Jayco’s Walters Addresses Owners at Entegra Homecoming – RVBusiness – Breaking RV Industry News
GOSHEN, Ind. – Some 400 Entegra Coach diesel motorhome owners in about 200 high-end Class A diesel motorhomes have converged this week at the Elkhart County 4-H Fairgrounds in Goshen, Ind., for the 9th annual “Entegra Coach Homecoming,” an event also featuring some 60 industry suppliers.
The Entegra rally, like other traditional RV owners’ clubs, is intended to meld relationships among the diverse membership of the Entegra Coach Owners Association as well as management and service personnel at Middlebury, Ind.-based Jayco Inc., where the THOR Industries Inc. subsidiary manufactures its traditional Entegra Coach-branded Class A diesels plus an array of other motorized and towable products under the Jayco and Entegra nameplates.
As many industry watchers are probably well aware, of course, the big news around Middlebury and this year’s annual Homecoming is the fact that THOR only last week (May 5) announced a “strategic partnership” between its Jayco Inc. and Tiffin Motorhomes subsidiaries, through which production of Cornerstone, Anthem and Aspire Entegra Coach Class A diesel motorhome brands will transition from Jayco’s northern Indiana headquarters to Tiffin’s Red Bay, Ala., facilities by the end of 2025, after which they’ll be marketed exclusively by Tiffin.
So, in yesterday afternoon’s (May 13) Homecoming kickoff held inside a large fairgrounds building out of the rain, Jayco President & CEO Ken Walters, backed up by Senior Director for Product Development Pat Carroll, addressed a large crowd of diesel owners – three-fourths of whom are first-time Homecoming attendees – regarding Jayco’s overall strategy in preparing to exit the diesel motorhome market in 2026.
“We’ve got big-name entertainment, plenty of food, camaraderie,” Carroll told RVBusiness Tuesday prior to the kickoff. “And the biggest message is that we’re going to stand behind this product as long as they own it and we’re not going to go away. Entegra Coach isn’t going away. It’s not like it’s closing its doors. We’ll still make sure you get the premium, quality service and your parts that you would expect to, moving forward.”
Walters, in his time at the podium, also assured the crowd that Jayco plans to stand by existing warranty commitments this year and beyond for current owners while maintaining a strong market position going forward for Jayco’s other Entegra-branded motorized product lines including Entegra’s Class C’s, Class B’s and gas Class A’s along with its other towable and motorized RV brands.
Partly behind the Tiffin transition for Jayco in the big picture, Walters stressed to the crowd, is the fact that the overall diesel motorhome market – currently totaling between 2,500-3,000 units annually – is diminishing some over the years. Yet, he told the owners prior to a question-and-answer session, the Tiffin transition will enable Jayco to expand production of other product lines at its 3,200-employee Middlebury facilities including some of the Heartland towables that Jayco is currently absorbing as part of THOR’s recently announced towable RV consolidation move.
“So, I really want to explain how we got to this business decision, where that came from, and then really how it affects you most importantly, the people who are part of our Entegra family,” said Walters. “So, over the course of the last couple of years, you guys have heard it consistently: The overall Class A diesel market nationally amounts to about 2,500 units. We’re about 10% of that, having retailed about 250 Class A Entegra diesels. Tiffin did about three times more than that, 750 or so. … So, it’s just a function of an optimization of resources.”
Another intervening factor in Jayco’s decision to pursue other product categories beyond diesel, he explained, has to do with some of the substantial price hikes that Jayco and other RV and commercial coach builders are anticipating in the foreseeable future from both Cummins and Freightliner – resulting, at least in part, from California’s CARB-related evolution.
Bottom line, Walters emphasized, the whole Entegra diesel transition was not imposed by THOR, its parent company, as some social media critics had implied, but instead by the managements of both THOR subsidiaries.
“(Tiffin Motorhomes President) Leigh Tiffin and I spent a long time in conversations about all this, and our (Jayco’s) senior management did as well about our business, our utilization of resources,” explained Walters, “and we put a plan together involving a significant increase in overall potential volume for his business and a small part of our business that we presented to THOR. All we needed from THOR was their approval. It’s their assets. They trusted our business plan. We showed them the math, we showed them the logic for both our business and for Tiffin’s business, and they gave us our approval to move forward and to put this plan into motion.”
Walters again assured the audience that the company would stand by existing Entegra diesel warranties going forward while also supporting owners of the nearly 7,000 Entegra diesels that have been built and shipped out of Middlebury over the past 10 or 12 years in terms of service parts, technical support and education.
“If you have a coach built by Jayco – I’m going to say Jayco or Entegra currently – we’re going to continue to be in business in a meaningful way,” he maintained. “Jayco and Entegra are going to warranty every coach we build. We’re going to build Class A diesels all the way to the end of this calendar year. And the (technical support) people you talk to on the phone every day are the same people you will continue to talk to.”
Meanwhile, he added, plans call for a continuation of Entegra’s annual Homecoming and instructional “Entegra Coach University” at a company that, bottom line, is financially stable amid today’s rather unpredictable economy.
“We are a very successful part of multi-billion-dollar THOR Industries,” he said. “You guys can see it publicly traded on the stock exchange. We are THOR’s biggest division and not just in the sheer number of units, but when you look at revenue and income and those things. We are really stable. We’re not going anywhere. We’re 55 years at Jayco going into 56.”
