3 must-have RV driving gadgets

These will make driving your RV safer & easier

Driving an RV can be a fun, but sometimes a stressful experience. Some high-end RV models come with all the bells and whistles needed and the latest technology. But most RVs do not and if you buy a used model that’s a few years old, chances are the technology is already out of date.

We’ve driven our RV to 27 states and traveled more than 20,000 miles in our first year since purchasing it. We invested in a few simple gadgets that have made driving our motorhome a better overall experience.

View from the driver’s seat of our Dynamax DX3 with the touch-screen radio/navigation, back up camera system, and tire pressure monitoring system that we installed.

Below is our list of the 3 must-have gadgets that will improve your RV driving experience by making your travels easier, safer, and more enjoyable. These are important items whether you are full-time RVers or occasional RV travelers.

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1. Touchscreen stereo with built-in navigation

Since getting to your destination is half the fun, a touch screen GPS will help make sure you arrive safely and keep you entertained while driving. Most RVs do not come with a very high tech navigation or stereo system. It’s definitely worth investing in a better car stereo system that has navigation built in and can connect to other apps.

For our RV, we replaced the original small stereo system, with a new and improved one that is touchscreen, double the screen size, and has the ability to use Apple Car Play or Android Auto. Here’s the model that we purchased for our RV and you can see how it looks in the image below.

One thing to note, when driving an RV, we recommend using an RV specific GPS such as RV Life for navigating your trip. With the RV Life app, you can enter in the make/model and dimensions of your RV to ensure that the route you’re taking is safe. This has saved us a few times from avoiding roads with steep mountain passes, low clearances, bridge weight limits, etc.

Eonon touch-screen stereo/navigation that we added to our RV.

2. Wireless backup camera system

When driving or towing any size RV, the ability to see either behind your trailer or the vehicle you are towing behind your motorhome is critical for being safe on the road. Many RVs are quite large with several blind spots so it’s important that you can see from different angles while you’re driving.

Our RV came with a back up camera that was old and extremely low quality. It also did not allow us to see the tow hitch, which led to an unfortunate accident in our RV when we were trying to hook up our race trailer to the tow hitch. Plus, we almost got into several accidents while driving due to cars being in our blind spots.

We decided to buy a new wireless backup camera system that would allow us to view behind our RV while on the road and also to see multiple angles such as our tow hitch so we can make sure our tow vehicle is safety secured at all times.

Here’s the system we use for our RV. In the image below, you can see the two angles we use for our motorhome. We have one camera turned out so that we can fully see behind our Jeep, and we have another camera pointed down looking at our hitch that attaches to the Jeep. We keep this monitor on at all time while we’re driving.

Yakry backup camera system that we installed in our RV.

3. Tire pressure monitoring system

Whether you are driving your RV long distances across the country, or parking at campsites nearby for an extended stay, the tires on your RV will take a beating and wear over time.

Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) allow you to monitor your RV’s tire pressure and temperature electronically in real-time while you’re on the road. Tire failure can cause significant issues for your RV and can sometimes lead to very dangerous accidents. A TPMS can alert you to potential issues before a major failure happens.

These systems are fairly easy to install. They consist of special valve stem caps that read pressure and temperature and transmit that data to a digital display mounted in the cab where the driver can see it.

We bought a few cheap tire pressure monitors and they all ended up breaking after a few weeks of use. We decided to invest in a higher quality TPMS model like this one. We purchased the model that has six tire sensors, one for each of our tires.

We’ve been using this TireMinder model for 6 months now and haven’t had any issues. It saved us from a potentially bad blowout while on the highway when it sensed the pressure was low in one of our tires.

TireMinder tire pressure monitoring system that we have set up in our RV.

We hope this helps you to select gadgets for your RV that make driving safer and easier! Let us know what you think and if there’s other items you’d add to this list.