The brave souls who bought a used, 340k-mile rental camper van

dmoose•2 minutes ago

I picked up one as well and even after flying to pick it up and fuel for driving 700 miles back I'm in it less than $4K. My theory was fleet maintenance to some extent mitigated the 330K miles and even if it takes a crate engine to keep it running I probably still get enough value to be worth it. Turns out I got 19 mpg on the drive back and the only thing I've found wrong with it so far is dead battery in a tps. Wrap is goofy looking but at least I'm never going to lose it in a parking lot.

bloomingeek•about 1 hour ago

Really cool story! It's always been my premise that good maintenance means longevity on vehicles. I keep our vehicles with the idea of "driving the wheels off of them", but always end up giving them to my kids after wanting an upgrade vehicle with some modern tech. (One of them has almost 200K miles on it.)

As for a Honda Element, I've always wanted one, but my wife thinks they're ugly. ;)

Helmut10001•41 minutes ago

Our VW T4 from 2002 has 300k km on it. I consider this half it's total possible mileage, if not less. I wish they would still build reliable cars like these today.

jlongr•2 minutes ago

20+ year old cars are much less safe than modern ones. I would strongly consider a newer car if I were you.

venzaspa•7 minutes ago

Average vehicle milage before being scrapped is still on the rise, so I assume they still do.

BigTTYGothGF•35 minutes ago

> I wish they would still build reliable cars like these today.

How do you know they don't?

cucumber3732842•20 minutes ago

Can you really or is it like the T1N Sprinters where yeah you technically can take the longblock to half a mil or more but you'll have replaced everything external to it twice over by then?

mschuster91•36 minutes ago

Damn I had no idea the T4 got produced that long. I drove a 1996 T4 with the good old Vorkammerdiesel many years ago - practically a tank.

chiph•about 2 hours ago

"Runs and Drives" for $4300 is a bargain. All the other features were a bonus.

PaulHoule•about 1 hour ago

For a while my car buying strat was to buy a new Asian car and run it for 130,000 or more miles. In the pandemic though we had to get my son a car in a hurry so he could drive to work and new and gently used cars were hard to find so we discovered you can always get a pretty cool old car for that kind of money with the expectation that pretty soon you're going to spend about the purchase price in repairs; in our case it was just fine because once he had the job he had the money to pay for repairs himself and it is still a lot less than the payments on a new car.

Gravityloss•about 1 hour ago

Interesting that they replaced the central panel with something more traditional looking?

mschuster91•about 2 hours ago

That paintjob reminds me somewhat of the GTA San Andreas campervan of The Truth.

jcgrillo•about 1 hour ago

Fleet vehicles are generally not a terrible bet, they've at least been somewhat maintained.

chasd00•about 2 hours ago

My kids call those “free candy vans” hah.

MrBuddyCasino•about 2 hours ago

I can’t find details about their bankruptcy except some platitudes. How does such a business suddenly go broke?

delichon•about 1 hour ago

  "How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
  "Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually, then suddenly."
  -- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

mcphage•about 2 hours ago

Thanks for sharing that, that was just a nice story.

RickJWagner•39 minutes ago

I agree. Today has some very good stories on Hacker News, best day I can remember.

cucumber3732842•23 minutes ago

A van that's seen a lot of highway miles and was owned by a large fleet is almost always a good bet. It's shuttle services who are skipping everything they can because "lol we're depreciating this over 3yr and then trading in" are who you gotta be worried about.

This is basically a story about who people cut from a filter bubble that circle jerk about Sprinters and Camrys are shocked to find that the most popular fleet van of the 1980s-2010 does in fact live up to it's value prop of delivering boring reliable service to business to which it is just a cost center to be minimized.

The brave souls who bought a used, 340k-mile rental camper van

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