Other sources place the weight at 40-45kg/88-99lb, depending on options.
Thanks, Dan. Now I understand why the most relevant piece of information isn't quoted in the puff-piece.
I take George's implied view: Wind! BTW, brilliant pic, George, makes your point perfectly.
There must be large, flat, windless expanses somewhere on earth, but if so I have never seen them. I've been to all the world's deserts (excluding only the Gobi), which would be most people's first thought of large empty flat spaces, and I was born in a semi-desert, and they're all up and down and windy besides because they're sculpted by the wind. Nor is the sweeping grasslands of the savannah in the subtropics necessarily flat and it is certainly not windless or the rain would never fall.
I know. Maybe you could take that caravan to the North Pole (or the South Pole), travelling with the prevailing wind, and just keep going past the pole and off the ice the other side. Every time I was inside the Arctic Circle, doing research for a book, it wasn't fundamentally all that far below freezing, but the windchill factor would kill you all the same, 24/365.
I therefore reckon that caravan would be not a luxury but
required on such a bicycle journey to a) keep the wind off you, and b) to provide shelter during rest breaks. You could load your food and water and cooking implements into the caravan and do without panniers, so not all the caravan's weight should be counted as "dead weight", in fact, you might have to load everything possible into the caravan to keep it anchored to the ice.
Don't invite me on that journey. I'm happy to leave such heroics to the real hard men.
Who's up for a challenge?
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On George's point about side winds, it seems to me the side profile if the caravan is designed to move the centre of aerodynamic pressure back as a far as possible without intruding unreasonably into the living space; I think it likely that the Centre of Aerodynamic Pressure and the Centre of Gravity of the caravan will be not too far apart horizontally, which is a Good Thing, aiding straight-line stability in crosswinds; they mustn't however coincide because that will create a barbell effect that will jerk the bike around as the caravan swings from side to side around that pivot. Can't guess so easily at vertically separation, which would be the lever length of the overturning moment; perhaps less than half the height of the caravan. Also the corner rounding seems applied by someone with stability in cross-currents firmly in mind. None of this means the thing won't be uncontrollable in a strong enough wind, only that it will probably not be too much of a handful in moderate crosswinds.
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Interesting find, Bob.
