A New Van – Farewell Bertie

For some time now we have been contemplating a new van. It’s been a fantasy for a while, but a serious fantasy where we have been collecting our requirements together and analysing the vans that might meet those criteria. Always a Business Analyst…

Our Requirements

• Under 3.5 Tonnes
  • I (Becky) have been unable to drive Bertie because I don’t have C1 (ability to drive vehicles over 3.5tonnes) on my driving licence. Blame being a townie. I never had to drive to work/school/college and so didn’t have an incentive to learn to drive until a few months after C1 was removed from a standard licence. I could have taken an additional test, but in truth I didn’t ever really fancy driving Bertie anyway, which leads to criteria 2…
• Less than 2.1m wide
  • I really do want to drive the next van. Paul would like that too as he’s a bit tired of long drives to make the most of our Schengen days. So I want it to be agile and easy to navigate in tight spaces. We also spend a lot of time in the mountains and we want something that is easy to drive to remote spots, width is more important than length (fnarr fnarr). But also we want it to be…
• Less that 6.5m long
  • So that we have the ability to park in more spaces. And for ultimate driving convenience we wanted an…
• Automatic Gearbox
  • One less thing to worry about when driving.
• A Fixed Bed with Garage Under
  • gives us a lot of storage for all our outdoor gear. We’re still quite happy with a transverse bed despite having to climb over each other at night and prefer to snuggle up rather than have separate single beds.
• All water services onboard
  • We don’t want any pipes running below the van (except for the grey waste). We have to have a van that’s reliable when we go skiing in winter and frozen pipes are the biggest risk. We also want a good capacity water tank, preferably 100 litres for off grid.
• Plenty of Payload
  • All vans have a limit to the weight of additional ‘stuff’ they can carry. We know that we carry too much stuff with us. Guilty as charged. But we don’t want to be compromising our activities either. We like going prepared for anything. So we want at least 600kg payload.

Where could we compromise?

Things we would like but are willing to compromise on:

• A diesel heater. LPG works fine, but for ease of acquisition diesel is better
• Lithium set up. A more efficient battery set up would be lovely but we could install that ourselves
• Solar Panels. Another job we can do ourselves if we need to
• Refillable gas. Again something we can do ourselves
• Not a white box We prefer the style of a panel van conversion but realise that it’s not all about looks
• Oven. Not a must for us, we would be quite happy to do with a hob and some of the useful gadgets that are out there.
• Not a wet room bathroom layout. We’ve been very spoiled with Bertie’s shower cubicle and know we will have to make a compromise, but I really don’t want to have the faff of cleaning/drying a wet room. We’ve seen some nifty space saving bathrooms on our search so there are options out there.
• Awning. We rarely use our awning, they are nice on a sunny day but we wouldn’t mind if we had to live without one.

The Decision

After a lot of searching, we finally realised that we weren’t going to find the right panel van with a good payload without uprating to over 3.5T. It felt like we were going round in circles for a while. We would find a panel van, but it would have a minimal payload. We would find a small motorhome but it would be 2.3m wide. We would find a ‘compact’ (narrow) motorhome but it would be too long.

Finally, on the way back from Scotland, while trawling auto trader, we found the Chausson S514 Sportline. A 6m van which is only 2.1m wide and has way more than the 600kg payload we have been looking for. It also has a transverse bed, a decent garage for a small van and a great space-saving layout, including one of those bathrooms that transforms from loo and basin to a shower cubicle. A diesel heater and a solar panel come as standard. Chausson have obviously put some thought into creating a motorhome that fits the gap between panel van and ‘grown up’ motorhome.

We spent a long time talking about it. Was it the van we were after? Did we really want to buy brand new? We’d always thought we’d go for something a few years old so that we could do what we wanted without any nerves about invalidating warranties. We went back to view it three times, spending a lot of time looking in detail at the way it was set up and reading the manuals for the various appliances and fixtures. We looked at similar vans, worried that we might have missed some other obvious choices. 

Finally our mind was made up. This was it! An early Christmas present to ourselves. A lot more money than we’ve ever spent before in one transaction (apart from houses). Highbridge Caravan Centre had a van in stock – a cancelled order – so we wouldn’t have a long wait. A few negotiations later we had committed £1000 to a deposit and agreed to pick up in January.

Feelers went out to people who’d expressed an interest in buying Bertie, with any luck we could avoid owning two vans at the same time. In the end Bertie was sold just the day before we were due to pick up the new van. Bertie went to a couple of likely Irish blokes who may or may not have been legitimate traders. I was quite emotional for a while. It’s was difficult to part with something we had called home without having doubts that we were making the right decision.

Goodbye…And Hello

So Goodbye Bertie. Thank you for many wonderful adventures and treasured memories.

And hello to our compact and bijou new van (yet to be named)

Our new van being out through it’s paces