History of the Camper Van: From VW Buses to the Modern Class B Boom
The history of the camper van starts with the simplest idea in RVing: don't tow the house, and don't build it on a truck chassis — convert the van itself. That idea had to wait for the right van, and it found one in 1950. This post traces the camper van from the Volkswagen bus and Westfalia's conversions, through Detroit's 1970s conversion-van boom and the lean decades, to the Sprinter revolution and the #vanlife era that made the modern Class B the fastest-moving corner of the market. For the class as it stands now, see our Class B and camper van guide and the best camper vans roundup.
The Volkswagen years
Volkswagen launched the Type 2 Transporter in 1950, and within a year the German coachbuilder Westfalia was offering camper conversions for it — a "camping box" that turned the cargo van into a sleeper with a fold-out bed and storage. Westfalia's conversions grew more sophisticated through the split-window era (1950–1967): pop-up roofs, fitted cabinets, a proper little kitchen. In Britain, converters such as Dormobile were doing the same work on British vans by the late 1950s, with lifting roofs and their own fitted interiors.
The bay-window bus (1968–1979) completed the formula. Westfalia's pop-top Campmobile versions were sold through US Volkswagen dealers in the 1970s — a factory-warranted camper you could buy off a dealer lot, an idea the American industry would take decades to match — and in North America the Westfalia camper became the counterculture's transport of choice: cheap to buy used, simple to fix, and just big enough to live in. The Vanagon carried the line from 1980 to 1991, adding water cooling and, in the Syncro, four-wheel drive; the EuroVan camper — converted in the US by Winnebago, of all companies — was sold until 2003 and was the line's last factory chapter. Volkswagen's exit left a hole in the market that took a decade and a different van to fill. Back in Europe, Volkswagen eventually returned to the idea in-house: the factory-built California, sold there since 2004, is the Westfalia concept with a VW badge.
The buses themselves became collectibles. Restored split-window campers and well-kept Westfalias are now auction-grade vehicles: in typical asking ranges as of October 2026, tidy restored Westfalias commonly list around $40,000–$90,000, and the very best split-window examples have brought six figures at auction. Treat any specific bus as a classic-car purchase, not an RV purchase — condition, originality and documentation set the price.
Detroit vans and the conversion boom
America's own van era began in the 1960s with the Ford Econoline, Chevrolet's vans and the Dodge A100, and exploded in the 1970s. Detroit sold the bare vans; a vast aftermarket of conversion companies fitted them with raised roofs, captains' chairs, cabinetry and beds. Most 1970s conversions were lounge vans rather than true campers, but the full camper conversions among them — with galleys, water systems and sleeping for a family — established the template, and the industry's Class A/B/C scheme gave the type its permanent name: Class B, the van conversion. One converter bridges the whole era: Sportsmobile, founded in El Paso, Texas in 1961 (and based in Indiana since 1976), has converted vans continuously from the Econoline years to today's Sprinter, Transit and ProMaster builds, pop-top roofs included — a reminder that the class was never quite as dead as the sales charts suggested.
The factory end of the class professionalised in the following decades. Canadian maker Roadtrek, building van campers since 1974, and Pleasure-Way, founded in Saskatchewan in 1986, turned the Class B into a properly engineered product — integrated plumbing, real insulation, coach-built interiors on Dodge, Ford and Chevrolet van chassis — while makers such as Leisure Travel Vans carried the torch through the 1990s and 2000s, when the class was a quiet niche between the trailer boom and the motorhome mainstream.
Those lean decades mattered more than they look. The surviving builders spent them solving the van's hard problems — how to fit a shower, a furnace, fresh and waste tanks and a real bed into 20 feet without making any of them miserable — and the solutions they standardised (wet baths, cassette toilets, under-floor tank heating, sofa-bed hybrids) are the ones every modern Class B, factory or DIY, still uses. When demand returned, the class did not have to be reinvented; it had to be scaled.
The Sprinter changes everything
The van that restarted the class arrived quietly. Mercedes-Benz launched the Sprinter in Europe in 1995 and began selling it in North America in 2001, first under the Freightliner badge. It was a different species from the American vans: a tall, narrow, diesel-powered box you could stand up in, with commercial-vehicle durability and car-like economy. Converters adopted it immediately, and Airstream's Interstate, launched on the Sprinter in the mid-2000s, showed the premium end of what a Class B could be.
The Sprinter solved the old camper van compromise. A Westfalia asked you to accept 1960s performance and a wet tent's worth of space; a Sprinter conversion offered motorway speed, diesel range, a real bathroom and standing headroom — in a vehicle that still parked like a van. The two eras even shook hands directly: in the mid-2000s Airstream sold a Sprinter-based camper actually built by Westfalia in Germany, badged the Airstream Westfalia — the original converter's last factory appearance in the American market, and a collector's curiosity today.
#Vanlife and the three-platform boom
The cultural wave arrived with social media. Photographer Foster Huntington is widely credited with popularising the #vanlife hashtag from 2011, and the image of the camper van as a home, office and escape pod spread far beyond the old RV market. Manufacturers answered with platforms: Ram's ProMaster reached North America for 2014 and Ford's Transit for 2015, giving converters three modern vans — Sprinter, ProMaster and Transit — at three price levels, exactly the three-platform market our Class B guide describes today.
The emblematic product of the era is Winnebago's Revel, launched for 2018 on the all-wheel-drive Sprinter: lithium power, off-road stance, a gear garage under the bed — a factory answer to a decade of DIY builds. Around the big factories grew a boutique tier the class had never had: builders such as Outside Van (converting Sprinters since 2007) and Storyteller Overland, whose Transit-based MODE series our Class B guide names among the best-known adventure builds, sell small-batch vans at prices above the volume makers'. The DIY scene itself is part of the history now; factory lead times and prices through the 2020–21 demand surge pushed thousands of buyers to convert cargo vans themselves, and the conversion-parts industry that grew up around them is permanent.
Prices tell the story of the class's rise: as our Class B guide sets out, new camper vans run roughly $110,000–$250,000 as of October 2026, with top-trim Sprinter builds passing $300,000 — per square foot, the most expensive RVs you can buy, and a long way from a plywood camping box in a 1951 Volkswagen. The next chapter is already visible in outline: battery-electric vans, led by the eSprinter and Volkswagen's ID. Buzz, are beginning to attract converter attention in the mid-2020s, and if history is any guide the class will absorb them the way it absorbed the diesel Sprinter — slowly, then all at once. To see where seventy years of the idea has landed, browse the camper vans and Class B listings and compare the three platforms side by side.