Hi Mike, nice job and the whole thing looks great! Really impressed with your MPG too.
Thanks for the compliments and, yeah, the fuel economy has been freaky good. Pretty speed dependent. I'm guessing I'd lose a couple mpgs running at a constant 70, and maybe slip out of the 20s running 75. (Still not bad, though, for something that big.)
I haven't seen too many of these, there are some running around town. Saw one with the Benze emblem, another Dodge, so I was a little puzzled at first.
You have a right to be confused, because it's confusing.
Start with Freightliners. Freightliner was and is owned by Diamler-Benz, so ever since being first imported in 2002, there have been Freightliner badged Sprinters. Then there's Dodge. Dodge was owned for a while by Daimler Chrysler, and during that time there were Sprinters badged and sold as Dodges. That continued until about 2008, when the Daimler-Chrysler partnership broke up. So in 2010, Mercedes started selling Sprinters as their own at a small number of dealers (though the number has been growing). The urban legend (perhaps true) is that Mercedes didn't want all the plumbers and dog groomers and other van buyers mixing in with the S-Class prospects at the Mercedes showrooms, so even though the vans are Mercedes-badged everywhere else, the U.S. dealers didn't want them. But by now, the Sprinters are sophisticated swoopy-looking things with lots of upscale appeal--and it's easy to spend $50K-plus on one--so the outlook has changed.
HOWEVER, they are all made in Germany on a Mercedes assembly line, and except for the badging, there's no difference among the brands. And since the vans are MBzs everywhere else, it was easy to buy Mercedes grills and badges, so for a few hundred, it was easy to change the Dodge and Freightliner models into a Mercedes, which is why you can find lots of the old T1N models badged as a Mercedes. My first Sprinter was a Dodge, but you wouldn't know it because of the Mercedes badging.
How reliable are these? The engines, I've not had a diesel but know a couple ex-Benze car owners who did, they had problems.
Toughest question ever. It's probably not too helpful if I tell you it's a crapshoot. Some of the trucks, especially the ones with the inline 5 ('02 to '06), pile up legendary miles without incident. 300 or 400K miles is not uncommon and one guy has 850,000 miles without major troubles. But for every guy who writes in and says "Just passed a quarter-million without troubles," there's a guy whose "piece of junk has been nothing but problems." Of course, if I went to a Duramax, Powerstroke, Ford, Dodge, whatever, forum, it'll be full of people with problems, so you can't judge very well from the negative reports.
But in common with all modern trucks, the Sprinter is complex and computerized and can fail in ugly ways. My '05 was running perfectly, but when I loaned it to the AdventureDuo for a couple of months, they had three things go wrong. After I got it back, I never had a problem, and the new owners haven't had a glitch, either. Weird. My own opinion is that Sprinter reliability is generally good, but that they react poorly to a lack of maintenance, and that the small service network and the relatively low number of mechanics with long-term expertise hurts. That said, the advantages of the van over the competition usually make the tradeoff worthwhile. (And neither the E-Class or Express/Savana have been reliability wonders.)
The other thing, looks like you have tons of room in there, how long is it inside from the back of the seats to the back door and what's the width?
On both the T1N (old) and NCV3 (new) models, the cargo floor of the shorter model (ignore the super-short T1N) is about 10.5 feet long. but you can get a giant NCV3 with a load floor that's over 15 feet. A T1N is about 70 inches wide at its widest, the NCV3 is a couple of inches wider. The van body is very curved, so the width at the ceiling is considerably less (which makes for wacky overhead cabinets . . . a foot wide at the bottom, 4 inches at the top).
Last question, how is the ground clearance, can the be raised a bit easily?
There's an easy inch to be gained by going to taller tires, but nothing much beyond that. Recognize, though, that on my T1N, for example, there's already 9 inches of clearance at the suspension and 13 inches under most of the undercarriage. Those are good numbers out of the box (better than a Wrangler Sport), so ground clearance is probably not a major issue.
Oh, sorry, one more, I saw a 4x4 version could be had, what does the conversion run, approximately?
Figure $20-$30K. Really expensive, but it's all custom engineering, unlike where E-Class converters can use Ford pickup components and charge half that. Still, if I converted my Sprinter, I'd have a go-anywhere secure camper for under $60K, which compares favorably with a lot of less-comfortable alternatives. The reason I don't do it is that the 2WD Sprinter is good enough for most everywhere I'd want to go.
