Fleet
Three small. Two big.
Three vans we drew and built, two we bought as finished conversions from a builder who already carries the certification. Different vehicles, different rate cards, different limits — so they are listed that way, with their own spec tables, rather than averaged into one sentence about a fleet.
- 3 electric · 2 diesel
- Travels 2 or 5
- Sleeps 2+1 or 4
- North Vancouver pickup
Cove & Current · North Vancouver, British Columbia · May – October
If you are two
Take an electric one. It is quieter, it is cheaper, it is the van we designed around two adults and a rooftop tent, and the whole North Shore is inside its range on one charge.
If there are three or more of you
Take a big one, and take it now rather than arguing with our two-seat rule at the curb. Five belts, four berths, standing height, diesel heat. It is the only answer we have that is actually true.
The electric three
Kia PV5 Cargo Plus · 2 seats · from $185/night
Two adults, a rooftop tent you climb into from inside, and a kitchen on drawers out the tailgate. Built by us, on the North Shore.
The two big ones
Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 2500 AWD, high roof · 5 seats · from $265/night
Standing height, four real berths, five seat belts and a diesel heater. Bought as conversions, not built by us — and they are diesel, which we would rather tell you now.
The electric three: read this before you fall in love with it
The electric three. Every number verified or marked pending. No adjectives.
- Travels
- 2
- two certified front seats
- Camps
- 3
- 2 in the roof tent + 1 child on the table bed
- Rig height
- 2.24 m
- no parkades
- Fresh water
- 40 L
- plus 20 L removable grey
- Real-world range
- 240–270 km
- loaded, tested figure pending van #1
- Toilet
- None
- portable cassette available
The big two: what a Sprinter costs you as well as gives you
The two big ones. Different van, different constraints — read both.
- Travels
- 5
- three rear belts, factory anchorages
- Sleeps
- 4
- rear bed + dinette conversion
- Rig height
- ≈ 2.74 m
- no parkades, no canopies, over-height on the ferry
- Length
- ≈ 5.93 m
- a rear rack can push you over the ferry’s 6.1 m line
- Fuel
- Diesel
- full out, full back. This is not an electric van.
- Off-road
- No
- AWD without low range: gravel and snow, not ruts
Two sizes, two sets of consequences.
Nobody in this market publishes this, and it is the difference between a good trip and a van wedged into a parkade at 11 pm. These are the numbers that decide where you can sleep, park and put the ferry.
| Constraint | The electric three | The two big ones |
|---|---|---|
| Height, loaded | ≈ 2.24 m | ≈ 2.74 m |
| Both are over-height for BC Ferries. Neither fits a parkade: the usual Metro Vancouver cap is 2.0–2.1 m. | ||
| Length | 4,695 mm | ≈ 5,930 mm at the 144 WB |
| The line is 6.1 m. The small van is 1.4 m clear of it; a Sprinter with a rack or a bike lift is over it. | ||
| Parking garages | No | No |
| Downtown caps are 2.0–2.1 m. Street parking, surface lots and campground gravel are fine. | ||
| Drivetrain | Front-wheel drive, 143 mm | AWD, no low range |
| Four-season and gravel-road capable. Neither one is off-road, and we will not let you find that out on a service road. | ||
| Standing up inside | No — you sit or you lie | Yes, ≈ 1,950 mm after the headliner |
| The single biggest difference in a week of rain. | ||
| Bathroom | None; cassette toilet $20/night | Wet bath |
| Every campground on our routes has facilities. The wet bath is for the drive, not the campsite. | ||
The ferry, since you will take one
BC Ferries draws two lines: 2.13 m over-height and 6.1 m over-length. Both of our vans are over the first one and we would rather you heard it from us than from a sign at Tsawwassen. You declare the height, you drive the over-height lane, you get put on the main deck instead of the car deck, and you leave the sunroof-and-bike-rack fantasy at home.
The length line is where the two vans part company. The PV5 is 4.70 m — 1.4 m clear of it, which is a real advantage of a small van and one reason our rates can be lower. A finished 144-wheelbase Sprinter camper lands at roughly 5.95–6.10 m, and a rear rack or a bike lift puts it over. We will tell you which side of the line your van is on at booking, and we will not pretend the over-length rate does not exist.
It is also the reason both big vans are 144-wheelbase and not the roomier 170. A finished 170 camper is about 6.97 m — not near the line, over it, on every sailing, for the life of the van. The 144 is a van you can plan around. The 170 is a van you pay a surcharge on twice a trip and cannot park at a campground pull-through.
The parkade, since you live in one
Neither van fits a parking garage in Metro Vancouver — 2.0 to 2.1 m is the usual cap and we are 2.24 and 2.74. Pickups happen in open-air parking for exactly this reason, and if your plan involves leaving the van downtown overnight, tell us and we will help you find a surface lot instead of apologising afterwards.
What both vans do happily is the thing people actually need from them: gravel campground roads, snow up to Duffey Lake in shoulder season, washboard forest service roads at a sensible speed. That is the honest claim — four-season and gravel-road capable. Neither van is an off-road vehicle and neither gets a winch.
Why a cargo van, when a passenger van has seats?
Because the seats are the problem, and in the small van they are unsolvable. The kits that convert a PV5 Passenger keep the second row — five travel seats, a bed that folds out of them, and about 1,311 mm of usable length behind row two. Building on the Cargo gives us 2,255 mm of flat, uninterrupted floor with no hinge, no step and no mechanism to design around. A bench added to a Cargo is not a seat: it needs engineered anchorages, a certified belt and a BC inspection. So we did not add one.
Which is exactly why the fleet has two Sprinters in it. Somebody has to carry the families, and the honest version of that van is not electric yet.
And why not just buy the kit?
We looked hard at the VanLab kit and the Vantrack rooftop setup — both excellent, both built for a van Canada is not getting, and one of them states plainly that it does not fit the Cargo. Building our own means the water, the awning, the ladder route and the child bed are ours, and it means the thing you rent is the thing we drew. It also means you can watch us draw it.
For the big vans we went the other way: bought from a builder who does this for a living and has already carried the certification. Ego is expensive and a signed conversion is cheaper.