AutoYurt: The Improved Vanlife

You know those van life people with the giant expensive Sprinter vans and the furniture and plumbing that's a hassle to maintain and the whole thing costed a gazillion dollars to build and they hate it? I have the solution, and I'm calling it AutoYurt.

Much smaller van. No furniture. You sleep on the floor in a big pile of blankets because it's way cozier than a bed. You don't need to put in ceiling lights and lightswitches, natural light is more than enough to fully illuminate a van because of how small it is. If you need light at night time, install a hook in the ceiling for a simple lantern. Fully illuminates the joint, super efficient, cozy.

As prior stated, there's no reason to install plumbing systems, store your drinking water in a 5 gallon cooler with a spigot like you see football players using. And showers? Get one of those camping showers you leave in the sun to heat up, hang it from the roof rack, set up some kind of curtain system, and bam. A warm shower with privacy for easy and cheap, without the complicated work to set up and without the electrical use of a pump and heater. Less holes to cut in your vehicle, less work to get the van built out, easy.

Now comes time for the kitchen. Van people always have super expensive yet super tiny fridges and tiny cabinets and cupboards that never hold all the food they need and they go to the store seemingly every day because of how stupidly inefficient all of the parts of their dumb setup are. Plus with how electricity heavy their induction burners are, yet how little they make use of it by cooking bland stuff with no spices (They hardly ever even build a spice rack!), we need to find a solution. There are many ways you can go about this, but my plan is to use a mess kit from the surplus store. I'm not going to be living in my van full time, so I have a lot more liberty in how I tackle some problems. Plus maybe a cooler of some sort for any cold items, and of course some kind of box so the burner isn't sitting directly on the grandma-styled shag carpet.

All of the above simplifications and changes make the electrical need much less severe. I imagine I'll spend most of my indoor time with the van playing my Nintendo Switch or using a laptop, plus whatever power draw is used by the MaxxAir fan I'm most certainly implementing so I don't die, so I can get away with a much smaller battery and solar system. And the wiring will be very simple because I'm not using fixed lighting. Also no need for a heater in that small a space, body heat and blankets can work their magic.

The above setup is much more cost efficient, easier to build, faster to build, less work to maintain, and more comfortable to be in. The name, AutoYurt, comes from how much closer it is to the sort of setup the Mongols roaming the steppes would use. A shelter, ground to sleep on, a fire to cook around. All of the basic needs are met, plus you've got electricity and you're in an automobile.
People going into van life say they're going to live the simple life, right before they try to cram convenience into a moving vehicle that just makes it more of a hassle than it's worth. If you're going to be a nomad, embrace what they did well and how they did it. There are ways to add convenience that don't end up making more chores for yourself.
The highly commercialized, "aesthetic" van life you see with the whitest of white girls on Instagram, all full of beige, is hardly a life to live. And those people are probably faking it, like how mukbangers spit out most of the bites they take. That's why those videos are full of cuts and edits. Is it impressive that they are able to make such use of their limited space? Hell yeah! But they're not using it well.

Now that we've discussed the advantages of AutoYurt in terms of simplicity, let's go on to the efficiency advantages.
Because there's no permanent furniture in an AutoYurt, you can much more easily use it for transporting cargo. The small size and lack of constant noise from plumbing and heaters and fridges makes stealth camping an actual possibility. Especially with magnetic signwriting on it that makes it look like a construction or HVAC company van and a roofrack to make the fan and (if applicable) solar panel less visible, you're much less likely to run into trouble when camping outside a Walmart. And you know those kitchens that companies like Contour make where you can use them both from the inside and outside? My whole idea with the small camping stoves and flameless heaters like in MREs is easy to operate with the cooking setup sitting by the back door on a box that you can also use as a tv stand or a desk for your laptop while you're sitting on the floor. Is this something straight out of r/malelivingspaces? Hell yeah, but it's how humans have lived for millennia. Simple and efficient. It's the simple life that people say they want to live when they start van life, but never actually follow through.