Country Coach

Country Coach is best known for its own Class A diesel motorhomes, which are covered in the Country Coach brand entry. This entry covers a smaller part of the business: finishing Prevost bus shells into custom motorhomes at the company's home in Junction City, Oregon.

The company's own history page says Bob Lee left Caribou Manufacturing in 1973 and started Country Campers, that his brother Ron and Lenard Lee soon joined, and that the business took the name Country Coach, Inc. in 1984. National R.V. Holdings, Inc., a motorhome maker that filed reports with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, bought Country Coach on November 6, 1996, paying with stock valued at $9.0 million.

The start date of the Prevost program is not settled. The National R.V. annual reports for 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001 and 2002 say the Country Coach Prevost Conversion was introduced in 1979. The reports for 2003 through 2005 say 1983. The oldest Country Coach Prevost coaches found in used-coach listings are 40-foot XL models from the early 1990s.

The reports show how the coach changed. The 1997 report describes a fully custom coach in 40- and 45-foot lengths, with one floorplan that had a slide-out room, priced from about $650,000 to $1,000,000. The 1998 report names the Prevost Le Mirage XL and H3-45 VIP shells, with prices starting at $659,000. The 1999 report names the XL II shell, starting at $715,000, and the 2001 report lists 40- and 45-foot Le Mirage XLII coaches from $967,000.

In its report for 2001, National R.V. said it intended to end the Prevost conversion in 2002. It gave three reasons: limited profit, falling sales of bus conversions and the need for factory space for motorhomes that sold better. The conversion stayed in the lineup. The report for 2002 lists a 45-foot XLII double-slide coach from $1,218,000, and the report for 2003 says the Prevost work had moved to a leased building away from the main plant. Later reports give that building's size as 27,000 square feet.

Starting prices for the double-slide XLII kept rising: $1,290,000 in the 2003 report, $1,310,000 in the 2004 report and $1,339,000 in the 2005 report. The reports list features such as Crestron electronic controls, a satellite dish that works while driving, GPS navigation and computer-controlled air leveling. MotorHome magazine tested a 45-foot XLII double-slide coach with the Monarch Summit floorplan in its November 2005 issue. The test coach was priced at $1,420,395, including $81,725 in options.

On February 20, 2007, National R.V. sold Country Coach to Country Coach Holdings LLC, a company owned mainly by Riley Investment Management, for total consideration of $38.7 million that also covered some additional assets. Country Coach's history page says the company later went bankrupt and laid off more than 450 workers, then reopened in April 2009 with more than 100 workers. The page says Country Coach is now owned by Oregon Motorcoach Center in Eugene, Oregon, and describes its work as repairs and customizing. A news report from February 2010 adds that the restart was small, that the company shut down again in the fall of 2009, and that a judge converted the case to a Chapter 7 liquidation in November. Ten finished motorhomes were auctioned, and founder Bob Lee and his brother Ron bought the brand rights and other intellectual property for $170,000. The report does not mention Prevost conversions. No source was found that says when the last Prevost conversion was finished. The newest ones found in listings are two 2008 coaches described by a dealer. The Prevost-Stuff listings stop at 2006.