SPRINTER DELIVERS A LOT OF TECH
Merc’s van turns 25 this year and it’s right up with the auto-trends
Speaking from a car-driving point of view, my biggest takeaway from a few days with the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter (apart from child-like delight at driving a van and playing fast and loose with Loading Zones) was how much high-end technology is packed into it.
You expect light vans to have the latest in diesel tech, but the Sprinter also has a lot of driverassistance and infotainment equipment that you might normally associate with a high-end car.
Call it experience on Mercedes-Benz’s part of you like: Sprinter is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, spread over three different generations.
Usually with a car review we’d delve into specification in some detail, but with a van like Sprinter that’s futile because it comes in virtually any shape or size you want. For example, you can have the big Merc in panel van (including a “Solutions” base for more customisation) or cab-chassis (single or double), FWD or RWD, four or six-cylinder with four different power/torque outputs and two different fuel tank sizes among them. Oh, and medium, long and extra-long wheelbases. And standard, high and “super high” roof configurations.
There aren’t unlimited combinations of course, but start mixing and matching what’s available and the results are still mindboggling.
That’s been part of Sprinter lore for a quarter of a century: even back in 1995 it came in a multitude of configurations to serve as everything from a tipper truck to an ambulance.
For the record the Sprinter you see here is a 316 MWB, with the 120kW/360Nm 2.1-litre twin-turbo diesel (the gruntiest of the four-pot engines) driving the rear wheels. GVM 3.49 tonnes. Something of a sports van, if you like.
Okay, not quite. But maybe a bit of a luxury van. The load-carrying safety basics are covered with Attention Assist, Load Adaptive Control and Roll-Over Mitigation. But you can also option the Sprinter with stuff that wouldn’t be out of place on a premium passenger car: Active Distance Assist Distronic cruise control, Active Lane Keeping Assist and even “LED High Performance Headlamps”
Incredibly, the latest model also features the Mercedes-Benz User Experience (MBUX) infotainment system. That’s very posh for a van.
The techy stuff is Sprinter territory too: even back in 1995 it came with anti-lock braking and in 2006 it introduced adaptive stability control and Mercedes-Benz’s Parktronic. It’s also now available in fully electric guise (BEV — Battery Electric Van?) in Europe.
From the point of view of a passenger-car driver, the Sprinter 316 is still a pleasing thing to pilot.
The powertrain is perky, although the RWD models “only” get the 7G-Tronic gearbox — the FWD versions have another two ratios.
There’s real substance to the steering and it tracks nicely through corners. Is this stuff important in a van? Well yes, because an engaged and comfortable light- commercial driver is a happier and safer one, surely.
The Sprinter has been an influential van in the last quartercentury. Perhaps even more so than many of us realise. For example: the first two generations of the rival Volkswagen Crafter were in fact simply rebadged Sprinters. VW didn’t design its own Crafter until the current generation launched in 2017