North American RV and Powersports Composites: Supply Base and Application Map

North American RV and powersports composites demand splits into two buying patterns that share one materials supply base. The RV side is a laminated-panel business concentrated within a short drive of Elkhart, Indiana, where roughly four out of five North American RVs are built. Sidewalls, roofs, floors, and slide-out walls are vacuum-bonded sandwiches of continuous-cast fiberglass sheet, block foam, and a wood or thermoplastic substrate, produced on lamination lines owned by Lippert, Patrick Industries, and the larger OEMs themselves. Front caps, rear caps, shower surrounds, and fender skirts are the true molded composites in an RV, and most of them still come out of open molds in marine-style shops.

The powersports side is a molded-part business. Polaris, BRP, Honda, Kawasaki, Yamaha, and Textron mold most body panels from injection-molded polypropylene in their own plants, then buy SMC and fiberglass parts, notably personal watercraft hulls and decks, snowmobile hoods, and golf car bodies, from a short list of compression molders led by Core Molding Technologies and Molded Fiber Glass.

Beneath both sits the same tier 2 and tier 3 base as boatbuilding: AOC, Polynt-Reichhold, INEOS Composites, and Interplastic for unsaturated polyester and vinyl ester; Owens Corning, Johns Manville, and Jushi for E-glass; Composites One for distribution. RV volume is the swing factor. Wholesale shipments fell from roughly 600,000 units in 2021 to about 313,000 in 2023 before a slow recovery, and FRP sheet, lamination adhesive, and cap resin demand moved with them. Powersports volume has been steadier, and its material mix is shifting from SMC toward long-glass and glass-mat thermoplastics wherever the part can be pressed in house.

RV supply looks like marine on the materials side and unlike anything else on the tier 1 side. Two Elkhart companies, Lippert and Patrick Industries, supply a majority of the content in a towable that the OEM does not build itself: chassis, axles, slide mechanisms, laminated walls, doors, windows, roofing, furniture, and countertops. A towable OEM in Elkhart can be a final-assembly plant that buys laminated walls from Lippert, a front cap from a local fiberglass shop, a roof membrane from Dicor or Alpha Systems, and a shower from LaSalle Bristol. The larger OEMs, Thor, Forest River, and Winnebago, run their own lamination lines and cap molding for the same parts, which keeps the Tier 1s honest on price.

Tier 1 composites in RV means sheet, not molding. Crane Composites, with its Filon and Kemlite brands, and LAMILUX supply continuous-cast FRP sheet by the roll and the panel. That sheet is laminated, not molded, so the process is adhesive and foam, and the resin buyer is Crane rather than the OEM.

Powersports OEMs mold more in house. Injection molding of polypropylene body panels sits inside the OEM plant at Roseau, Lincoln, Timmonsville, and Newnan. What goes outside is compression-molded SMC, rotomolded HDPE, and the occasional carbon part, and that work goes to Core Molding, Molded Fiber Glass, and regional rotomolders.

Tier 2 and Tier 3 are identical to marine. The resin producers, glass producers, core suppliers, and Composites One serve the Elkhart cap shops and the powersports molders from the same plants and the same sales teams that call on boatbuilders.

Three groups anchor demand. Thor Industries is the largest RV builder in the world, running Airstream, Jayco, Keystone, Heartland, Tiffin, Thor Motor Coach, and Entegra Coach from plants in Indiana, Ohio, and Alabama, with its own lamination lines and captive suppliers in Airxcel and Postle. Forest River, a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, is its closest rival in units and runs the broadest set of towable, motorized, bus, and cargo trailer plants around Elkhart. Polaris is the largest North American powersports OEM, molding polypropylene body panels for RZR, Ranger, Sportsman, and its snowmobile lines in house at Roseau, Minnesota, and buying SMC and rotomolded parts from outside.

The full roster, including Winnebago Industries, REV Group, BRP, Harley-Davidson, the North American plants of Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha, Textron Specialized Vehicles, Club Car, and the newer Elkhart towable entrants, is in the gated portion of this report.