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.
How Much Van Is Too Much Van?
When I first saw our new Sprinter blocking out the sun at MotorTrend HQ, I will admit to wondering if this was more van than I had bargained for. I knew driving an all-wheel-drive Sprinter meant I wouldn’t be parking in many underground garages, but our van is 8 inches longer than a crew-cab Super Duty with an 8-foot bed, which will make street parking a challenge. Its height—a towering 9 feet, 3 inches—means it won’t make it through most fast-food drive throughs. Or car washes. In fact, I have yet to figure out how, at 5-foot-6, I’m going to clean the windshield at service stations. I’m pretty sure it’ll involve a stepladder.
But then I climbed inside my new rolling zip code (it really is a climb; the floor is 2.5 feet above street level) and marveled. The cargo floor stretches more than 11 feet behind the rear seat and nearly 70 inches between the walls. It makes the 8-foot bed of our Chevy pickup look like a desk drawer. “We can get at least 25 bales of hay into this thing!” I gleefully told my wife, Robin, who glumly answered, “Yeah, but then we have to unload them all.”
Vans Ain’t Cheap
Base price for smallest cargo Sprinter is $52,195, but our jumbo-size Sprinter 2500 Crew Van with all-wheel drive starts just over $71,000. Mercedes offers a plethora of packages and stand-alone options, and our van is decadent by Sprinter standards. Full details are in the spec sheet below, but here are the highlights: Upgraded “comfort” seats with fake-leather upholstery, a big-screen stereo with MBUX infotainment, LED head- and taillights, a chrome grille, electric-folding mirrors, a 360-degree parking camera, lane keeping and blind-spot assistance, and all-weather floormats (which no ranch truck should be without). The cargo area has optional protective paneling and a wood floor with D-rings, important for securing cargo since the van doesn’t have a partition. (We considered installing one, but for various reasons we thought it would be better to have free access from bow to stern.) No alloy wheels; our van has steelies with optional black paint, and we’d have it no other way.
Total sticker price is just shy of $81,000. We’d need a van just to haul that much cash, but if you’ve priced heavy-duty pickups lately, you know they’re in the same ballpark—though our van is missing some of the features you can get on a high-end truck, like adaptive cruise, satellite radio, and cowboy-chic interior trim. We jest about the latter, but not really; from inside, there’s no mistaking that the Sprinter is a commercial product at heart.
Get To Work, Sprinter
Will the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter prove to be a pickup killer, or have American equestrians been doing it right for the past century? We have a year and no shortage of challenges planned to find out. Stay tuned to see if the box triumphs over the bed. Oh, and if you happen to see me and our gigantic blue-gray box wheeling around the western U.S., feel free to stop me and ask if I really intend to daily-drive it for the next 12 months. You’ll put me one dime closer to that dinner.
After a two-decade career as a freelance writer, Aaron Gold joined MotorTrend’s sister publication Automobile in 2018 before moving to the MT staff in 2021. Aaron is a native New Yorker who now lives in Los Angeles with his spouse, too many pets, and a cantankerous 1983 GMC Suburban.
Read More
