Have they followed the rest of the RV market, and inflated their pries, so they can give every customer 30% off? That seems like the minimum mark-down these days, and some motorhomes closing in on year-end can be marked down closer to 45%!!!
Ha! Are you kidding? You think SMB is going to change their 30 year old way of building cabinets? Not a chance.
That said, they do hold together impressively well with L-brackets. I use them in my SMB clone cabinet builds but I use this stuff called real wood. It's readily available and much more robust. So common it grows on trees. I can't believe they haven't tried it.
I look at the new SMB prices and think how a nice Prevost bus could be bought for the same money not long ago.
Good to hear that the hold up. I would think that the vibration of on/off road use would loosen the screws, especially if the were in MDF.
The upside of this is if you want the off road capability of an E-series instead of a sprinter, you have that option. On the other hand, if you want an on-road machine, you can get a sprinter. The prices don't surprise me. Build it and someone will buy it.
From what I've seen and read, all SMB are built-to-order (and there's a waiting list), so my guess is the price basically is what it is. The green van is a prototype with a lot of bells and whistle options so the MSRP likely reflects that. SMB has never been particularly vague about pricing. When I did a rough Sprinter build estimate based on the website info, the total came to about $150K. And that was before even thinking about a lot of the special stuff I would like to have.
Hence why I bought a used van (my avatar pic) and plan to do a DIY build over time (if I'm ever home again long enough...) and spend the majority of my time on this forum in the "home build" section. And for what I want to do, 4WD is not really high on the priorities. In many ways, the added height would be a liability.