This $16,000 Teardrop Camper Wants To Take You On An Adventure Without Emptying Your Wallet

A common complaint about today’s RV industry is that most trailers are just too expensive. Indeed, inexpensive trailers are few and far between and those that are cheap are often built like crap. Utah company Bean Trailer thinks it has the antidote to expensive crappy campers with its Bean Stock 2.0. This little fiberglass off-road teardrop camper appears to be durable and offers the space of a larger teardrop but at a base weight of just 1,175 pounds. Even better, you can grab one for just $15,999, a price that won’t make you drop your Stanley tumbler.

This morning we received an email that, when read without context, sounded insane. The headline read: “Valued Industry Expert, Playing With Sticks, Approves Bean Stock 2.0.” Jason Torchinsky imagined someone, probably a kid, who was playing with sticks and approved of the second iteration of a beanstalk. The reality is much less silly. Playing With Sticks is a YouTube channel focused on reviews of small travel trailers, often of the teardrop variety. Drew from Playing With Sticks recently got his hands on a Bean Stock 2.0 trailer and was impressed with how large it was, how inexpensive it was, and how it still came in at under 2,000 pounds.

We’ll show you that video later. For now, let’s take a look at this trailer. Bean Trailer says the Bean Stock 2.0 is for the price-conscious buyer who still wants a well-built trailer that’s light and can still go off-road.

Bean Trailer

Bean is a newer name in the teardrop space, and it’s blazing a different path than many players in the off-road trailer space.

The company was founded in 2016 by Mark Harling and his business partner Brian Dyer. Harling was one of the co-founders of Salt Lake City-based Sterling ATM, a manufacturer of ATM enclosures. As Harling notes to Company Week, that company, which was founded in 2002, goes through “peaks and valleys” in production. Sterling ATM is one of the nation’s largest providers of ATM enclosures, but the demand for such products depends on bank mergers or banks deciding to upgrade their equipment. Harling saw a need for a product with a bit more of a steady demand.

For his next venture, Harling decided to use the fortunes from Sterling ATM to chase his dreams. He loves the outdoors but hates the two months out of the year when his part of Utah is just too cold to go biking. As Company Week writes, to escape the cold of January and February, Harling started looking for a teardrop trailer to take to warmer southern Utah. During that search, Harling noticed that everything he looked at seemed to be built to be disposable.

That’s when things clicked. He wanted a durable trailer, and Sterling ATM was working with 20 years of fiberglass, metal fabrication, and millwork experience with its staff.

Harling started designing the first Bean trailer and in 2017, Bean Trailer started using Sterling ATM as its contract manufacturer. The first Bean prototype was made that year and sales began before 2017 drew to a close. Reportedly, Bean Trailer is now Sterling ATM’s biggest customer. So you could say that a Bean Trailer comes from a company that knows ATMs.

Now, the company sells seven variations of its trailer from the premium Black Bean to the vintage-style Classic Bean. At first, a Bean Trailer had a starting price of $18,995, but that has since risen to $28,790 with the company’s most expensive trailer starting at $42,390. Bean Trailer markets itself as the affordable option, but even it started to experience the too-familiar price tag bloat. The Bean Stock 2.0 reverses that course.

The New Bean Stock 2.0

Price isn’t the only way Bean Trailer sets itself apart from other trailers. You’ve probably already noticed that these trailers are made out of fiberglass. Many off-road and overlanding trailers are made out of steel and aluminum, but Bean Trailer thinks one-piece thick fiberglass is the better route to take.

Bean Trailers start with a powder-coated steel frame. On top of that sits a mostly one-piece fiberglass shell. I say mostly because, on other Bean Trailer units, the outdoor kitchen unit does have its own separate fiberglass hatch. That gives you a composite roof and composite sidewalls with a honeycomb inner structure. The company uses 3/4” composite insulation and the exterior gets a 10mm to 12mm gelcoat layer or Raptor Liner. Bean Trailer believes that with fewer seams, there will be fewer chances for leaks. The company is confident enough in fiberglass that it offers a lifetime warranty for roof leaks.

As for off-roading, Bean Trailer says it tests all of its trailers off-road, including at Moab. The company says that its fiberglass will flex, even with significant impacts. But if you do manage to take a chunk out of the fiberglass, the company expects its trailers to be repairable by automotive body shops or boat shops.

The Bean Stock 2.0 does differ from its stablemates. While the other Bean Trailers have outdoor galleys under a rear hatch, the Bean Stock 2.0 doesn’t have a kitchen at all. That makes the Bean Stock 2.0 have a true one-piece fiberglass design as the body is uninterrupted from front to back. We’ll get back to the cooking a little later.

The trailer’s exterior features a receiver hitch on the rear with a 200-pound weight limit for a bicycle rack or other attachments. There’s also a cargo rack up at the front. That’s pretty much it for standard features outside. If you want a four-inch lift kit (the stock ground clearance is 17 inches) and all-terrain tires, that’s extra. Also extra is a Timbren 3500 lb HD Axle-Less Trailer Suspension, which gives you a lift plus extra capacity if you want to carry a roof tent or build out the interior. Standard is Timbren 2000 lb Axle-Less Trailer Suspension.

Also optional are rock sliders, pelican boxes, a roof rack, various awnings, solar panels, an outdoor shower, powered coolers, and more.

Inside, you get ample storage and a queen mattress to sleep on. Here’s where the deletion of the rear galley makes a difference. There’s enough space for a couple and some kids to sleep comfortably in there, despite the low weight and the trailer’s total length of 14′ 1/4″.

Bean Trailer also markets the trailer as having 12 inches more headroom than average and the trailer’s total height, when equipped with a roof fan, is 83 inches. Standard Bean Stock 2.0s without a lift kit can fit in the average American garage!

Continuing with the interior, in addition to the bed and the storage, you get a 110V electrical system fed either from shore power or from a Goal Zero Yeti 500 499Wh power station and a 500-watt inverter. The battery can be upgraded if you want more juice. The trailer is also already wired for solar. There aren’t many interior upgrades, with options including a backrest, larger batteries, and different fans. It appears that Bean Trailer does expect some buyers to use the Bean Stock 2.0 as the basis for more hardcore builds.

Now we arrive back to cooking. Bean Trailer offers two options for meals.

You can option your trailer with an underframe table package for $995. This gives you a counter you pull out from under the trailer, slot into a spot on the right wall, and a bag with your cookware, plates, and utensils that you hang on the side of the trailer. You would then bring your own water setup to use with the sink and your own cooktop. If you want some cover while you’re cooking, the best option for that would be one of the optional awnings.

You can see how that works in the Playing With Sticks review:

Now, this isn’t an ideal cooking setup if you’re somewhere really cold, rainy, excessively windy, or really muddy. So, Bean Trailer also sells a deployable interior shelf and a hanging organizer that you can use to make a small kitchen with. That one will cost you $650. Neither of these could be called luxurious, but in my own experience with an off-road trailer, a basic galley will get the job done.

Sadly, as you’ve probably already noticed, there’s no toilet of any kind, so you’ll probably want to buy a cassette toilet if you don’t want to be very close to nature.

Inexpensive And Light

That’s the rub with the Bean Stock 2.0, it’s cheap, but if you want much of what you see in these promotional images, you’ll have to start paying extra to add bits. Still, $15,999 is an affordable starting price for what seems like a sturdy unit. I also love the choice of 18 standard colors! I bet you could also add many of these options yourself later for cheaper through DIY.

What’s also good is the weight. This trailer weighs just 1,175 pounds empty before adding options. That blows the door wide open for so many potential tow vehicles. Bean Trailer even has its own list of what it thinks would be good tow vehicles: This trailer can be towed by small SUVs like Subaru Forester, Ford Escape, Toyota RAV4, Mazda CX-50, Kia Sportage, Ford Bronco, and other vehicles that have at least a 1,500 lb. tow capacity.

This could also be towed by the Ford Maverick, the Hyundai Santa Cruz, or that wagon you have sitting in your garage.

While the Bean Stock 2.0 may not have a ton of features, I am happy to see more manufacturers recognize the fact that not everyone wants to pay $50,000 or more for an RV. It’s also awesome to see yet another light unit out there because not everyone is interested in buying a truck to tow a trailer with. RV manufacturers, if you’re reading this, keep bringing us cheaper units!