6 Reasons Why I bought the Ford Transit and NOT a Mercedes Sprinter or Ram Promaster

what's up youtube in this video i am going to be discussing why it is that i chose the ford transit over the mercedes sprinter or a ram promaster for my camper van conversion my name is eric johnson and welcome to my channel i'll be documenting and sharing everything about this diy van conversion if you'd like to follow along by all means hit that subscribe button so just kind of jumping into it the first category is going to be the purchase price now when it comes to purchase price this is kind of a hard uh topic because the way that these cargo vans they come from the factory is like a base price or a base level with basically no options like no power windows no power door locks and then you can add something like i can't remember exactly how many of the transit had but i think it was in the hundreds as far as the available options so pretty much everything that you see that looks even remotely nice on these vans is an added option from the base price it's almost impossible to find an apples to apples comparison of one cargo van versus another if you're gonna go find it like on a dealer lot so assuming you spec all the vans um at least from the core standpoint as close as possible the transit's about 48 000 with all-wheel drive the promaster is starting price is 43 000 though that is again two wheel drive and then the sprinter with its four-wheel drive uh depending on the payload that you choose you're either looking at 58 000 or i believe it's 63 000. so the next category was the drive train options available so of course there's like four-wheel drive or two-wheel drive or all-wheel drive now my understanding of all-wheel drive is that it tries its best to make sure that it's delivering power to the wheel that has traction but it's not as manually controllable as like a dedicated four-wheel drive so it's not going to be as good but it is absolutely better than just a two-wheel drive option now you can after market upgrade the ford transit to a four-wheel drive system where they'll just take components from like a you know the 350 the f350 trucks and they'll just swap it out for the the ford transit so if you do start with a two-wheel drive you can at least upgrade it to a four-wheel drive down the road which was not something that i saw as being an option on the promasters could be wrong there but i don't i don't think that was an option so the next category was either a diesel or biodiesel engine versus a gasoline engine now the mercedes sprinters were predominantly all diesel promaster and the ford transit were both gasoline engines you could get a gasoline option uh sprinter but it's only like the four-cylinder something like that so not really common and not something i think you could even get with a four-wheel drive so there's some sort of combinations that are not compatible with mercedes but i after a bit of research walked away from biodiesel feeling like that was not really uh the best option for me there were a couple of issues that i found with biodiesel compared to gasoline you know first and foremost biodiesel does not do well in cold temperatures so right off the bat you have a decreased uh fuel efficiency so you're going to get worse miles per gallon when you're in cold climates with a biodiesel compared to gasoline also biodiesel fuel can freeze um if you're in like negative five degrees fahrenheit or negative 20 degrees celsius or lower biodiesel the i think it's called they refer to it as like gelling or gelling up now you can add like a stabilizer to or i'm not sure if it's called a stabilizer but basically you can add like a fuel additive to biodiesel so that it doesn't do that um have that freezing issue or you can go into lower temperatures uh but it's just like one more thing where if for whatever reason you weren't anticipating like a massive weather drop and you hadn't added that that preservative to your fuel tank you could definitely find yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere with your engine not starting just because it got cold and you didn't expect it to and that seemed like another major liability that i didn't want to deal with so that runs into the next category the cost of maintenance so the mercedes sprinter engines are like i said really particular so much so that not even every mercedes dealership has a certified technician for their sprinters there's only specific dealerships that do have a tech who's certified to work on their sprinters and if mercedes themselves doesn't even have this kind of like across the board it gets to where trying to find like a certified tech to work on your mercedes sprinter is something of a hurdle and i've seen a number of other people kind of discussing this issue of you know where they can get service you know what cities have like a certified technician and basically just the scenario of if you're out in the middle of the boonies and you're not near or in a major city and if something does go wrong you're either gonna have to get your your sprinter towed to the next you know the nearest certified tech which could be whatever hundreds of miles to the next you know major city or you're gonna have someone who doesn't know what the heck they're doing with those mercedes engines which are different like they're they're they're a lot more complex than the ford or the promaster engines so the ford uh transit engine is super similar to like their uh the f series trucks and like e-series vans they're like a dime a dozen basically every single mechanic out in existence can work on a ford transit you can find parts pretty much on the shelf everywhere and the cost of those parts are pretty minimal you're not necessarily having to import them from europe somewhere and not only is like the labor less expensive the parts are less expensive but just ease of access is going to be a lot a lot greater for all those reasons and just looking up like the average cost of ownership you know the ford trains it's one of the lowest out there and that was a kind of a major issue or a major concern for me guys we are almost done if you are still here still watching let me know give this video a thumbs up but let's continue we're almost done two two more categories the next one was aesthetics now from an aesthetic standpoint you know my personal opinion the mercedes sprinters look gorgeous inside and out i think they kind of take the cake the next option i thought that the promasters were kind of like i don't know just smushed face kind of a vibe from the outside super boxy i don't think that they're by any means ugly but they just weren't as i guess you'd say like sexy as the sprinter and then the ford transit is kind of like a middle ground like it's not this you know it's not as good looking as the sprinter but it's i don't say ugly but it's not as ugly as the promaster um and so it was kind of at least from the exterior uh happy medium as far as the interiors um again mercedes i think they set the bar i mean it is a mercedes but you do definitely pay for that ford i feel like was very close as far as like the kind of the vibe of the cockpit just the the layout the big navigation screen um all of these things i thought were kind of in ford's favor over promaster so the last category were kind of just bonus items but cool at least to me pretty cool bonus items the ford transit has as an available option and betty here has the option for a mobile hotspot through 18t so it's built into the van it gives you data connectivity on att's network which is different from my cell phone i have verizon for my cell phone so between the two um i guess you'd say devices i usually can get connectivity you know even if my verizon doesn't have service then usually att does because of that connectivity with the ford you can actually remote access your vehicle i can start the engine from my phone i can lock the doors unlock the doors it'll show me where it is on the map all of these were pretty sweet features that i didn't even have in my normal vehicle before i bought betty here the one caveat i will say though is that having that uh that mobile hotspot built in does seem to kill the primary battery on this vehicle stupid fast pretty much like you've got to be driving this thing every couple of days i think or you're going to have an issue with your battery dying especially if you only have the one main battery so i'll probably be upgrading to two batteries in the future just because of that issue which i'm 90-ish percent sure is due to battery drain from the mobile hotspot turning on for like a half hour at a time whenever it turns itself on so anyways if you enjoyed this video if you stuck around until the end let me know what was something that you learned in this video either about the ford transit the mercedes sprinter or the ram promaster if you'd like to see anything else um similar to this let me know in the comments um i'm here to try and help answer questions for you guys if you guys haven't already seen it you might enjoy this other video of mine where i discussed how i financed my ford transit uh camper van conversion not only the purchase of the vehicle itself but also the the upfit or the conversion itself so anyways

Channel: Erik Johnson

Views: 300,074

Keywords: Campervan, Conversion, Ford, Transit, 2020, How to, Erik Johnson, Betty, Campervan Conversion, Ford Transit, Cargo Van, Vanlife, 2020 Ford Transit, how to, DIY, off grid, tinyhome

Id: u49RhXvGz-w

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 03 2021