Squeezing a bathroom into a pickup camper without making the truck a big, lumbering beast on road and trail is no easy task. It's often a choice between creating a huge, heavy camper that explodes the size of the truck or shrinking the bathroom down into a tiny, part-time space that's little more than a removable fabric curtain hanging in a corner of the living area. The all-new German-designed Flip90 uses a power-rotating design to expand out its interior, creating a hard-sided shower/toilet room that also adds elbow room and indoor cooking capability. In the morning, the camper folds back up into a neat, compact bed-top box for maneuverable on/off-road travel.
The Flip90 was born as a collaboration between Queensize Camper and ICC Offroad (which we knew as "ICS Offroad" the last time we saw it). Both German camper shops have experience in creating RVs that expand at camp, and the Flip90 relies on a 90-degree rotation to pack small and simple on the road before expanding out at camp. It reminds us a lot of the Scout bike trailer, just sized to ride on a truck instead of behind an electric bicycle.
At the push of a button, the Flip90's outer shell rotates back the namesake 90 degrees to expand the interior. The resulting standing-height vertical structure serves as the entryway, the shower/toilet room, and added living space for cooking and hanging out.
The non-rotating body box secured to the truck houses all the camper equipment, starting with the 79 x 57-in (200 x 147-cm) near-queen "Rock & Roll" bed that adjusts into a sofa. That bed stretches out atop the kitchen equipment at night, concealing the driver-side slide-out with gas ceramic cooktop and sink and the passenger-side 45-L compressor fridge box with hinged flip-top.
The shower hookup on the sink creates an indoor shower, but strangely there's no indication of a floor drain, and the 19-L waste water tank is hooked up to the sink in the kitchen slide-out. It looks like campers will need to catch water in a standalone shower pan to prevent flooding. There's no built-in toilet, either, but it would be easy to use a portable toilet in the privacy of the hard-walled fold-out foyer – certainly a better option at night than a freestanding or truck-mounted privacy tent flapping in the cold night air outside the camper. The 75-L fresh water tank is installed in front of the rear axle.
Another advantage of the flip-back design is that it brings anything mounted on the roof down for easier unloading. In the photos, the surfboard strapped to the available rooftop tie-down tracks is ready to pull off and drop in the water, without having to climb all over the truck.
The Flip90 camper weighs as little as 550 lb (250 kg), depending upon equipment, which is extremely lightweight for a truck camper. It's been designed around a flatbed Volkswagen Amarok and measures roughly 7.5 feet (2.3 m) high when closed in drive mode, allowing the entire truck to fit inside a shipping container.
ICC Offroad offers the Flip90 as an empty shell for €22,900 (approx. US$26,575) and as a fully equipped camper with bed, kitchen, water tanks and shower hookup for €29,990 (US$34,800). For those that prefer the weight behind the bumper rather than over top it, Queensize and ICC have also developed a Flip90 off-road trailer with a larger interior and a manual strut-assisted opening system in place of the power system.
Watch the Flip90 pickup camper make camp in the short clip below.
Sources: ICC Offroad and Queensize Camper (both German)