The term “overland” is so sizzling hot right now that seemingly every RV builder is trying to do something to capture that rugged individualist, or at least the people who want to feel like rugged individualists. Many overland builds are light on the actual building and merely involve slapping some off-road tires on a stick-built trailer, while others are legitimately beefy mobile sleeping spaces. Then there are expedition vehicles like the $696,377 Storyteller GXV Epic. This thing boggles the mind from its 60mm thick walls to a fuel tank so huge the darned thing can drive from Chicago to Las Vegas without stopping. Yet, it might not be the best choice for overlanding, anyway.
One of my favorite parts about the RV industry is that there’s a little something for everyone. Do you want something that’s best described as “better than a tent?” Perfect, a pop-up camper might be your jam. Do you want something akin to hitching a Holiday Inn to the back of your Silverado? Most travel trailers will more or less handle that. If you have piles of cash, you can buy giant Class A buses for millions of dollars or just have some guys convert a semi-truck into a giant mobile home. The possibilities are endless.
Then you arrive at the overlanding RV. These range from little more than a utility trailer with a tent on top to this, the gigantic expedition RV. These things cost more than pretty darn nice houses, but then again, you could live a comfortable life in something like the Storyteller GXV Epic.
Born From The Pandemic
Storyteller Overland was founded in November 2018 by Jeffrey Hunter, Lee Conn, and Andrew Cooley. According to the publication Birmingham Lifestyle, the story began with Hunter, who had experience in the custom vehicle industry, but he felt something was missing. Hunter wanted more than just to make money by building vehicles for affluent clients. He wanted to cultivate a community.
Soon, Hunter would meet Lee Conn, a man who was at first a customer looking for a custom Mercedes-Benz Sprinter. Hunter and Conn began dreaming about different ideas and decided to join forces. As the two began forming their business, they met Andrew Cooley a man with experience in upping profits in businesses. Cooley was on board with Hunter’s vision and all three guys joined forces to create something different. According to Birmingham Lifestyle, this was Hunter’s vision:
That vision, according to the three founders, was not just creating a custom camping van that exceeded expectations, but also harnessing and growing the network of people who share a love for the open road. They knew happy travelers were already encountering each other along the way, having conversations and making memories — and had been for years. The mission of Storyteller would be to raise awareness that the network exists and to create goodwill across the entire United States.
In short, Storyteller is supposed to be both a company and a community. The founders of Storyteller Overland coincidentally had perfect timing. They decided to build custom camper vans because they believed that segment of the market was underserved at the time. In 2019, the company displayed the first two examples of its campers, which were based on a Ford Transit and a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter.
This decision to go all-in on camper vans paid off. Americans changed their habits when the pandemic hit. Many of those who would have otherwise purchased a ticket on a cruise or went to a resort now wanted to hit the road. A lot of those same people didn’t want a giant Class A or even a smaller Class C coach, but something compact. RV sales rocketed during the pandemic and suddenly, vans were extremely popular. This was great news for a startup like Storyteller.
Since then, Storyteller has built a lineup of different campervans. But, how does a company focused entirely on vans get into expedition vehicles? Storyteller has grown large enough that it has gobbled up other brands. It picked up Global Expedition Vehicles (GXV) in 2021 and Taxa Outdoors in 2024. So, now Storyteller has a bunch of different overland-style rigs under one umbrella brand.
The GXV Epic
When Michael Van Pelt founded GXV and the company built its first expedition vehicle in 2006, the whole idea was to create giant, self-contained vehicles that could survive anything the world dished out. GXVs are supposed to be as well equipped as an ocean-going vessel and as durable as perhaps a Dakar truck.
Outside of the 2024 Thor Dealer Open House sat a new GXV Epic. This motorhome was unveiled back in May and has been on the RV show circuit since. Storyteller says the mission of the GXV Epic is:
“The EPIC is designed to outlast the elements, offering everything you need to venture beyond the frontier in comfortable luxury, completely self-sustained and off-grid.”
The GXV Epic starts life as a Kenworth K-370, a Class 7 cabover truck (GVWR of 32,000 pounds) that is usually found with a dry van body on its frame. Power comes from a Paccar PX-7 (a derivative of the Cummins 6.7-liter six) making 260 HP and 660 lb-ft of torque. That’s backed by an Allison 3500 six-speed automatic and the power gets delivered to all four wheels through a GXV-exclusive 4×4 system. The truck features a front and rear locker operated by air, a low-range gearbox, and a 50:1 crawl ratio.
Storyteller Overland says that this drivetrain combined with a 200-gallon fuel tank should equal 1,800 miles of driving range. That equates to 9 mpg, which isn’t bad for a vehicle of this size, weight, and total lack of aero. Storyteller says this beastly truck has 11.5 inches of ground clearance, a 32.5-degree approach angle, a 25.5-degree breakover angle, and an 18.46-degree departure angle. The company also boasts about the truck’s 194-inch wheelbase as being shorter than a “standard four-door truck.”
I took a tour of the GXV Epic in Indiana and one thing stuck out to me as being a particularly bad idea. The GXV Epic’s air brake canisters sit low to the ground. The truck has such good clearance elsewhere that I could see you clearing a rock up front just to have it take one of these bad boys out. In a way, I’m amused that such a such a huge machine, which rides on massive 44-inch tires, still has pretty low points to drag things on.
But it does appear to be pretty rugged. The truck has burly steel bumpers, King shocks, a 20,000-pound winch, 1980W of solar power, a 6 kW generator, a mini garage in the back, and of course, bedliner for paint. Storyteller even claims there’s an 18 kWh battery onboard and a marine-grade electrical system.
More of this is inside, where you step into a box with 60mm walls. Storyteller says these walls are so thick and have enough insulation them that your GXV Epic will be a true four-season RV. Everything in here is what you’d expect to get when spending six figures on an RV. There’s a full galley kitchen, a dinette that turns into a full bed, and a queen bed in the rear. There are also onboard laundry facilities so you can clean clothes while you’re in the middle of nowhere.
One thing that’s cool is that the RV can be heated in three different ways. You can heat the RV from the engine’s heat, electric heat from shore power, or a 65,600 BTU diesel hydronic system.
The interior quality is great! I’m not entirely sure we’re talking about $696,377 of materials here, but the interior is still better than most of the rigs across the street in the Thor display. I even love the teak in the bathroom.
It’s What, Again?
Things start getting weird once you start digging into the details. Let’s start with the bathroom (above). For some inexplicable reason, Storyteller Overland says: “[T]he EPIC boasts the largest bathroom in any home on wheels, ever.” But this just isn’t true? Yes, the Epic has a spacious bathroom, but anyone calling it the largest bathroom ever has never toured a multi-million dollar Prevost. Unless maybe Storyteller doesn’t consider one of those a “home on wheels?” I don’t quite understand that verifiably untrue claim.
Moving on from that, you’ll then check out the water capacities. Alright, 120 gallons for fresh water is great! But hold up, the gray tank is only 40 gallons? Where’s the rest of the water supposed to go? It’s not going into a black tank, because the RV doesn’t have one. Oh yeah, the toilet has its own tank that’s just 4.75 gallons.
Then we get to, well, the size of the thing. I love big trucks. I’m the kind of person who likes to own vehicles that are both as large and as small as possible. Storyteller markets the GXV Epic as being “truly unstoppable,” but I’m not so sure about that. A GXV Epic would have fit on exactly zero of the trails I drove down with the Mammoth Overland ELE. This thing is simply too big for many fire roads, let alone technical trails. A more accurate statement would be “truly unstoppable, so long as you have a wide open space.”
I also want to remind you of this truck’s mission. Storyteller says it’s supposed to “conquer any terrain with ease” and it’s the “ultimate Epic Overlanding Vehicle.”
This is the kind of truck you’re supposed to spend days in exploring remote areas of the world where your only connection to civilization is a satellite dish, yet the toilet has the same puny capacity as a $9,000 teardrop you tow behind a motorcycle.
To be clear, I don’t mean to specifically pick on Storyteller Overland here, but rather how seemingly every expedition vehicle builder advertises these things. They’re always marketed as planet-conquering machines, but then they have obvious oddities that prevent them from cashing that check as written.
With all of that being said, the GXV Epic is a pretty cool truck. I bet driving this thing is a ton of fun and you’d get questions everywhere you went. Tanks aside, it also seems pretty well equipped, which it probably should because, at $696,377, this probably costs more than your home. Or, it might just be your home. I just wish the marketing was maybe a notch or three less aggressive.
(Images: Author, unless otherwise noted.)
I think if I were forced to live in Florida for some reason, I would like to have something like this instead of a traditional house. Hurricane-of-the-week on the way? Unplug and head out of town. With the onboard battery, solar panels, and generator you could park just about anywhere and maintain a level of comfort without trying to find a hotel. There’s still the water situation, of course, but one thing at a time.
In fact, I suspect something like this could be made less expensive if it ditched all (or most of) the serious off-road-oriented goodies and focused on being a bug-out vehicle.
Can’t wait to see some spoiled, trust-fund 22 year old instagram influencer going out and seeing all the “Amazing” places out there and taking posed photos in front of one of these with their tag-along film crew that stays in the hotel up the road.
This is just what you need in Vegas. So much better than flying there and staying in a nice hotel. /s
If you ever get the chance, watch the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man. It tells the story of a guy who survives a bear attack and becomes driven to the point of obsession about confronting the bear again, and all the hubris associated with that. Central to the plot is the ever-evolving bear-proof suit he’s designing and testing. I won’t give away the ending, but let’s just say it’s never really about the suit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Man
This truck is that suit.
You’re thinking of Project Grizzly and Troy Hurtubise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Grizzly_(film)
Grizzly Man is a fantastic Hertzog film about a bear conservationist who was just as nutty and lost to the bears in the end.
Maybe I don’t understand overlanding but where is that behemoth supposed to actually go? I could see maybe out west it might work if the trails are fairly easy. Here in the upper midwest it is unlikely that thing could go down anything more rustic than a gravel road.
From the specs it is longer and taller than my Class A, not sure about width, though. I know mine barely fits going through state park campgrounds. Maybe if this thing is narrower than it looks? It’s also got to weigh a solid metric shit-ton more than mine (10k loaded).
I like that it’s not made from paper mache and spit like a normal RV is, though. Their off-grid electrical seems pretty good at first glance, too.
The legitimate use case for something like this is so razer thin that it’s overkill for 99.9999999% of cases. That said, If I was going to go live out in the Australian Outback, or rural Africa, or somewhere similar, then this would be a great choice.
Anyways, can’t wait to see these parked in the RV parking of California state parks having never set a wheel off the tarmac (except when the owner misjudged the turning radius while backing into a slip with power hookups)
The fact that anyone with enough money can go out an buy and operate something like this on a basic drivers license is absolutely insane. I get the CVWR is below the 26k required for a CDL, but this is fundamentally a commercial vehicle. It seems genuinely unwise to unleash a mammoth with air brakes that gets driven 3 times a year onto the road with someone who will likely never even consider looking to see if the braking system components are even there, much less checking functionality. Not to mention these companies constantly overstate the off road capability of these trucks to their buyer base which typically has minimal experience in harsh terrain.
That’s less than the current median for a house here in Seattle. Somehow I think I’ll still pass on getting one of these RVs, though.
lol, yeah. That gets you a modest starter/fixer in the Seattle area.
Lee Con, a man…
I loled right there.