TESTED 2022 Benimar Tessoro 494 TESTED
We bade a fond farewell to our trusty Auto-Trail Tracker FB (aka Tilly) and welcomed a newcomer from a far-off land into our family, in the shape of a Benimar Tessoro 494.
We'd been looking for an affordable replacement for Tilly for a while, not that there was anything wrong with her. In fact, in our four-year ownership she'd never put a foot wrong, was as comfortable as an old shoe and had served us very well.
However, we'd decided that clambering in and out of a French bed and squeezing into a small toilet/washroom were perhaps not for us in the long term. Val, my wife, also craved drawers for storage in the kitchen and I wanted a more powerful engine and better loading margin. Therefore, the hunt began.
We did a lot of homework, but nothing grabbed us by the wallet and said, “It's me you're looking for!”
Until, that is, I espied a purposefullooking example on the Marquis website. I'd heard of Benimar as a manufacturer and seen the odd example, but certainly not one in the metal. The problem was, the example we were looking at was at the Durham premises, not exactly on the doorstep from where we live in Shropshire.
It appeared to tick a lot of our boxes: an island bed, a roomy
