Beefy, Austrian-Made Camper Van Aims to Drive America’s Glampers off the Beaten Path

People do like to sit high in their rides, but this high? A ladder would have been helpful to mount the extra-tall Krug Expedition Bedrock XT2, a US$690,000 go-anywhere camper from an Austrian company that wants to conquer the American off-road RV market. This is off-the-beaten-path glamping at its finest.

The example tested is, so far, the only one, but Krug has high hopes for the American market, which has a growing appetite for “expedition” off-road vehicles ranging from trucks to beefed-up RVs. The company describes the XT2 as a “6×4 off-road machine converting a luxury variant of the Ford Super Duty F-550 and bringing it to the next level with suspension and chassis frame reliability.” In other words, it’s a rugged three-axle truck with a double bed attached. The camper is a joint production with Iceland-based Arctic Trucks, which specialises in polar expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic.

One of Arctic’s vehicles set a speed record of 108 hours from the Russian Novolazarevskaya Antarctic research station to the South Pole in 2010. The XT2 might be ideal, then, for a trip through the spectacular scenery of Alaska or for hitting the highway in Canada and driving north. The truck is ready to go off the grid, supported by electric power from a 1,450-watt-peak solar panel array and a 23-kilowatt-hour battery bank.

The founder of Krug, Viktor Ermolov, tried a competitor’s expedition vehicle around 2010 and thought he could do better with a vehicle filling an unmet need for a light (relatively speaking) expedition camper that could drive well in extreme terrain. The first truck came out in 2011.

The Expedition Bedrock XT2 doesn’t mind a dusty trail.
Krug

“Our clients are adventure-seeking individuals with a passion for nature and conservation. They prioritise quality, reliability, and sustainability in their purchasing decisions and are motivated by the desire for unique and meaningful experiences,” Krug Expedition CEO Slawa Knorr said in a statement to Penta .

Asked about the typical client, he said that young couples and families with children are being seen more and more.

On the road, the 9,000 to 10,000-pound XT2, which looks like a normal truck-mounted camper on steroids, was surprisingly easy to drive. Under the hood was a Ford Powerstroke 6.7-litre diesel with direct injection and 330 horsepower, with the weight of the camper yielding something like nine miles per gallon. The assisted steering was fairly light. The brakes felt like they were hauling down considerable weight, which they were. The biggest consideration while driving was considering the width and avoiding contact with cars lining the road. The cab was relatively comfortable, and the visibility good except toward the back, where the big mirrors became extra important.

The third axle decreases ground pressure up to 25%, and the big Continental multi-purpose tires provide a lot of grip. The rear air suspension is adjustable from the cab to accommodate heavy loads and rough terrain.

The exterior camper panels are made from a high-grade, glass-reinforced plastic (GRP) laminate that is 70% fibreglass. Inside, the XT2 offers functional luxury. There was a comfortable-looking king bed in its own nook, a kitchenette, a bathroom with walk-in shower supported by a 118-gallon filtered water tank, and a dining area and lounge with a 32-inch TV (with Starlink connectivity) and a table that converted to a second sleeping area. For a week away, it was more than fine, and the buyer can make it as luxurious as they want.

The dining area converts to a second bedroom.
Krug

The kitchen’s fresh water uses the General Ecology Seagull IV-X2 system to banish chemicals, bacteria, and viruses. It may be cold where you’re going, so the quiet Truma Combi diesel-powered air heating system is on board, providing cabin heat and hot water. A hydronic system for underfloor heating is also available for colder climates, with automatic frost protection and radiators in the bathroom and dining area radiators. And for hotter weather, there’s the highly energy-efficient Nomadic Cooling air-conditioning system.

If cooking al fresco is desired, a portable outdoor kitchen can be built into the underfloor storage boxes.

For weekend getaways, any number of less-expensive camper solutions are available. The XT2 is aimed at rugged adventurers, who want to be virtually self-sufficient for excursions off the beaten path. It’s not the only vehicle in this expedition category. There’s also the evocatively named Storyteller GXV Epic, priced at a similar US$696,377. This is a big, tough all-wheel drive truck with up to 1,800 miles of range, 18 kilowatt-hours of available power, a built-in washer and dryer, and more.

Or how about the Ford F-250-based US$350,000 27 North Ascender RexRover truck, which sleeps four? Need more room? The cabover Loki Steyr 1491 accommodates six.

Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.

So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.

“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.

It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.

“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.

After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.

The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.

But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.

They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.

Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.

“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.

“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”

“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”

Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.

When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.

The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.

It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.

He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.

In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.

About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.

In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.

About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.

Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.

“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.

Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.

Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.

So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.

When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.

“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.

It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.

Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.

“The opposite of AI,” she said.

Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.

“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.

Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.

His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.

Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.

“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.

“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”

Beefy, Austrian-Made Camper Van Aims to Drive America’s Glampers off the Beaten Path

Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.