The Mercedes-Benz Sprinter AWD Van Is a Pretty Great Pickup Truck
Our hero delves into the intricacies and potential disasters of hauling future mule poo.
First things first: In keeping with my promise to long-term fleet organizer Christian Seabaugh, I will not tell you about using our long-term Mercedes-Benz Sprinter to help my friend—the same one I didn’t tell you about in the last update—move more stuff to his new house. Not that you’re missing out, because it’s a similar story to last time: 1,355 pounds from Burbank to Tehachapi, uphill for a hundred miles, just under 19 mpg and no problem accelerating to (or cruising at) 70 mph. So really, not telling you about it is no big loss.
Besides, Seabaugh is right, for once: Stories about using a van to help a friend move are so cliché. Still, I have to tell you—er, that is, I don’t have to tell you—when it comes to this sort of thing, the Sprinter beats the daylights out of a pickup truck. What would have taken two trips in my Chevy Silverado 2500 pickup took one in the Sprinter, and it was volume, not weight, that would have been the Chevy’s limiting factor. No worries about tying anything down lest it fall or blow out of the bed. And again, we were able to split the move over two days, loading up the night before, getting some sleep and driving up in the morning, a boon for my aging back.
But I won’t tell you about any of this. No moving stories. I promised Seabaugh.
The Van as Pickup Truck
The main reason we selected the Sprinter as my year-long test vehicle was to replace a pickup truck we tested with plenty of horse chores, the primary one of which is hauling hay and feed. Our mules go through so much hay, it’s like they eat the stuff. Oh, wait.
If it sounds like I’m stalling for time and space, you’re right. My plan for this article was a 1,500-word treatise about the finer points of hauling hay in a van, a story that would somehow—presumably by magic—be fascinating enough to keep you riveted to the end and begging for more. (“No, Aaron, please don’t end your article without educating us on the finer points of carrying teff versus timothy!”)
The reality isn’t that interesting, but it is pretty simple. Much to my surprise, vans are better for hauling hay than pickup trucks.
Predictions of a Haynado
Truth is, we—and when I say we, I mean my wife, Robin, who is the brains of our operation—thought hauling hay in the van might be something of a disaster. I’m assuming that even the most urbane urbanites among you have some experience with hay, but if not, here’s the problem: It’s dried grass, and it gets everywhere. Like, everywhere.
“You know what’s going to happen, right?” Robin said as I headed out on the Sprinter’s first hay run. “You’re going to open the window, and hay is going to blow all over the place. By the time you get to the ranch, you’re going to look like a poorly manicured lawn.” (You’ll notice my wife’s use of the second-person singular. When it came time to get hay, she miraculously had urgent business elsewhere. Funny, that.)
Regardless of her predictions—and her irksome track record of being right—I had prepared well for my first hay run. I bought a plastic tarp to cover the floor. To secure the hay, I found ratcheting tie-downs sturdy enough to strap the Death Star down onto the back of an Imperial cruiser. (Could have saved the Empire a lot of money to have that sucker pre-fabbed, I’m just sayin’.) Robin had sent me to buy eight bales of hay—the most we had ever managed to fit in our long-term Nissan Frontier’s bed—plus four 50-pound bags of feed. I instructed the loaders at the store to carefully stack the hay just aft of the Sprinter’s forward set of tie-downs.
Dude, Where’s My Hay?
Fast-forward five minutes, the loaders have disappeared, and I’m wondering where the hell the rest of my hay is. The van looked empty. So I counted, a skill on which I pride myself, and yep, there they were—eight bales of hay and four bags of feed. Half a ton of future mule poo, and the van still looked empty. This load would have filled the Chevy’s 8-foot bed, and the Sprinter still had enough room to move the contents of a studio apartment, which of course I would never tell you about because I promised I wouldn’t write any stories about helping people move.
I set about strapping down the load of hay, lengthwise and crosswise, cursing the tarp, which was constantly in my way. Spoiler alert: By hay run number two (six bales of timothy, six 11.5-cubic-foot bags of wood shavings, and one sack of feed, about 950 pounds total), I had dispensed with the tarp and the loading straps and was telling the loaders, “Just put it wherever the hell you want.”
Weirder Than a Pickup Truck?
What goes in must come out, and unloading the hundred-pound-or-so bales is a job I leave to my wife and our friend Dave, who owns the ranch. This might sound terribly unchivalrous of me, but in fact my wife won’t let me unload the hay, because it involves a pair of evil-looking devices called hay hooks. Google them, and you’ll see they’re straight out of a slasher movie. To move a bale of hay, you chuck the pointy ends of the hay hooks into the bale as hard as you can and use them as handles. Robin is convinced I’m going to miss the bale and drive a hook straight into my own flesh, and remember what I said about her nasty habit of being right? This is a woman who has spent the last 20-odd years watching me get tangled in my own bedding and will insist to anyone who will listen that her husband is, and I quote, “incapable of operating a blanket.”
Both Robin and Dave said walking into the van to unload the hay felt strange for reasons they could not quite place a finger on. I pointed out that the floor height was similar to the truck’s and that there was room to stand up straight. “Yeah, I guess it’s not so strange,” Dave conceded. We quickly developed a rhythm: While Dave or Robin hay-hooked one bale out of the van, I’d slide the next one to the rear step, an easy job given the Sprinter’s smooth resin-coated wood floor and the fact that it doesn’t involve hay hooks or blankets. The biggest problem we’ve found is that the doors get in the way of the lean-to where we store the hay. If I could order my Sprinter all over again, I’d pop for the optional doors that fold back against the body.
It's Clean-Up Time
What of Robin’s predictions of disaster? For once—no, really, this might be the first time since I met her—my wife was wrong. Cruising up to the ranch with that first load of hay, I merged onto the 118 freeway, set the cruise control for 65, put my finger on the power window switches, and prepared for the ultimate high. I rolled the windows down and … nothing happened. Well, not nothing—the windows did roll down—but Robin’s prediction of a haynado was completely unfounded. (But not unreasonable. Once I forgot to close the Frontier’s rear sliding window before driving away with a load of hay. Took ages to get the interior cleaned out.)
While I didn’t get swarmed by bits of flying hay in the Sprinter, it still made quite the mess behind the seats. Hay crumbs got everywhere, particularly in the divots that house the tie-down loops and the crevices between floor and fenders. In the pickup truck, all it takes is a few miles at highway speeds to blow the hay out of the bed, but with the Sprinter, I’ve got to clean it myself. The broom I bought didn’t quite do the trick, and Dave suggested a battery-powered mini-blower. I found a billion of them on Amazon and bought one for around $40. It’s a small device roughly the size and shape of a travel hair dryer, with several attachments to shape the flow of air.
I was skeptical, but when I turned the thing on—holy cow! It generated a windstorm that could power a good-sized yacht across … well, maybe not the Pacific, because after prolonged use the blower overheats and shuts itself down, but at least to the other side of the harbor. This little battery-powered hurricane did a great job blasting hay out of those narrow crevices, and with minimal effort on my part (which, to me, is the ultimate sign of advanced engineering). Provided it doesn’t spontaneously combust and burn the Sprinter to the ground, the blower may well prove to be the most useful accessory I’ve purchased.
Hauling on the Cheap
While our hay-hauling trips in the pickup trucks have been limited by capacity, we have no such issue in the Sprinter; theoretically, it’ll haul 25 bales, though I’d be reluctant to try that without a cargo divider installed. Instead, we’re limited by how much hay we can store in the lean-to at the ranch. So far we’ve made four hay-and-feed runs totaling 3,600 pounds of hay and supplies. Thanks to the Sprinter’s efficient little diesel, my prediction is that we’re going to see some significant savings in our hauling costs over both the Chevrolet and the Frontier.
So far, we’re loving the Sprinter as a ranch vehicle, and I’ll be loath to go back to my pickup truck when my year with the Sprinter is over. Of course, we haven’t yet tried towing the horse trailer with the Sprinter, but my RedArc trailer brake controller has arrived, and that will be the van’s next challenge.
For More On Our Long-Term 2024 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter:
- Arrival: Our New Pickup Truck Is... A Van?
- Update 1: Off-Roading in the Sprinter—There Is No Turning Back
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.
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