I like to camp off-road. Not crazy rock crawling. E.G Dirt roads Ocala National Forest.
I pull a 4x8 camper with a Jeep renegade. Seems to work fine - but Jeep is uncomfortable (small) and with a 2.4l,
years ago, I had an Astro van with a lift kit- it was awesome. Putting a lift kit to Increase ground clearance might be a great balance- and I could bring my boat. Thoughts.
timm
I pull a 4x8 camper with a Jeep renegade. Seems to work fine - but Jeep is uncomfortable (small) and with a 2.4l,
All a Jeep Renegade is, is a rebadged Fiat. They don't have any relevance to the Jeep heritage. Lifting any car produces awkward angles with regard to the vehicle's drive axles. They're meant to more or less be straight. Fiat already makes junky cars, don't make it worse.
Jeep Wranglers can be lifted because they're rugged and they can take the awkward angles without breaking because they can rock crawl, etc. Rock crawling stresses the heck out of the car -it's a body-on-frame vehicle for a reason.
As @justin-shepherd said, with independent suspension you're going to run into problems with the drive axles being at too steep an angle or even too short, as well as suspension problems, when doing a lift. Guys who used to try lifting AMC Eagles ran into this problem with the independent front suspension and you really could not lift those more than an inch or so without having to do other modifications. (For extreme lifts guys used to install a Jeep front axle in place of the IFS, which as you might imagine required quite a bit of custom fabrication.)
Even on solid-axle Jeep Wranglers to do it right you have to take into account changes to suspension geometry. There tons of poorly-done Jeep lifts out there.
So which vehicle would you want to lift?
The Astros were built very truck-like so it was easy to do, but they're long gone.
These days minivans all have uni-body construction, which doesn't take well to modification (not without a lot of fab work). I've seen videos of it being done, but usually the body is plopped on top of an existing 4WD chassis.
Most offroad camping people just start with full-size vans. Ford e-series, Chevrolet Express/GMC Savana (which came with an AWD option from the factory 2003-2014), Mercedes Sprinter (factory 4WD is already lifted), etc. Lifting the suspension in those is trivial.
I was in the same boat as you around 10 years ago. My modified Astro camper was totalled, and I wanted another van. I opted for the 2013 GMC Savana AWD
