[hnthrow289570]

>when i lived in a van i spent twice as much per month repairing it as i had on renting my san francisco apartment

I just straight-up do not believe that dollar amount, lol

You had to have bought a terrible van and went to a terrible mechanic that was maliciously breaking things so you'd come back for that to happen. Vans are work horses and usually simple compared to regular consumer vehicles.

[kragen]

i did buy a terrible van (a vanagon from 01983 whose new owner has dubbed her calypso and made her into a wonderful van; you can see her at vanagon meetups), and although some professional mechanics did make some mistakes that broke things worse, i'm pretty sure they weren't malicious. more important is that i was a terrible mechanic and didn't know how to recognize or manage when things were going wrong

simple, it certainly was. it was so simple it didn't have water cooling or an oil temperature gauge, and having to rebuild the engine twice in three months (due mostly to overheating) was a big part of why it was so expensive

looking at current vans, though, it seems like it would be easy to spend fifty or a hundred thousand dollars on a van that was still too small to stand up in? so i'm not sure my choice was obviously bad; i just lacked the knowledge to use the old van effectively