Indiana Is the RV Capital of the World
No state in the country is more synonymous with a single manufacturing sector than Indiana is with recreational vehicles. Elkhart County, in the north-central part of the state, builds roughly 80 percent of the recreational vehicles made in North America. The cluster is dense, vertically interlocked, and unusually fast-moving — and that combination shapes everything about the electrical cordage that runs the assembly lines.
Thor Industries is headquartered in Elkhart and builds Airstream, Heartland, and Keystone product through its subsidiaries. Forest River, a Berkshire Hathaway company, runs more than 100 plants out of Elkhart. Jayco assembles travel trailers, fifth wheels, and motorhomes in Middlebury, and Grand Design RV, Alliance RV, and Winnebago's towables operations round out the OEM base. Feeding all of them are tier-one suppliers like Lippert and Patrick Industries in Elkhart, which build chassis, slide-outs, furniture, and components on their own production lines.
What makes RV production distinctive from an electrical-tooling standpoint is the pace of change. Floorplans turn over every model year. Electrical harnesses, lighting packages, and slide-out configurations get revised constantly. Lines run hand-built and labor-intensive, with workers moving around a unit rather than the unit moving past fixed stations. That means power and signal cordage has to be flexible, get out of the way between cycles, and tolerate frequent re-tooling — exactly the problem retractile and coiled cords were designed to solve. Autac ships this cordage from our Connecticut factory to the Elkhart cluster; for a full picture of how we serve the state, see our Indiana retractile cord manufacturer page.
What the RV Line Demands From a Cord
Walk a travel-trailer or motorhome assembly line and you will see hand tools everywhere: pneumatic and DC torque tools, cordless-tool chargers, staplers, routers, sealant guns, and electrical-test rigs. Each station needs power delivered from overhead or from a bench, and each cord lives a punishing life. The engineering requirements cluster around a handful of recurring challenges.
Flex Life and Retraction Memory
An RV assembly cord can be extended and retracted hundreds of times per shift. Over a model year, that is hundreds of thousands of flex cycles. An ordinary straight cord left on the floor gets run over by carts, kinked, pinched in slide-outs, and tangled with adjacent stations. A retractile cord pulls down to the work, then springs back out of the aisle when released — but only if the jacket and coil hold their memory. Cheap cordage relaxes, loses its coil, and ends up dragging on the floor within weeks. Retraction memory over a long service life is the single most important property for this application.
Jacket Compound and Plant Environment
RV plants are not clean rooms. Cords are exposed to adhesives and sealants, sawdust, abrasion against metal framing, foot and cart traffic, and wide temperature swings in plants that are not always climate-controlled. The jacket compound determines whether a cord survives. Thermoplastic rubber (TPR) offers an excellent balance of flexibility, abrasion resistance, and retraction memory for general assembly. Thermoset rubber compounds like our Auta-Prene stand up to oils, chemicals, and heat where the environment is harsher. PVC works for lighter-duty interior sub-assembly stations where cost matters more than ruggedness.
Current Rating at the Working Length
A torque tool or charger draws a specific current, and the cord has to carry it — not at its retracted length, but fully extended, where resistance and heat rise. Undersizing the gauge to save cost produces voltage drop, nuisance tripping, and overheating. Most assembly-tool drops are well served by 14 AWG or 12 AWG, 3-conductor, 15A configurations. Higher-draw stations and heavier pneumatic systems step up to 12 AWG or 10 AWG at 20A.
Conductor Count, Shielding, and Signal Integrity
Not every cord on the line carries power. Electrical-test and inspection stations verify wiring, lighting, and 12V house systems on finished units, and those rely on multi-conductor signal cords. When test equipment sits near variable-frequency drives or welding, electrical noise becomes a problem, and shielded coiled cords protect signal integrity. Conductor counts on the line range from simple 3-conductor power up to 10-plus-conductor signal and control bundles.
How Retractile, Curly, and Coiled Cords Solve It
The whole reason coiled cordage dominates RV assembly is that it converts a long working reach into a short resting footprint. A cord that extends to six feet for the operator can retract to 18 inches when released, clearing the aisle and protecting the cord from traffic. That single property — controlled extension and reliable retraction — is what keeps lines safe, organized, and free of the trip hazards and cord damage that plague straight-cord setups.
Across the three Autac product families, the fit looks like this:
- Retractile cords handle the power side — overhead tool drops, torque-tool and charger feeds, and bench power at sub-assembly stations. Browse the Retractile Cords hub for stock power configurations.
- Curly cords serve lighter, high-flex applications — handheld scanners, test probes, and signal connections where a tight helical coil and long flex life matter more than high current. See the Curly Cords hub.
- Coiled cords cover shielded and multi-conductor needs — inspection-station signal bundles and control cabling that has to reject electrical noise. See the Coiled Cords hub.
For finished assemblies that need molded plugs, custom connectors, or stripped-and-tinned leads to drop straight into a fixture, Cord Sets combine the coiled element with the exact terminations the station requires.
Typical Indiana RV Applications
Across the Elkhart cluster, the same handful of cord applications recur on nearly every line:
- Overhead retractile power drops at travel-trailer and fifth-wheel assembly stations
- Cordless-tool charging and pneumatic torque-tool power on moving lines
- Chassis, slide-out, and furniture sub-assembly bench cords
- Final-line electrical test and inspection-station power feeds
- Wire-harness and lighting build cells for towable interiors
Because RV plants iterate floorplans and electrical layouts every model year, the cord population on a line is never static. A station that needed a 36-inch retracted length last year might need a 24-inch cord with a different connector this year. That churn is precisely why no-minimum-order-quantity custom builds matter so much in this sector — more on that below.
Recommended Autac Products for RV Production
The configurations below map to the most common RV-line needs. All are UL/CUL listed and built to spec at our Connecticut factory.
| Application | Gauge / Conductors | Jacket | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| General assembly tool drops | 14 AWG, 3C / 15A | TPR | Balanced flex, abrasion resistance, and retraction memory for everyday line use |
| Pneumatic / high-torque stations | 12 AWG, 3C / 15–20A | TPR or Auta-Prene | Carries higher current at full extension without voltage drop or heat |
| Heavy power / chassis cells | 10 AWG, 3C / 20A | Auta-Prene (thermoset) | Rugged, oil- and heat-resistant for the harshest stations |
| Interior sub-assembly bench cords | 18–14 AWG | PVC or TPR | Lighter-duty, cost-effective for furniture and trim cells |
| Test / inspection signal | 16–18 AWG, multi-conductor | TPR, shielded | High flex life and EMI rejection for electrical-test rigs |
Custom retracted lengths from 18 to 48 inches let cords pull cleanly off the line and spring back out of the aisle. Extension ratios from 1:3 to 1:7 tune how far a cord reaches relative to its resting length. And our conductor color charts let you match plant-standard color coding for fast visual identification on busy lines. When a configuration is not in the standard catalog, the Build Your Cord tool lets your engineers specify it exactly.
Why the Domestic, No-MOQ Advantage Matters in Elkhart
The RV industry's defining trait — constant model-year change — is exactly where imported, high-minimum cordage breaks down. If a supplier requires 500 or 1,000 pieces and a 10-week ocean lead time to qualify a new cord, a plant cannot economically revise a single floorplan's electrical tooling. The cord becomes the thing that slows the line change instead of enabling it.
Autac approaches this differently. We manufacture every cord at our North Branford, Connecticut facility, and we build custom retractile cords to order with no minimum order quantity. That means an Elkhart RV product engineer can qualify a five- or ten-piece pilot cord for a new model-year floorplan, validate it on the line, then scale to a production run with the same factory team building both — so the specs are preserved exactly from pilot to production.
The domestic supply chain reinforces the advantage:
- Short, predictable lead times. Stock catalog cords typically leave our Connecticut dock within one business day, with roughly two business days of ground transit to Indiana — total door-to-door turnaround of three to four business days. Custom-engineered cords ship in about four to six weeks from design sign-off.
- Direct engineering access. When an Elkhart buyer calls with a technical question, they reach someone who works in the building where the cords are made — no distributor middle layer, no offshore time-zone gap.
- No customs, no import surprises. Domestic-only freight means no broker fees, no cross-border delays, and no container-traffic lead-time stack-up before product reaches a Midwest dock.
- Diversity-spend credit. Autac is the only 100% woman-owned UL-listed retractile cord manufacturer in the industry, and our WBENC certification counts toward supplier-diversity targets common in large-OEM procurement programs.
Building for the Next Model Year
RV manufacturing rewards suppliers that move at the speed of the line. Autac has been building retractile, curly, and coiled cords since 1947, and we serve the Elkhart cluster the same way we serve every Indiana sector — direct from the Connecticut factory, UL-listed and lot-traceable, with full custom capability and no minimum order quantity. Whether you need to re-spec a tool drop for a revised floorplan or qualify a new signal cord for an inspection station, we can build it and ship it on a schedule you can plan a model-year launch around.
To spec a configuration for your line, use the Build Your Cord tool, request a quote with your specifications, or call us at 800.243.3161. For the complete picture of how Autac supports Indiana's RV, automotive, life-sciences, aerospace, and steel sectors, visit our Indiana retractile cord manufacturer page.