While visiting Great Falls, Montana, a few years ago, I asked a local about nice spots to camp. He looked at the Jeep I was driving and said, “You’ll need a rooftop tent.” In response to the look of perplexion on my face, he continued: “Bears. You don’t want to be at snack height.”
I shopped for rooftop tents, but I never found one that justified the expense, ungainly bulk, and the few hundred pounds it added to the worst possible place on my truck. So I avoided camping in places with bears.
Then GoFastCampers (GFC) outside Bozeman, Montana, launched its Platform Camper for the Ford Maverick; a combination pickup bed topper and rooftop tent that claimed to address all of my reservations. The Platform Camper was light, looked good, and at $7700, it cost less than comparable units. When business took me back to Montana, I pinged GFC, which led to an appointment to tour the company’s facilities and a few days with a Maverick equipped with the company’s Platform Camper.
“Everything on this is designed to last forever and to be worth restoring,” GFC co-founder Graeme MacPherson said about the Platform Camper. This statement applies to the 620-some-odd bits that go into every Platform Camper.
“The primary design ethos of our product is not to look terrible on your truck. You wouldn’t be embarrassed to show up with the Maverick anywhere in a city,” MacPherson continued. The fully assembled and installed Platform Camper hits an approachable middle ground between two aesthetics that may disconcert urbanites: van down by the river and tactical prepper.
How the Platform Camper Is Made
GFC buys aluminum tubing and rods, then produces its own parts to turn them into a Platform Camper. In a cozy steel building room called “Machine Town,” Haas Automation CNC machines mill aluminum components from raw stock.
The pieces for a complete camper are cut, milled, drilled, and polished together, then placed into their respective slots on a single cart reserved for an individual customer’s Platform Camper. GFC doesn’t build a Platform Camper until ten days prior to installation.
I’ve been on plenty of factory tours, and everything I saw on this tour of GFC’s facilities spoke of quality. Lasers cut the patterns for the 300D denier ripstop fabric before more lasers weld the panels and the anodizing on aluminum parts meets architectural standards, so items such as brackets and hinges won’t fade or turn purple after years in the sun. Additionally, the company fits a robust UV protection film to the translucent composite honeycomb roof panel. And that’s just scratching the surface.
The Platform Camper contains no organic materials. Instead, the rig relies on composites and milled components as a means of improving the camper’s strength without adding unnecessary mass. GFC made a video that shows the aluminum spaceframe bed topper supporting a 5000-pound static load.
Meanwhile, the camper’s pop-up tent includes tracks around the roof’s perimeter, which allow users to install accessories such as crossbars or an awning. The rig’s top is capable of supporting up to 800 pounds with the tent stowed, and 75 pounds with the tent deployed.
GFC claims its Maverick-compatible Platform Camper weighs around 250 pounds—a meager bite out of the Maverick’s 1500-pound payload capacity. The topper panels are available in nine colors at no extra cost.
Installation, meanwhile, runs $175. That’s if it’s done in Bozeman. Opt for one of seven other available locations located across the country, and that sum rises to as little as $600 and as much as $1299. The Platform Camper we borrowed for a few days rang in at $8689. That sum included the aforementioned $175 installation fee, $525 worth of tent windows, and a $289 Mantis Claws ladder.
Platform Camping
It took one shopping trip to find my sole gripe with the Platform Camper: the exceptionally fiddly key cylinders on the six locks securing the topper panels, none of which easily accepted the key each and every time I attempted to lock or unlock a given panel. That said, everything else about the Platform Camper felt well-built and of high quality.
The camper roof sits 6.5 inches above the Maverick’s shark fin antenna. Save for the occasional chirp when the wind hit the truck just right, I would have never known there was a camper nesting in the compact pickup’s bed. GFC reports the Platform Camper cuts a couple of miles per gallon from the Maverick’s fuel economy.
I first tried the camper as an office, stopping at the Pilot Travel Center south of Great Falls, Mountain and promptly getting on a Zoom call. It took approximately 90 seconds to raise the tent and rearrange the composite, modular bed panels to play the part of a standing desk for my laptop. With the meeting over, I promptly locked everything up and was back on the road in less than two minutes.
I had just one night available to actually camp in the Platform Camper. A cold front made my time at the Home Gulch campground more treacherous than anticipated, with high-speed gusts cascading down from the ridge above my campsite rocking the Maverick.
Sub-50-degree Fahrenheit temperature only added to the challenge of falling asleep in the soft-sided and uninsulated tent of GFC’s Platform Camper. In spite of this, the rig never showed any signs of distress due to the subpar weather. I heard not a single creak or rattle during my night in the camper.
Thanks to the sleeping bag I brought with me, I found no issue with the thin two-inch thick memory foam mattress of the Platform Camper. More discerning sleepers might want to bring additional padding with them prior to calling it a night in the Platform Camper.
That said, I wished GFC equipped the tent with some additional small-item storage such as a pouch or two sewn into the walls. Likewise, the Platform Camper would benefit from a lantern-friendly strap on the inner portion of the tent’s roof.
After three hours of shivering and swaying in the bluster, I called it quits and drove to Helena. Don’t worry, though, because I plan to head back to Montana with my own truck to repeat this same test. Only next time, I plan to spend at least one full night camping in the GFC Platform Camper. Weather or bears be damned.
