Our New Yearlong Review Pickup Truck Is … a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter Van?
A year of truck chores with a Sprinter van will show us if boxes are better than beds.
“You’re really going to daily-drive that monster for a year?” If I had a dime for every MotorTrend staffer that gazed up at our new long-term 2024 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van and asked me that, I’d have … well, just about 50 cents so far, but I’ve only been driving Sprinter for a couple of weeks. If I keep putting those dimes aside, I bet I’ll have enough for dinner at a nice restaurant after a year with my new Mercedes pickup truck.
Pickup truck? Yep, that’s the idea. My family has horses—mules, actually—and we use our trucks to do actual truck things. I spent last year endeavoring to find out if a midsize Nissan Frontier could take over both the equine chores of our aging full-size Chevy pickup and the daily-driver duties of our Jeep Liberty. The Frontier did a great job, and that got me to thinking about other alternatives to the full-size pickup. Over in Europe, you won’t find many Ford F-150s; instead you’ll find vans like the Mercedes Sprinter, Ford Transit, and Fiat Ducato (the Italian cousin of America’s Ram ProMaster) parked behind horse barns. Could boxes be better than beds? Spending a year with a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter outfitted like a 4x4 pickup was the only way to find out.
How the Europeans Do It
Mercedes was surprisingly enthusiastic about the idea. It turns out that one of their media relations folks had horses when she was growing up in Germany. “We owned Sprinters,” she told me. “They were perfect for traveling to horse shows and hauling equipment. You could even sleep in them. I’d love for Americans to see the advantages the Sprinter offers.”
What really pivoted me toward #VanLife was the epiphany that my wife and I haul more stuff in our truck than behind our truck. Vans don’t tow as much as today’s full-size or even midsize pickups; the Sprinter’s 5,000-pound towing capacity is 1,260 pounds less than the Frontier’s. But vans are payload champs. Our new Sprinter can carry 2,988 pounds, which is right up in Ford F-250 territory. And unlike a lot of pickups, the Sprinter maintains nearly all of its towing ability even when loaded right up to its gross weight rating.
Why the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter?
Why the Sprinter and not a Transit or a ProMaster? Mercedes’ enthusiasm notwithstanding, it was the five-seat Crew Van format that won us over, as it emulates the seating of the ever-popular crew-cab pickup. (Ford discontinued the Transit Crew Van last year; Ram offers a Crew package for the ProMaster, but it has a partition dividing passenger and cargo areas.) We also thought the Sprinter’s recently upgraded diesel powertrain might give us a fuel economy advantage over the gasoline engines in other vans. Besides, Sprinter vans are just, y’know, cool. Even The New York Times thinks so.
Mercedes offers the Sprinter in a variety of sizes, and my colleagues and I debated on the best for this mission. Long or short wheelbase? High or low roof? We definitely wanted trucklike all-wheel drive, which raises the Sprinter’s ground clearance to 8 inches (and that’s only under the mechanical bits; the body stands about 18 inches off the ground). AWD Sprinters include the 208 hp/332 lb-ft High Output version of the 2.0-liter turbodiesel I-4, as opposed to the 168 hp/295 lb-ft standard-output version. As I plan to haul heavy loads, I figured we’d want the HO engine anyway. We were leaning toward a smaller van, but fortune made the decision for us: The van Mercedes found that was closest to our wish list was a biggun with the long (170-inch) wheelbase and high roof. We gratefully accepted.
