I was just looking at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmbF0akhQ-w
“40+ Truck Campers, Bedracks & Truck Caps of Overland Expo West '24”
which shows a lot of stuff aimed at people who choose to camp and/or live in off-road and overland trucks - mostly pick-up trucks - instead of the vans this forum is mostly aimed at.
Most of the stuff shown is too high end for this community, because it has to be built tough for overland use. They have some over-the-cab shells that more or less turn a truck into a compact footprint RV. Some of them cost over $100,000 (USD). I can’t really imagine buying one - that’s a lot of stealable vehicle. They also have heavy duty and modular rack systems (bed racks).
My own interest at this point isn’t in living in a van. I am more interested in (low end) adventure travel, which may include vehicle camping. But there is a lot of overlap between these communities, and some of the ideas make sense for all of them.
E.g.,
- Slide out storage solutions. If you sleep inside a relatively small vehicle, it makes sense to be able to slide out your storage bins.
- Rear top and side mounted Slide out gear racks. You have to open the back door to slide these out from inside, but it gives you easy access to gear. They also have bolt on storage boxes that mount only on the outside, to take advantage of the fact that the top levels of many modern vehicles stick out less than the bottom. While I would much prefer a boxy vehicle that didn’t have that fact, so there was more storage inside, sometimes you have to go with what is available. They also have bolt on traction boards, to help you get unstuck from mud or snow or ice - useful to the off-road and overland community than ordinary vanlifers, but I’ve used the somewhat less beefy traction mats to get unstuck from a dirt parking lot after it rained.
- One of the biggest advantages of a van over a pickup truck is that, if it does not have a center console, you can easily walk directly between the front and back of the truck. I used to have a VW camper van that I could easily do that in, and I loved it. Especially for winter camping when I didn’t want to go outdoors in the snow. On pickups with caps, you usually have to walk outside, or crawl through sliding windows at the back of the cab and the front of the cap - hard for a larger or less spry person. But on some over-the-cab shells, you can climb up and down through something like a sunroof in the front section and the cap in the rear section, through a pop-up or permanent camping area. The sunroofs or pop-up to also give you easy access to a tent which can be set up on top of the shell. (Incidentally, car camping in my car, I was recently very glad I didn’t have to set up a tent. It rained heavily, and my campsite completely flooded with water, and turned into mud. I was also glad I have AWD, because driving in mud can be tricky.)
- There are some very light weight shells - pop-ups and even inflatable shells - that you can easily lift (and bolt) on and off of your pickup without an elaborate winch system.
- Cassette toilets. You can wheel them to a dump site, or just to dump in an ordinary toilet if no dump site is convenient. They are typically sealed so as not to release odor into the vehicle. I suppose a lot of vanlifers and people who camp in vans have already discovered this, but I didn’t know they existed.