2022 Winnebago Revel 2 Week Ownership Update! The Good, Bad, & Ugly

hello and welcome to another episode of out of spec reviews you join me with the 2022 winnebago rebel this is our new revel we just bought it and we bought it to create a van life series here on this channel taking you through the buying and ownership experience of one of these winnebago rebels now if you're a long time viewer of this channel and others you know that we review plenty of new cars but we only get them for a week at a time and it's so hard to provide a long-term update here at least with this we're going to take you from the purchasing all the way through at least a year plus of ownership and see what it's like to join the vanlife family now in this video it's going to be quite a long one we're going to have it broken up into chapters so if you're interested in a particular portion for example some of the issues we might be having with this van with just two weeks into ownership and 2 000 miles on it you can just skip right over there but if you want to watch the whole thing grab a big can of popcorn can of popcorn bucket of popcorn and i'm gonna run you through basically everything we've experienced with this winnebago rebel from start until now about 14 days of ownership before we get into our experience with this revel let's talk about what it is well there's plenty of different rvs recreational vehicles on the market from a class a bus to a class c sort of box on a chassis this particular style is called the class b and it's basically a van build so you can get a ford transit a dodge or a ram promaster or a mercedes sprinter or the three popular conversion van builds i've seen them also on e-class ford chassis or even some gm uh other chassis but all together pretty much you're gonna get sprinter transit or ram and so you kind of have to choose i think first is what kind of vehicle do you want to be driving around uh the pro masters are generally front-wheel drive which just nixed it off the list for me not a fan of that i know it's not a performance car but that just didn't do it for me plus not a fan of the styling uh the transits are really cool and if you get a top spec one you can actually get co-pilot 360. so we'll do really good driver assistance that was high up on the list and you can get the ecoboost engine which just rips and those are pretty neat and there's a new version of that called from winnebago called the winnebago echo which i'm very much looking forward to testing we'll bring that to you here on this channel and that's a four-wheel drive over landing type transit build but it's more of a b plus it's kind of got a cab on the back of it it's kind of interesting and the reason we went here with the revel and the sprinter chassis was two a couple different reasons i'm a mercedes guy um i think they look the best i think it's the most premium i love mbux the infotainment and i like that it was a diesel too you know we're going to be pulling heavy loads running this thing wide open throttle with big trailers on the back i just wanted something that was dependable and that mercedes v6 diesels from what i hear just run and run now not to say they're not without their intricacies we'll get into it in a little bit but that's the reason i chose the sprinter chassis and then once you start looking at van builds on the sprinter chassis you have the storyteller overland you have the one transwest builds down in frederick can't remember the name off the top of my head maybe the everest i don't know there's a few different uh you know vans you can choose from and we ultimately of course obviously settled on the revel by winnebago the first right off the bat the reason i was just like oh well we got to get one it's a very silly reason but i'm a silly person is come over here and take a look at this led headlights it's so rare to find sprinters with factory led headlights i just think they look great at night they look great during the day really nice running lights better tail lights and so the storyteller overland and the other ones all had the base halogen lights and i'm like well if you're spending you know this thing stickers out just under 200 000 if you're going to spend that kind of money on a vehicle well you better have the best headlights possible from a styling perspective and from a light output and the rebel was that but then i was able to back up my decision i didn't let that sway my whole buying decision but i backed up that decision with just the search results on google what people are looking for what they're interested in what the owner group base is like what the aftermarket support is like what the factory support is like from a dealer service network and winnebago just has the most searched for class brv and it's this rebel right here so from a business perspective you know us providing content on a vehicle this will be more relevant to more people we'll also have something we can compare all of the other models too that's a known quantity it's sort of like a tesla model three that's why we bought one everyone knows what it is it's a known quantity and the comparison videos always do well so you know not to beat around the bush it was a business decision to get the revel over other vans but i'm not you know disappointed with it very much enjoy it so that's why we bought the revel let's go around the back and i'll tell you how we bought the revel so once i settled in on the exact unit that i wanted to purchase again for the company so we can provide videos to you uh it started the nationwide search of getting the best price now a lot of people will argue you know direct sales manufacturer dealers are outdated i actually totally disagree i think dealers have a good place and i really like negotiating on a price i like to send out bids you know basically contacted every single dealer in the country who sells revels and i said look we are planning on buying a revel for media coverage we want to enjoy it as a personal use vehicle with our dogs but also to provide videos on happy to plug the dealership we bought it from but what's your best price and we went back and forth turns out that i got a best price at a place that i also have friends working at funny how that works sometimes and it was from general rv and they honestly not sure where they're located i think they have a whole network of dealerships anyway never went to one never had to step foot in a store this is why i think the whole idea of buying an rv local to you makes almost no sense whatsoever um i think the only benefit of buying one local to you is your service might get you in sooner but i've heard so many mixed results i would say it kind of doesn't matter in our case we got a great deal at general rv want to say thank you very much to alex d'angelo who i believe sells more rebels than at least most in the country and uh he really hooked us up and made it possible now when you go and buy a winnebago rebel you pretty much have to go to the dealer you bought it from and pick it up and what happens is someone from the winnebago factory in forest city iowa or in the case of this they're made in uh man can't remember the name of it but like 12 miles north of forest city we uh you know they drive the van to the dealership and then you end up taking delivery of your new vehicle with like 1200 miles on it or if it's really far 2 000 miles on it and in some cases they have to tow a car to drive back so you get a brand new rv in this case a rebel that's just run wide open throttle on the highways with a tow vehicle and well that doesn't seem that good does it for engine break-in so i asked alex and winnebago pr and i said hey you know we're going to be making this into a series and two videos can we pick it up at the factory in iowa and they said you know normally we don't offer this but because you guys are youtubers and we want to do it for the video again full transparency they said yes we'll just park it in the parking lot you guys can come pick it up at the factory and that brings us to our next topic what was factory delivery like so what was our factory delivery like well uh we were able to take delivery at the factory again thanks to winnebago because we make youtube videos and this is all filmed on our out of spec motoring channel so a sister channel to this particular one and you know no need to beat around the bush it was an awkward weird experience you know we're buying again an msrp of just about 200 000 vehicle and you'd expect something a little bit special when you do that but we flew into minneapolis not to say like i'm okay that they didn't do anything special but like also kind of funny that they didn't uh so we flew into minneapolis and uh there were you know there's no way to get down to forest city iowa that's easy so it's a two and a half hour drive so we thought uh let's rent a car well they were all at a rental car so we ended up taking an uber from minneapolis airport down to forest city iowa just turned out you know to be like the worst uber driver ever he was in his odyssey going full throttle lifting off full throttle lifting off how that car had 180 000 miles on it and did not have an exploded transmission i have no idea but that's a testament to honda build quality but alyssa and i were just about thrown up in the back seat of that car she was texting me she's like can we find another way i'm like we're in the middle of nowhere this is our only option so we uh took that uber down to four city iowa they had a um sort of a customer service center and so we show up and we walk inside and you know this is our factory delivery and they're like hey how can we help you and i said oh we're kind of this over here to pick up our rebel oh great awesome well it turned out everyone was there for service so we got our first glimpse into what rv ownership might be like because every single other person was there because they had a major defect with their rv that required them having to go back to the factory to have it fixed and i guess you know good way to be exposed to what to expect right off the bat and that you know totally aware of what what's going on here my friend steve lato says never to buy a new rv or used rv unless you know exactly what you're getting into and with all the research i've done i knew what we were getting into and it was so funny took them i would say probably an hour of waiting around to figure out oh you guys are actually here to pick up a new one then they found a guy and then they went to go find our rv and then brought it around to us which was nice and they were like oh here are the keys like great your appointment's tomorrow morning at 7 00 am like wow that's early because again we were an hour behind so that 7 a.m is really 6 a.m for us or maybe it was 5 a.m i can't remember uh so we're like no worries we'll grab the rv can we at least stay in it for the night and figure it out they said oh yeah no problem so they just handed us the keys and we just went on our way um and that was kind of weird so we figured it out the first night had a blast you can see all this on out of spec motoring this was just across the street at sort of their visitor center and uh yeah that was it went went back the next morning for orientation every question i asked the guy was super nice but they typically handle with the big buses the class a motorhomes and uh he just had really no idea about this thing to be honest i was like oh so how does this thing work and he's like oh i don't know and so anyway we just kind of figured it out our own if you thought we got like a full delivery at the factory you thought wrong we really had to figure things out but that's okay i watched every video on the rebels so many great ones out there and i do want to mention as well general rv was just super awesome throughout the whole thing if i had any questions i could just message them directly and you know it's a very non-traditional way to take delivery i do not expect you to go through the same thing there are many people who want to take delivery close to the factory there is a dealer a mile away from winnebago um and i called them seeing if we could just buy one from them but it was like 30 000 more expensive and was like a year waiting list so we ended up doing it our way and it worked out i would say even better so that was our factory delivery before we go any longer into this video i want to take you on a quick tour of the interior and exterior of our revel how we expect it why we expect it this way and maybe some interest intricacies and oddities that you may not know at some point in the future i'll do like a full in-depth tour of this thing but this will just be a quick highlight so we have a 2022 winnebago rebel that is like the official registering name of the vehicle but it's built on a 2020 mercedes-benz sprinter 2500 4x4 chassis and it's built in germany the chassis and then shipped over here now there is a south carolina production plant for sprinters but the four by fours at least at this point are all built in germany and the reason that this is brand new but it's a 2020 chassis is mercedes hasn't started importing the 2021s yet or even selling them and we are expecting either of them just to skip the 2021 model year or for them to have a lifecycle input impulse or a sort of a refresh halfway through the 2021 year that will be sort of a styling upgrade mechanical upgrade and just sort of little tweaks but i believe they will be getting rid of the six cylinder at least that's the rumor we'll talk more about this engine and how it drives towards the end of this video so that is why it's a 2020 sprinter with a 2022 conversion but we picked it up i think with 56 miles on it is when we took delivery so brand new to us which is pretty cool come around this way so we have a giant windshield that was cracked five miles into us taking delivery safe light came over repaired it we have since tinted it and we'll get into some upgrades and modifications we've already done and want to do in the near future you have these uh bf goodrich ko2 tires on method racing wheels i'm not sure i'm a huge fan of this combo i think if i was to do it again i would spec the base wheels just the steelies from the factory and then upgrade my own aftermarket the bf goodrich's are awesome the ko2's great legendary tire for sort of dirt and mud and general over landing but extremely noisy on the highway and uh you know just a lot of tire cavity noise from about 35 to 55 miles an hour then you have the method racing wheels which i think are okay but not particularly attractive or aggressive and i think again you can be a little bit more creative on your own perhaps in the future you'll see us even upgrade these at some point um no so the what's funny is mercedes advertises this as having like keyless entry well guess what you don't so there's no like open and lock button from the handle you have to go into your pocket hit unlock or lock every time and then you can start the vehicle you do not need to put the key in its little key slot as long as the key is in the cabin it will just start right up so that's easy we have uh obviously coming around the outside some exterior lighting these awesome little nets from rolex and they have this magnetic counterpart so you don't actually need to zip and unzip every time you get inside this has worked really well so far except come in and take a look at this i'm not sure if this is a defect but i asked the guys at the factory and they're like it'll get better over time but here we are after using this for weeks you can see it doesn't quite add up here and i think uh yeah sometimes we just kind of have to mesh this manually move it around so that we get a tight seal again just one of those things that you're constantly doing that just gets a little bit annoying over time but it's a very small problem we have this awesome carefree awning that doesn't require any posts and there's an app for it to work the i haven't been able to figure out how to get my phone connect apparently you're supposed to hold in this switch for three seconds after bringing it out there's a whole process i haven't been able to figure it out and i'm pretty good with tech um but that that's something i haven't spent too much time on it's got a light it comes all the way out really easy we've used it a couple times out camping it's been awesome i think i've slept in this thing close to 10 nights so far and it's been uh really a cool experience so you can see these awesome leds that come around here that light up just enough at night the other night we were camped right by a river super surreal i was making dinner right here on the table man it was just sort of the dream come true everything i've been looking forward to doing so you know super pumped that we have this thing really awesome this color is one of three colors that the rebel comes in it's a blue gray sort of like this here you can get silver or you can get tan we were between this or the tan i think oh what am i trying to say i think we made the right choice going here with the blue just for looking good on camera and thumbnails and i don't know i think it's a good color we almost didn't get it though because they ran out of orders for blue ones and then someone canceled so we got ours sooner i think our total time from order to delivery was about eight weeks come around the back with me so let's close this we'll go inside here in a second you can see that the van has lettering 4x4 branding for the rebel i actually really like this thing but i think we'll take these four by four things off i think we'll take that winnebago one off over there and actually let me just mention these running boards really quick they seem to be pretty sturdy which is awesome so really liking that we've used this feature here on both sides tying up the dogs to these little tie outs here that's worked wonderfully and and there's also under lighting so you can see the side markers are on here and it also lights up underneath the van however these rails are not without problems right off the bat first off i'm not sure if they're too low but i think we might end up reaching the limitation here off-roading sort of going over some things we haven't yet but we haven't taken it on any aggressive trails here in colorado we've done the switzerland trail some national forest stuff enough to get a wheel in the air here there but we haven't taken it out to like moab or anything but this is my main concern come on in and this isn't just on this particular one you can see they put this black finish on everything and it's already starting to peel in places where i'm not sure how that's totally possible so i do worry about future rust on here on this thing i've heard of others just like completely falling off due to rust so that's a concern um i sort of get the impression my impression here is winnebago is like a good general builder but i wouldn't say everything here is bespoke top quality we're not there at all and i think that might be something we should look forward to or look into when we start comparing this revel to others such as storyteller and just try and gauge the quality of materials one of my biggest issues with this entire van is this exhaust pipe right here and the exhaust system in general being a diesel is quite annoying we'll talk about it when we drive it but particularly this exhaust pipe is to me the most like terrible error they could have made look at this mounting bracket i show this to people and they're like how is that possible and i guess they took the stock exhaust off to try and route the exhaust out here so if you're laying in the back you don't suffocate yourself with fumes or something but at the end of the day this is the lowest point of the van it's going to get totally knocked off when we start doing some crawling you know approaching obstacles here so that has to go we need an aftermarket solution if you know of one comment it or maybe we can just put a stock exhaust on that we find from someone now the sprinter itself the revel is built on a 144 inch sprinter chassis and it's the tall the high roof so four wheel drive with the factory lift kit in the shortest wheelbase means it's the most maneuverable off-road we have the most ground clearance you can get from the factory we have the shortest wheelbase so it actually fits into normal parking spot and it's really no harder to drive than like your normal everyday car so i'm very pleased with the size with the chassis no complaints there at all coming around the back here i think it's funny someone points it out that these look like frowny faces and i think that's kind of hilarious all around so more badging in the back here you can see we've put the outer spec motoring logo there perhaps we'll keep it perhaps we won't we have this ladder on the back that i'm not a fan of because you can't climb on it here on the back i've seen people do it but it's very much recommended that you don't because it puts all the stress on this mounting point what you do is you just untwist this little thing hook it into the roof rails on the side and then you can climb straight up it's actually pretty simple and easy i think i'd like to get a side mounted ladder solution and then put boxes on the back so we'll see this van also is rated at towing 5 000 pounds from the factory which we have not tried yet but we will perhaps we'll do a whole video on an mpg loop with and without a trailer perhaps i don't know you guys let us know what you want to see but uh curious about how that will work coming around the sides we have some interesting things over here as well you'll notice both sides of the van have these flares they are aftermarket but they come from the factory from winnebago they're sort of part of the upfit i should say and it means that you can lay completely sideways in the bed so i'm six foot one i can lay totally flat and that's purely because we get these extra few inches on either side wouldn't have it any other way this window is lovely at night you get a nice breeze uh really fantastic solution i think continuing along we have our 30 amp 125 volt power connection here we'll talk about the whole electrical system in a future chapter of this video but i do want to you guys to make note this is where you hook it up to power yes it will let you drive away when it's hooked up there's no power circuit interrupter or anything like that so just be mindful and this is our cassette tank right here so the toilet is just inside the van you can do your business in there it goes into this tank i keep gloves in here i've emptied it once so far it's been a non-issue we pulled it out dumped it in the toilet in our house and put it back in the van it's been great been using the restroom quite a bit in here holds about five gallons which in human waste form that is honestly quite a few days for us at least so that is your quick exterior tour of the 2022 winnebago rebel again i can go in depth and i could spend an hour just talking about the hood what's underneath all of this stuff if you're interested in the super long detailed overview of this van and maybe even other rvs and vans we will bring that to you right here on this channel jumping inside the van there's a few things i'd like to show you now again this isn't going to be our full tour but i do want you to get an idea of sizing and one thing i want to bring up is we travel with our three dogs we have a golden retriever a great day in german shepherd mix and a uh remind me of oppa's breed saint bernardin bernard thank you i don't know why that skipped my head i was gonna say bernie's mountain dog st bernard he's new to the family but we brought all three of them with us uh this weekend for a two day camping trip up in the colorado rockies above 11 000 feet of elevation and everyone was great we fit perfectly so one of the reasons i love the revel is this entire back situation over here so come on back with me and take a look so first off you get this giant sort of garage space that i could put a motorcycle in a bicycle uh whatever i want of course however then if you just back up a little bit i can hit this switch right here and i can pull this bed down from the ceiling and we have all the sheets and everything off in the washing machine at the moment but i can pull this bed all the way down into its resting position here we go and if you take a look in here let me just kick the lights on there we go i'll go past you you can see you have almost i would say a full-size bed maybe not quite a clean but definitely lays flat when you just push the mattress down a little bit and to me that's just fantastic underneath the bed there's still probably three feet where the dogs can hang out that's where they usually sleep at night the humans are on the bed another thing i really like about this van is if you come back up front again i'll show you inside the restroom situation in here let's just make sure there's a little top notch that i sometimes forget about and this door is really kind of hard to open if i'm honest it has like a crazy strong magnet there on the bottom it almost feels like you're gonna break it but we've used it we're using it as trash for now but there's a full stand-up shower and the toilets here so you can use the toilet you know just standing this way if you're a guy or if you're a girl you can sit this way or you can rotate it around so there's plenty of options and i've been able to shower in here when we've been like entertaining people out on the campground so they don't see me with the door closed and i fit in there i'm six foot one and i can take a nice hot shower all on my own i think this is one of the coolest things it's something a lot of the other vans don't offer because it honestly does take a lot of interior space away having this sort of restroom and shower situation you know it's a big part of the van but to me it's something i wouldn't want to live without and i really enjoy it then we have the seating area where we've kind of put the window shades on right now something that's nice it is kind of tight i really hate the material that these cushions are made out of i don't know what they're using but they just feel so nasty i don't know i just don't like touching them so you can get different color schemes i don't know if there's a way around that but just not not a fan of that material myself that's my personal preference and we'll get into all of the electronics in a later portion this table listen to this squeak this just shows kind of that build quality i was talking about it doesn't seem to be all that amazing listen that's no pressure by the way that's just like annoying and then every time you hit a bump you just hear this kind of so i what i think we're going to end up doing is just pulling that table out finding a different solution to mount another type of table there and uh one of the best parts about this rv though are all of the power ports and plugs everywhere so you can see we have usbs here we have power outlets right up here we have outlets in here which we have some other stuff going on i'll tell you all about this later on and some modification stuff we have power outlets in the back we have a 20 amp power outlet here that's used exclusively well you can plug whatever you want in there but you can only use that to power your induction cooktop on high power because this is again a nema 520 uh outlet the rest are nema 515s there's under floor storage honestly plenty of storage throughout this van i think people order these things and get this garage lounge storage system not to say it's a bad idea i just think it's very expensive without kind of living with the existing van and seeing if it fits and my impression at least at this point is i'm so happy we didn't order any extra storage solutions that took away from the garage space because honestly there's almost more storage than we know what to do with and we do travel pretty light but it's been very impressive so far nice cabinets and things the pantry here for example is extremely deep and tall i think you can buy more shelving throughout if you come in and take a look at this the shelves are pretty spaced far apart but you there's a company that sells some extra ones we have some marshmallows up here and chips and salsa and stuff it's been been really fantastic so that's your quick tour of the van we'll get into some of the intricacies now as to some of the things we've learned as first-time rv or van lifers now some of you might be wondering well why didn't you guys go out and build a van you know we we're known in sort of the car reviewing world as being very electric vehicle focused and i do like evs i also love combustion cars um but they're like why why didn't you go out and build one you spent all this money on a rebel like why would you do that and there's a couple reasons the first is if i went out and built a van or or you know bought a chassis and hired someone to build it out it would be look at kyle's wacky creation imagine trying to sell that in three years with zero technical manuals or you know reliability concerns and fixing it on the road no service network there so that to me was just like a non-starter for our first foray into rv at some point in the future are we gonna build a van maybe i think it'd be really fun but we need to learn about it we need to use something well i want sort of the standard before we go out and do it on our own and not to say that we will if they keep making cool ones like this we probably won't ever have to but come over here this is the seal that shows that this is truly an rv from winnebago and it's the you know rv association sort of stamp of approval that this is a motorhome and that helps with resale also if anyone wants to finance this vehicle in the future they can then go out and get rv financing instead of vehicle financing which should allow them to extend their term farther out into the future maybe 20 years even you know not not to suggest any of your financial decisions but at least it's possible to insure this register it and run it as an rv instead of a van that's then been converted so for a resale perspective no brainer this was the way to go even if we spent a bit more money up front it also took a lot less time than building our own but we're learning many things even with this vehicle and there's a lot of intricacies that go along to this and even things from like the refrigerator for example we had to make sure that this was a compressor driven refrigerator and that means it can operate at angles of tilt we parked this thing a couple nights where we're like way tilted over because we don't have leveling blocks for it yet and the refrigerator still works and stays cold it also runs off the chassis 12-volt battery i believe therefore i've never had to turn this fridge off it stays cold all the time and the solar panels on the roof keep it topped up and running these are the things i just didn't even think about and then you get to your whole water system come around to the back because you know a lot of people who buy rvs hang out at campgrounds and they're all smushed in next to each other and really nothing against campgrounds it's just not where i want to be spending a ton of time if i'm honest so coming around back here we have our whole water system which is pretty interesting first off we have hot and cold water well how do you get hot water in an rv two different ways you have an electrical heater and you have a diesel heater well i haven't tried the electrical heater yet because for the most part we don't have the van plugged in i think you can do it off the batteries but i'm always trying to preserve battery life so we fire up our hydronic heater it's not a hydraulic heater it's an s bar system it's basically a jet turbine that runs off diesel that creates waste heat which then heats up your water system the which is super neat so you have on-demand hot water and it can just run that straight through you can then choose you know that takes like 15 minutes to warm up by the way so before you want hot water you need to plan ahead to turn on the diesel to turn on the hot water and then eventually it will warm up so these are the things we're learning and then you got to think about what you want to do with your tank do you want to leave a hose connected here all the time and just run off of pressurized city water well the nice thing is you don't have to use your onboard water pump you don't have to worry about using too much water because you have an unlimited source from the city and you got to change all these things around what you want to do then on top of that if you want to store water in here you need to fill up your tank what i've been doing is just filling it up till it overflows and then shutting it off because following the gauge on there it seems to show full way before it's actually full and you know this is just an interesting thing for us to learn and then you have to winterize it we'll do a whole video on that because i'm not even sure how that works yet there's tons of different methods going on there and then you get to your electrical side of things so the van itself comes with a tt-30 adapter this right here this is what plugs in the wall well a lot of homes friends houses don't have a 30 amp plug at home so how are you supposed to plug the van into a wall well you use this which i typically wouldn't recommend it's a 30 amp 125 volt connection to a nema 515 regular wall plug the problem with this is this is rated for 30 amp peak load this is rated for 15 at peak load the van doesn't know what it's plugged into without changing some settings so you can pop your breakers if you run the ac and try and charging charge the batteries and these are all the things that you got to get into with intricacies and we'll talk more about the electrical system here in a little bit but there are ways around them but we had to figure a lot of this out the other thing just mentioning the water system really quick is from what my understanding is the water can get pretty dirty sitting in the tank in an rv especially on a hot day so we run all of our water through this water filter that goes into the rv and then we plan to have a sink water filter as well but i think all the water that we drink will be in water bottles itself i don't think we'll ever drink the water that's out of the storage inside the artery so that's the water fill up part now let's talk about the water dumping part so when you have water that goes into the sink you have to then push it to a gray tank with a little switch that sends it you know you fill up the sink it doesn't drain you hit the little button it sucks it down with a pump into your gray tank which then comes out here and so your gray tank has a little bit less storage capacity than your fresh water tank makes sense you're going to be using some of that water so what you do is you open this little tap and then pull this lever right out i won't do it now because all of our gray water will flush out and for the most part if it's just like sink water you can just dump it into a city drain because it's no dirtier than any water that you'd be using in your house but if you happen to like put a lot of soap in there or other stuff there's specific dumping stations that you can dump that into and the van comes with a little slinky to make that dumping process easier if you take a look under here i can pop open this little container and you can see that blue tube that's how you can direct that gray water right into the right spot the black water because it's a cassette type situation uh basically how do i close this there we go there we go locked in the black water for your human waste just dumps into a toilet or an outhouse or a dumping station manually outside of this cassette so other intricacies you can't drive around with things on the countertops that goes without saying but it's something you have to get used to you hit the brakes and stuff starts flying everywhere and crashes you also want to make sure you choose an rv with mechanical latches my friend matt farah recently took a sprinter on a vacation that was not a winnebago and his had uh magnetic latches all over the cabinets and stuff was flying everywhere and ketchup explosions and olive oil explosions here we have mechanical latches inside our rv that's a quick uh you know just intricacies things you learn over time let me talk you through the entire electrical system let's walk you through the electrical system on the van so you have to have 12 volt power for your chassis for your infotainment for your 12 volt power sockets and you also have to have 120 volt for your power sockets for like your consumer goods and also for the lighting and things like this and um what comes with the revel are two xantrax 125 amp hour battery packs and these are lithium ion of course and they sort of come like this although not totally sealed up on all the plugs uh they're really good batteries comes with an app to control everything and i'm pretty pleased so far with the entire system let me walk you through how this works everything pretty much gets run through these two battery packs so to charge them you can either plug them in the wall remember i mentioned that power circuit you can run the diesel engine it's got a separate alternator to charge these up that's the fastest way to charge these is by driving along with the revs up a little bit just juices these things up at about two and a half kilowatts combined i think it's the peak i've seen charging with both batteries combined and then you can also charge them with solar now there's a couple different forms of solar you can do with the van i believe we have 225 or 215 watts worth of solar power on the roof that's peak and they're flat so they're not really facing in any direction so like midday you can get i don't know maybe 14 amps or so combined is the highest i think i've seen um so that that's maxing out your uh your your solar load but then you can expand the roof load you can add more panels or even back here there's an extra little plug you can do which makes sense because uh what what i think would be the smartest thing to do is park the van in as much shade as possible so you don't have to run the air conditioning and then put a solar suitcase out somewhere where there is sun and then run the power into these things so that seems to be making the most sense if you're hanging out at a campsite for a long period of time what we've been doing so far though is just running off the batteries at night starting the van up in the morning and going for a drive into town to get starbucks or whatever and then going back to the campsite and by the time we do that they're fully charged because they're lithium ion when it gets below freezing they don't like to charge or really discharge so you have a separate battery heater that you can kick on to warm these up to sort of a comfortable temperature where they can operate in their normal their normal way this xantrex inverter over here is what powers all of your electricity and it also handles the charging of the batteries from the wall if you are plugged in through your 30 amp connection from the outside it will bypass the battery packs to your wall outlets and just feed the electrical system straight grid power from whatever you're plugged into it just goes through a bypass mode but also charges up these batteries off the wall that can be a lot of load especially when you're plugged in just to a little 15 amp connection here and you can turn down through setting 24 on your inverter how much load you actually want to pull through the wall to charge the batteries which seems to work pretty well the inverter itself is rated at 2000 watts and it's a pure sine wave inverter which is great for your electronics because you get that really nice sine wave that they want to see for electric uh power but it's only 2 000 watts so the air conditioner on like the hottest day we've seen 106 degrees so far with this van pulled about 1700 watts which was even too much for this wall outlet we literally could not run the van with nothing else on plugged into the wall with these at the lowest limit to run the air conditioning when night came around it started pulling around 1200 watts which was at least maxing this out but enough for it to handle so we could keep it cool throughout the night when we slept in there and hot weather seems to really affect uh your electrical of course it doesn't anything nothing new here but you can't run the ac and cook with that cooktop i showed you earlier at the same time just not possible you gotta turn ac off cook and then you're back and i think that's a fair compromise that's that's totally normal no issue whatsoever uh that's pretty much the electrical system back here i'm gonna show you the control panel up front that controls everything it is worth mentioning about how long you can run the ac for on the batteries i think we've gotten about two and a half hours of real world usage before the batteries were down to about 20 percent i don't want to take them all the way down to zero not good for lithium of course uh and and honestly the thing i don't like about the system is it full charges the batteries and just leaves them full all the time i wish there was a setting i can just keep them around you know 50 to 80 or put a max charge up there at 80 so i don't have those things just sitting at a hundred percent charge but they're probably not as expensive as like an electric car battery so maybe i shouldn't worry about it as much now we get to our whole control panel everything you're seeing here is factory fresh straight from winnebago you have all of your lighting controls which have a on off and dim setting the dim isn't that dim but really nice at night glad they have that this is our whole diesel heating system so right now what we have is our diesel or electric heating so that's where you choose the electricity and then you can choose do you want it to go to the water or do you want to heat up the cabin just by pulling this up or down and obviously it's hot outside we don't need it right now but that's how you would set your heating temperature and there's vents all throughout for the heat the air conditioning and heat are two separate systems this here is to control the euroloft bed it comes with a key not sure why we've just left it on never changed it so i would say that's kind of silly to be honest why do you need a key maybe for kids not sure then you have your uh water uh system this is to turn your water pump on and off you have your tank levels you can see we have one third fresh water one third gray waste tank right now and then you can see the voltages of your chassis battery and your house battery back here we have our xantrex inverter board here it's actually overheated which does happen and it's totally shut the system off so what i need to do is go back here turn the inverter off and back on again and it's not even working welcome to rv ownership maybe we'll try and do it a hard reset later sometimes you have to turn all the systems off so let's just do that now i'll show you how this works this has happened a couple times where our xantrex has completely failed and we need to go through a reboot process so i'm going to turn the solar off i'm going to turn the batteries off let's see battery off maybe i have to hold it in give it a second there we go battery's off everything is now completely shut off now what i'm going to do is turn the batteries back on i'm going to turn the solar back on and you can see our xantrex inverter has come back on this happens i've noticed when it gets really hot and the left side of the fan the van gets a ton of sunlight goes into like some overheat protection mode and you got to restart everything so if you've experienced this let us know these are the weird things we're learning these intricacies like i'm telling you then we have our solar charge inverter i really don't think we get that much solar from the factory i'd like to expand this at the future but it's sort of cost prohibitive especially when you can start this thing up take it for a short drive and charge it in an hour yeah i don't know maybe it's not a good place to spend the money if someone wants to give us solar panels we use them uh but this is how you check your voltages or your amps coming from the panels right now it's cloudy only 1.3 amps at about 14 volts not much power at all we have our fuse panel down here and this is how we can flip all the breakers on and off which is really nice so we have all of everything there in one easy spot and i think that's your full tour of the electrical system even with a real-time problem solving right on the spot and now it's time for the issues and problems that we have had already throughout our ownership now like i mentioned we picked this van up with 56 miles on it in iowa we're back home in colorado right now we've had it for honestly a little bit over two weeks and about 2 200 miles the biggest egregious problem and issue with this van that i have is come take a look inside all of this stick on carbon fiber nonsense that winnebago thought was a good idea to put on there for those of you who don't know i am not really a carbon fiber guy unless it's useful if you make a car out of carbon fiber like a carbon tub or carbon body it's to save weight not for styling don't put extra stick on five dollar stuff and a 200 000 van that just doesn't fit that well and i'm worried if i take it off it's going to peel the piano black off behind there perhaps we'll come up with a wrap skin to go over it because that is just totally against the kyle connor way of thinking right there a couple other weird oddities and issues that we've noticed so far are you know these things rusting here on the sides i think i mentioned the beginning of the video the the running boards are rusting and this door especially when you're parked on an angle is not the power door earlier rebels i believe the 2020 model year specifically had the power door on it and my understanding is mercedes actually stopped making the power door an option for the 4x4 chassis and why they did this i don't know i guess they had an issue with like inclines or off-camber parking but this is a really heavy door uh and it goes so far back you can see when you're inside for example and you have this shade down which we generally keep down because we're out camping and it's bug season and we have this shade down too you have to like go over and reach all the way back and pull the door up and if you're not tall that's going to be kind of annoying now there are a couple rebel forums and owners groups on facebook for example and someone has made like a halfway stopper kit we're gonna be trying out to see if we can make our own copycat version of theirs or if someone makes one on the market comment down below and we'll get that for sure so that is an annoyance let's see what else we have we have an actual couple problems inside and this is to be expected when we bought an rv we did not expect a hassle-free ownership experience so if you guys go over there i can show you everything problems first off we were out camping the other night and our screw came out of the refrigerator the nova cool so it's actually kind of difficult to get it to unlatch and open up and to stay latched so we use this secondary one good thing that's there but that's still a little janky it keeps coming out doesn't really hold the fridge we have usb ports here that only one of them works which is kind of annoying we have this table that just sounds like nails on a chalkboard if not worse which i think is a major problem we have a whole power outlet in the back on the bottom that just was never hooked up from the factory always check your power outlets we were told the same thing i'm like ah factory pickup they said they spent 30 hours going through our van well guess what they didn't go through it enough i don't think aside from that alyssa can you think of any other issues oh we have one more thing in here if you guys come take a look so come on in here excuse the trash this was a part that we actually broke or it was very easy to break but this little latch came off so we've been using this duct tape to hold the door closed um that's kind of silly i think so other than that i think the van's been pretty solid again it's new only 2 000 miles i'm not expecting an ownership hassle-free experience i'm expecting issues you saw that xantrex inverter freak out earlier you know this is just what it's like owning an rv it's going to be interesting but uh i think that goes with the course i'd like to go over some of the upgrades we have already done and some of the upgrades we at least plan to do at this time in the future and that you can go as crazy with a van built out as you want honestly we might end up going that route we may end up keeping it relatively stock but there was one upgrade that we knew we had to do right off the bat and that was tinting this windshield and the side windows we ended up going with xpel's ceramic tint i believe we did a 80 tint on the windshield and we did a 35 or 30 on the side windows not dark but really good for heat rejection and it kept things nice and cool of course we needed to get that rock chip repaired right after we got the vehicle again i mentioned safe light came out it's not totally 100 perfect you can still see a little chip there but way better than what i thought we were going to have to do which would be replacing the entire windshield when we first got the van and let's go through some more wheels and tires i think we're gonna leave these as is for now but i think if we were to totally build out the van we'd go a little bit larger the problem with going with too big of a tire on the sprinter chassis is it freaks out the adaptive cruise control system and that i don't want to have break because we've even picked this up and it already started faulting out on the way home from the uh from the dealership but i've or from the factory i should say but i've heard mercedes adaptive cruise control systems on these just sometimes wig out if a sensor gets blocked or something like this so we cleaned everything it came right back to normal no worries there but if you go with too big of a tire you lose adaptive crews and because this is going to really be our highway cruiser and off-road blaster it's our do everything vehicle uh well we can't lose that i don't think that's a minimum at a as a necessary feature to have in a vehicle the next would be a suspension upgrade either going with more of a lift or with a totally different suspension setup i believe there's three main ones on the market for a sprinter i could see us definitely upgrading that into the future i'm not a huge fan of how this van rides of course it's a 10 000 pound beast but it's extremely bouncy and i'll show you that when we drive it in inside it's not scary i've had it up to 92 miles an hour um but uh yeah definitely could use some work in the suspension department at some point in the future if we decide to go crazy if not the stock is going to be fine for 99 of people and so far i've been very pleased with it up to this point coming down the sides we may end up changing out our running boards for something a little bit sleeker something that doesn't come all the way this far back honestly the entrance to the van ends again right here so the fact that we need any extra running board other than that we really don't we're going to be definitely changing out this exhaust for something else that's going to happen very soon early on we're going to be peeling the stickers off like i mentioned i'm going to be changing this ladder out for one of the side mounted ladders uh others have mentioned you know we should go for a back door mounted ladder i get there's benefits to that over the side ladder the side ladder could cut visibility add wind noise i just think it looks so cool so we're gonna do that but plenty of different options to do back here from boxes to racks to have a generator on the back so we can keep the van plugged in running off the generator uh for example if we're gonna be parked in like moab for a long period of time in the summer and we want the ac to stay on we've already done a couple upgrades actually if you take a look at that antenna up there this is the wii boost antenna booster cannot recommend it enough actually the first night we went up into the mountains to test it out right off the switzerland trail outside of boulder colorado we had one bar of service going in between zero and one bar kicked this sucker on then we had two bars of 5g and i was like dang this is awesome so it worked really well it's not magical though you can't go in like the middle of nowhere with no service and expect it to boost zero anything times zero is still zero but this certainly helped quite a bit i wired it up myself i have zero mechanical or technical ability for anything like that and it worked just fine we also have another addition to this vehicle it's called a waggle it's inside plugged in right up here under the roof and this is a little brick that plugs into the usb port that monitors the temperature i can go onto my phone i can take a look at the temperature inside the van at any given time and that way if we leave the dogs in there they they you know at least we know they're safe and cool and that's good and actually one time it gave us an alert that it was like 87 degrees inside right when we had left and kicked the ac on we said oh and then the next alert we got said it was 84. it was dropping and dropping and that worked well another thing we're going to do for the dogs actually is going to come up with a gate solution so this is sort of the dogs area down here there's two things we want to do we're going to have a fan mounted somewhere so they can get air flow and we're also going to put a gate across this door it has to be narrow because the bed still has to slide up and down so that the dogs can stay back here if we're cooking or if we're driving it's honestly safer if they're in the back of the vehicle and um you know there's just situations where we just you know someone comes up to the van we don't want them all running out we just need to have a containment area for them and that's going to be this whole area back here of course in terms of other upgrades well let's pop the hood for that under here this is going to be an area of focus this van is slow there's just no way around it so we have the i think om something or other it's the six cylinder turbocharged mercedes diesel engine they've been using them forever here is the lowest power tune of any variant so we know that at least from the factory they came with more powerful powerful versions with the same engine 188 horsepower 340 pound-feet of torque 330 pound-feet of torque man is it just not enough to move this thing we'll talk about when we drive it there's a couple different tunes available one is the rentek tune that you can buy from owl vans or straight from rentec i know the guys over there and then also you can get a custom tune my friend lenny used to be the head tuner at rentec awesome guy trust him with all of my engine tuning that i've had on bmw and mini products he does mercedes as well obviously coming from a rentec background i might just have him dyno tune this and do it real properly for this this specific engine we'll see how that goes but that'll be a whole video at some point in the future testing 0 to 60 times towing exhaust temperatures are we going to blow the thing up i don't know but we need to do something it's dangerously slow one of the things i like about the cab and one of the reasons we ended up going with the rebel was the mercedes layout you know i review cars for a living right here on this channel and having this mbux control system this awesome steering wheel this really good gauge cluster well this is just what i like for sure so let's start this thing up let the glow plugs run for a second on a cold start for the van there's two different cycles that it'll go through if it's cold i've noticed below 60 degrees fahrenheit it will run in high idle for about two minutes and then come down to regular idle if it's warm out 70 80 90 100 degrees like it is today uh then it just starts right up at idle like most diesels do into drive interestingly this this handbrake is pretty neat so you can pull it up lock it in place push it back down that allows the seat to swivel and then you just pull it back up and then put it down like a normal handbrake so i find that to be kind of nice we're in drive seven speed uh mercedes transmission here uh know it and love it driven it many products of course but unlike most mercedes is the steering's actually quite heavy i kind of expected a one finger kind of vehicle and you can steer this with one finger um but it will uh it's kind of heavy i gotta say so there's also a power steering hose clamp that is faulty from the factory that there's a recall for i haven't checked to see if ours is done yet but it's early on the list to do i'll peek in there in a little bit just to see if they have the proper clamp so when you first start this engine up it's honestly been pretty annoying out in the uh the camping spots that we've been going to so you start this thing up give it you know 30 seconds a minute to warm up and then you start driving and it gives you like no power we've gotten stuck in four wheel drive in low range just sitting at full power trying to get this thing to move won't even boost up the turbo or anything like that and then you know after a couple seconds of it doing that then it finally just goes back to normal and gives you full beams and you know that's just an intricacy that you kind of got to get used to is this thing requires a lot of warm-up but if you let it idle for too long it will fill up the diesel particulate filter which then could cause harm so you need to really drive this on the highway there's a setting inside the menu here that will let you monitor how full your filter is and if it gets close to 100 you just got to get on the highway and drive this thing for about a half hour for it to do its regen cycle to burn off all the soot inside the exhaust in terms of uh diesel exhaust fluid def we've used exactly a half a tank of def in our 2141 miles so i imagine every 4 000 miles you need to fill it up i hear exactly it's a 5 gallon tank and they are sold in two and a half gallon jugs so at a half tank we're gonna fill ours up that should take a full two and a half gallon jug that you buy at the store then you don't have any waste or leftover and then you know if you start running it out the van won't let you restart limits your top speed it gets pretty messy down there for all that efficient stuff in terms of daily driving it's super easy to drive it's got plenty of torque to pull you around town i find that the van revs out a little bit too far especially in first gear but you can pull the up shift paddle and it will always try to go to the next available gear and drop the revs down so i kind of just drive this thing around pulling the up shift pedal so it's not revving out to 3200 rpm in first gear which is unnecessary if i'm not needing the power it does this to help eliminate lag in daily driving situations but i would say it's not totally necessary here for example i'm full power and then it just boosted up so you can hear stuff flying around off the line this van is a dog you really have to wait for the turbos to kick on uh for this thing to move and this is sort of that problem we were seeing off-road and it's something to be mindful of it's just you cannot pull out new an intersection and go and this is a sprinter specific issue so what we're going to be doing is tuning it opening up the exhaust potentially trying an intake just letting air flow better and seeing if this helps with the drivability at low speed cruising along the highway 70 miles an hour in adaptive cruise you could go all day long no problem this thing eats the miles uh the wind does affect it quite a bit but on a non-windy day we've driven this thing 80 85 miles an hour even 90 miles an hour of your foot down and rock and rolls real well going up the i-70 mountain pass uh which is you know real steep up to about 11 000 feet of elevation up at the eisenhower tunnel maybe 10-5 we were wide open throttle most of the way averaging about 68 to 70 miles an hour and again that's working the engine pretty hard during our first thousand miles one of the reasons i wanted to pick it up at the factory was to give this a proper break-in period so we gave it you know gentle throttle but then also a little bit of boost and vacuum varied the revs didn't sit on the highway gave it a nice gentle break-in period and then slowly started driving it harder over the next 500 miles as soon as we hit 1500 miles i kind of just beat the heck out of this thing driving it up the mountains at wide open throttle to seat everything in see if there were going to be any issues and the only thing i've noticed is when you drive it pretty hard the temperature gauge will start creeping up into the red or just right outside the red so the oil temps get pretty hot i'm going to look into potentially an oil cooler situation just to prolong the life of the oil mercedes recommends 20 000 mile service intervals you can certainly do that on your van i'm not going to do it on mine i'll probably change the oil right at about 2500 miles outside of us kind of getting this thing broken in and everything good and then we'll do every you know eight to ten thousand miles in between those intervals twenty thousand miles on oil just as hard as we drive this thing i don't think it's going to be best for long term while i will drive it hard i want it to maintain and i want it to last and i'll never drive it hard with a cold engine things like this so we're going to do our best to take care of it other than that squeaks and rattles when we picked up the van from the factory they fixed one rattle which was on the sliding door window but it's been pretty quiet other than that one door in the bathroom i showed you that doesn't seal properly now that we have duct tape there it seals just fine and the one last thing i'd like to demonstrate to you is sort of this turbo lag off the line situation you can see our temps are coming up out of the cold and we're warmed up enough for us to go hard acceleration i just want to show you what to expect when you start driving this thing let's just take it off a full cold ac just to give it a little bit of help when you pull out into an intersection so watch this i'm just going to hit full throttle you'll hear my foot hit the floor floored nothing nothing nothing there we go big power so you need to be really ready for that many second delay off the line now what you can do is try and break boost it but it's pretty hard to time your entrance and i don't like to sit on the torque converter for too long trying to build up boost with my left foot on the brake and right foot on the throttle it just it sometimes doesn't even work either because you need to be again 1800 revs or so for this turbo to really build boost and that i'd say is a pretty big drivability issue around town it's i mean alyssa what do you think pretty annoying right very annoying very annoying around town especially when you're loaded up and you're just trying to do errands you like have this surging problem and people will suggest pedal boxes and all these plug-in stuff and while i haven't tried them so i don't want to comment without an engine tune you're not changing anything except telling the car how much throttle you're giving it and if you're already giving it full power it doesn't matter what you plug into the damn thing you're getting you're asking for full power here at speed though you put your foot down and it goes and revs out to 4 000 and moves along just fine so i would say i want the tune more for highway pulling and um yeah maybe around town it we can fix some of this drivability stuff but overall i'd say you know for most people if you're just patient with it like here off the line waiting waiting now we can go you're gonna be totally fine with this thing so uh final thoughts am i happy we went with the rebel am i pleased with the purchase well a hundred percent i'm actually the most excited about this out of any vehicle i've ever owned and i know i've pointed out a lot of problems in this video you have to understand my job is kind of to find faults in cars and to praise them where they're really good and to knock them where they're not so i instantly go to all of the negative things that drive me nuts and i want to fix but overall i just am so pleased with this van i've been sleeping in it very comfortably i think i'd like to add a mattress topper that's an interesting thing we should put to our upgrades list definitely want to upgrade this mattress or put a topper on there for sure uh other things that i'd like to do with the van well you know there's there's countless things i'm sure i could think up but am i happy with this purchase 100 i can't wait to tour the country with the dogs using this thing it's the perfect thing for us at the perfect time we're able to tow trailers we're able to go off-roading we're able to go camping out in the wilderness and kind of have everything in one spot plus it looks cool and it's a conversation piece and we're able to bring really neat content to you guys and the one thing i want to make very clear is i don't want to make just revel content in the rv world i want to review other vans other rvs and start figuring out this world because we do it with cars nothing stopping us from breaking into the rv world and becoming the next mats rv reviews or andrew steele and starting to review these things so keep an eye on our channel for more let us know what you'd like to see hopefully this video is helpful to you if you're interested in buying a revel and if you have any questions of course put them in the comments and the topic of our next video might just be answering your questions see you on the next one bye

Channel: Out of Spec Reviews

Views: 46,374

Rating: 4.734304 out of 5

Keywords: Car, Review, Acceleration, Braking, POV, Handling, Test, VS, Comparison, Interior, Exterior, Supercar, Hypercar, Sedan, SUV, CUV, TFL, Redline Reviews, Motor1, sports car

Id: q_KVJLSdOFo

Length: 62min 16sec (3736 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021