This is an Airstream Bambi 16′ Travel Trailer that was made in 2021. It’s just about the smallest Airstream money can buy but that doesn’t mean it’s not full-featured – it still has a full kitchenette, a dinette, a bathroom with a toilet and shower, and sleeping accommodation for up to four people.
Compact, lightweight travel trailers like this are ideally suited to people with smaller tow vehicles, or simply those who prefer a more manageable home on wheels. They’re also well-suited to singles, couples, or those with pets rather than kids, though this trailer could accommodate two adults and two kids without too much effort.
This is a photograph of a young Wally Byam, the founder of Airstream and arguably the most influential person in the history of travel trailer (caravan) production. Image courtesy of Airstream.
A Little Trailer On A Sheep Farm
Airstream was founded by Wally Byam in 1931 in Culver City, California. Byam had been born on the 4th of 1896 in Baker City on the Oregon Trail. He would grow up working with his uncle on a sheep farm, and living in a wooden trailer that could move with the herd.
The trailer had a bed, a table and chair, a stove, water, and food – it would later go on to inspire Byam to create what is now the best-known travel trailer in the world.
Byam would work and support himself through college, graduating from Stanford and initially working in the related fields of journalism, advertising, and publishing. He retained his love of the outdoors from his early life working on the farm, and used to take his wife Marion Byam camping, but she couldn’t stand sleeping on the ground in a tent.
The First Byam Trailers Begin To Take Shape
As a result of his wife’s dislike of roughing it, Wally built a “tent contraption” on a Model T Ford chassis that was far more civilized than a normal tent, but still left a lot to be desired from a comfort and practicality standpoint.
This is the front section of the Airstream Bambi, the dinette set can hold four people, and the table can be lowered down to form the middle of a twin bed when additional accommodation is needed.
He soon replaced the tent with a teardrop-shaped hardshell permanent shelter, and it was this design that soon attracted the attention of other campers he met on the road – some of which asked him to build one for them too.
It was this interest from people he met on the road that first sparked the idea to create his own travel trailer company, which he did at first by building them each by hand in his front yard. Noise complaints from neighbors resulted in him soon moving the enterprise to a proper factory.
His early trailer designs were unusual in that they took aerodynamics into account, whereas many other companies simply made wooden boxes on wheels that offered the aerodynamic coefficient of a house brick.
Aluminum Inspiration
In the 1930s Byam would see a Bowlus Road Chief for the first time, a travel trailer designed by Hawley Bowlus, an aerospace engineer and the builder of the Spirit of St. Louis aircraft.
In this instant he realized that aluminum was the perfect material for the job, offering far better strength and longevity than the wood and Masonite trailers he had been building up until that point.
There’s a permanent queen bed in the rear of the trailer, with a built-in flatscreen TV for watching movies in bed in the evenings.
In 1936 he would release the Airstream Clipper, an aluminum travel trailer that would revolutionize the industry despite the fact that it was released in the midst of the Great Depression. Of the 400+ travel trailer companies that existed at this time in the United States, today only Airstream remains.
The Airstream Bambi 16′ Travel Trailer Shown Here
Over the past 90 years Airstream has built a wide variety of trailers, including long triple-axle models beloved by movie stars like Tom Hanks as their home-away-from-home when working on set.
The trailer you see in this article is considerably smaller, just 16 feet in length, but despite its compact size it is fully equipped for everything you need for life on the road, and even for life off the grid.
Inside you’ll find a kitchenette with a countertop, a stainless-steel sink with running water, a two-burner propane cooktop, a microwave oven, and a refrigerator/freezer. There are dual gas bottles stored on the front of the trailer to ensure an ample supply of gas.
Here you see the kitchenette, it’s small but features a countertop, a stainless-steel sink with running water, a two-burner propane cooktop, a microwave oven, and a refrigerator/freezer.
The dinette set has seating for four with a table in the center. The table can be lowered down to turn it into a double bed when required, and there’s a permanent queen bed in the rear. The bathroom has a toilet and shower with hot water, and the trailer has a Zip Dee awning, a Dometic air conditioner, a furnace, a flat-screen TV, and a JVC CD stereo.
This Airstream is now being sold on Bring a Trailer out of Statesville West, North Carolina with a clean North Carolina title in the owner’s name. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid you can visit the listing here.
Images courtesy of Bring a Trailer
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
