Introducing Limited Edition Beast MODEs

One thing we’ve noticed about the Storyteller Overland community over the years is that many of you love knowing your van’s backstory.

“My van is number seven off the production line!” “My van is the first ever Beast MODE!” “My van is one of only 17 Retro OG MODEs!” These are all statements we’ve heard you guys say loud and proud, and we love that you’re all interested in what makes your van one of a kind.

With that in mind, we did something special this year. We ordered a handful of red and black chassis from Mercedes-Benz – only 25 of each color – and designed some limited edition graphics to go with each color. We’re calling these vans the Vandit and the Van Torino.

Dillon Hollingsworth, Senior Industrial Designer at Storyteller Overland, said the design team started out with 50 or so different concepts for the limited edition vehicles.

“What seemed to stick was trying to tie some sort of graphic history to the unit, like iconic vehicles or things that are well-known in the automotive space,” he said. “We were looking at famous automobiles in Hollywood, and that’s how we landed on Starsky and Hutch’s Striped Tomato and then the Smokey and the Bandit Trans Am.”

Industrial Designer Renée Pu originally designed a smaller white stripe for the Van Torino, and Dillon encouraged her to go bigger through multiple design iterations.

“That red van itself, because of its color, is extremely flashy,” Dillon said. “So we didn’t want its stripe to be subtle, like it is in our Classic MODE or the Stealth. We wanted this van to be impactful when you see it, and we wanted to properly pay homage to the original Gran Torino design.”

He helped her to compose a larger stripe graphic. From there, they had to implement it and make it “real.”

“The curvature of the Mercedes Sprinter makes alignment of large graphics quite challenging, especially around our Flarespace Flares,” Dillon said. “With the help of our talented production team, we were able to pull it off and make an incredible looking unit.”

The end result is a van that’s as unique as you are. When we unveiled the Van Torino a couple of months ago, we had many people come by and say, “I just have to get a photo of this van!"

Dillon led the design of the bronze contour lines on the Vandit Beast.

“I noticed on the Bandit car, its graphic package had a lot of bronze highlights that follow the body line of that Firebird,” Dillon said. “I experimented with various ways I could use that same methodology with bronze vinyl to highlight the contour lines of the Mercedes Sprinter.”

Then Renee led the hood design. “Renee thought the black Mercedes unit needed to capture the essence of the Bandit car, but in our own unique way,” Dillon said. “So she reimagined the Beast logo to be front facing and embody the design language of the Firebird hood graphic.”

Once again, Dillon faced a challenge with bringing it to life and working with vendors’ printing constraints and production limitations.

“It’s one thing to mock up a graphic that looks cool – it’s another thing to implement it into production and to have it work with your vendors.”

The end result? Two new head-turning limited edition Beast MODEs. Each model has a plaque on the dash with its limited edition name – so Vandit or Van Torino – and which number it is out of 25.

So next time you meet someone in the Storyteller community, you can say, “My van is Number 9 of 25!”

Want to drive home in a Vandit or Van Torino Beast MODE? Fill out the form below and we will be in touch shortly!