Good morning CaliforniaTime
Yes, it was a 2020 Sven on the Man TGE chassis.
1) The heating system is one of the reasons I have gone for the Sven Hedin again. It is far superior to all of the systems I have had before. I had the second battery and 200w of solar power. The solar kept the batteries topped up, however the weather was good and the heating was rarely used, but the hot water was always on.
2) I don’t recall there being an ‘auto dump’ frost protection system, nor did I have any issues, although there weren’t many cold nights. I have had issues with the Truma system in other vans, it is annoying.
3) I didn’t have the underfloor heating.
4) I had the 177bhp DSG. I covered approximately 7k miles in it whilst I owned it. General running around was no more than 25mpg. On longer journeys it would do 30mpg.
5) Design flaws:
- The bathroom door would catch on the work top - fixed with a rubber stop
- Needed to add some small rubber stops on other furniture e.g. the bed step to protect them
- The fridge was problematic initially, the compressor etc. is remotely mounted under the bed. This was fine once the problem was identified and fixed.
- You can leave the bed made up, but the pop out means you have to keep sorting the bottom sheet out
- No awning light option - easy to sort out
- The mixer taps are plastic, I assume for weight saving, however, the van fully laden with full tanks was only around 3400kg
- The bathroom door catch was a clever magnetic catch, never worked properly, I see Westfalia have changed the design.
- The rear door handle has a strap fitted so that the handle can be reached in an emergency, the strap needs to be perfectly positioned or it stops the top of the door latching.
Mostly niggles that were/are easy to fix.
