Carapate Aventure is a start-up founded in 2019 to revive the teardrop trailers developed in the United States. Lightweight, ingenious and comfortable, these mini-caravans are made locally near Nantes. Featuring retro-design lines, with a bed that doubles as a sofa and an indoor-outdoor kitchen, they weigh just 560 kg, and are easy to tow and set up.
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MotorTranscript
00:00Jean-Marie Raimond, Fabien Denine, for Carapat Aventure.
00:07We are both interior architect designers. We studied in this field.
00:12We met at a party to talk about our travels, our road trips,
00:17and we came to talk about this concept of mini-caravan.
00:21We are both fans of micro-architecture and the constraint of the mini-caravan is interesting
00:26because it is a vehicle that drives, but in which you have to sleep,
00:30cook, move, have a base camp.
00:33So it also brought together things that we liked,
00:36optimize small spaces and also tell a story with a particular design.
00:44The R4 or the 4L, the memories I have from my childhood,
00:47I am in a large family,
00:50so the mother who took all the children to school,
00:54we were a nice brotherhood,
00:56and we were all behind in the 4L and we pushed like that,
00:59Gertrude, to climb the slopes,
01:02and all the children pushed Gertrude, the 4L,
01:06to get to school.
01:11Most of the users are walkers,
01:14people who have turned to nature,
01:16who have done camping or who have hiked,
01:20people who travel and who have VTT passions,
01:24different things like that,
01:26and who are looking for a little bit of comfort and a base camp too,
01:29so that also met expectations for these people who have passions outside.
01:34The 4L is really the base camp of adventures,
01:38of trips that we can create,
01:40and the R4, in that sense, carries this imagination.
01:45The construction mode has gone from something
01:49of a rather artisanal prototype,
01:51to something really industrialized.
01:54We use quite advanced machining technologies.
01:58The key ideas of our project were defined at the beginning.
02:02Several ideas, to have a sliding kitchen
02:05for use inside or outside,
02:08it was to have a side window
02:12to really feel that we are in the middle of nature,
02:15to look outside and have an incredible panoramic view.
02:19There is also the emphasis that we could put
02:22on manufacturing in France and eco-design.
02:25The 4L, to this day, is the only mini-caravan,
02:29maybe even the only caravan,
02:31that has undergone a life cycle analysis.
02:35It means how we consume when we make a mini-caravan,
02:39and at the end of the mini-caravan's life cycle,
02:42what do we do with it?
02:46It is true that associating the 4L with the R4,
02:50an electric vehicle, is very interesting,
02:53since we now have the most pollutant,
02:56the most emissive,
02:58largely reduced because we have an electric vehicle.