And the Winner is….Mercedes-Benz Sprinter! Well, after looking at a few (hundreds) of vehicles online and test driving a few of them, we decide on a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 314 CDI.

Read here how we selected the perfect vehicle for us with our requirements.

The vehicle is only 3 years old (at the time of purchase), has just under 120’000km on it and is in top condition. In addition, it is affordable with 20’500CHF for its current condition.

And our Sprinter is yellow! In Switzerland all Post and DHL delivery vans drive in the same shade of yellow. We now have a van exactly in this shade of yellow! Whether the van remains yellow, will still be found out. For now, our joy is huge!

The only drawback, the car has neither air conditioning nor cruise control. The cruise control is easy and relatively cheap to retrofit, which we have previously researched. Otherwise, we would probably not have bought our new baby. We will write more about the retrofit cruise control installation in a future blogpost.

Our Sprinter has the length 3 (long) and is therefore 6.97m long and the height 2 (high roof) and is therefore 2.70m high from the road. It’s already quite a big vehicle. Mimi will still have to get used to the size and needs a few more miles to drive safely. Paddy is used to big vehicles and has no problems with them at all. Luckily, he is more the chauffeur and Mimi the landscape viewer/dreamer on the passenger seat.

But then picking up the vehicle from the garage is still a bit of a thing in itself. We don’t want to register the bus right away, because it will certainly stay in one place for the conversion for a while and we can save on vehicle taxes and insurance costs. Without registering it there is also no number plate. But to be able to drive on the road we need one. Fortunately, our garage owner is so accommodating and leaves us a garage number plate for half a day. Not a regular service, because in case of an accident the garage is liable!

We ourselves come from the canton of Lucerne, we buy the Sprinter in the canton of Zurich and temporarily we will park it in the canton of Aargau at Mimi’s parents. So first we drive an hour to the garage, then we drive another hour to Aargau with two cars, and then we drive another hour back to the garage to return the license plates. But what wouldn’t you do for the big dream.