ok, now I'll respond to me (I may be Schizophrenic, but we'll always have myself) After the last few days I've learned that the new Sprinter's egr valve while improved , is still not good for extended idling, after overnight idling and then driving away the white smoke gets bad, then in our case there was a loss of power that required us to pull over and shut the van off , wait, then restart. These problems seem to be fixed by increasing the idle, the dealer told me when I bought it that they didn't think it was necassary to add the high idle feature as the problem was fixed, so I kept my 800 bucks only to go into a panic when the van would only go 65 after idling overnight. EO has saved the day as always, it took some research but I found a past post that said to cut a dowl rod to exactly 9 1/2 inches, notch one end to fit over the lip of the lower dash above the gas pedal, then use the other end to hold the pedal down, this put my idle at a little over 1000 rpm and seems to have fixed the whole issue. Cost, not a thing actually, I found a piece of dowel at home and made this idle stick in 10 minutes, saving 800 bucks. After I said in a past post that we were getting the new sprinter with the sleeper (Caldwell Dodge, Mike Walker has been great)several people wrote me asking me to update them after we got the van, I can honestly say that its awsome (now) and I highly recommend the sprinter w/sleeper as far as comfort and ease of use, as for the mechanical side its too soon to tell, we know these are German built and not really made for extended idling as I'm told they don't do that in Germany, the idle stick has been alleged by many to have fixed the problem, only time will tell. I'll say this, we've (my wife and I) been running team in straight trucks for a couple of years, the whole time wanting to try the cargo van deal but afraid to because of the naysayers who keep saying there are no miles in it. We were averaging about 3000 miles a week in a straight truck with panther, getting 8 mpg. In our first 5 days in a van we've ran 2600 miles at 22 mpg and we're pretty sure we'll get another load before the full 7 day week is over, our payments are lower and the fuel overhead is lower, we're some happy expeditors so far, I know things can and will change from time to time, but this feels right.
