CI Cipro 85 - Practical Motorhome

Find out what the experts make of the CI Cipro 85 in the Practical Motorhome review

Verdict

The Cipro is great value for money – and we love its spacious, tidy washroom – but its accommodation materials do feel the cheapest here. It’s the old adage – you get what you pay for.

Pros

Spacious kitchen work area
Excellent washroom.

Cons

Lack of storage space
The feel of the cab and habitation materials

Living

The front half-dinette arrangement includes a side-facing single seat, which will accommodate one more diner. The swivel cab seats and an extendable-table arrangement allows all diners to easily reach their place setting. The dining table pulls out easily but sits a bit too high (at 78cm).
There’s space and sockets for a flatscreen TV, and if you fit one, it’ll be sensibly sited, too, because you can see it easily from the dinette bench seat.
The area is well lit with a big rooflight, and headroom throughout stands at around two metres but it’s quite low in the cab, due to the design of the Renault Master chassis.

Kitchen

The kitchen is very well equipped, with a full-size oven and a hob with four burners (lots of its rivals have only three-burner versions). It also offers genuinely practical workspace: a useful ‘shelf’ to the right of the worktop allows room for chopping or just somewhere else to put things while you’re preparing food.
It’s a shame, then, that storage below the worksurface isn’t so great (no drawers, for example). Still, you do get an extractor fan above the worktop and a Heki rooflight to keep things bright.

Washroom

The washroom is cleverly designed, with masses of room. Its chrome-fitted finish looks stylish, and it’s crammed with storage units – we particularly liked the toilet roll holder neatly mounted on the inside of a cupboard door. The shower, like the rest of the area, appears sturdy and well built.

Beds

You get two single beds arranged longitudinally at the rear (the gap can be filled to create a spacious double) and there’s the bonus of an additional single, transverse guest bed via the dinette (not all rivals have this). There’s lots of space (56cm) between its two single beds, too, and two steps up to its single beds.
With the single beds, you can raise the head of each mattress to allow more comfortable reclining – all you do is pull the frame underneath the mattresses upwards, and you can lock the bed head into a number of different positions.
Headroom above the single beds is compromised by the intrusion of cupboards and shelves – just 58cm, but that’s considerably more than many of its competitors (such as the Adria Coral, Hymer T 674SL or TEC Freetec 708Ti.
The Cipro’s dinette bed is created by extending a panel below the dinette seats before dropping the table and filling the gap with cushions. Really, it’s more suitable as a guest bed for occasional use, because it’s quite narrow.

Storage

The garage door lip is the fairly low (35cm) and should therefore be the easiest to load; the garage doesn’t come with a rubberised floor, and it’s not heated, whereas a number of other manufacturers offer these facilities as standard. It does have anchor points for lashing down kit while in transit, though.
The Cipro has a half-length wardrobe between the two single beds and we found it slightly inconveniently placed. The fresh water tank occupies the area under the dinette bench.