Join me for fleet shuffle mumbling... Hauler time.

Exhibit 1: Okay, last time I tried to sell the Aprilia, I waffled. It's beautiful. It's wonderful. It hasn't turned a wheel since Labor Day weekend '16, as I just haven't been able to manage track day time. It's now listed.

Exhibit 2: We're about to move. For some reason (get ready to laugh at me), we're scared to move with the current van. It's so desperately ugly that we're talking seriously about spending a day scuffing the paint where it's peeling and sending it to Maaco; being a giant, windowless (more area) van, we figure that's probably a grand by the time we drive away. On a van for which I paid $CHALLENGE, though I have since had the transmission rebuilt a few years ago and rebuilt the front suspension a couple of years ago. It's a reasonably solid, reliable van, but it's ugly, and uglier than we're willing to just live with for now.

Aside: Not interested in vinyl wraps, tool dip, or alternative medicine. Just don't feel like mucking about with them. I hope I haven't just invited a giant tangent in which people debate whether or not these constitute my real best options.

The Big Question: What's my new Hauler Of Things?

I didn't want to use a specific descriptor, because while I lean heavily toward sticking with a van, I think I should keep an open mind. Unfortunately, most of the New School Vans (Transit, ProMaster, Sprinter, etc) are too new to fall into my "vehicle really used mostly when moving large things" price range. OTOH, I'm going to have to spend more than last time. We really are hoping to do a meaningful upgrade, and not to be wishing we'd gone further up real soon.

Here are a few observations floating in my head. Maybe you can reinforce some, or discredit some.

• Pickups get used like cars often. That means there are a fair number of 10-15 year old trucks in decent shape with moderate mileage on them, just like cars.
• Vans, especially cargo vans, are not "family pets" like trucks. They are bought for businesses, and spit out when the cost/benefit ratio goes downhill (relatively used up).
• 3/4 ton or 1 ton. I do not like the way half-ton vehicles drive, especially with any weight in them. I don't spend enough time in one to be too concerned about the ride quality being better on a half-ton.
• I like vans better for everything except working on the engine, and loading gravel or bark mulch, neither of which I do often. I think I even prefer taking stuff to the dump in a van (with a cargo divider), because the more awkward loading and unloading is made up for with the lack of a need to tarp anything.
• If this plan rolls ahead, I'll be without a track day bike or a functioning band for the first time in years. I hope that neither of these is permanent, but there you have it. The need to keep amplifiers locked outside the club is on hiatus already. Similarly for the bike, though I only ever used it as accommodations once, and don't tend to take a motorcycle places in weather that would make me regret the open air. OTOH, it's nice that anywhere you go in a van, everything you have loaded is secured from wind and people.
• Due to (awesome) shifts of priority I'm likely to need to add a trailer and pull a car occasionally at some point. I can't imagine any vehicle I'd consider wouldn't do this dandily.
• I want there to be trucks with low load-in, and boxes that are more like vans than camper shells. Maybe there are? Maybe I should build one...

So what else should I be taking into account?

I sorely wish I could do a Ferdinand-like old medium duty truck, but making that pretty enough to help our situation and functional enough to do all those things means more time and/or money than I can throw at it right now. So another "normal" vehicle... Yawn.

Discuss? I know there isn't even a coherent single question in there; I'm hoping I learn something useful about options I hadn't considered, or recent innovations, or types of bed topper, or... Y'know. Stuff one learns when GRM discusses stuff.

lowered crew cab truck with a roll up tonneau cover. solves the gravel/bulky/dump loading issue, and good soft tonneaus are pretty much waterproof to turn the bed of the truck into a giant trunk. lowered provides easier ingress and egress, as well as much easier loading. 

ive done this with various cabs and trucks, and never once regretted this vs a van for 4 or less people. 

In my book it’s hard to beat an extended 3500 03+ express with a 6.0.  However its really hard to find them with under 300k miles.  

In reply to Dusterbd13 :

Interesting. I've only had one extended-cab truck (not even a full Crew), and it was fairly unwieldy in town. It was a '91 F250 4x4. Lowering would probably help reduce the amount of the landscape blotted out by the hood. OTOH, the van is strictly two seats, and that's fine. So I could take your notion and just apply it to a standard cab...

I've always been anti-lowered-truck for trucks that aren't just hot rods, but I've totally failed to research what lowering can be done without affecting their ability to haul stuff. I mean, drop spindles shouldn't hurt load capacity...

One thing I dig about my van is that it's got probably nine feet of cargo room inside, behind the divider, and it's not significantly longer than a Jetta wagon (happened to park next to one). But it's not like people don't drive around in full size pickups just fine all the time, and it's also not like I live in downtown L.A. Or even downtown PDX, though I do have to go there sometimes.

Patrick said:

In my book it’s hard to beat an extended 3500 03+ express with a 6.0.  However its really hard to find them with under 300k miles.  

Yeah, that's the thing... Vans get used up. Pretty sure my formerly-Airborne-Express B2500 has more than the indicated 150k miles on it.

To be fair to gm, they got the drivetrain right.  Prior to the 3500, which i sold on the forum for 1000 with 311k, i had an 07 1500 that i ran up to 428k(former taxi) then put the 5.3/4l60e into my challenge car.

i felt comfortable venturing far from home in either 

as far as lowered load capacity: a flip kit, drop spindles, and front springs dont reduce it by much. however, in my application on this truck (true dual purpose haul/luxury ride) which is a 95 c1500 regular cab short bed, i used firestone load bags. this is an adjustable air bag kit in the rear that mounts between the frame and rear leaves, and give an additional 2500lbs capacity in theory. ive used it so far with dump runs and railroad ties. works exactly as intended, even with a 3 leaf pack that is considerably softer and a truck thats sitting at 5/7 drop. 

If you go with a lowered truck, helper bags are the way to go. I have the weakest springs available in a '96 F150 4x4, and you can't tell that you have it completely full of bricks under the tonneau cover, unless you notice that the tires are pretty squished. 

Band? Van beats everything. There is approx 1 billion huge old 3/4 to 1 ton vans for sale that are about $0 because not many people want one. Hell i just missed a perfectly fine 98 e350 with a v10 for $400 with the blower motor out and 120k miles.

I also work construction, vans are better than trucks for 75% of things. Tools are under cover, locked and without back seats you can put a lot more stuff in one vs a truck. The only thing that sucks is tall heavy stuff can be awkward to move if you cant stand up.

Or get an older e250 with a 300 in it and drive it forever

And exactly how ugly is the current van anyway?

How much of this is the answer for you?  

minivans sort of suck at towing. Cargo vans are quite a bit different. 

In reply to John Welsh :

A very cool arrangement, but I have virtually no passenger needs, and do want to be able to sweep out the cargo area after a dump run, so not ideal for me. If I go van, I'll probably have a cargo divider again.

I was thinking 2wd truck. Most people “just have to have” a 4wd.  I’ve found that 2wd trucks are usually cheaper, cleaner, and lower than their 4wd brethren.

As far as the locked part, if you start another band or feel the need for it would a camper shell work? Our of sight, locked, albeit probably not as secure as a van. 

Warning: I’m not a van-man, or a band-man, so take what I said with a grain of salt. 

From everything you're saying, backed up by most of what other people are saying, what you want is not only a van, but, in fact, the known-quantity, "reasonably solid, reliable" van you already have.  It's just, apparently, ugly.

No offence, but I don't see why that matters, unless you're moving to the Hamptons.  If it really does matter, then I would look seriously at the scuff-and-Maaco option, if only because you would then have a solid, reliable, familiar, non-ugly van with a transmission and front suspension you know are good.  Why search for, and then buy, somebody else's bundle of hidden problems?

Stealthtercel said:

No offence, but I don't see why that matters, unless you're moving to the Hamptons. 

Exactly.  Worry about replacing the van after you've moved and life has settled down.

Ransom said:

In reply to John Welsh :

A very cool arrangement, but I have virtually no passenger needs, and do want to be able to sweep out the cargo area after a dump run, so not ideal for me. If I go van, I'll probably have a cargo divider again.

Admittedly,  not the best for towing.  But, is towing really a requirement ? 

In reply to Stealthtercel :

No offense taken, and I keep coming back to that this evening.

I can't say I'm totally decided on keeping the van; you know the vehicle-shuffle malaise... But we basically got to this question by my wife asking if we should just sell the van and upgrade rather than putting $1k in paint into a $2k van, and it's hard to resist spousal encouragement to shuffle vehicles... The thing is, $1k can get lost in the noise on finding a new, used truck and getting the deferred items taken care of, so the fact that it's a lousy investment in the van doesn't really matter as much as it might.

I'd always sort of assumed that the van would either develop a problem clearly too expensive or time-consuming for the cost of the van, or my miscellaneous pursuits would turn up a shortcoming that truly called for an upgrade. Swapping it out now sort of leaves me without a specific direction other than this general notion that, for the moment, I'm less likely to need to lock musical gear or a motorcycle up, and more likely to need to haul home improvement materials which may be a little easier to dump in a bed.

I'm still curious to see what other ideas come up, but I'm thinking that until I can do something really exciting (old Ford C-series? UD? NPR? Unimog?), I might as well...

In reply to John Welsh :

In keeping with the above; it's not needed this instant, but I expect it really will be. Which sort of folds back into the notion that it's probably better to keep Uglyvan 'til something really lets me know what I need to change.

It really does need to be less ugly, though. 

Antihero said:

And exactly how ugly is the current van anyway?

It's just got really nastily flaking paint. It's one of those things that's sort of compounded by being a windowless cargo van. It's not super-hideous unto itself, and we are *not* moving to the Hamptons... But we're moving into a nice little neighborhood where there is no HOA, but folks' lawns are okayish and project cars seem to exist but mostly have covers on them. I feel like there's a sane balance of folks trying not to have too much crap lying around but not getting crazy about keeping up appearances. I just don't want to be "that house", especially right when we move in. You can call me silly, and maybe you're right, but I'm rolling with it.

And it's got this one funny rust hole in the left rocker:

There are also a couple of mechanical items which give me misgivings, maybe more or maybe less than they ought to for a vehicle that isn't driven much.

One is that it's a nominally-ABS vehicle which no longer has ABS. I'm guessing this is early enough that it's not an otherwise weird braking system or bias that only works right with ABS, and I've recently freshened some things up while doing rear wheel bearings. But I had a moderately alarming short stop downhill in the rain a couple of weeks ago, unladen, with the rears locking up a bit. But I modulated, and I'm not going to say ABS is a requirement, and I'm not sure it was any worse than any other unladen truck.

The other is that given its history, and the fact that the ABS delete involved stupid things like running wires so that it *looked* at a glance like there were still wheel speed sensors up front (seriously, wires with screw rings that ran from the upright to the engine block), I wonder whether the airbags are actually still present and functional. Again, this sort of falls into the category of stuff that I wouldn't have if I went nuts and got a cool, older truck or something, but if I'm going to drive a boring van from 2001, I'd like to have some of the safety features I'm getting in trade.

Still, I think the folks arguing for keeping it are probably right. I hope the paint that stays put through scuffing stays put after having been sprayed over for at least a couple of years or so.

In the meantime, maybe I'll update my saved CL searches to cover UD, Isuzu NPR, Top Kicks, and, uh... anything else cooler than this. Or maybe it'll run 'til a Promaster 2500 falls into my price range and I can get some Fiat badges to replace the Ram absurdities...

How about a Suburban? It’s kind of a cross between a pickup and a van, and they blend right into a neighborhood, tow very well, haul lots of crap inside. 

In reply to Sonic :

My impression is that Suburbans sort of the worst of both worlds ; even lower height between bed and roof, and the taller floor of a pickup (correct me if I'm wrong; that's one of the motivators for this thread!). They certainly do look more "residential" than pickups or especially cargo vans, but from an appearance standpoint, I find the condition more problematic than the type. There's someone with a nice old Ford C-series a few blocks from our old house, and being in nice condition it gives more of a "vintage car" vibe than a "run down industrial" feel...

I've towed quite a bit with a T1N sprinter.  Not sure what kind of car weight you are talking about, but the gas mileage is amaze.  Could work for a light car and light trailer.  For sure not the cheapest van, but if you do miles you more than make up for it in fuel.

If you can make an NPR work for all your needs I'd probably look at that.  Its not as neighbor friendly as a Sprinter...

You guys talk a lot of sense. Regardless of that, I've just agreed to sell the van to a friend with the heart and stomach to rattle-can it and enjoy.

So the replacement hunt is on!