Choosing the right vehicle

Important for the choice of the right vehicle is that you first think about what you expect from a vehicle. What needs are to be satisfied. The first thing to do is to ask general questions. Such as:

• How should the driving and living comfort be?
• Which category of driving license do I need?
• Do I want an off-the-shelf vehicle or do I want something more individual?
• Do I want to work on the vehicle myself?
• Do I want to drive away from paved roads?
• What budget can I raise for the purchase of a motor home?
• What range should be achieved with one tank?
• etc. etc.

Every answer for everyone?

There are no generally valid answers. Everyone must be able to answer this question to get to the right vehicle, and for us the following questions were central:

• How big (length x width x height, weight) should the vehicle be?
• What range do we want to be able to drive with one tank?
• What technical standard should the vehicle have?
• Do we want to expand ourselves or have it built?
• How much money do we want to spend?
• How important is driving comfort to us?
• How important is sleeping comfort?

Background to the question of the size of a vehicle

The dimension of the mobile should not be underestimated. A truck with 10 tons or more may be extremely impressive, but it will become hell at the latest when driving through a mountain village. Or the only road leads over a wooden bridge which was built a hundred years ago. There is no sign in front of it what the maximum weight is. At this point at the latest, one wishes to go back to the beginning and start all over again with the question of choosing the right vehicle.

Background on the question of scope

The classic: you drive through a desert because you find it so beautiful there. But the next gas station is not just around the corner and the needle of the fuel gauge keeps pushing towards the letter “E”. The “E” is not for”e”ver. Then the beautiful desert can suddenly turn into a freezing cold desert. Or you drive through a country which has higher fuel prices than the following country. With a sufficiently large tank you can cross the more expensive country without having the whining of your wallet constantly in your ears.

Background to the question of the state of the art

If you like to repair a damage or defect by yourself, you will rather look for a vehicle that has not much electric gadgets. With a high-tech luxury truck today, an analysis of the defect is impossible without a laptop. And every additional electronic  device wants to be powered. Then the search for enough power can be annoying. And after all, you want to travel around the world and not look like the sockets in every country.

Background to the question itself or have it built

Who has enough budget can buy a ready-made vehicle. This is certainly great, because you can leave immediately. In the case of self-construction, however, the journey already begins during construction. This can already degenerate into adventurous searches to find a workpiece on the large market “Internet”. It is fun to research, to compare and while searching you might even find other and better solutions and ideas.

Background to the question of money

If you believe the statistics on Wikipedia on the number of millionaires worldwide, there are about 30 million people who have a fortune of over one million dollars. That sounds like a mighty many millionaires. If you consider the number of the world’s population of about 7 billion people then it is only 0.5% who can throw money around. For us, this means not buying a ready-made Expo-Mobile but building it ourselves. I might repeat myself at this point – we want the money for traveling, not to stand out and show off with a monster truck.

Background on the issue of driving comfort

If you drive for 8, 9 hours on a road which has never heard the word tar, then driving comfort has a completely different weighting than a satellite dish on the roof in order to be able to watch stupid channels even in the most distant countries.

Background to the question of sleep comfort

If we assume that we sleep an average of 8 hours, then that is one third of the entire day. If you extrapolate that to a lifetime, we sleep around 24 years. This is a duration that cannot be ignored. And whoever sleeps badly cannot enjoy traveling. It was therefore clear to us from the outset that we wanted to give the subject of sleeping comfort sufficient space.

So there are many different aspects that should be considered when choosing the right vehicle.