Good advice from Geek. List what you want to do, where you expect to travel, length of trip and length of stay, off grid or using sites.
For example:
if you ski and want to do winter trips to Alps or suchlike stop now, buy a Continental fully winterised double floor van with inboard tanks and plumbing and large gas capacity or diesel heater but expect to pay upward of £80k or find a used one.
Or. If you are happy with three seasons in moderate climate, perhaps with winter trips limited to milder weather, want to stay on campsites every night with services available, and don’t want to spend too much on a van you can carry on looking at the Swift one or similar.
But then think about how you may want to customise it to more closely fit with what you want to do.
With that MIRO of 3.3T you will be very limited, there are plenty of sub 6m 3.5T vans on the market with a good payload.
If you want to stay off grid as much as possible you’ll be looking to add
solar panels and an extra
battery at least. You may want a spare cassette to lengthen the time between ‘pit stops. So is there space to put them and spare payload?
Fo you want to carry bikes? Have you capacity on the rear axle. Remember everything behind the rear axle imposes more load on the axle than it’s own self weight.
2 x 6L gas won’t last long if you use it for heating in winter. Those little swift gas lockers don’t hold any more, so is there space to put an underslung tank? (more weight).
Those vans have uninsulated underslung water tanks, water pipes and plumbing? You may pay for the ‘winter pack’ but that is of limited effectiveness, uses heaters which use too much power to use off grid. You can add insulation, but in sustained sub zero temperatures added heat is still needed.
You can upgrade the legal weight, but that may need addition of air assistance, and with paperwork cost several hundreds of £££.
You need to find out what the weight distribution is between the axles. Ask Swift or the dealer…and good luck with that! I am skeptical about the figure quoted for the heavier 140 engine and auto box, double check that, it may be higher. You may find that on an automatic van of this configuration and MIRO there is very little spare capacity on the front axle. Manufacturers make their payload figures look better by weazle words in the small print, allowing reduced quantities of gas, fuel, water etc in their MIRO figures. If you can’t travel with full tanks then you can forget about staying off grid.
Don’t for a minute believe this van is realistically suitable to carry 4 people other than without luggage or anything in the tanks.
I speak from experience, I started off with a small swift, cursed it and the dealer’s perennial ineptitude for 5 years and later bought the van I should have bought in the first place.
At the end of the day every choice is a compromise, but what you are looking for is the compromise that best suits you. You just need to be aware of what it is you are compromising. There is no ideal van. Quality assurance is something the customer does after he has bought it. ...sadly that is the nature of this industry.
