My wife & I have found the best way to spend our recreation time is to ride our bikes. This mostly means road or mountain biking. We often take road trips that are routed to great bike rides, predominantly in the western US. Often the rides are located in places where hotels are not practical or convenient, leaving camping as our best option. Unfortunately, the years have made sleeping on the ground in a tent undesirable.
Since 2010, the road trips have been in our F-150 SuperCrew with a cap on the bed of the truck and hotels. We love this truck, it drives great, is super comfortable, can carry 4 bikes inside and does everything we want…except provide a good place to sleep when we are loaded with gear. After almost 7 years and 125,000 miles, it is still practically good as new.
On our road trips, we’ve been seeing folks with all kinds of vehicles & trailers that make life on the road easier and more comfortable. Researching road tripping vehicles over time, the priorities for us are:
- space for 4 bikes inside
- space to sleep comfortably
- storage space for hiking, biking, photo and camping gear
- ease of driving and parking
- reliability
- 4 wheel drive would be a nice bonus
- auxiliary power of some sort
The Mercedes Sprinter seemed to be the right compromise. The Sprinter is not a slam-dunk, however. There are a fair number of downsides:
- They leak water which can lead to corrosion
- Exhaust system maintenance can be costly
- The 4wd system works, but not as convenient as the F-150 or Audi Quattro
- The creature comforts of the Sprinter, even with all the upgrades is still nowhere near as nice as a car priced at half the cost of the Sprinter
- No satellite radio option
- The displays and overall user interface of the driver controls feel 20 years out of date.
With those downsides in mind, how do I still move forward?
- Adjust expectations, it is a van, not a luxury car, sports car, or even a pickup truck.
- Compare it to any other vehicle that can meet the priorities above and a van still makes the most practical sense.
- Speak with Sprinter owners.
- Look at the other vans on the market…some folks prefer the Ford Transit or the Ram Promaster or the Nissan NV2500. To Sprinter Or Not To Sprinter Another nice van comparison write up
- Talk with van upfitters to see their experiences overall and with the different brands.
- Look at the van life and van owner online communities.
As a result of this, the Sprinter game was on…now, what Sprinter to buy?
- 144″ vs 170″ wheelbase
- torn, but went with 144″ for drivability and parking. The extra 2 foot 2 would be nice for the extra space inside, but in the end practicality won out.
- 4×4
- yes, we live in the mountains and it snows and the piece of mind is worth it
- due to demand, it can add more than a year to getting the van
- plenty of folks claim having great experience in the snow with 2wd. I believe them, I don’t care, I want 4wd.
- high roof
- to build out a platform bed with bike storage underneath, the height is necessary
- ‘cargo’ vs ‘crew’
- cargo is preferred, crew is ok, just not ‘passenger’ due to the rear side windows and extra throw-away bench seats
- Hitch
- yes, extra bikes may need to be carried and you just never know when this can come in handy
- Roof rails
- yes, we have a roof rack and awning in the future
- Auxiliary battery
- yes, nice to have
- Comfort seats
- yes, much better than the default seats, but still hardly an upgrade. Mercedes must hate van drivers.
- Color
- Anything except black (too hot in the summer) or white (free candy?)
- Auxiliary Air conditioner
- Nope, takes up too much space inside and out. Plus we try to avoid the hot weather.
- Becker navigation
- Nope, I have yet to see a car navigation system capable of what my smartphone can do.
OK, so we decided what we want and how we want it configured. Ready, set, buy. I called around to several dealers in the area and they all had the same line, place an order on a 2017 Sprinter and we should have it within a year. Since no one would break ranks, we decided to get in line and plunked down the $2500 non-refundable, interest free deposit and wait.
A month passes and I’m starting to get impatient. I start crawling cars.com for 4wd sprinters, sort the results by distance to identify dealers that have 3 or more sprinters listed. I am looking for dealers that have a high volume of Sprinters figuring the likelihood of them having something available is better. After contacting the dealers with the listings, I learn that they list the vans regardless if they are sold or not and they are generally all sold. I keep doing this every few days or so and periodically have some luck with exceptions. For instance, some of the available 4×4 vans I rejected:
- Outfitted well, but Passenger instead of Cargo or Crew
- Wrong color
- Aux A/C unit
- ordered by an upfitter that had all window holes cut out but no windows installed. We could have dealt with this one, but the rear side windows were a no-go for us.
After doing this for a month or so, we finally hit pay dirt. A dealership in CA has a 95% match on our configuration. WE’LL TAKE IT! The van build sheet
OK, so how do we buy a van that is 1000 miles away?
- Fly to CA, inspect the van and drive it home…or fly home if it doesn’t pass our inspection.
- It turns out that we have to pay CA sales tax if we drive it off the lot even if we never register it in CA. Therefore, we’ll ship it regardless since shipping is much less than the difference between CA and CO sales tax.
- Fly to CA, inspect the van and ship it home and fly home.
- Too risky, don’t buy it.
- NOPE
- Buy it sight-unseen from afar and ship it home.
- I’ve never done this before and car dealers are, well car dealers so I was wary.
- I spoke with a few folks who have done this in the past and came up with no bad experiences.
So we put our big-boy pants on, signed contracts via FedEx on Wednesday, emails back & forth, phone calls back & forth, it is all going great, time to wire the money on Thursday, got confirmation from my bank that the money was transferred…come Friday…no more email responses, no more returned phone calls. UH OH. Saturday morning, still nothing. HMMMPFF. I start calling up the chain of command at the dealership…got the sales manager. I explain the situation, he deadpans that once they have my money they don’t care. He quickly realizes the faux pas and back tracks and apologizes profusely. He does get to the bottom of the status and says the van shipped the day before (Friday right after the money arrived) and I should hear from the shipper on Sunday to arrange delivery on Monday. We get the call Sunday night and the shipper shows up on time Monday morning.
Phew…everything worked out well. The only problems were the communication breakdown by the salesman and it seems that southern Californians can use water in their windshield washer systems which will freeze solid in a Colorado cold-snap. Fortunately, no damage was done with either snafu.
Now it is time for the build…