Trial by Fire for Our Mercedes-Benz Sprinter AWD Crew Van
When disaster hit Los Angeles, the Sprinter proved just how useful a van can be.
We addeda Mercedes-Benz Sprinter AWD to our long-term fleet to see if a five-seat crew van could do truck jobs as well as a pickup. It was day-to-day doings we had in mind, but when a series of devastating wildfires hit Los Angeles in January 2025, I discovered just how flexible our Sprinter van could be. It did everything a pickup truck could do, and a lot more.
Before I begin, a survivor’s-guilt-fueled disclaimer: My wife Robin and I have close friends who lost their home and everything in it to the Eaton fire, and we’re unusual in knowing only one family to suffer such a loss. The fires caused us some stress, which you’ll read about here, but what we dealt with was mere inconvenience. As you read, please know that Robin and I never forgot how extraordinarily fortunate we were—and are.
Ruby and Lucas, oblivious to calamity nearby.
Get Ready, Get Set
When the fires broke out on January 7, I was at a hotel in Palmdale, California getting ready for an early morning of performance testing the next day. Robin’s phone call woke me at 11:30: There was no immediate danger to our home, but the Hurst fire was close enough to the ranch where we keep our mules, Lucas and Ruby, to worry her. The ranch was under an evacuation warning, and an evacuation order—the next step beyond a warning—had already been issued for nearby areas. If the winds shifted, the fire could head that way.
We keep our old Chevrolet pickup and horse trailer at the ranch for just such an emergency, but the Chevy had been on the fritz for a couple of months. The Sprinter was meant to be plan A, but it and I were now 50 miles away, and it had not yet towed the horse trailer. (It took longer than expected to get a trailer brake controller working; that will be the subject of a future update.) My wife, sparing me the verbal beating I so richly deserved for not getting the Chevy fixed, told me she was going to borrow a friend’s Ford pickup and head for the mules, but she was concerned about road closures. I said I’d head down right away. With the two of us approaching from opposite directions, we figured one of us would make it.
I drove as quickly as I dared in the high winds, and less than an hour later I was exiting the freeway, the hills on the opposite side already aflame. Balboa Boulevard’s northbound lanes were lined with staged fire trucks, but it was still open southbound—until it wasn’t. My heart started to pound, but the officer at the roadblock told me I could still go west through the maze of neighborhood streets. Thank goodness for GPS navigation.
Do We Go, or No?
I got to the ranch at half past midnight to find the power out and the trees disco-dancing in 50-mph wind gusts. By the time Robin showed up with the borrowed Ford, I was hooking up the trailer to the Sprinter.
“Is this thing gonna work?” she asked.
“I sure hope so,” I said as I shoved the trailer plug into the Sprinter’s wiring socket. I was rewarded with lights on the trailer and a green LED on the dial of our RedArc brake controller. You could almost hear my sigh of relief over the gale.
Now we had a decision to make: Evacuate or wait? Normally, if there’s even a hint of a whiff of a possibility of danger, we load our animals up and take them out. Los Angeles County has excellent infrastructure for large-animal evacuation: L.A. city’s Animal Services Department has a fleet of trucks and trailers, and there are several large equestrian centers that take in displaced pets at no charge throughout the county. Robin and I volunteer with a city-affiliated crew that helps move the animals, and we like to get our guys out early so we can work without worrying about them.
Stay or Go: Two Bad Options
Now, however, we had a new problem: Lucas. At three years old, Lucas was (and still is) an adolescent mule. He’d never been through an evacuation, and we had yet to start his trailer training. Loading him into the trailer could be difficult, and if he flipped out at the evacuation center, he could hurt himself or others. The fire was a threat, but evacuation held its own unknown dangers.
Robin and I walked up to the top of the hill, from which we could see not just the Hurst fire, but the Eaton and Palisades fires, as well. The wind seemed to be blasting straight toward us, but the smoke plumes were going southwest and the air smelled clear. What we didn’t see were firefighting aircraft, which were grounded by the extreme winds. With the firefighters concentrating on population-heavy areas, Hurst would likely be advancing unchecked.
We headed back down the hill to find two rigs from Animal Services arriving to evacuate any horses whose owners wanted them to go. It was now around 2 a.m., and several of our fellow horse-owners had gathered, wide awake and agonizing over what to do. The officers’ concern was that if the winds shifted and the fire came our way, they might not be able to get back to us. Two owners decided to put their horses on the city trucks. While Robin and I had our own trailer, we figured we’d need all the experienced help we could get loading Lucas. I was in favor of going—back in 2019, the Saddleridge fire came over the hill behind the ranch, and I don’t mind telling you it scared the daylights out of me—but Robin thought staying was, for the moment, the safer choice.
“We’ll wait and watch the winds,” she said. “As soon as we smell smoke, we go.”
The Sprinter Becomes a Camper—And a Bug-Out Vehicle
We got to work readying for evacuation, parking the Sprinter and trailer in front of Ruby and Lucas’ stalls and packing up supplies we wished we’d taken last time we evacuated: hay, wood shavings for the stalls, and odds and ends like buckets and rakes. Trying to keep my mind off the fires, I noted this key van advantage: Many pickups lose payload capacity with a heavy trailer hooked on. The mule-laden trailer would take us right to the Sprinter’s 5,000-pound towing capacity, but we could still safely load a ton of cargo into the van itself.
The night passed slowly, with Animal Services returning twice more to evacuate horses from the ranch behind us. (The ranch is on a steep hill, so it’s easier to walk the horses over and load from our place.) Between loads, Robin and I walked up the hill to check the fire’s progress. I had a twin air mattress in the Sprinter from our beagle rescue trip, and as the sun rose, Robin napped in the back of the van while I reclined the driver’s seat and snoozed behind the wheel.
At Last, a Chance to Tow!
By daybreak the winds had died down, allowing firefighting aircraft to fly. I had pumped up the trailer’s tires during the night (another chore I’d neglected; they were down by some 25 psi) and found one leaking through the valve stem. Taking advantage of the lull, I took the trailer down to the tire store. Finally, a chance to tow! But my attention was divided: Power was still out in the neighborhood, and some of my fellow Angelenos had forgotten that a dead traffic light is a four-way stop, resulting in several spectacular accidents. I had to brake hard to avoid a careening F-150; good thing the trailer was empty and the RedArc brake controller was working well.
I cautiously made my way to the 118 freeway, where the Sprinter’s diminutive 2.0-liter turbodiesel I-4 amazed me with its ability to smoothly and briskly accelerate the trailer to highway speed. The tire shop pulled all four of the trailer’s wheels, gave the tires a thorough once-over and replaced all four valve stems just to be safe. Back at the ranch, I backed the van and trailer into the ready position.
For the next two days, the Sprinter became our mobile headquarters. I bought a queen-size air mattress, which fit neatly between the Sprinter’s wheelwells, and Robin and I slept in the van with our phones by our heads, listening for alerts from the Watch Duty app. The ranch owners offered us their RV, but we were perfectly happy in the Sprinter, which had a built-in “alarm system”: If the wind kicked up, the van would rock and wake us up.
While the tragedy was compounding for many of our fellow Angelenos, the Hurst fire cooperated by moving away from us. We slept at home Friday night but left the van at the ranch, loaded and ready to go. By the end of the weekend, we thought it was safe to disconnect the trailer and take the van home.
The Real Work Begins—And the Sprinter Is Ready
This is where I expected my story to end, but it didn’t. The fires displaced thousands of people, and almost immediately, independent groups of volunteers sprang up to start delivering clothes, food, water, and whatever else was needed, wherever it was needed. MotorTrend editors Scott Evans and Miguel Cortina were already hauling supplies while Robin and I were stowing the trailer, and they steered me to a social media group that was organizing deliveries. “They’re going to love you and the Sprinter,” Evans said.
How right he was. Turns out there were plenty of items that wouldn’t fit into an SUV and would strain a pickup truck. First, I took a home hospital bed to a convalescent home mere blocks from where my friends lost their home in Altadena. The next morning, I was driving 100 hot meals, freshly cooked by a mother-and-daughter team that ran a Dominican pop-up restaurant, to a shelter in downtown Los Angeles. Two days later I was back downtown, swapping a crib I’d picked up in El Segundo for a load of food, water, clothes, and toys for a family burned out of their Altadena home.
As I drove, I noticed SUVs stuffed with bags of clothing, pickup trucks with palettes of drinking water, and vans like mine, concealing their cargo but riding low on their axles, all of us following the ant trails of our freeways and delivering sustenance to all corners of our colony. I’ve never been prouder of my adopted home city. Recovery will take months, and I plan to keep the Sprinter busy with volunteer work as long as it is needed.
We set out to see if a van could be as useful as a pickup truck, and in the space of just a few days, the Sprinter has given us a definitive answer. As useful? No—the Sprinter is much more useful, to the point that Robin and I are starting to wonder if we should replace our Chevrolet pickup with a van.
For More on Our Long-Term 2024 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter:
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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