At $8,999, Is This Ultralight, Ultraspacious Camper Just Right?

The new Tune M1Lite combines the best parts of different camper categories—space, versatility and a small footprint—into one affordable price

This new camper from Colorado-based Tune Outdoors looks to me like it could represent the perfect compromise for drivers who need to use their trucks for daily driving and other mundane tasks, but also want plenty of space to do more than just sleep inside their camper. Let me explain my relationship to the camper space, the things that most people don’t understand about them, and through all that work towards a greater understanding of why the Tune M1Lite could be right for you.

Regular readers should feel free to skip past the next paragraph. I hate providing my bona fides as much as you hate seeing them repeated, but since there’s so much bad information around campers on the Internet, and new readers might not know all this, I want to clarify why my thoughts may appear novel when compared to more derivative work. Promise it’ll become obvious why all this is relevant.

Long story short, I used to write about cars and motorcycles, and enjoyed careers in those worlds that forever changed them. I was number two on the team that built Jalopnik into the most widely read car site on Earth, before it was destroyed by a creepy tech billionaire using a sex tape of a washed up wrestler, and the motorcycle site I built in the late 2000s toppled legacy titles during its very disruptive five-year run as the most widely-read publication that space will ever see. But I found all that pretty one-dimensional, something I fixed by pivoting into the outdoor world first with IndefinitelyWild, a site I launched in partnership with Gawker Media, then 18 months later when I moved to Outside, where I’ve worked as the outdoor lifestyle columnist for the last decade. I brought sincere coverage of vehicles and campers to that publication, and through it to the wider world of outdoor recreation media for the first time.

I’d like to think that that one of the things that explains the popularity of my writing is that I’m good at figuring out how stuff works, then explaining that so everyone can understand it.

And that’s why, in 2017, I was excited to learn about a new company called GoFastCampers. One of its founders emailed me out of the blue to suggest I would like to be friends with him, and it turns out he was right. He drove down to our wedding in Todos Santos with his wife and then-baby in early 2020, my brother-in-law has worked as their product designer since shortly after that, and I’ve helped out both formally and informally over the years.

The reason why I was initially interested in GoFast was because any part you add to a vehicle needs to be considered as part of the overall system. But that approach had historically been ignored in the camper space, as customers and brands focussed more on widgets and gizmos that made them nicer to spend time in, all at the expense of making them something you could actually drive and live with. GFC fixed that by reducing the very idea of a camper to its logical minimum, creating an end product that provided a standing height internal space, room to sleep, and storage for your gear, all in something so light and so strong and so low it actually improves the truck you fit it to.

Consider that approach alongside the historic problems that plague the camper industry: Most products there are sold with both dealer and distributor margins baked into the price, so you end up paying new car money for something that maybe cost a couple grand for some meth heads in Indiana to assemble with staples, hot glue, and chopper gun fiberglass. The end results leak, grow mold, and begin falling apart from day one. But not GFC. They replaced the staples with billet aluminum, the glue with grade 8 bolts, and the chopper gun fiberglass with structural aluminum and honeycomb composite, then sold the end result direct to consumer, with what little margin was left over reinvested in living wages for its employees.

I explained all that in an article in April, 2018, shortly after the company went live. Wiley (the human, not my dog) and Graeme, the founders, had been planning on making one or two campers a week, as a side project in an industrial lockup. But that article sold over $3 million in product for them virtually overnight. Wait times almost immediately shot to over two years, something the pair eventually fixed by investing in human capital and using robots to eliminate menial labor.

But reducing those wait times took a while, and in the meantime there was suddenly a lot of demand for novel ultralight campers, and no one to deliver those. Dozens of imitators sprung up overnight, preying on buyers’ inexperience with campers that looked similar to a GFC, but failed to deliver anything like the same value.

Super Pacific cloned GFC’s website, and launched a camper that was twice the price, twice the weight, with half the strength. Lone Peak took a page from Walmart’s book, and produced a knock off that looked kinda the same, but features all the quality of an Ozark Trail camp chair. Vagabond did something similar, innovating through its use of hinges that look like they stole them off demo sheds in Home Depot parking lots. Nowhere in any of that are mentioned good jobs or happy employees.

And through all that, those rip off artists copied the traditional camper industry, and started pushing widgets and gizmos and other shiny objects over genuine function that actually creates value for customers. A lot of buyers in this emerging space for ultralight campers are first time consumers not only for campers, but maybe even 4x4s, so they’re easily misled by the sex appeal of of a new gadget, and have little ability to honestly assess their own needs or expectations.

Me, Teddy, and my truck. Photo: Matt Hardinge.

But I get it. While my two GFCs have been the most reliable components on the two trucks I’ve put them on, and add an immense level of practicality both in normal driving and while camping, they do lack space. And on occasions where my wife and I would like to shelter comfortably in a usable interior, along with our three big dogs and camp gear, they fall short.

Into the mess described above entered Tune, with its innovation being a roof that popped up vertically, rather than hinging into a wedge from the front, along with an extended cabover. The two features together are reminiscent of traditional slide-in campers, but unlike the hermetically sealed box promised by those, the Tune instead bolts to a truck’s bed rails, just like a GFC. Seeking more space, the original M1 also pushed its side panels out wider than the footprint of the truck bed, a small but mighty touch that really does amplify the feeling of space when you stand inside one.

The regular Tune M1. Note extreme width, which extends six inches on both sides wider than the truck itself.

By itself, that long, wide cabover on the Tune combines with the vertical roof to create something approximating a queen size bed, one which sits entirely forward of the truck bed, leaving that entire area open from floor to ceiling. If, like us, you spoon your dogs while you sleep, you can add an extension that takes up a foot or so of that bed space to increase bed dimensions to king size. Because there’s no camper structure, appliances, or anything else below the height of the bed rails, Tune delivers the most space you can find in any camper, and each one is custom sized to the truck it’s fitted to.

There are downsides. Weight for a camper built for a 5-foot bed Taco is 400 pounds. So, given that truck’s 1,050-pound payload, you probably should’t pair one with passengers or protection parts. And, with an internal standing height of only 6’6”, there’s no room for a drawer system like those made by Decked (which are 12-inches tall) under your feet. Prices for the M1 start at $13,000, which is getting within spitting distance of a bare bones slide-in. (I should add here that you cannot safely carry any slide-in camper in anything lighter than a 3/4-ton pickup.)

But what you’re going to notice most about the Tune is just how much it sticks out beyond your truck’s footprint. The added width of the sides starts to make spaces between trees feel very claustrophobic off-road. Especially if you tick the box for the huge glass windows. And that enormous cabover catches wind and visibly flexes with the truck bed in your peripheral vision as you drive. Carrying one around feels very much like driving with a huge slide-in, just without the crappy stove or smelly toilet waiting for you when you do eventually crawl your way into camp.

That experience is very much in contrast to that offered by GFC. With one of those bolted to your truck bed, you can’t even notice it’s there. It doesn’t slow you down, it doesn’t get in the way, it doesn’t flap around, and you don’t have to worry about knocking it around on tree branches.

Enter the Tune M1Lite, which (finally) is the subject of this article. It cuts out the pokey outey sides, shaving 12 inches off the total width, eliminates all the glass, and shrinks the cabover. The end result is $8,999, 322 pounds (sized for a 5-foot Taco), and a queen-size bed that eats up some (as yet undefined) truck bed space. Tune says interior volume shrinks by 20 percent from M1 to M1Lite. That’s only $49 and less than 50 pounds more than an equivalent GFC, which offers only a full-size human bed that takes up all space over the truck bed when all its panels are in place.

Way smaller, but still pretty big. Don’t plan on using any indoor parking garages and do plan on very low highway MPGs, especially if you insist on driving a Taco.

Better? If you prioritize driving like an asshole over hiding inside a camper while outdoors, probably not. We’re talking about flat rather than tubular extrusions and composite rather than billet aluminum joints. But if you do drive carefully off-road, and do want to hide inside, this could prove a really good, really accessible alternative. This is the first GFC-adjacent product that I actually think might give GFC a run for its money, so long as customers understand both the differences, and their own needs.

Like the original, this thing is bare inside, allowing you to continue using your truck like a truck when you’re not camping. Boards, cement, dead animals, dirty dogs? No problem. Just a bare space with a (big) comfortable bed that keeps you out of the elements. And when you’re driving through the weather and the washboard that defines the real world, it turns out that basic value proposition is a lot nicer than fragile luxuries.

Deliveries are supposed to start in December, and I look forward to checking one out once they start reaching customers. Tune is now accepting deposits on reservations, but I don’t see any need to rush out and buy one, the era of unfeasibly long wait times for campers has very much been replaced by companies hustling for each and every sale.

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