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Warning: MTB’s being stolen out of vans at service stations is a very real thing - I’ve heard several stories of people returning from bike park wales, and having bikes nicked out of van whilst stopped at services on way home. Possibly targeted at bike park car park and followed.
A good friend of mine uses his work LWB transit Kombi van for taking bikes to the bike park, and the cargo section has full bulkhead between it and rear seats. He always purposefully reverse parks with back of van against a wall or something static so that the rear doors can not be opened. He had 3 bikes nicked out of the back of his van at a services on M4….. didn’t even realise the were gone til he got back to Bristol, as thiefs had somehow unlocked the front doors, released hand brake, rolled van forwards, removed bikes, put van back and locked all doors leaving no obvious sign of entry.
Yes your bikes will be safer in a van, but leaving them locked in a van overnight/hours at a time unattended is a very bad idea….. especially a £70k LWB van that shouts expendable income, and a taste for outdoor activities. You may as well have a sticker on the back window that says “£20k’s worth of bikes inside, please don’t steal them”
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I'd say maybe.
The original goal was to get a vehicle that the bikes could go inside.
An example - we went mountain biking yesterday, stopped at services on the way there and the way back, one of us had to stay with the car whilst the other went in so that the bikes could not be stolen.
When we got home we were both knackered - but bikes had to come off the roof, be put back together, be stowed away securely before we could make dinner.
It would be great to have the bikes inside a vehicle so that things are just more convenient.
The other thing that sticks in the mind was when we drove up to Scotland - there was literally one place that had some secure storage that we could put the bikes in (in Yorkshire, handily next to Dalby forest, so it's an ill wind...), but that meant that of all the B&B's, hotels etc in the middle of the UK we could use one.
Bikes inside the vehicle - this is no longer a problem.
But! That original goal become subject to a lot of feature creep - easy to do when you go down the rabbit hole of custom MTB/campers.
The V220 can stow the bikes, and in some configurations can have a kitchen/workshop and some beds, but in general use it can just get the bikes in the back on the extending tray.
I think it works for what we actually need, rather than the bells and whistles that we ended up looking at. Although I do wonder whether a Marco Polo Horizon as the base, with the same Blok Pod stuff in the back would not be a more flexible vehicle - but we could always get an EV one of those in three years.
Can't remember who pointed it out earlier, but you can see here that the bottom trays are the bike ones, rather than the ones for the bed-pod (they're a lot longer):