huh? I lived in a subaru outback in the forest for some time. I bought the car for $1500. It lasted ~6 months, I spent a few hundred registering and bare-min

huh? I lived in a subaru outback in the forest for some time. I bought the car for $1500. It lasted ~6 months, I spent a few hundred registering and bare-minimum insuring it and when it died I called a junkyard and they hauled it away and gave me $100. It's not like it cost anything to park it in national forest. When I was homeless in North Dakota I met a guy with a Ford E350 ho bought for about the same price. He was handier than I was and as far as I can tell he could keep it running indefinitely from junkyard parts for almost nothing. The grift is overselling what goes into the van, or a new and overbuilt van. The bigger issue is van-life dumps your externalities on everyone else -- you aren't paying property taxes but you probably still avail yourself of local public services and utilities as part of the cheap living. It doesn't scale.