's all the same materials. This one is just physically built smaller. And part of the reason that they stuck with the micro mini name is that is their line of seven foot wide travel trailers. So it all made sense. Now this is not the biggest tallest pass through, but what's interesting is it's very wide. And if you actually go camping, then you know wide storage is more functional than very tall storage because you don't tend to stack cargo vertically in transit, especially in the belly of an RV where it's going to shift and fall. You tend to set stuff side by side. So that big wide compartment down there, while maybe not tall, is actually still very, very functional. Now notice how they had double slam latches on the door. All exterior doors for cargo have double slam latches with magnet catches on them. And that's just one of those nice, easy convenience things that when you're thinking, okay, well they made a scaled down smaller fifth wheel. Again, they didn't skimp. It's just physically smaller. It's not equipment smaller, if that makes sense. Now this is just a straight seven foot wide body, which is, I mean, historically even, it's not like seven foot wide fifth wheels were something that was ever commonly done in the past. This is pretty much virgin territory right here. And this is some very interesting out of the box thinking from what is often viewed as a very classical manufacturer of RVs. A lot of people don't realize Winnebago was actually a Winnebago trailer before they started making all their motor homes. But this is unusual even for them. So what this is giving us guys is you're not getting near the headwind. You're not getting that, it doesn't look physically imposing behind a half ton truck because it's not sticking out past the truck. Now, I do always, always recommend, even on a narrow body rig, you still get towing extension mirrors, but you could have a common tow package F-150 or 1500 or whatever, and this would be fine because the thing with like a lot of tow package half tons is they might be able to pull 11, 12,000 pounds, but if you look, a lot of them only have like a 1400 pound payload rating, whereas a lot of fifth wheels in the quote half ton market have a 14 to 1600 pound hitch weight plus the weight of the hitching cargo. Well, this one, even once you have hitching cargo in it, it's still going to be in that half ton towable realm. Now, vehicle capacities are all different. One half ton is not the same as another. So please guys, give our team the opportunity to do their job and verify your safety. Before you just go spending money willy nilly and throwing caution to the wind, call our guys, we will ask you the capacities of your vehicle or help you find them to make sure that even this small thing is still safe for your vehicle. Now, we've got a simple side mount solar prep plug here, which is handy, a little fifth wheel like this, much easier to park in the shade, and it's only, what is the spec? Like 11.3 at the tallest point. So it's not terribly, terribly tall. And we've got a simple little water and cable docking station here. I do like the position of that little courtesy light. So when it is time to utilize the dump station right down there, very simple and easy to do so. Now, above the tires, there is a galvanized steel plate, which is something that we see done a lot in like our Jayco trailers here at Haylett RV. And the thing that I talk about that a lot of times is if you have a blowout, that radial tire now has a shield that it's smacking into before it starts ripping up your trailer. But frankly, even barring a blowout, stones, like how many times has a stone hit the windshield of your vehicle? And you're like, holy crap, that hit hard. Well, you think the tires on your camper are not throwing stones up into the body of the camper? Having a galvanized shield above those, don't you think logically that would make sense to help protect the camper long-term? But it's something a lot of brands don't do. Some do, but not all of them do because it's something you're not really looking at. Now, when we start looking at a smaller series, again, there's a difference between being smaller and scaled down. And that's what I wanna stress here is this is not scaled down. You see that all the windows do still open for airflow, even the window right here behind the ladder. Another neat thing that they're doing, a lot of brands are starting to move toward this. I think it's all a reaction to the Jayco J-Smart lighting system that we talk about in our videos. But this not only, pardon me, this also has backup lighting. You can see the white element inside the taillights as I walk around here. When you shift into reverse, it will cast a very bright white light. We've got the Voyager backup camera prep up top there, fully walkable roof that we'll see in a minute. Now, something that's hard to see from way back here is just in front of that rear bumper, between the bumper and the rear stabilizer jack, there is a gas grill quick connect. So if you do wanna do some outside cooking, not under the awning, not inside, if you are gonna go boondock camping, that's perfect. Also, let's take note of the fact that they have a maximum size awning in here. This has an 18 foot power awning with LED lighting. You got your speakers below it, a big campsite window on this floor plan. So you actually get to see your destination instead of closing the windows on the opposite side of the camper so you're not looking at the neighbors. Little Camper still has the nicer stable step entry system here. Now this version here, the LCI stable step actually has a wider top platform so you can kind of use it like an extra little campsite chair in a way or it just gives you more foot space when you're trying to juggle keys in your hands when you're standing at the doorway. And if you drop your keys, it can't really like fall through. You know what I mean? The door is anti-slam, has an auto closed screen door, the handy little tension band. You see the bigger entry handle here. And this stuff like this, like under the seating on the door side, they just utilized every ounce of space. Now there was storage inside of here, or under the seating on the inside of the RV as you may recall. But now we've got an extra large exterior storage bay available out here as well. As we back up a little bit, I'm gonna pass some outside TV hookups and then after that guys, I just wanna thank you for tuning in. If this is the first one of our Haylett RV videos that you're watching, I definitely hope you tune into a few more. Folks who are regular viewers, I appreciate that. You know, all of our folks who have liked and subscribed and all those good things along the way. And I tell ya, if this is any indication as to the neat, fun things that'll be coming to the RV industry in the near future, I'm pretty excited. Cause I love new ideas. It felt like for a while, things were starting to get stagnant. And I think you're gonna see a lot of other manufacturers watch this. They're gonna see, is Winnebago doing good with those tiny fifth wheels? And if they are, I bet money. You're gonna start seeing brands with names like Cougars and Eagles coming out with tiny fifth wheels like this. It's only a matter of time. If one guy does it and they're successful, someone else is gonna do it. So, like I said, leave us some feedback. Tell us what you think. Good idea, bad idea. What you like, what you don't. Share the good, bad, the ugly, the in-between. Because I'm really curious to know what people think about this. We've got a few more floor plans coming in. We've got one with a rear bathroom coming. Or maybe it's here by now. Cause when you're watching this, it might be different from when I'm recording it. There are bunk models. There's different arrangements coming out for this. This is just the first one. And again, the longer you watch us here at Haylett RV, the more of them that you're going to see. So, take care, stay safe, have fun, and happy camping, everyone. Holy crap, I forgot to get on the roof. Well, until now, anyway. I realized I had already kind of said my sign off and I never got up here. Anyway, like all Winnebago's, we are actually walking on a three-eighths roof decking. We've got arched roof trusses. They're actually like, for a long time, they're actually using tubular aluminum trusses. And I found out recently in the micro mini series, they did swap over to a galvanized stamp steel roof truss. So, you know, sometimes I might still slip out of habit and call it an all aluminum structure or skeleton. But I think the biggest thing a lot of people are wanting to know is, is it wood or is it not wood? And this is a not wood skeleton. And remember, it does ride on that little bit different kind of chassis. So, they made it smaller. They made it lighter. They didn't make it cheaper. They didn't make it flimsier. They just shrunk the body size down and said, what do you think of this? I think it's going to sink or it's going to swim, but I got a feeling that this fish has gills and she's going to make it. So, once again, we do it all here at Halet RV, as you clearly see. So take care, stay safe, have fun and happy camping, everyone.