$150k vs. $40k SPRINTER VAN (full tour)

we have spent the last six months traveling around the us living full time out of our converted sprinter van that we bought for a little over 40 thousand dollars this tiny home on wheels has taken us on some epic adventures but it's also come with its own set of challenges like electrical issues i did not think that was gonna happen a propane leak a broken fridge the list goes on today we are just outside of las vegas and we have ran at this top of the line winnebago revel that according to the internet retails for over 150 000 this beautiful van with some super cool features is going to be our home for the next few days and we're going to be comparing the experience to see just how much more comfort you get for an extra 100 000 [Music] thank you sir we rented this van from a company called blacksford and yesterday they delivered it to our hotel which was pretty sweet and we drove it west to the middle of the desert at this point we've got some driving in cooked a meal and spent our first night in the rebels so now that we've been living out of this fan for the last 24 hours we're gonna give you the full tour and show you how this stacks up against the sprinter van we own we should start by pointing out one of the biggest differences between this van and our van and that's that the rebel is the shorter of the two sprinter vans our van sits on a 170 inch wheelbase and the rebel sits on a 144. so with that said this fan actually feels just as big inside and that's thanks to these flares this little area on the outside which sticks out a few inches that gives you just enough room to lay the bed horizontal which opens up a ton of space on the inside but before we show you around the inside of the van let me finish showing you around the outside of this fan on our van we have a couple solar panels on the roof a little plug on the outside and that's pretty much it the outside of this van is a lot more exciting i'll start with one of my favorite features i'll start by unlocking the door when you open up these back doors there's actually an outdoor shower all you do is you grab this blue hose and then you come right over here insert the hose into this little metal thing whoops like i was saying you insert this hose into the little metal thing and then you have the option for a hot and cold shower there's nowhere really to hang the faucet so it'll be one of those things where you have to like get yourself wet soap up and then rinse yourself off but either way it's just super convenient to have the option for an outdoor shower or if you were like at the beach and you just wanted to spray your feet off it'd be nice to have also this van has something that i've always wanted on our van which is a ladder that takes you up to the roof unfortunately there's not a roof deck up here like i've always wanted so you could like hang out on top of your van but there is an air conditioner two solar panels and a max air fan it's still just nice to have the option to be able to get on top of your van and clean the solar panels or take a cool picture over here on this side of the van we have a winterization valve which may not seem like a big deal but we're out here without our van because we had a pipe freeze and burst so that's pretty handy to have we also have a freshwater drain a place where we can fill up our water and another freshwater drain but back here behind the screen with the touch of a button i can roll out our motorized awning this is so convenient we wanted an awning on our van because it really opens up your outdoor living space but i also knew that i would rarely take the time to set it up but with this being as convenient as it is i think it's something we'd use every single day and then once you have your awning out you just come inside grab this little pole insert this little metal piece into the groove flip up this clip and you have an outdoor table i just love the idea of being able to eat outside this was not an option in our van before we go to the other side let me show you one more thing there is a built-in mosquito net that's super easy to use you just unclip it roll it down grab the zippers and now you can leave the door open and no bugs will get in we actually bought one of these that magnetically clips onto the inside of the door but it's such a pain to put up that we used it once i think that's kind of one of the big differences with this fan and ours is just because of how convenient stuff is i think you would actually use it a lot more over on this side of the van we have a few features that can only be fully appreciated if you live in a van like the convenience of being able to fill up your water on the outside of the van or a conveniently located gray water tank drain both of these things working together if you're at a campground with full hookups pretty much feels like you're living in a house your van's pulling in water as it needs it and it's discarding it when your tanks start to get full the way we live now we constantly have to be aware of how much water we have in our freshwater tank and how quickly our gray water tank is filling up so this would be pretty incredible and then in this cabinet right here we have outside access to our cassette toilet tank so i'm currently holding all of our waste in my hands but i'm actually excited about it because in our van in order to empty our tanks you had to get the p tank and then carry it through the van which is a little dangerous big time messed up oh i need your help okay put the camera down i need your help here it just slides out you can take this empty it where you need to it slides back in and you never have to see your waist not to mention if we want to empty our solids we have to completely remove the toilet from our van and since that's usually my job this is one of my favorite features on this van before we go inside the one other thing i should mention is that this van is also four wheel drive [Music] real quick we want to say a big thank you to surf shark for continuing to support this channel and keeping our online identity safe with the best vpn on the internet if you don't know what a vpn is it stands for virtual private network and it encrypts all the information sent between our computer and the internet so that no one can steal our personal data so as we're using public wi-fi while we travel we're protected with surfshark but a vpn can be used for more than just security it can also be used to unlock content that isn't available in your area it's super easy to change the virtual location of your computer and get access to a new content library if you don't already have a vpn we highly recommend surfshark we're coming up on our one-year anniversary with the service and we still love it plus it's the only vpn on the internet to offer one account for unlimited devices you can use our code cara nate to get 83 off plus three months for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee so there's no risk to try it out to get started just click the link in the description below all right now i'm going to show you around the inside of the van starting with the cap it's all pretty similar to our van but everything is just a lot fancier i love this big screen and most importantly these four big sturdy cup holders this might not seem like that big of a deal but when you've driven across the country little details like this make a big difference we've lost so many drinks due to our little flimsy cup holder right here so this makes me really happy but the one thing that the cab has that ours doesn't is this button which opens the back sliding door both of the front seats swivel around to the back which really opens up this area plus there's a table that folds down that's super easy to set up just gotta move the seat back pull it up till it locks in and then this is magnetic so you can have a small or a big table i think this is my favorite part of the rebel compared to ours because in order for us to have a table to eat or work at we have to completely convert the bed which means more than half the time we're eating and working in the bed because we're too lazy to convert it so this just folds back down super quick and the windows on the rebel open up hours just crack a little bit and there's a permanent screen there so here you have the option to be screenless or boom screen but the best part is that the window covers are built in as well our window covers take up so much storage space and i feel like they take forever to put up and this takes two seconds so once again it's the little details and up here we have a storage closet they have a jetboil pots and pans not sure what's in here what i do know is if we were living in here full time this would be stuffed because it seems like there's not as much storage in the rubble and back here behind this bench we have the control panel which is just a little bit more organized than our control cabinet you pretty much control everything in the van with this wall this turns the heater on and off this is the hot water heater solar charger light switches this turns the inverter on and off pretty sure this turns on the hot water heater in the shower but what i appreciate the most is this button right here by clicking this you can see exactly how much liquid you have in your fresh water and your gray water tank in order for us to do that we literally have to take the bed apart and lift the bench and look at our water tank to see how much is left same with the gray water nate has to crawl under the van to see how much space we have left empty it out with your face not so close now before we move back any further into the van there are a couple things that i think are really cool but aren't really relevant to us since it's just the two of us but i want to show you anyway so this area actually converts into a second bed you just lift this cabinet extension which i love pull on this lever and it converts into this little bench then you take the back rest lay it on top and it becomes a small wobbly second bed nate's brother came and stayed with us for two weeks last year and he had to sleep on the floor since we don't have this so even though it's not perfect it's definitely better than the floor and legally we can only have two passengers in our van like the driver and the passenger seat because we don't have any more seat belts back here but there are two seat belts on this seat so you can have a couple friends join you on your adventures and then they'd fight over the bed moving on into the kitchen the sink is somewhere that i think that our van has the rebel beat ours looks a lot nicer and it's a lot deeper plus in order to drain the water in the sink you have to press this button which is slightly inconvenient but i do like how the faucet collapses you can close this if you're not using it and have way more counter space that plus this counter extension now the induction stove this is something i've always wanted an hour van instead of propane because we all know our relationship with propane isn't the best why is this happening however nate tried to use it to heat up water this morning and we didn't have enough power so we had to make the coffee outside so now i'm reconsidering if this is the best option for us because we camp off the grid a lot and this would become a problem if we stayed at campgrounds more often we could plug in for power i would 100 go with this option so above the stove we have this little shelf with our dish cleaning supplies we have a cabinet up here that holds the water kettle and plates and cups and bowls once again i feel like this is a little small compared to ours but we have this giant vertical pantry with so much space i'd want to add a few more shelves here but this is great down here we have a refrigerator and little freezer i think it might be a tad bit bigger than ours but i do like how it has this little lock on it so it doesn't fly open and then we have these teeny tiny drawers these are much smaller than ours but it has all the kitchen supplies in there i do like how they lock with these little buttons though and over here it's the bathroom so our bathroom has just a curtain which is not super private so i like that this is actually a locking door even though it is a little harder to open now this is a shower with a toilet inside just like ours we haven't used it yet but it seems pretty normal just a shower head that hooks up here then there's a little cubby where you can put your soaps and stuff and when you take a shower you can close the toilet paper up so it doesn't fly now we hardly ever use the shower in our van it really just turned into a storage closet and what's great about this one is it's built to be a storage closet if you wanted to use it for that so if you stay in a lot of campgrounds and use the public bathrooms you could put up to three of these shelves in here and store so much stuff but we took the shelves out because we are using this toilet which funny story when we first got here and i was using it i was like i don't get it like why is this toilet not like why is it facing this way where i can't close the door and then this morning when my coffee kicked in i thought hmm maybe you can rotate it and then go to the bathroom in privacy so this toilet is different than ours we have a composting toilet which separates your liquids and your solids and i've liked it because it doesn't stink but it does add a little bit more work on our end this one is very similar to just a normal toilet so the way it works is you do your business and then to flush you just pull this little lever everything falls down into the tank run a little water to make sure it cleans everything out close the lever so you can't ever smell anything and that's it and then the magical tank cleaning gods come down and it all disappears that's neat okay well i think i left that open too long and to kind of stink now last but not least let me show you my favorite part of the van which is the bedroom the entire back of the van is shared between the bedroom and what we are calling the garage there is so much space back here since we're only here for a couple nights we're just living out of our suitcases right now but if we were living here full time i would definitely want like a permanent dresser with drawers because right now i don't know where all of our clothes would go up front but if you were just using this fan as like a weekend adventure mobile you could fit so many toys back here like bikes skis fishing poles all the things that we don't have room for in our van but it's a little deceiving nothing you store back here can come above this line because [Music] how great is this our bed is already made with just a push of a button seriously the biggest headache in our van is making the bed like there have been so many nights where i've considered just sleeping on the couch because i didn't want to make it that bad so this is no doubt the coolest feature of this van now we were super curious to see how we fit in this bed since ours is vertical and just for context i'm 5'5 and if i put my head at the very top of my pillow look how much room i have left i'm five ten and if i point my toes until they're touching the wall i have about two inches above my head so you could probably sleep comfortably in this bed as long as you're less than six feet tall plus if you need some privacy just unclip this so easy over here we have some usb ports night lights a teeny tiny window and air conditioning we do not have ac in our van and we spent majority of the summer in the mountains last year so it wasn't that big of a deal but there were definitely some nights where it would have been so nice to have this it's not that bad not that bad no not when you spread out like this however the ac doesn't run off of solar so it would really only be useful if you were staying in a campground and you could plug in [Music] and that about wraps up the tour that's everything you get for a van that cost over 150 000 now if you line our van up next to this one and you made us choose which one we wanted to live out of obviously we would choose the professionally built one that costs three times as much but with that said there are some things that we love about our van more than this one first of all if you take away all the functionality of both vans i think the inside of ours looks way nicer i love the clean white modern aesthetic that we have versus the inside of a van that you can tell was built by a company that also builds rvs it's totally a personal preference this one just feels like a camper and ours feels homier and we shoot a lot of content in it we just like it all good all good another thing is our fresh water tank is twice the size of the rebels which means that we can spend twice as long off the grid before we have to fill it back up now don't get me wrong i prefer the motorized functionality of this drop-down bed and the revel to hours but our bed is three inches short of a king-sized bed i don't know if that's much of a perk but it's just nice to have a little more room a huge difference between ours and this van is that if you want to have guests over this fan really isn't set up for it at best you could fit two people in this bench seat that i'm sitting on and then one person right here so you could have three people around the dinner table but it would be really cramped where hours you can comfortably fit for this is a little one but this is something we strategically thought through as we were having our heater installed and that's that we can turn the heater on and off from the bed which is super nice because these van heaters you don't like set them to 72 degrees and that's where it holds it they're either on kicking full blast or off and so there's times when you either wake up in the middle of the night freezing or you wake up in the middle of the night sweating and it's so nice just to be able to reach over and click a button and last but not least is the storage area that we have for electronics in our van not only is it a safe that keeps everything from being stolen if somebody were to break into the van but there's also a charger built in so we can charge all of our electronics in one place this van on the other hand there are these outlets in the kitchen so last night when we were charging everything we just had our drone and cameras everything was just laying right here on the countertop we aren't seriously considering upgrading to a rebel we just thought it'd be fun to try this out for a couple days all in all we are very happy with our van especially when it's working

Channel: Kara and Nate

Views: 3,323,734

Rating: 4.8611088 out of 5

Keywords: #vanlife, converted van tour, full time travel, kara and nate, kara and nate vlog, morning routine, off grid living, self converted sprinter van, sprinter van, sprinter van conversion, tiny home, tiny home on wheels, tiny house, travel, travel couple, travel vlog, van life, van life couple, van life usa, van life vlog, van tour, vanlife, vlog, winnebago, winnebago revel 4x4, winnebago revel off road, winnebago revel 2020, winnebago revel review, winnebago revel bed

Id: JfxyakPvWvA

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/HazPippy]

After seeing how little they know about van maintenance and how often things go wrong them I’d think twice about renting to them LOL

[u/klein_four_group]

The pandemic has really highlighted how unappealing they are as hosts. I started watching in 2018 and they stood out for doing really photogenic collabs and high-quality video editing. But in the past year, their content has become really boring. I know all vloggers put on a fake persona but these two in particular can't even hide the fakeness. Compare that to the Endless Adventure, which comes off as much more genuine.

[u/BlueXanzCan]

man i cant imagine living my entire life on camera , filming every minuscule thing of ur daily life

[u/Kacers]

I feel for the couple who sold them the van. If I put in that much effort to convert a van and sold it to a young couple who would be showing off their travels I’d be so excited! Like I could continue to live vicariously through them and still see my beloved van. But they have complained about the van from the very beginning. I’d feel sick about it, hearing how negatively they talk about the van. It’s never their responsibility for being so completely unprepared and naive. It’s the “problems with the van”. The fact that it wasn’t “professionally converted”. They’re so completely insensitive. There’s a way to discuss hardships without being so completely insulting to the couple who worked so hard to create that van.

[u/ArnoldLayne1967]

Their next video is “Will Smith’s $2.5m RV vs our $40k van”.

I don’t even know what exactly they are going for here. Is this like a paid commercial for that Revel van?

I think they are also filtering all their comments after that LV suite video. Every comment now is rainbows and sunshine and people expressing literally how they are vicariously living through Kara and Nate.

I saw a comment saying the only thing they like are airports and airport lounges. Well, you could go for the Sam Chui competition but at least Sam Chui is an aviation enthusiast who knows a lot about aircraft and airline operations. There are couple of others like Wingin’ it Lucas and the German guy whose name I forgot who do airline reviews.

I don’t even know wtf these two are selling anymore and why people are watching them. Oh never mind..., they are vicariously living through their faked and staged lifestyle.

[u/VirtuallyHappy]

I don't get what they're doing here. Did Winnebago sponsor this thing as long as they highlighted all the greatness of the Revel vis a vis their conversion which was 1/4 the price? Well duh. A pair of vloggers I respect much more, Elsa Rhae and Barron, did a Q&A. They live in a Scamp - a trailer model which is actually quite in demand but obviously not as $$$ as a Revel. One question was if money were no object what kind of van, and Barron mentioned a Revel. But then he said he'd want to customize it and make it how it worked for him so at the end of the day, not worth it, and he circled back to being satisfied with what they had.

Here it's - how about if we spent over 100k on new versus the 40k we spent on used! Total waste of time. There's no point to this.

Ok, essentially Winnebago gave them the use of the van in exchange for the hype, and they used their own van, which was 1/4th the price! as a reference point to highlight the Revel. Arnold was correct., Everything they do from now on is advertising.

[u/i_Jay]

POSITIVE COMMENT ALERT!!! I really enjoyed this comparison video and some of the features in the rented van were amazing would love to have it myself. What I really like was at the end Kara and Nate said that if they had the choice they would still choose their own van as they feel it is homier etc. Thanks for keeping me entertained throughout lockdown K&N!

[u/falermal]

Well at least they're cashing in on their Vegas trip🤷🏾‍♂️

Edit: this was sarcasm

[u/LilyofCasablanca]

Unpopular opinion coming up- I admire how they’ve made the best out of their channel during the pandemic. For me, the joy in watching them has always been their willingness to try things that aren’t part of my daily life. Not sure why there’s so much hate for them in this subreddit. I enjoyed this video!

For all the downvotes, I’d love to know why. Feels like there’s quite a bit of group think going on when I literally just said what I like about them. Is this a hate on them sub and I didn’t know? :/