VIDEO: We Get Jiggly Off-Road with the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 4×4

By Manuel Carrillo III - June 3, 2016

My favorite thing about the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 4×4 Crew Van is that it’s different. If you drive one of these, you’re proudly displaying that you’re an outside-the-box thinker by driving inside one of the biggest boxes ever to come off a production line.

The Sprinter 4×4 is so different from anything else on the road, pedestrians and other motorists take notice. In supercar-saturated Los Angeles, had I been driving a Mercedes-AMG GT S, maybe a handful of people would have batted an eye, but this big red van I lovingly named “Clifford” attracted a bushel of eyeballs.

This is a recreational vehicle you can drive to work every day, so long as you don’t have to park in a low-roofed structure. Our Sprinter wasn’t even the High Roof model, but still, this thing is imposing, and remains taller than most parking structures will allow.

Whether you’re driving in the city or on trails like you’ll see in the video, you’ll feel like a star behind the wheel of a Sprinter 4×4. It’s like Mercedes-Benz took some of the magic DNA of the G-Wagen, spliced it with the Sprinter, and the end result is amazing.

Now that there’s a four-wheel-drive Sprinter on sale in the U.S., if Mercedes were to cancel the G-Wagen tomorrow, I wouldn’t be that depressed. Don’t get me wrong, I love the G-Class, but the Sprinter 4×4 is so good, it almost takes the place of the iconic Geländewagen.

For a long time I’ve been saying the G-Class is the coolest Mercedes-Benz on sale today, but the new four-wheel-drive Sprinter comes in at a close second with about 90 percent of the G-Wagen’s cool factor. When you consider our Sprinter tester retails in the mid-$50,000 range — less than half the price of the cheapest ($119,900) G-Class SUV, the Sprinter becomes even more appealing.

Watch how this American-built 4×4 beast performs off-road, and watch me gush over it like a young boy playing with his big red dog.