Can We Live Full Time in an Electric VW Camper Van? – 3 Days with Our ID. Buzz

I keep forgetting this is popped up. So I'm over here doing everything like this. I'm like, oh, my back. And I'm like, oh, wait, we can't tell if the thing's on because there's obviously no engine noise. We'll hit the accelerator and let's see what happens. OK, oh, there we go. If you hear that sound, that means you can go. You're telling me I still have to make an entire bed right now. It's like midnight, y'all. This is dumb. Well, it's morning and we already made one huge mistake. We woke up to only 30 percent battery because we did not plug in the charger the correct way. Well, good morning, adventurers. Good morning. And welcome to another beautiful day here in Washington, where the sun is shining. It's not great at all. Yeah, it's been completely sunny, completely blue skies for the last like week. It's been magical. If you caught our last video, we picked up this camper van in Seattle. This is a brand new electric Volkswagen van. But this one isn't like the rest. It's been pitted out with a full camper van set up on the inside. So this is just like what you're going to find in like the 70s Volkswagen bus, except it's from 2025. Oh, man, the future is here and we're living in it. And in that video, we also gave you guys a full tour of the inside and all of the features of the camping elements. So if you're interested in that, the video should be on the screen and in the description below. So you all know we had a bit of a charging fiasco this morning. Apparently, this pigtail connector was just slightly loose, but it acted like it was charging and then just stopped. But we've got it all plugged in correctly now. So we're going to get this thing topped up before we leave this campsite. We are charging up about 14 miles per hour. So it's going to be a while. So we've had some time to drive the camper around, get used to the features, the little quirks, getting it charged up, making sure we don't run dry and end up stranded on the side of the road. But now we really want to answer the question, could we actually live full time in this rig? So we're going to be putting that to the test. We're going to spend the next two days doing everything in this van. Cooking, sleeping, working, driving, all of it. Plus, we want to get out, see some of the nature. But we are also in the middle of absolute nowhere. And there are very, very few charges, if any charges at all, to keep this thing topped up. All right. So it looks like it's back to van life for us, too. But this time it's different. Is it different, though? I don't know. We'll see. We'll never learn a lesson. We'll see what happens. We got our coffee. Check. There's a full kitchen in here. So now the question is, will it breakfast sandwich? That's what I'm about to make. Move over, Gordon Ramsay. This actually looks like a cooking show or something. I like how you get your own little nook. I keep forgetting that this is popped up. So I'm over here doing everything like this. I'm like, oh, my back. And I'm like, oh, wait. Yeah. And I just let her do it. I don't tell her. Thanks, darling. Looks like the van will breakfast sandwich. Well, it's super simple. Ham, egg, cheese on a little baguette. Coffee. This breakfast sandwich. Cheers. That's for you, man. That's for you. Give it a taste. Try your handiwork. Now I'm a happy camper. We do have technically a full kitchen in the van, but the sink is tiny and the tanks are only like a few gallons each, aren't they? Like three each. So it fills up very fast. But luckily, the campsite has a big giant sink for us to use. Make our life a little bit easier. So it is officially well into the afternoon. We are only charged at fifty five percent. You guys are realizing it's going to take all day even to get it up to 80. And we're sick of waiting around here. I mean, we're right next to the National Park. There's all this beautiful forest land, coastline, all these little towns. And we're just stuck here in the mountains. We want to see the site. So we're just going to take off. We have 115 miles and we're going to see where that'll take us. Yeah, there is actually a little town called Forks. Some of you guys might know this because it is where Twilight was filmed. I did not know this. Yeah, allegedly. So we got a battle vampires and a dying battery. Can we achieve this? I'm up for the challenge. Let's go. You better hold on tight, spider monkey. Is this thing on? I can never tell. Yeah, you guys, we're having a little bit of trouble with the technology of this thing. It does a lot of stuff for you. Like sometimes we can't get the door to open and close because that's all automatic. We can't tell if the thing's on because there's obviously no engine noise. We'll hit the accelerator and let's see what happens. OK. Oh, there we go. If you hear that sound, that means you can go. Are we ready? We got some AC going. We might run our battery down, but I need it. All right. Here we come. We found the Tesla charging station and theoretically should be able to take this like this into here, that then it plugs in like normal. Now what? I don't know. Let me check the app and make sure it's working. We had to download a whole app for this. All right. I'm in. Post 1C. Start charging. Adapter. Well, OK, we are officially super charging. And I guess this is what you do when you're charging an electric vehicle. You leave it there and then you go do something else that kills like 30 minutes of time. I guess it's not too much different than stopping at a gas station and getting like a snack and using the restroom. Just a little bit longer. And we really don't have to charge it all the way up. We're just going to see how much charge it gets when we go to the cafe back. And that's going to be good enough. Well, we popped into a gift shop and they have wildlife paraphernalia galore. I feel like we had to come in right when you're in Forks. You've got to give in to it. Look at me. I'm so buff and I'm a werewolf and I'm really cool. I'm impressed you knew he was a werewolf. I know. How did I know that? I've never seen the movie. Oh, I beg to differ. I think you just let the cat out of the bag. I out myself like Jerry on Seinfeld when they made him take the lie detector test. OK, this is pretty fun. Not that I know really anything about the movies, except that you either love them or you really hate them. Well, that took about 20 minutes and got us all the way up to 80 percent. So that was faster than I ever thought it would be. We would have been at the campsite to like 10 p.m. trying to get it to 80 percent. Well, hello there and welcome to our office. You guys, we came back to the campsite and we decided to catch up on a few emails that we've been ignoring for the last few days or putting all their workspaces to the test. Yeah, it's kind of cool that there's two completely separate workspaces in here. It actually feels really freaking good. Plus, I can do this. But I think email time is over and now we have to move on to cleaning up our space. Obviously, it's a small space and as usual, it gets cluttered in about two seconds and it drives me freaking nuts. So I know we've only actually slept in here for one night, but I think we have a system down for getting everything organized and decluttered, and it starts with putting the table down. Boom. So much more space. Next, we need a little more headroom. Boom, yo. Instant headroom. There is not a ton of storage in here, and what little storage there is is already filled with things like plates and pots and pans. So we still have all this stuff and we have our suitcases back here. So as you can see, they've got the storage here, but they're filled and our suitcases wouldn't fit down there anyway. Have no fear, though. Allison has plans and the plan is to move our suitcases up here. Out of sight, out of mind. Don't forget my suitcase. OK. Boom. Since we're going to be lounging in the passenger seat, the driver's seat becomes, you guessed it, storage. Put our backpacks up here because we get into those frequently. Boom. I keep saying boom after everything. What's wrong with that? I don't know. That's my catchphrase now. Boom, boom, boom, boom, y'all. Haven't quite figured out a good spot for trash, so I'm just putting it up there where Eric usually sits. Rude. Sorry. Love you. Stuff keeps rolling out when I open the door and immediately gets covered in crap. I don't know. These may have been cleaned, too. I'm not exactly sure. Oh well. This place cleans up pretty nicely, minus the trash. Once we figure that out, we'll be golden. Pesky trash. I don't want to put it outside. It's going to attract critters, but we'll find something to do with it. All right. We did it. Nice job. It only took like, you know, 10 minutes ish. Hey, boom. Our van is officially all clean and ready for the evening. And now I think it is time to take a stroll down to the beach. Cool stroll. You're really strolling. So y'all may or may not have noticed that I have been wearing the same shirt for multiple videos now. But the question is, does it smell? Nope. Now do me. All right. Of course, it doesn't smell because these are made from wool, baby. But not this kind of wool. This is Unbound Merino, and we wanted to give them a huge thanks for partnering with us on this video. Their clothes are lightweight, breathable and temperature regulating, which is great because the days have been super toasty while we've been here. But the nights have been very chilly. So I've been nice and cool in the sun and nice and cozy at night. Plus, they're super comfy and stylish. So we're looking good, even though we are literally living in a van down by the river. Well, ocean. R.I.P. Chris Farley. And I love that they don't have any visible logos on the clothing because I don't know if you guys have noticed, but I don't wear anything that has actual logos or brands on it. I just like to keep things simple, I guess. But really, their clothes are just great for travel because they're super light and take up such a small amount of space in your luggage. You can head to unboundmerino.com to pick up your own Merino wool gear. Their crew neck T-shirt happens to be my favorite. But there's plenty of awesome wool gear to snag for your upcoming travels. Plus, new customers always get 10% off. Well, this was a bad time to lose my sunglasses, wasn't it? The sun is harsh out here, y'all. I thought it was supposed to be like gray and overcast and gross. I offered him my heart sunglasses, but he wouldn't take them. Didn't seem right for my persona. But this is one of the weirdest trails we've ever been in. It's just a bunch of stones that are like each one of them is the perfect skipping stone, don't you think? They are. Mostly for giants, though. But they are all like so perfectly rounded. All right, lead the way. Is there water? Somehow we're getting further from the water while also getting closer. Well, we made it down to the water, but this is one of the weirdest beaches ever. The whole thing is just those huge round rocks. And then lining the coastline, there's just a bunch of downed timber. It's like a ghost tree beach covered in huge rocks. Nobody's here. It's cold. What is this? It reminds me of annihilation. This is like what the beach would look like in the shimmer. And apparently that tide will go way out and you can walk way down there. It's so cool how these rocks are like in middle, mid transition, like there's a big one, medium one, a cute little one. And then all these tiny little pebble ones. Each one of these is like the perfect skipping rock. He says you got to skip on water. You know what I'm saying? I'm just going to come out and say it. This is the most beautiful skipping rock I've ever seen in my life. It's perfectly symmetrical, perfectly. Hold that. You guys think he's been talking a lot about skipping rocks on camera? Try living life with this guy. That's all he's been talking about since we entered the beach. Look at that rock. So go skip it, man. I can't. The ocean's too angry. Save it. I'm going to save this for later. Put this on my shelf and be like one day. I'm going to skip this on the river by the railroad track. Well, the forest has become very, very magical. The sun is setting slowly and it's casting this light and shadows all through the forest. It's basically Narnia. That's where we are. And we're also back at our campsite. The sun has just gone down right over there. It's got nice and cool out. I think it's about the perfect time to start a fire. How's it going in here? Pretty good. Bumping some tunes. I got food going. Tonight, it's Allison's macaroni surprise, which, believe it or not, is different than last night's Allison pasta surprise. Well, it smells good. It's going to be delicious, but it's 930 again, you guys. This freaking late sunset is tripping us out. What do you do tripping us out? Is that a thing? All right, Allison's chili mac surprise. That was the surprise is that there's chili powder in it. I thought the surprise was that it's so dang tasty. Have you tried it yet, sir? No, I haven't. But I mean, come on, it looks amazing. Well, if you like chili mac, it looks amazing. If not, it kind of looks like not that appetizing, maybe. I'm going to say I think we're getting the hang of this rig. And we're learning how to maximize the space, how to keep it tidy, how to cook in here. I think the main thing is that you have to be comfortable living both inside and outside. Yeah, I do think we've really lucked out having nice weather so far. If it had been rainy this trip, we would be singing maybe a very different tune. But when the sun is shining and the weather is nice, this life is lovely. You guys are seeing behind the scenes the real late night van life stuff. It's not too glamorous. No, this is this is what it looks like. Don't look crazy with my eyeliner. You look great, kid. It's more so like this little cloud that you're sitting in. I don't know why, but I'm frozen to my core. We have to make our bed. I have to take off my makeup, brush my teeth, clean up and all this stuff. But I'm so cold I don't want to. I guess we could turn the heat on up front. Can we do that? They also said something about there's some camp mode where you can set the heat or AC to turn on throughout the night. You're telling me I still have to make an entire bed right now? And you do, because there's no room for me to do it with you. It's like midnight, y'all. This is dumb. I guess now I got to make this bed so we can finally go to dang sleep. And voila, bed. Well, we made it look super easy, but if you saw what I saw, you would realize it is not easy at all to make this bed in here. And watching her do it is very painful. There's a lot of stuff on this bed that she had to situate and move around as she was making this bed because there's nowhere else to put any of it. Yeah, it's never easy making a bed in a very cramped space. Yeah, I mean, this kind of sums it up right here. What? Don't look at this. That's where that stuff goes. You weren't supposed to see this. This is what always happens, no matter how new or technological or advanced the van is, this is exactly what happens every time. Van life for life. But y'all, I think we are going to finally hit the hay once and for all. It's like one a.m. What the heck? So we are all ready. It's going to be a beautiful day tomorrow. It's going to be great. So now we just got to go to sleep. It's like Santa's coming, except Santa is a mountain. And we're going to see him. I never know where she's going when she goes on these little rants. I'm sleepy, y'all. OK, good night. See you tomorrow. Bye. Well, good morning, y'all. Good morning. How did you sleep? OK. I was asking them. Oh, how did you guys sleep? It's actually not too bad in here. It's a little cramped, obviously. It's a little tight, you guys. Not going to lie. Yeah. And we thought about trying to sleep up there, but that seemed even worse. Just trying to have to climb up and down. And I'm a little sore from just being cramped in there all night, but I think it'll be all right. I think coffee is what I need next more than anything. Coffee and I guess start cleaning all this mess up. This is how we feel every time we wake up in a van like this. We get up and look around. We're just like, I don't want to do any of this. So we just go back to bed. And then it gets really late today and then you lose all your time. And then that's our life. Well, we're not doing great today, but we do need to get our elves in gear. So. So let's do it. She's getting pretty good at making breakfast in here, or at least breakfast sandwich. Yep. I didn't burn anything today. That's good. It looks freaking delicious, though, doesn't it? I'm very excited. All right. So the plan is coffee and breakfast. Get this all broken down and put away and then get on the road because we got to get out into this nature, y'all. We got grand plans up at the top of this peninsula. We have officially entered the National Park. Up until now, we've actually just been driving around the peninsula. We drove by this incredible lake with this beautiful blue water. And of course, the scenery has just become stunning. But right now we're heading to this insane viewpoint. However, we have to climb up a hill in our VW to get there. Obviously, this thing can handle it. But do we have enough juice? That's the question. I think it's going to be OK because whatever it estimates, you basically have to cut it in half when you're going straight up a hill. Yeah. And we are going from basically sea level to a mile up over the course of like 20 minutes. So we're putting it to the test. Yeah. We are officially in the park and we have made it to the top of Hurricane Ridge. Can say 100% worth the drive up here, y'all. I don't think we quite realized what we were in for. And this isn't even the good view. This is just like the mediocre view up here. It's really cool because often the distance gets hazier and hazier and just turns to blue water. And then on the other side, of course, you have these rolling fields that look like the sound of music with snowcapped peaks behind it. And this is just beautiful pine forest. I think there are still snowcapped peaks way off there. Wondering if maybe that's Canada, eh? Got to admit, it is pretty dang nice to be out in nature, like actually out in it, not just stuck at our campsite. We're going a little stir crazy there. This is lovely. So many mountain peaks. Definitely some of the top views we've ever seen in the U.S. I mean, it's pretty hard to beat. What's funny is the drive up here is very unassuming. You get the sense that you're getting higher, but you just take one turn really close to the end here and this all opens up. I love how in the backup camera they look like all the cars look tiny and squished. It's adorable. Little bitty. Well, that downward journey gained us a whopping 50 miles. You guys, we got up to 101 mile range. That's pretty impressive. But sadly, our campsite for the night is like 90 something miles away. And I don't trust it. We're going to get there. So let's top her up. So we're topping up. And as we pulled in, we noticed that there is another new Volkswagen van over there charging as well. Yeah, we're pretty cool. We're in the club. You guys, we just stopped at this little Thai restaurant to grab dinner, and we are getting way more than we bargained for. We're getting a whole show. There are whales, you guys, like four of them out there. They're literally like flying out of the water and spinning in the air. Cool. Yeah, and there was some lucky little jerk on a jet ski getting about five feet away from them. Yeah, I feel like that's not actually what you should do, but he did it. Yeah, we decided not to cook in the van again because as usual, it's getting late and cooking it really late and then eating really late is really not working very well for us. No, it makes it very hard to sleep and we're sick of cleaning up. So we let somebody else do the work for us. Speaking of, we just wasted another like 20 minutes here. So oops, I blame the whales. Dang it. Yeah, it was so cool. Bye. I love you. So we did decide to go off grid tonight after all, but we're kind of cheating. We're actually at a Sun Outdoors and we're in one of their primitive sites. So we don't have any electricity, but still off grid. And because of my little whoopsie daisy on our first night of camping, we now know that we don't need much battery to survive the night. I think we're down to 40% or so, but it's going to be totally fine. And we don't have to use the stove because we ordered in. Yes, because it is already 915. So if I were cooking, we wouldn't be eating till like 10 o'clock. It is actually our final night in here. We fly out of the area tomorrow. So after this, we got to do a little packing. It's not going to be a fun night, but this is going to make it all that much better. Well, our time with our awesome, adorable little camper van is coming to an end. I know for once, I'm almost sad to return a Volkswagen van. Almost sad being the key word there. So the question is, could we see ourselves living full time in a rig like this? Well, definitely much more likely than the old school like 70s VWs because having everything just basically be brand new, super solid feeling. You're not worrying about the vehicle like there's no weird smells. There's no engine breakdowns. It's dead silent. No, it's been wonderful. You guys, I have cruise control. I can go whatever speed is necessary. It has air conditioning, heating. It has everything. Every rate, every amenity you could possibly imagine. Like it's even cooling my butt right now. Being electric. You guys saw we had a little bit of issues here and there with the range. I think that would be a challenge if you were trying to live in this full time, because the idea is that you're going to get out into nature. And a lot of those spots you'd like to go to are in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes you have to drive an hour there and an hour back, which this thing can do. But you do have to plan to make sure you have a charging station at the beginning and the end of that journey. Yeah, if you were really going off grid, I think you need a bigger battery bank. Yeah, for the back. We only used about 30% of the onboard battery last night. So you could definitely go off grid for a night or two. I don't think you'd have much of a problem. And I don't know if we mentioned it, but the tanks back there are only three gallons each. So I would probably opt to put a bigger tank in there if I was going to be spending any more time in this thing other than just a weekend. Yeah, but for a weekend, it's perfect. I mean, the fridge is surprisingly huge. You can put a bunch of stuff in there. As you can see, you can cook all kinds of meals. The bed, I would probably opt to sleep upstairs in the pop top. That bed is definitely bigger than the one down below. You just got to do some acrobatics to get up there. But you got options. But I will say they've done an incredible job maximizing the space in here. There's tons of functionality in all this kit that they built in back there. But nothing changes the fact that it is a very tiny, small space, no matter how many amenities it has. So I think the final verdict, three days, maybe a week is the max we could last in here. I mean, we did three days and we're pretty much done, not with the vehicle itself, but with the small space. Yeah, but that's going to do it. We're going to head to the airport, off to other adventures. You just have to stay tuned to see what we get into. Oh, yeah, I think we're going to a beach next. Well, from this kind of beach to a tropical beach, I'll say that. Goodbye, adventurers. We'll see you on the road.