I bought a 0,000 Motorcycle Hauler – 2020 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 2500 Cargo Van – High Roof

Introducing my new cargo van, which I will use to haul my motorcycles to many racetracks, many times. It’s pretty well equipped with nice features, I have a plan to try to make it more affordable to own, and I’ve made this video to share it with you! I’d love to hear your thoughts below!

Hi i’m chad and this is my 2020 mercedes-benz sprinter 2500. so i’ve been renting cargo vans to get out to the racetrack lately and there came a time where i had done two in a month and it cost me about a little over 600 and i was like you know what would it make more sense for me to have my own cargo van and not have to pay for a rental every time i want to go

To the racetrack and i decided the answer was yes so that led me to purchase this beauty again this is a 2020 mercedes-benz sprinter 2500 this van is optioned with the high roof and it is the 144 inch wheelbase so the shorter wheelbase it was brand new had 12 miles on it when i bought it it has a 3 liter turbo diesel v6 that produces 325 foot-pounds of torque and

188 horsepower now that we’re all opened up here you can see we’ve got the big sliding door looking inside we’ve got the l tracks mounted up high so i’ve got hooks on the way for those that should allow me to secure my ramp vertically up against the wall in here which will be nice because that’ll free up some floor space when the bikes are in here so i parked

A little bit too close to this bush but the doors do actually swing out all the way to the side well this one does this one doesn’t quite it goes pretty close but not quite all the way because obviously it has to leave room for the sliding door to open but pretty nice very convenient um so my van in terms of uh cargo options has this awesome cargo partition it’s

Also got flooring put in and uh that’s an option and uh the hooks are actually standard which is really nice i think the hooks are pretty common practice as standard equipment for most cargo vans but still nonetheless really nice also got stepping up back in here the led lighting that is also a factory option and quite nice does a really good job of illuminating

The van making everything very visible whether it’s dark or light peeking in through the window here you can see into the cab one of the biggest things with this i am six foot three and i can totally stand up and walk around in here and not hit my head on anything and that’s awesome because the transit van that i’d rented in the past before i started renting the

Sprinter was a 250 with a medium roof and i had to duck a little bit and that was kind of annoying so it’s really nice and there’s just enough space where even if i were to i just missed that but even if i had my boots on i would still be able to walk around in here and be pretty straight up which is being a tall person extremely valuable to me i like not hitting

My head on things so it’s great it’s perfect for everything that i think i’m gonna need to use it for i should be able to get two to three bikes in here and a couple people’s worth of stuff so i’m excited let’s take a look at the cab and show you guys what’s going on in there before we hop up into the cab here just take a look it’s keyless which is really nice i

Didn’t know that that was a feature on cargo vans but it is with a mercedes yeah so pretty nice the leather head is a nice quality it’s not crappy vinyl it feels really nice climbing up in you sit pretty high up but i’ve actually found that i really like this aside from the leatherette seats which were an option there are a few others in here this center display

Is part of the distronic package as well as this leather wrapped multifunctional steering wheel so this van has adaptive cruise control or the radar enabled cruise control which is really awesome and may will make for some very comfortable driving back home after a long day at the track the center menu has this little navigation pad right here detects swipes so

You can swipe through all the different features and information that you can display here go back cycle in through a few other things we have additional controls for calling volume adjustment for music and this is cool because this pad controls the carplay some try to get that in one shot you go back here go to your navigation which is pretty cool go back so

You can find cool points of reference like gas stations parking etc back over here you can go to the menu and see what other apps are available so this was huge for me i really wanted to make sure that i was buying a vehicle that i was going to be comfortable with and it was going to keep me comfortable on longer drives and i wanted again just be comfortable the

Whole way there i want to make this as easy on myself as possible because i want to be able to save my energy and expend it in riding not on stress and out over driving something that you can’t tell right here but this van also has blind spot detection and monitoring which again i really appreciate this is a pretty big van and obviously the visibility behind you

Is not great um although these mirrors i use the convex mirrors for pretty much everything this is just to really tell me if i have something in my blind spot or not that’s really all you can see is a part of your blind spot but using these convex mirrors is a game changer super helpful and then just having the blind spot monitoring as well is very nice got

Your climate controls with the partition it cools off and warms up in here pretty quickly and there’s some other safety features as well i believe distraction monitoring i don’t know if that’s the correct way that you say it but it will alert you if you are becoming distracted and give you a little warning it has breaking assist i think i covered the spec sheet

Actually one thing i am forgetting power folding years baby we’re rolling in style enough about the features let’s get out on the road and take it for a little drive and let me tell you guys a little bit about what that’s like because i’m willing to bet um not a lot of people have driven a cargo van in their life but i’ll tell you what i really like it and if you

Give it a shot i think you will too all right so taking off in the 2020 mercedes-benz sprinter 2500 with the high roof and 144 inch wheelbase and the 3 liter v6 turbo diesel what’s it like to drive it’s actually pretty comfy it’s um not what i was expecting the first time i hopped in and got behind the wheel you know you look at cargo vans and you think they’d

Be big and clunky and just really cumbersome to drive and the sprinter really isn’t at all it just feels like a really really really high truck so obviously you sit very far forward i’m just behind the front axle and you’ve got a lot of van back behind you but it’s pretty easy to manage and feels really nimble for what it is i think the steering feels nice it’s

Pretty light i mean lighter than i think you would expect from a big heavy duty vehicle like this but it’s not too light not like paper like to where you feel totally disconnected from the road the chassis feels pretty good as well it feels pretty rigid the brakes work pretty nicely yeah i feel about as confident slowing this thing down and stopping it as i would

In a just a standard passenger car or a truck it doesn’t feel like it’s lacking stopping power for what it is and the kind of driving that it’s meant to be doing uh the one thing that i will say is the brake pedal does feel kind of spongy up top and the pedal is pretty soft when you for the first i’d say like inch or so that you press it but once you get there

And you’re making some good contact pads against rotors uh it has a good feeling to it it just you know again takes that getting through that initial bite to get there but yeah for the most part it’s pretty comfy i mean i’ve had it on the highway i’ve had it just on surface streets and it feels good i mean it rides pretty smooth the seats are pretty comfortable so

As i mentioned before this van has a three liter v6 turbo diesel engine so it produces 188 horsepower according to the spec sheet and 325 foot-pounds of torque at 1400 rpm which is pretty impressive i think based on my standards i’ve never heard of an engine producing so much torque at such a low rpm that wasn’t a super super super crazy high performance sports

Or supercar engine and this thing pulls off the line pretty nice it feels very strong and i don’t doubt that it’s gonna have no issue carrying two or three motorcycles and all of my stuff and all of the second person stuff if it has to do a little acceleration here show you the torque of this turbo diesel v6 and that’s 60. obviously not the fastest vehicle not

Meant to be but it’ll go and most importantly with all that torque it’ll go while it’s got a bunch of stuff in it the diesel engine in this van is actually one of the core reasons i decided to get a sprinter over a transit so i’m gonna go off on a little tangent but i’m gonna bring it back here so when i was shopping for vans there were only really two models

Of van that i was considering the sprinter and then the ford transit so the reason i ended up going for the sprinter was it was a lot easier to find one that was well equipped over a transit lots of the transits were just the naturally aspirated v6 engine which is you know no slouch but i i think the diesel was the better way to go especially for the long term

Just being that these engines are designed to work very hard in a situation like this and be able to take it in stride and not wear out excessively now they do make a diesel version of the transit but those are extremely hard to find i did not really have a lot of luck looking for one and anyone that i did find was not well optioned so one of the things that

Drove me absolutely nuts when i rented the transit van that i had back at the end of 2020 going out to chuck wallet twice was the fact that it did not have cruise control and when you’re sitting on a freeway that’s pretty much straight for three hours and you just have to hold your foot in a constant position it’s just a bad time the first time i rented and drove

That van to chuck walla i recognized that and i have no idea why i rented it the second time i just don’t think i really saw any better options out there for for the money until the sprinter that i ended up renting showed up and that had the a lot of the features that this fan has actually a lot more features but it had the same radar adaptive cruise control that

This man has and i absolutely love that feature it is so nice to just get on the freeway set a max speed and just steer it’s great it breaks for you slows you down it’ll even slow you down to a stop in traffic and then pick you back up it’s a truly amazing feature and just takes so much stress and fatigue away from the driving experience so that was something

I just i i had to have after that in addition to that the sprinter is it feels much better built it feels a lot more solid and stable and feels like it handles nicer than the transit did even though the transit that i had was a medium roof and a comparable wheelbase to this one and this is the high roof so there’s a little bit more weight up top there this van

Still drives much nicer feels a lot more stable on the freeway feels a lot more precise in corners not that i’m doing any kind of crazy cornering in this thing but the other thing too is it was a lot easier to find a high roof sprinter van than it was to find a high roof transit the low roof and medium roof transits are fairly common again most of them have that

Naturally aspirated v6 engine which i wasn’t particularly interested in it’s very easy to find a sprinter 2500 with that v6 turbo diesel and a high roof short wheelbase long wheelbase they’re out there so to talk dollars and cents i purchased this van brand new it was a 2020 model i bought it in february of 2021 and i bought it for 50 that included tax title and

Licensing and it’s a for all the options this man had on it was a very fair price so in addition to the fifty thousand dollars that the van cost me i added an extended warranty to the van for 1 357 which i just paid for up front that extends the uh powertrain warranty from three years and 36 000 miles which is the standard warranty to five years and a hundred

Thousand miles just wanted to make sure that i had the coverage to really use this thing and not have to worry about it that peace of mind was very valuable to me i financed the van with no money down through my credit union which is navy federal i have excellent credit so i was able to get their lowest interest rate i financed this for 72 months at that rate

Of 2.29 so my monthly payment is a just a couple cents under 750 one of the plans that i have to offset the cost of owning this van because i’ve been working from home for the last year thanks to the pandemic i’m not really sure what my future looks like in terms of returning to an office so i don’t use this every day i see myself driving this thing maybe one

Or two weekends a month and the rest of the time it’s just gonna be sitting so my plan is to rent this out onturo just like the vans that i had rented before and my hope is that i can get close to if not right at what this van cost me to own a month which is 750 plus the 136 dollars a month that i pay for my full coverage insurance so that’s about 886 dollars

A month and if i could get close to that even half of it it’d be great and i know that there’s no guarantee that i’m going to even rent this thing out once on turo so i’m totally prepared to pay for it on my own if i have to but i figure it makes sense to just throw it up there overall i think the turo move is smart and is just going to help me out a lot in

Achieving my goal of becoming a motorcycle racer and sustaining it financially and since again not going to be driving the van regularly i think that’s really the best way to put it to use i’m treating this thing more like an asset than a personal vehicle but at the same time i wanted to you know get something that i was going to enjoy driving get something that

Was going to keep me comfortable i don’t want to be all worn out when i’m getting to the racetrack after having driven three hours and then get out there and start spinning laps exhausted trying to focus i want to be able to reserve that energy and my focus for the time i’m at the track so i can focus on my lines focus on using the brakes well focus on opening

The gas smoothly just focusing on everything that’s going to get me faster and keep me safer and i think this is the best vehicle for the job it’s going to do a great job of hauling everything and i i’ve had the adaptive cruise control set here for the last like 10 minutes there’s a car in front of me i haven’t touched the gas or the brake once it’s been really

Pleasant i’m really looking forward to getting out on the race track and getting myself there in my own van for the first time i’m super excited to do that and super excited to take some longer road trips in the next year or two here i want to get up to laguna seca i want to get out to spring mountain in nevada maybe las vegas motor speedway utah motorsports

Campus and eventually circuit of the americas so i’m super pumped to have this van and have the ability to get myself and my stuff to a race track anytime i want to go there it’s going to be a blast so on that note i’m going to go ahead and wrap this video up thanks for watching if you enjoyed consider giving me a little click of the like button no need to smash

It just a nice gentle click will do uh consider subscribing if you want to see more motorcycling related content whether it be motorcycle racing or just me riding my 200v4 out around on the street got some exciting stuff in the works and some cool new content coming soon if you subscribe i highly recommend enabling notifications click that little bell you’ll see

More of me and more motorcycles which is probably more interesting to you than me but um if you have any questions about the van or anything else about it and the purchase process let me know drop a comment below love to have a conversation with you there and yeah let’s be friends so i will catch you in the next one take it easy and have a great weekend later

Transcribed from video
I bought a $50,000 Motorcycle Hauler! – 2020 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 2500 Cargo Van – High Roof By hiimchad