PICK YOUR RIG: The perfect Overlanding Expedition Vehicle?

PICK YOUR RIG: The perfect Overlanding Expedition Vehicle?

– Welcome, everyone, to this video of how to choose your overlanding vehicle. (gentle music) After I became a mother, of course a lot of things changed, but the one thing that didn’t change was that I still really
wanted to go traveling with my partner and also with my child. And of course you cannot continue traveling on a motorcycle like I used to, but we had to invent and find new ways. And we started our travels
with my Toyota Land Cruiser that I drive in my normal life. And when Little A was I
think eight month old, we went on a longer trip to Austria, Italy and just got into the
traveling with a child mood. And after this trip, we realized we really would
like to have something different because you’re very
restricted in a normal car that has no place where you can stand up. If the weather is bad,
it’s not so easy anymore because you’re really
confined in this car. Your child wants to move. We also thought it would be
so nice to be able to cook and to just stay at some mountain tops where there is not so much
going on in the nature. So yes, we really felt like we wanted to look in some options
of bigger travel vehicles. And when we started this
research, I looked at YouTube, and realized there are
not that many videos that are about this topic because it seemed like
everybody, from the start, was like, “Oh, I want
to have this big truck,” and then they’re having this big truck or people are like, “Oh, I love van life. Let’s build a van.” and they end up with their van. But we really didn’t know what to get because we didn’t know what
would fit our needs best. And if you’re new to the subject, it’s like a whole new world opening up. Before, on a motorcycle, it was always… I don’t know, I have been
riding a bike now so long that it was like a world that
I kind of move naturally in. And now with this big vehicles and cars, it’s a completely new world. So we literally didn’t
know which car to get, and that made us say, okay, let’s start from the scratch. (upbeat music) Starting from the scratch for us meant look at all the options that are available and that we think might
be something for us. If you look at overlanding vehicles, the first thing that
comes through your mind is this huge overlanding traveling trucks. And we in the beginning looked
at them and we were like, uh, I don’t know if we’re truck people, but we still wanted to look into it because we thought, yeah,
maybe it’s an option. So we went to some fairs to look at different overlanding vehicles, basically European fairs because we said what is offered in the US
and Australia for example is not necessarily legal in Europe, and we want to have the
car registered in Europe because that’s where we’re
based in Switzerland. So we started to go to
some European fairs. There are a lot of like
camp events, fairs. There’s also some off-road fairs. One of the bigger ones is
in Bad Kissingen, Germany. And yeah, we went to these fairs and looked at all sorts of vehicles. And I think the first truck
that we saw, it blew our mind. They’re so big, massive, and it’s really like
carrying your home with you. And yeah, we said like,
okay, let’s look at trucks. What do they offer, what we
need, and what don’t they offer? And for us the pros were
of like big vehicle trucks, you really have everything. You have so much space. Another pro was of course you
can also carry everything. And one of the most
important things for us was we want to carry one
motorcycle on our vehicle. So one of us can drive with our child and the other one can
drive with a motorcycle. That would be super easy with a big truck because they’re so heavy anyway, so it doesn’t matter if you
have another bike in the back or anything else. Then you have all these fantastic options. You can have like outdoor kitchens. You can have like a barbecue that you can pull out
of the out of the truck. It’s really absolutely amazing. You have all this sleeping… You can really live in that
vehicle very comfortably. You can stay off the grid for, I think… What did they say? This vehicle that we looked at, I think 30 days or something
with electricity and so on. So that’s also pretty amazing. Or if something happens
in this terrible world and zombie apocalypse is starting, you have to ride vehicle, definitely. (dramatic music) We kind of like started
out not liking trucks because we thought we’re not truck people, but the more we looked into it, the more we were actually
really starting to consider it because we thought, oh, it’s
so convenient and it’s so nice. Then we get a little bit
like I think too hyped by it. We watched a lot of videos
on YouTube and Instagram of people who are
traveling in these trucks, and it looks pretty amazing. So, yeah, I think we got a little bit sucked into the truck world, but then also, at one point, after this whole hype that we had or this whole, “wow, these are
so crazy vehicles” vanished, we also looked at the cons
of having a truck like this. The biggest cons are of course the price. These vehicles are incredibly expensive. Even if you do a lot yourself, which we don’t want and can’t do because we’re both not very handy. They are still so expensive. So one of the biggest drawbacks of having a big truck like
this was actually its size, which is great for putting
things in, having a shower, having a toilet, having
everything you need, but which is actually not
that great for traveling because only when moving
around here in the Alps there are so many mountain passes you’re not allowed to drive
with a truck like this because it’s strictly not allowed. The trucks are too big. The hairpins are too small. You’re not able to maneuver through all these mountain roads. I then also thought back off the places I visited on my
world trip with a motorcycle, and where I would really
like to go back and realized, hey, there is so many roads
like in Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan that were really, really small and a lot of hairpins and
things, and also in the US. And then I thought I really don’t wanna do these roads with a truck, and also I think some of these roads are not possible to do with a truck because you just can’t go
there with a vehicle that big. That turned out to be
one of the biggest cons of being in a truck. Besides of that, we are
not really truck people. We also had another issue with trucks, and that was that we are three. Many, many vehicles or many builds work for two people traveling because of course you have a driver and you have the seat next to the driver, so you have two spaces in front. And if you have a child, there are a lot of trucks that can have actually three people
sitting in the front. But if you want to have a guest,
for example, a fourth seat, then it gets really, really difficult. And we realized, hey,
we would like to have our child not sitting
with us in the front row but rather have him sitting behind us because for us that just
feels more convenient. Plus we really thought
we would like to have an additional fourth seat. So if you want to take
someone for a little while or someone visits us or maybe I go alone with Little A, and one of my friends and her child, then we really need four seats. So that was also a priority for us. And when we looked at trucks,
it got really difficult because as soon as you
want to have a second row, you need a double cab basically, and these double cabs are very huge. And for us, it felt like they
were a little bit too massive for what we actually wanted and desired. There were some trucks that
had a little like row behind that would have been possible. But when you’re more than two people, things get much more difficult. The truck models that we looked into, there was a MAN Trucks, MAN, M-A-N, Trucks, that we looked into. In the end, the only model
that we really looked into was a brand called Steyr. It’s an Austrian brand, and they made lots of
trucks also for military and especially firefighters. And the special things about these trucks is that they are much more
narrow than most usual trucks. I think they’re only two meter 30 wide or something like this, which is just a little bit
wider than a normal car. So we felt that might
be easier to maneuver if you come for example to little towns. And sometimes you go through
this little town roads and you would not be able
to do it with a truck just because the roads are so narrow. That’s why we considered this one as basically the only truck that we would have actually kind of like. (dramatic music) At one point we also had to say, okay, let’s look at other options. The second option that
we really looked into. And we spent a lot of time with that because there is also so much material and so many videos of it
online and on YouTube, is a Unimark. And I think the Unimark is probably the most classic travel vehicle or at least, I don’t
know, it feels to me like, yeah, if you go overlanding,
the Unimark, it is… I have seen so many people driving a Unimark around the world. So for me, it felt a little bit familiar. That’s maybe why I was more drawn to it. Also, my partner and I, we both love the looks of Unimarks. We think they look so cool. And yeah, we really looked into all these options of Unimarks and looked at all these rebuilds. There are fantastic rebuilds
happening in the US. And the pro of Unimarks is, I think, it’s a car that
basically can go everywhere. I mean it’s really made for being off road and it’s made for going to places. It’s made for climbing on mountains. So we thought, hey, maybe that’s it. We love the look. It can go bring us everywhere. It’s somehow really cool car. You can do a lot of things with it. But when we was diving deeper into it, the same issue like with the
trucks started to appear. And with the Unimark especially, because the Unimark, compared to trucks, it’s not that long a vehicle in general. So if we would like to have
a second row at the Unimark, you have to have a double
cab, and that is huge. You have a huge cabin in the front. And the part that you have in the back, which is usually containers
that you connect to the front would just be so much smaller. So for us, it felt like the
double cab of the Unimark would be such a waste
of space, unfortunately. Even though we love the
look, we also thought, wow, these vehicles are
still extremely expensive. Even the base vehicles, even old ones can still be very expensive, not even talking about new vehicles. And that for us was really also
a drawback that we realized. Well, this is really like a price range where you have to think about buying a house or buying a Unimark. And then one of the
biggest drawbacks for us that also is the same
for trucks is the speed, The Unimark I think goes a max 90, and it’s a super loud vehicle also. You’re sitting in it, I mean it’s just very, very noisy, and the same for normal trucks. I mean they’re built as working trucks. Also, a truck cannot
go much faster than 90. In Europe, that’s not even allowed. So you’re very regulated
to the speed limit. You might think that
doesn’t matter that much. And if you go on a trip around
the world with a vehicle, it actually doesn’t matter that much. I can confirm this in most places, you cannot ride much faster than 90 kilometers per hour anyways. So that’s completely fine, and that was not our worry whatsoever. But our plan was, in the beginning, before we go around the
world with this vehicle, which we really want to do at one point, but in the beginning, keep it more close so we can also go a little bit to Europe, we can go to Sweden, we can go to Scandinavia. Like we did, we can go
to the Baltic states. And that also involved a
lot of transport rides, and it makes a huge, huge difference, especially if you can drive
110 kilometers per hour or even 120 quite comfortably. Do we really need these big vehicles or is it more convenient for us to say, okay, maybe we also want
to do some transport ride in a more decent speed that
doesn’t take us forever. And I really, really
think that this decision depends a lot on what you actually plan doing with this vehicle right now and what you’re using
it for in the future. And all of this criteria for everyone is completely different. (dramatic music) So after we looked into the
Unimark and truck world, we said, okay, maybe we consider also some normal camper vans. And that was actually very interesting because, in the beginning, we were really more fond of this like
crazy overlanding vehicles, and first looked into Unimark, first looked into the big trucks. And the more and more
time we spent researching, the more we went back to
maybe smaller vehicles. We, in the beginning, didn’t even consider having a normal camper van. In the end of our research,
we came back to that. and then we started to look into these normal camper vans. Also, we saw a lot of
them at all these fairs and saw how great, for example, all this Mercedes 4×4
Sprinters were built, and that we could probably do a build that would fit to everything we need. And with a van it got a
little bit more difficult because also most van life
concepts are made for two people, and because it’s just so much more easier, you have two people sitting in the front, then you have the bed in the back. It leaves you a lot of space. And that would not fit
for us, unfortunately, since we are not only two people, since we are three and also
want to have a fourth place. So from the beginning, we said we need to think about a concept that has two seats in the
front, that has a back row, and that has a kitchen, and see how many of the other things that we really wanted
we can include in a van. So we went to all these fairs and looked at all these vans, and saw them and realized immediately there are a lot of pros for these vans because they are not as big, they are much smaller, but also they’re quite
capable to go to places. I mean these Mercedes
Sprinters for example, 4×4 vehicles, they’re good. You can go with them on
all mountaintops basically. We also met a lot of people in the Western Alps here in Italy, which is quite off-roady and who were traveling there
with their Sprinter vans, and it was pretty amazing. So we were like, okay, let’s
look into these alternatives. I guess the pros of these vehicles are they’re not as expensive
as a Unimark or as a truck. They are much more agile when it comes to driving mountain roads. They are also more allowed
to drive on mountain roads because many times
there are weight limits. There’s also weight limits on bridges. If you have not as heavy vehicles, of course, you can go to much more places. Of course the things that
speak against traveling with a camper van are also pretty obvious if you compare them to the
trucks or Unimark of this world. Of course there’s not as much space, of course you cannot have everything that you can
have in these big vehicles. If you want to have an
Autogrill, and a kitchen, and a shower, and a toilet,
that’s a lot of things, it might not fit in one van. It can, but it might not, depending on what other
things you want to have. And one big disadvantage that we realized when we looked especially
into the Mercedes Sprinter, which is I guess one
of the common vehicles for building camper vans
these days was that, in Europe, it has a
weight limit of 3.5 tons. But if you think about the whole build, you think about a car,
everything that you build inside with like kitchen and so on, seats, and then carrying a motorcycle on the back would nearly go above this weight limit. Plus the whole base of the car is not really made for having something as heavy as a motorcycle on the back. I’m sure that’s fine if you wanna go from one camping spot to
the next camping spot, you unload the bike bikes,
you drive them there. But if you want to have
your bike on your vehicle also on some more off-roady stretches, if we for example can’t
or don’t want to drive, if it’s only one of us with our child and we don’t even have a second driver who can drive the motorcycle, we really need a build that can carry a motorcycle on the back. And that started to be a real problem when we looked into the camper van options because we realized, hey, there are basically no camper vans on the market that are already built, also much cheaper, or secondhand that fit all of our needs. So we even had to dig a little bit deeper because we realized, okay, if we want to have a vehicle
that fits what we want, we really need to customize
it to our needs ourselves or with a company. (gentle music) So we looked at all these cars, we looked at Instagram accounts, we looked at YouTube videos, we looked at videos from
people building these vehicles and we got more and more confused. And the problem and
also I think the danger with doing research about
your overlanding vehicle is once you start to see these things, you kind of want it all because you really see what is possible and it’s amazing what’s possible. You can really get everything, and it’s gets a little bit dangerous because you see what’s possible and that there are so many really fancy solutions for things. You get a little bit
trapped in wanting it all or at least that was what happened to us. But as always in life, having all the things is not possible. So at this point in the process, we decided to do a very smart thing, and I can recommend that to all of you who are looking into this
question, which vehicle to get, we made a list to prioritize, and we really wrote it down and we said, which are our highest priorities? And according to that, we
worked through these priorities and kind of set them
also really in numbers, not only like we want
to have these 10 things and it doesn’t matter, but we also said, okay, this is the most important thing for us. And just to share that with you, for us, the number one
on this priority list was we want to carry a motorcycle. The second thing on the
list was being agile. because we said what do we do with a truck if it can’t bring us to some of the mountaintops that we love and that we want to go
to even here in Europe? So we said it’s really important for us that the vehicle doesn’t get too heavy, doesn’t get too long, that it’s still working for us. And then we worked with
this priority list. And according to that, some of the things and the decisions inside
the van were made. And you might be surprised
because we decided against a lot of things that are common in normal van builds, and for other things that
are actually not as common just because we thought they fit our way of traveling better. Besides of being agile, we also said another priority is having this two rows to sit and we want to have a four seats for having guests or a visitor, so we need to have a second row where our son and maybe a
visitor can sit comfortably. When it came to being agile, we also thought about
what do we really need? Do we need to stay off grid
for 30 days in the desert with a big truck? And our answer was no. Because we are travelers, we are moving, I basically moved nearly
every day when riding a bike. I make a rest day or two, and even if we go to a
beautiful mountaintop, my partner and I both
are the kind of travelers who are like, okay, let’s
stay here for two nights, and then move on. So we actually realized
we don’t need that our van or our truck can be in
the desert for 30 days without meeting another soul
or going to a gas station or going to electricity. The last point that we came over that wasn’t our priority list was that we wanted to
customize our van ourself. And that also came a little
bit with the research because we just realized there
are no vans on the market that fit all the things that we needed. And we thought we do this once and we really want this
car to be like our car. We really want this
car to be like our home where we choose the interior,
where we choose the colors, where we also choose how it works. So that was also something
very important for us that we said we really, really would like to customize our own car. (uplifting music) I wanted to talk about this
topic only very briefly, and that’s the cost. Overlanding vehicles
are incredibly expensive and expensive basically no
matter if you do things yourself or if you buy them from
someone who does it. They are always expensive even if you’re the most handy person. The base vehicles are quite expensive if they’re in a decent shape. The interior is expensive even if you do everything yourself. Fridges are expensive. The batteries are expensive if you wanna have solar panels. If you want to have, some are expensive. It’s just that even if you’re
the most handy person on earth and you want to have a
proper overlanding vehicle that does a little bit more
than just sleeping in it without any electricity or water, you will go into more expensive areas. And I will touch this briefly because people are always very interested in how much that is. And I was, to be honest, shocked when I realized how expensive
these vehicles really are. And the first time came in touch with these huge trucks and realized, oh my god they’re so expensive. So from our research, the
vehicles that would have played in the area that we wanted, not even customized, but
on the secondhand market… I don’t even know if you
say secondhand market. I guess you say used vehicle market. Even they were quite expensive. And if we’re talking about a big truck that we would have liked, which interior we would have liked, which kind of like all the
gadgets that we would’ve liked, like an outdoor grill,
because we also said, if it’s a big truck, then
we want kind of everything because this is the reason
for having a big truck, that you can have all these things. And a big truck like that
would probably have been 600,000 euros or dollars
or more, realistically. Because alone the base
vehicles in a good shape, they’re so expensive. The same basically with a Unimark. The base vehicles, if
they’re not very old, if they’re in no good shape, if you don’t want to have
too much trouble with them, they are very expensive. And Unimark, I always talked
about the things that we like, and we looked a little bit around. We wanted to have something
nice to be with our child, and not something that is only work. So we looked in nice options, and the Unimark that we would have liked would’ve probably been around
like 400,000 euros or even up. And when we looked at
all these vans at fairs, we saw, okay, you can really get a new kind of customized van
for 150 to 180,000 euros, depending a little bit
on the base vehicle, but that’s where kind of
like the van benchmark lays if it’s really nice, and if it’s really,
really a good interior, and if it’s a kind of new
or if it’s a new vehicle. And so we said, okay, maybe
it’s also more reasonable to go for the small car because there we can
have our own interior. If we would’ve taken something bigger, it would’ve been so expensive we could not have had a customized version because it just would have
gone way out of our budget. So we said maybe it’s better for us to have the car can do everything
that we want, number one, number two, that we can really have our own interior like we wanted. (gentle music) And now after all this
talk, you might wonder, so which car did you get? And when we talked about vans, which after all this research sounded really like
the best option for us, we started to realize, hey, we can’t go with a Mercedes Sprinter because of the weight, because of the motorcycle
we want to have on the back. And that quickly brought us
to one brand called Iveco, and the car is Iveco
4×4 Daily it is called or Iveco Daily 4×4. It’s actually these kind
of like working vans also. They’re pretty amazing. They are more heavy. They have 5.5 tons, which means, for driving
that van in Europe, you need a truck driver license, which makes it a little bit unattractive for many people who are doing van life. Because making a driver
license for a truck is also quite expensive and
it’s also quite a hassle. So you really need to
be dedicated to do that. But for us, it was clear, we are fine. We’re choosing the vehicle that we want. And if we need a truck
driver license for that, that’s fine with us. We’re gonna do it because
this is gonna be an investment to the rest of our lives. And the great thing
about the Iveco is that, number one, it has much more load than a normal Mercedes Sprinter, but it also has a much,
much, much more sturdy base. As I said, it’s a working
vehicle, much more stable. And also on the axles, you
can have so much more weight than on the Sprinter, and everyone that we talked with who knows something about
overland vehicles said, hey, the Iveco 4×4
Daily, with that vehicle, it will be no problem to have
like a motorcycle on the back and also still go to places with it on. So when we made the decision that we’re gonna have an IVECO 4×4 Daily, we stumbled into another problem. We went to a shop in Switzerland and said, “Hey, we want
to buy this vehicle,” because we decided to
want to get a new one. And the answer was, “Sorry,
we cannot order one for you.” And we were pretty surprised, but it turned out that the
German police and firefighters had just ordered I think
300 of these trucks. So the production was running, and you could not place an order for the next 1/2 years
or something like that. And we were devastated because we did all this
research, we decided for a car, and then we were not able to order it. So we looked at the
market for used vehicles. It was also not very great because either the vehicles were already built as camper
vans or they were too old. And after a lot of research, we finally found two trucks
that were still on the market, and we were so happy. And then we had to take the next decision because the Iveco 4×4 daily
comes in different sizes. The two sizes that we looked
into was six meters 50 long and seven meters 50 long. So that’s a huge difference if you’re looking at the interior of it. One of the main Instagrams
account we followed during this research is an account called “Family Van Expedition.” They are driving in an IVECO 4×4 and they’re driving with
the seven meter 50 version. And when we looked really
into the cars we saw, wow, seven meters 50, that is very long if you really intend to put a
motorcycle rack on the back. And that’s why we pretty quickly decided, okay, we’re gonna go
for the short version, which means we will have
much less space inside. So we need to be extra smart with all of our decisions inside, but we will have still much more agility due to the motorcycle rack
not being that far out. Because if you have a vehicle, again, that’s done seven meters, 50 long, you’re gonna be at, I don’t
know, eight meters 50 at least, I guess, if you put on a motorcycle rack. So we decided to go for the small vehicle. And then the process of customizing
our own vehicle started. And I will show you that in the next video because I think we made a
pretty, pretty amazing vehicle for the limited space that we are having and for the three of us traveling with it. (gentle music) Since I know how social media is, I want to have a little short thing to say about the cost for the vehicle. I know that it’s a crazy amount of money no matter if you buy a van
or a truck or a Unimark. It is just a lot of money, and some of you might think
it is way too expensive to spend so much money in a vehicle. There are people who are spending all their money in a house who are paying off their loans to own that house on the end. And there are people like me who are spending their money and traveling and who are investing their
money in a vehicle like this. You don’t need to think
it’s a smart decision. You also don’t need to think
it’s a smart investment. And I have to admit, I actually didn’t think it’s
a smart investment either. I was very, very much in doubt, but I also have to tell you guys. Since we are driving that vehicle, I really think it was worth
all the investment that we did because we are in love with this vehicle. We take it to places. It’s like our second home. We live in it, we drive in it, it makes our life with our
child so much more easier and also traveling with
him so much easier. And this is one of the
biggest life qualities that we got back with this vehicle. A lot of things change when you become a mother and a family, and this vehicle kind
of was the closest thing that I could get to being my old me. And every time I am in this vehicle, I’m just genuinely happy. In this case, this investment was very, very much worth it for us. It might not be true for
you, but it is true for us. It’s us. People do different decisions, and hey, that’s why life is interesting. (uplifting music) Guys, this was a lot of talking and the talking will continue next month when I will publish one of the most anticipated videos here on the channel. The room tour of our customized
4×4 off-road camper van. This is a little dream coming true, and I am so happy to share all of our thoughts and ideas for van with you. Tune in next month when
it’s time to get to go to explore our Iveco 4×4 Daily. (bright music) (engine rumbling)

How to find the perfect Overlanding Rig for your needs, and all the lessons and learnings we had during the process as a family of 3 searching for a vehicle, that would take us to places (and possibly around the world).

As a family of 3 our highest priority was: get out there again with our Son to show him all the places we had traveled before and fell in love with. But we quickly realized that the options on the Overlanding vehicle market don’t really fit to what we want and need. Too small, too big, too expensive, too slow, too lightweight. So we started our research to find the perfect 4×4 Overlanding Rig for our needs to take us to places – and learned a lot of lessons on the way. In this video I talk about the process, how to find out what is really important to you (+ doable for you … turned out the market for Overlanding Vehicles is shockingly expensive …) and also what we decided for.

00:00 Welcome to this video: Pick your Rig!
00:19 Why we started to look for an Overlanding Expedition Vehicle – and why there was not much orientation provided
02:39 The options – big Overlading Expedition Trucks – Pros and Cons
10:05 The options – Expedition Unimog – Pros and Cons
14:45 The options – Campervans / Mercedes Sprinter – Pros and Cons
19:28 What you want vs. What you need – Prioritizing and conclusion about our Priorities
23:36 Costs of Expedition Rigs (Spoiler: they are insanely expensive)
27:12 Our Decision which car to get ( Iveco Daily 4×4 !!! ) and why this was a problem
31:41 Expedition Overlanding Rigs – a good investment?

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// Driving our customized IVECO Daily 4×4 Camper Van (“The Bus”)

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