What you need to know about Ram Promasters

hey guys this is jason with pandemic so on a lot of the groups i see people asking you know what kind of band should i get so three major bands that are available there's actually four if you consider nissan i don't consider them to be a major man uh people do use them but it's not as widely used for updates so promaster seems to be one of the most popular then we have ford transit and then obviously mercedes sprinter is very popular as well so this is a promaster 159 we actually have two of them in the shop they look very similar uh back to back right now that we're working on so promaster 159 uh this is kind of like the middle of the line as far as the the length so we have a 159 extended which we had just completed one which gives you a tremendous amount of space but it's a little longer a little bit harder to fit into like parking spots and things like that this one's really nice it fits into a parking stop spot pretty well they also have a 136 which is a little bit smaller which is if you followed us in before uh antoinette yvonne if you haven't seen her van follow her answering out yvonne on youtube she has a great channel we did her band it's a 136 which is a little bit smaller so you have those three difference they also have a 118 which is really small i probably wouldn't recommend building out on that if you wanted to have some nice functionality as far as like a bathroom and stuff like that so why would you want to go with the pro master there's like really three reasons in my opinion to go with a pro master um the biggest reason for most people is probably cost okay so your initial cost is going to be a little bit lower than a a comparable transit and it's gonna be maybe about five ten fifteen thousand dollars cheaper than uh two by four sprinter okay um the other advantage besides cost of your initial purchase is the ability to sleep side to side so you can put a full-size mattress without putting flares in which is a really nice feature so that would be another reason that a lot of people like to use these if you're doing a platform bed or you're doing a dinette so you can actually get a full-size bed in the back area which is really nice you still have to kind of expand out where you do your installation so that you can not use as much wall space and be able to fit the mattress in but you can fit it in the third reason is for ease of maintenance and let me tell you you might need to get access to a dealer so the dodge dealers everywhere which is really great so if you do need uh run into a problem say with your transmission at 13 000 miles like two of our customers um then you can just kind of limp over to a dodge dealer and have them fix it up so that brings up what's the downside this is the dakata okay so this is not a typical dodge van from the 1990s where dodge made the vans okay my mom had a dodge cargo van it's way different than this okay this is a european fan because of that i feel like it's not as strong you know in america we're real strong about engines dodge has always been a little sketchy on transmissions over the years but this van isn't as mechanically strong so i've had quite a few people have problems with transmissions if you watch on the groups as well as personally our customers we had antoinette yvonne's as an example left here she has 13 000 miles on it but before she gets to 14 000 miles she your transmission module goes she has to wait two weeks to get one that's in my opinion totally unacceptable like you have a band that's a year old has 13 000 miles and the transmission module goes that is pretty like relatively not bad i've seen people where their entire transmission is gone and less than 30 000 miles i think dodge has a problem there and i think they need to figure that out so that's not a really good a good way to start off van life remember at the end of the day you're you're investing whatever amount of time if you're building yourself or if you're paying somebody like pandemic to do the outfit there's a lot of money going into that van in my opinion i would rather put that into a platform that i know is going to be reliable the other thing and i can actually show you every used dodge band that we've got in here has this problem i'll show you now this is a customer van it's hard to see that now because it's been in a shop for a while but this van gets in this housing here moisture every single used van that's coming to our shop as low as 10 000 miles has had water in in particular the left driver's side one here so antoinette's was here this one also gets uh water in it as well there is a design flaw in this van that's allowing that water to get in here again in my opinion you have a new van has ten thousand miles you shouldn't have changed moisture in there that's that's kind of ridiculous okay that's the type of build quality issues that we have and we've seen with these dodges um i think they're a little bit of a dog they're not super strong in the engine but they can be comfortable they ride like crap when there's nothing in them as most cargo vans would because they're intended to have a load we have noticed in our builds especially with our wall system and our floor system fully loaded the vans actually drive very nicely the other thing i don't like about these bands is that they drive uh the driver seats very high so if you're really tall you can't put a swivel seat on this driver's seat if you're tall or you won't be able to see out the window without a swivel seat i can barely see out the window i'm six foot tall i'm walking i'm looking up this part of the window at the very top you're shorter not a big deal let's talk about that seat as well uncomfortable to drive long distances okay i've had to drive these vans two or three hours i get out i feel like uh somebody beat me up okay i drive the sprinter for three hours i get out i jump out and i'm like ah i'm ready to go okay not a super comfortable seat now they do have two different seat options this one actually has upgraded cnn which is a lot more comfortable than the standard call seat but still not wonderful the driving position is very odd it's very high feels like you're on the glass like you're driving a bus so that's another thing that i'm not a huge fan of but again are you willing to sacrifice that to save a few thousand dollars a lot of people are um they don't want to put players on you want to spend three thousand dollars on that it's a good option to look at what i always tell people is drive all three vans okay regardless of budget drive all three vans and then you'll know which one you like the most i drove a bunch of trucks before i bought my truck i didn't buy the truck i liked the most because it was too expensive okay i bought the second one i was like hey i bought this dodge truck 1500 ram it's a great truck but i also really like that ford f-150 raptor that was my favorite but i'm not going to drop 95 000 on a truck it's just not gonna happen i love it but it's just not gonna happen well that might be what you think about the mercedes you're like man i really love the mercedes but i don't want to drop you know sixty seven thousand dollars in a four-wheel drive version okay cool look at the ford transits my opinion for transit drives much better than this you still have the ability to have four dealers everywhere relatively inexpensive to work on bonus the only downside to the transit is again your ability to sleep side to side you could go ahead and put flares on it and you can't sleep side to side or if you're you know under 73 inches you can still sleep side to side it's a really nice van i really like that it drives really well the driving position it feels like you're driving a minivan i like that band a lot the only thing i don't like about it is i feel like the roof gauge is super thin i'm like 165 pounds i'm not really big but when i'm on top of that van and i'm cutting vents i can just hear the metal buckling and popping and hopefully not putting dents in it because it is thinner it's about the only thing i didn't like about that van um but it drives really nice so if you're looking at a van thinking about pro master go drive the promaster drive at least drive the transit just a couple thousand dollars more well worth it in my opinion um to have a just a better build quality more comfortable to drive and then all the other advantages that you have in the dodge as far as uh being able to get it serviced and the cost of service is going to be much less than mercedes that's definitely the downside if budget is not of a concern like you won mega millions mercedes all day long i wouldn't even think about this okay but if budget is concerned definitely look at the promaster look at the transit go side by side figure out which one you like more every customer i've told them to go drive bold they bought a transit so that i think pretty much says it all now do we build a lot of these promasters hell yeah we build a lot of them uh they're awesome uh to build on we have some really cool systems that make it a little bit easier we have a wall system that straightens the walls a ceiling system straightens the ceilings uh i do like to have the extra room in the back if i'm building a dinette or i'm putting a platform bed they're great bands um but just know what you're getting into it's just like anything you know you're gonna buy a house you're gonna look at school districts so just understand all the different advantages and disadvantages before you go forward best of luck and if you need anything follow us on uh facebook you go to our website pandemic.com um facebook is at catch us if you van instagram is at vandemickvans pandemic fans on youtube subscribe take care

Channel: Vandemic Vans

Views: 39,356

Rating: 4.8881354 out of 5

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Id: MIOSGnvfT1E

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021