The Rialta Passes

First, I must make this related digression, because I may never get the chance to use it anywhere else: My wife, while explaining to one of her friends what our Winnebago Rialta is, searched on her phone for “Rob Siegel Winnebago Rialta,” knowing that I’ve written multiple pieces about the vehicle. Without realizing it, she searched within Facebook Messenger, which then used its brain-damaged AI tool to generate the hilarious blurb below, which claims that I’m a “well-known enthusiast and expert on VW vans,” which I’m not. It then states that the Rialta was manufactured “from 1999 to 2010” (off by four and five years, respectively), and that I’m “often referred to as the VW Van Guy.” It probably found a photo of me working on Maire Anne’s VW bus that was used in my first book and is on the Bentley Publishers website, but no one ever referred to me that way, until my friends began lampooning me with it after seeing this ridiculous AI-generated drivel. If AI is coming for my job, it needs to do it a lot better than this.

But obviously, something Rialta-like was in the air, because yesterday, exactly seven years to the day after we bought it, we let our 1996 Winnebago Rialta go. It was not an easy decision. I’ve described in this column how the Rialta is a Volkswagen Eurovan with a Winnebago camper body on the back; how it was one of a tiny handful of compact fuel-efficient RVs available in the sub-$15K range if you found one in need of work; how ours was one of the early ones with the five-cylinder 110-hp Audi engine, so it was as slow as the old VW buses of yore; and how although we purchased it with the image of doing a big western road trip, its little engine was better suited to going to beaches on Cape Cod and staying in $40/night campgrounds, for which it was great. I might also have mentioned that owning a vehicle with a bathroom in it is absolutely wonderful. The first time we loaded the bikes on the back, rode on a rail trail, got caught in the rain, and not only had somewhere to stand upright while we changed into dry clothes but also could make a hot cup of tea, I realized that the utility of this little RV went far beyond the image of the big road trip.

There were several reasons for selling it. The main one was that the balance between its maintenance needs and our use and enjoyment had gotten out of whack. Nearly every trip in the Rialta was accompanied by some sort of repair. Most were minor. One of the more trivial ones was when the wires going to the central locking on the side door broke and shorted out, causing all of the central locking to fail, which made it impossible to lock the vehicle, because the side door would only lock with the central locking. I’d say that the shower drain pump not working was trivial as well, but my wife might disagree, as she was the one who needed to bail it out with a plastic bag. Another was when the switch that turns on the water pump malfunctioned, requiring me to jury-rig something so we had running water and a flushing toilet. More serious was the rig’s sole stranding—a burst brake line just before the bridge heading to the Cape that required a hasty, careful exit ramp, a snail’s crawl to a repair shop, and an unanticipated overnight stay.

On our final outing in the Rialta almost two years ago, the alternator died. We made it home by jumpering a relay that tied the coach batteries (which are constantly charged by the solar panel) to the vehicle battery. That failure caused me to address several deferred-maintenance issues. The alternator is only accessible from under the engine compartment, and the A/C compressor needs to be removed to get it out. While poking around, I discovered that several of the plastic coolant necks were weeping a little coolant, so I replaced them and the O-rings behind them. The big upgrade was the transmission cooler. One of Winnebago’s sins with the Rialta was not uprating the cooler used on the Volkswagen transaxle. They come with a small cooler mounted directly on top, but buying and integrating a larger externally mounted transmission cooler is strongly advised, as is a transmission temperature gauge. On most Rialtas, you can install a “ScanGauge” that pulls vital information such as transmission temperature from the OBD-II port, but our Rialta was a ’96 built on a ’95 Eurovan chassis, and that was the year before OBD-II was integrated, which means there was no port to plug a ScanGauge into, so I had to do the old-school thread-the-temperature-sensor-directly-into-the-transaxle-housing thing and mount a real gauge in the dashboard.

The fact that I did all this work after the alternator died indicates that I in no way considered that the final straw. It was a family health issue, not the alternator incident, that caused us to not use the Rialta at all last summer. However, I’d be less than truthful if I said that there weren’t general reliability concerns. Although I usually decry the whole “I just don’t trust it anymore” dynamic and come down squarely in favor of “address any ignition, fuel, cooling, and charging issues and it’ll be fine,” reviving the Rialta from its winter slumber was always accompanied by some odd stumbling and dying (the Rialta’s, not mine), and this year was no different. It fired up, but it sputtered and then died when I turned on the air conditioning to test it, and not only wouldn’t it start, but it almost sounded like the engine was intermittently seizing when I cranked the starter. I figured the last issue had to be somewhere in the battery-cable-starter path, and filing all the connections nice and shiny seemed to make it go away.

Then I discovered that the new alternator didn’t energize (didn’t begin outputting 14 volts) until the accelerator was blipped, so my conjecture was that turning on a big electrical load like the A/C fans before the alternator was running caused the voltage levels seen by the ECU to drop, which in turn caused the ECU to wig out. With clean engine grounds and this new blip-the-throttle-before-you-switch-anything-on procedure, the Rialta behaved, but I was never really certain I’d gotten to the bottom of it, and there was always the specter that it would recur on the road. And because the car was a year too old to have OBD-II, you couldn’t plug a standard code reader into it and find out what was ailing it. You’d need to use a VW-specific tool and pay a subscription fee.

The bigger picture, though, was that any outing in the Rialta was not unlike the last few Space Shuttle flights where, whatever its intended destination was, the true mission was to get it there and back without breakdown. Even with the lengthy list of work I’d done, I hadn’t performed a full systematic sort-out of the cooling system. The five-cylinder Audi engine is unlike the BMW engines I’m familiar with in that the timing belt (the all-important belt that spins the camshafts in the head, which open the valves) also runs the water pump. A receipt from the previous owner showed that the belt and water pump had been replaced in 2010, but the radiator and electric cooling fans were likely original. Judging whether to perform preventive maintenance on parts like this is tricky, as the replacement parts may be of poorer quality than the originals. Two of our adult children live with us, and they both asked about using the Rialta, but my answer was: “Well, it’s not exactly a turn-key RV, and I’m always going to feel responsible for it.”

All this began to dovetail into the fact that although I still think I’m 35, I’m in my Medicare years and the number of vehicles and the totality of their maintenance needs are beginning to exceed the limit of what I can do (I know, you’re shocked). I’m iconoclastic enough that reader comments from some of you of the form “Crikey, Siegel, why don’t you sell a few of these dogs and concentrate on your nicer cars?” have less than zero effect on me, but becoming overwhelmed by actual physical, time, and money issues of needed repairs is an entirely different matter.

Finally, crucially, the Rialta simply wasn’t being used. The only time it was pressed into service since September 2022 was to buy a bed for my son. Whatever ancillary justifications I had for keeping it—another beach getaway, going to music festivals, hitting the road and pursuing my fantasy of being a touring singer-songwriter—just weren’t being fulfilled. Again, the overriding reason for that was my wife’s surgery and recovery, but you can’t force things that are out of rhythm with reality.

Perhaps the last nail in the Rialta’s coffin was that not only didn’t we use it at all last summer, we rented a cottage in Truro, Massachusetts, right on the beach instead. And having done that, it’s kind of hard to go back to staying in campgrounds in the RV.

As painful as it was, I decided it was time to let it go. If we ever really want to do that big road trip, I’d get something a little bigger and more powerful (or buy a trailer I could tow with the Armada), but I think that when push comes to shove, in the fine line between camping people and RV people, Marie Anne and I aren’t really RV people, and that’s OK.

So I photographed the Rialta, did my customary brutally honest write-up on the vehicle’s history, recent repairs, and quirks, and priced it realistically on Facebook Marketplace. It sold in two days to a nice young man with a young family who will have their own adventures in it.

One fewer vehicle in the driveway, one fewer vehicle I need to keep running and pay insurance on, and some money in the bank. The calculus all makes sense, but we’re really sad to let it go nonetheless. Owning the Rialta was an adventure that gave us things to do and places to go together, and that by itself was a wonderful thing that we both will miss.

Farewell, Rialta. Long may you run.

I guess my two-week stint of being known as the internet’s “VW Van Guy” is officially over. But if you call me that, I’ll say “No, but I was sort of the Rialta Guy.”

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Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

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