Selling our first van! We bought this very well loved van from a fellow van camper back in 2021 and are finally and reluctantly parting ways with it. We’ve put over 30k miles on it, spent over 100 nights in it, and have enjoyed many cross country and local trips as our adventure and travel rig. We mainly used the van for road trips and climbing, and it worked excellent for that.
Now this is a pretty basic van build-out, but the one thing that this van will provide is SPACE. It is huge — as big as a van can get really before it’s a box truck. 170″ wheelbase, with overall dimensions of 289″ Length x 80″ Width x 108″ H, long with massive built-in cargo holds below the bed. There’s a fair amount of open space too, but that has worked well for us as a place to hang out in the rain. No more fighting with your partner over whether you have space to bring something, you will always have more space with this van. It’s also tall; I’m 6’1″ and I can stand up straight without hitting my head in any part of the main section of the van.
A bit of owner history: The previous owner was a Youtuber who has a really good walkthrough of the van here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beFBet4qpFU and then we bought the van in 2021 and have been using it ever since.
We made the following upgrades to the current build:
- Installed a diesel parking heater that draws from the gas tank
- Added a sink and foot pump with 8-gallon tanks
- Increased battery capacity by 66Ah
- Bought/made custom window covers
- Added a bunch of little custom 3-d printed parts for holding things and organizing
- Put well over $10k worth of maintenance work into the van, mostly done by the Mercedes dealership with certified mechanics. This van is good to drive for many, many more miles!!
Now the build itself is relatively basic with simple systems, but the nice part is it’s SIMPLE. There’s not a lot that can go wrong, and the stuff that does go wrong is easy to fix. If you want to modify the build, it’s easy as well, but I’d highly suggest living with it for a bit before making any changes — we thought we wanted to change a lot about the van, but wound up keeping things nearly the same.
For having more than a third of a million miles on it, it is in pretty darn good condition! As far as issues with the van itself, other than general wear and blemishes:
- The engine light is on due to the DPF, which the dealership has tried to flush and regen, but that did not work, so eventually needs replacing. That said, the tech there told me it’ll run just fine without replacing it, so we haven’t replaced it. The price we were quoted to replace it was around $1600.
- The sliding door lock is no longer automatic, so it needs to be locked / unlocked manually.
- When you turn the headlights on, you get an error light on the dash because one of the lights doesn’t work over the rear license plate. The previous owner told us about this issue and we never fixed it because it never bothered us.
- There’s a slight clicking sound (not from the engine, I think it’s related to the air vents) from something under the dash sometimes that is occasionally noticeable when sitting at idle. You can’t hear it when you’re moving though.
The van is up to date on all maintenance items and passed inspection in May of 2025 without issue. We have all the maintenance documents for this, much of which was performed by the Mercedes dealership.
Finally, this van has Dodge decals on it, but have no fear– it’s a Mercedes Sprinter. At one point in time, Mercedes and Dodge partnered up, but it’s just a regular 2008 Sprinter 3500 extended cab high top.
I hope you love this van as much as we do and get to do some awesome exploring!
