Adventure, romance, recreation? The ULTIMATE Expedition Vehicle will take you there
By Michael Van Pelt
I have been asked many times how I got the idea to build an Expedition Vehicle, but I must admit, it was not MY idea. Some of the ideas are mine, but the original thought was not.
Travelers have been using various forms of “expedition vehicles” since the development of the wheel.The seed from my ideas originally came from a small article in the National Geographic Magazine back in the 80’s. I mostly remember the photographs of a military looking Mercedes Unimog going up and over sand dunes and thinking that my 4×4 pickup truck wouldn’t do that. What made this so unique was that it had a small basic rectangular expedition camper box attached as a bed. I kept referring to this original off-road expedition vehicle that I saw in the magazine over the course of 25 years. Although this world travel vehicle was homemade, I kept thinking how neat it would be to travel like this. You could go anywhere you wanted to go, stay as long as you wanted to stay, and really explore the world.
In the last 10 years my thoughts have drifted back to this article and that extreme expedition RV many times, mostly because of the frustrations that I experienced with all of the different four wheel drive motorhomes, off-road campers, and 5th wheels that I have owned. It seemed that every time I went where I wanted to go in my RV, I would get stuck. I got tired of being attached by an electrical umbilical cord to posts beside slabs of concrete, surrounded by hundreds of people in the same situation that I was in.
I mean, RVs are supposed to be self-contained, right? If they are self-contained, stand-alone units, and I wanted to run the air conditioning, then why should I have to plug it in? What if there wasn’t a dump station to deposit waste into? Some of the other things that always irritated me were the squeaking of the cabinets and furnishings, with the blinds banging back and forth while negotiating corners, and heading for the next asphalt/concrete jungle of like-minded individuals.
I sat down and made notes on what I did not like about the campers and RVs that I had owned. If I could have one built just the way I wanted, what would that be? My mind kept going back to the original Unimog expedition vehicle, and after some internet research, I learned that the Unimog in the USA still existed. Oh, they had grown up a lot; in fact, the Unimog I saw in the original article would fit in the bed of the new Unimogs which were on the market. The old Unimog top speed was only mid-40 mph, while the new ones were only limited at 70 mph because of the tires.
The design is based around this new Mercedes Unimog, and what I would want in an Expedition Vehicle that would take me anywhere I wanted to go in the world. That was exactly what I had planned to do with it. The first trip I planned was in the U.S. as a “shakedown.” The 2nd trip I planned was to South America. I knew that to take either of these 2 trips the way that I wanted to take them was going to require something a lot different than anything I had ever seen.
I knew that fuel is available worldwide: Diesel, Propane, Gas, everything. However it is sometimes not available in the spot that you want it, or need it. I didn’t know at the time that you could cross a border and find that electrical, propane, or even water connections could be totally different from connections we used in the U.S. So what did I want in this original vehicle?
I was convinced that I wanted the same things in this 4×4 RV that I would want if I was in a boat in the middle of the ocean for months at a time. I wanted a chassis that would be strong enough to carry anything I wanted to put on it; powerful to give me comfortable speeds; an overland expedition vehicle that would give me off-road capability; that would take me places that a regular pickup truck would not go – and, of course, bring me back. I wanted to be able to travel with large enough capacities in fuel, water & electricity storage that I could throw that umbilical cord away.
I didn’t want to have a vehicle that I could take 1 lengthy trip and the vehicle would be worth half as much as I spent on it. One thing I noticed on the other RVs that I had bought, was that if you were willing to buy one that even had been driven 15,0000-20,00 miles, it was worth a fraction of a new one. The reason they were worth a fraction was that they were always built on light truck chassis that were considered, by most people, to be “worn out” at 80-100,000 miles. Because of using a light truck chassis, the compromise of weight verses quality, always lost out to weight. In a nutshell, they were just built cheap in order to keep the weight down. Everything had to be kept extremely light so as not to overload the typical American 4×4 motorhome chassis.
Because of all of this, I wanted to have at least a medium-duty chassis to heavy-duty chassis. I wanted 4 wheel-drive, high ground clearance, aggressive tires, locking differentials, and enough gears to go highway speeds or over rock-crawler terrain. The Mercedes Unimog fit the bill as this original chassis.
So, in building an expedition off-road camper, I was determined to get rid of the umbilical cord, which meant going with the appliances of an ocean going vessel, which translated into Diesel, the most available fuel on the planet. In researching the available appliances for this vehicle, I learned that there were some very incredible options out there. Furnaces and Heaters for water that were incredibly small, extremely efficient, yet able to do the job of a lot larger platform than I intended to build. I wanted the batteries to be maintained, even on days when I did not intend to drive the vehicle. I really did not want to go with generators, because my experience with generators were that they were typically only used for A/C, and when they were called upon, they were temperamental because they did not get used enough to keep the fuel from gumming up.
I wanted something that was comfortable for 2 people. I didn’t feel like I needed the luxury of some of the high-end land yachts because I was looking for adventure in the wild, not luxury in the asphalt jungle. What I ended up with was a mixture of both. The original prototype had 130 gallons of usable water that could be filled from a hose or pumped from a stream. It had 200 gallons of usable fuel. The fuel was diesel, which provided the necessary fuel for hot water, furnace, cooking, and transport of the vehicle. I put solar panels on the roof and 4-250 amp hour gel cell batteries which provided enough backup power to run everything except the A/C unit.
I finally completed this expedition vehicle (XV) in the spring of 2006. Upon completion, after our initial “shakedown” cruise to the Southwest US, we shipped it from Miami to South America. It quickly became apparent that the design and precautions that I had made were necessary for this type of a trip. It was unusual to find propane, which we thankfully did not require. In a total of about 1 year of travel, we only stayed in 2 campgrounds, both of which had facilities to dump waste. At this point, you are probably wondering what we did for waste disposal. We had run across a unique device called a “cassette” toilet. We had not seen this in any camper we had ever owned. A cassette toilet looks very similar to a regular RV toilet and operates much the same, but the difference becomes apparent when it is time to dump the waste. From the exterior of the off-road XV, you open a door and pull out a sealed canister that is much like the 2-wheeled carry-on luggage that everyone is familiar with. Once the unit is on the ground, pull out the retractable handle, and wheel it to any available toilet.
In 1 year of overland travel, we never found the need to plug in our expedition vehicle to electricity. We had enough water capacity that, if needed, would have lasted 2 weeks. The biggest test was floating down the Amazon River for a week while living in the vehicle, keeping the refrigerator on (which ran off of 12 volts), cooking food, and doing all of the necessary things for living (including all of the “necessary” electronics of computers, sat phone, camera batteries, etc.) without having to plug in or re-supply anything. Then we got off of the barge and let the vehicle continue down the Amazon River, while we went and played in the Jungle. The unit self-maintained itself like it was designed to do.
Another outstanding test of the expedition camper came in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, where we left it parked for 2 weeks while we took a trip to Antarctica. The temperatures were very cold, so we left the furnace on low, just in case. The refrigerator was on with all of our food supplies in it, we left, and it rained for almost the entire 2 weeks. The available sunlight during the periods it was not raining and the photovoltaic (solar) cells, mounted on the roof, kept the batteries maintained the entire time we were gone. We returned to find the battery capacity at 96%.
We build our vehicles to meet a number of criteria. Here are a few at the top of our list:
- Chassis strong enough to carry anything that you want to put on it
- Power enough to cruise at comfortable speeds
- Off road capabilities with high clearance to go over rugged terrain and take you places a regular camper will not.
- Locking differentials and gears to drive highway speeds or rock-crawl
- Large fuel storage for sustained camping
- Enough water and electricity storage to throw away that umbilical cord
- Luxurious home-like comforts
In 2006 Mike and Rene Van Pelt completed a 1 year, 30,000 miles expedition travel throughout South America driving one of our GXV expedition vehicles. They started their adventure by shipping their expedition vehicle, which they proudly called KOLOB, from Miami to Lima, Peru. Their expedition journey route began in Peru and continued down to Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and back to Chile, Peru and then to Ecuador. They also had great adventure while visiting Antarctica, Easter Island and the Galapagos Islands. Their return shipping was from Ecuador to Mexico, and the last leg of their trip was then from Mexico to home.