Storyteller Overland is an Alabama-based company best known for high-end, high-dollar go-anywhere RVs, which it builds out of all-wheel-drive Sprinter vans, giant Ram pickups, and even huge Kenworth trucks. (Our testing director Eric Tingwall and his family recently camped in the middle of nowhere in a $500,000 Storyteller GXV Hilt.) Now Storyteller has created a mini-me overlanding RV, the $198,999 Grand Bohemian. It’s an Ineos Grenadier re-equipped to transport, feed, and sleep up to three. Naturally, the assignment for Storyteller’s smallest RV went to MotorTrend’s shortest writer.
Kudos to Storyteller for picking the right vehicle as a basis. The Ineos Grenadier, for anyone unfamiliar, is a Land Rover Defender homage known for its go-anywhere attitude and funky non-self-centering steering. (Yes, yes, they somewhat fixed that for 2026. The Grand Bohemian we drove was a prototype based on an older chassis, but production RVs will be based on the new version.)
Interior mods start with stripping out the back seat. Most of the resulting space is taken up by a full-width storage compartment, topped by a cushion that forms the short side of an L-shaped couch. If you’re traveling as a party of three, the person who drew the short straw—or the short genes—presumably rides back here, sans seatbelt and reclined to deal with the scant headroom.
Somewhere underneath the couch is the 10.5-gallon water tank (I heard it sloshing as I drove) and its associated plumbing. Also hidden under floor and cabinetry: a four-gallon gray water tank for wastewater from the sink, water pump, furnace and hot-water heater, 5.4-kWh lithium-ion battery, and a 200-watt inverter. There’s a 30-amp, 110-volt connection for shore power, but the GB doesn’t use much electricity. The battery charges off a 400-watt solar panel on the roof or the engine’s alternator, and an hour of driving is enough to top off the battery.
Access to the living quarters is through the Grenadier’s split back door. Open it, and you’ll see the long end of the couch on the right and a cabinet on the left, home to the sink and several storage drawers, including a massive one that houses the 21-quart electric refrigerator. There’s not much headroom, though; if you want to spend time standing back there, you’ll need to raise the Grand Bohemian’s pop-up rooftop tent.
To deploy the tent, one unclips a pair of latches at rear and gives the tent cover a mighty shove upward—and I do mean mighty, as it takes a lot of muscle to get it started before the gas struts take over. Once the top is popped, two hinged roof panels, arranged fore and aft with a roughly 70/30 split, push upward to provide headroom in what is now the galley. That said, I soon learned that most tasks are best accomplished sitting down. (In the Grand Bohemian, that is, not in general.) Stowing the tent is a similarly burly task; it took all my weight on the supplied straps to overcome the struts when I broke camp.
Cooking? Yep, that’s covered, or rather uncovered, since it’s an outdoor kitchen. A swing-out awning that covers the driver’s side and rear of the Grand Bohemian allows sautéing in a storm. With the back doors open, a wooden prep tray swings down from the rear face of the galley cabinet, while a metal tray (with its own slide-out wooden cutting board) drops from the back door. On the latter you set an included single-burner induction cooker, which plugs into an outlet under the bench.
What happens at the other end of your digestive tract? The Grand Bohemian comes with what is known as a composting toilet, which is basically a plastic box with an impressive-looking array of seats, bags, and chemical neutralizers. (Unaccustomed as I am to high-end RVs, it struck me as not much different than pooping in a bucket, and I elected to seek out other arrangements when the time came to, er, powder my nose.)
Ready for bed? Pull down the forward roof panel (that’s the 70 percent side) and hoist yourself up. Shorter folks like me will be able to sleep on this one panel, but for more room, you can lower the aft panel, as well; just be sure not to let the strap that raises it drop down, or the only way to free yourself from the tent is to pry the panel up with your fingers. (Storyteller might want to rethink that, in case of an emergency where occupants need to exit in a hurry.)
All good until you realize you forgot to shut the back doors, which can only be closed from the ground floor. Incidentally, the Grenadier requires that the small left-side door be opened before the main right-side door will unlatch, which is annoying, but we imagine Ineos didn’t have RVs in mind when it designed the Grenadier.
I mentioned the Grand Bohemian claims to sleep up to three. Two can fit easily (and platonically, if you like) in the rooftop tent. For the third bed, a shelf slides out from under the couch cushion, and the Velcro-attached backrest forms the second half of the extra bed—the only problem being that the folks in the rooftop tent can’t get out without stepping on whoever is sleeping downstairs.
For my test drive—er, test sleep—I headed up to a BLM off-road and camping site near Mojave. A showroom-stock Grenadier isn’t the most pleasant road-tripper, so Storyteller has outfitted the Grand Bohemian with an Evictus prerunner suspension that it says provides a more compliant ride and better crosswind stability. (The Evictus decal on the back window could go, though; this is a vehicle one is supposed to live in, at least temporarily, and yet every time I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw “EVICT US.”) Storyteller also fits bigger wheels and more aggressive tires, along with a bumper guard, a winch, and a compressor to refill aired-down tires.
I arrived at the campsite and quickly realized that the ratio of snakes to rangers was approximately infinity to zero, so I really appreciated the bright yellow lights that illuminated the area around the rig. After crawling around some rocks to please the camera and video crews, I used the induction burner to cook up some pretty ace smashburgers, which would not have been anywhere near as ace had photographer Darren Martin not been there to walk me through the process.
As night fell, the video and photo guys left me to the wildlife. The temperature was dropping, so I ran the gasoline-fired furnace while washing the dishes in lovely hot water. The lack of space inside the Grand Bohemian was the biggest issue; for example, any time I wanted to get something out of the fridge, I had to scootch to the forward end of the couch, and before I could do the dishes, all my clothes—except those I was wearing, of course—had to go to the front seat or the bed. The Grand Bohemian turns camping into a game of Tetris.
Storyteller fits the Grand Bohemian with LED interior lights that go white or red, the latter to preserve one’s night vision. (The red is also great mood lighting for watching submarine movies on your tablet.) That was awesome, because when I climbed up into bed and opened all three of the tent’s massive windows, the view was exquisite. And the sky—my god, it’s full of stars!
I found the mattress a little thin for my taste, and the Grand Bohemian’s bed doesn’t conform to the size of a standard air mattress, so I fortified my bedding with a couple extra blankets, (which, of course, meant more stuff to stuff into the Storyteller’s cramped confines when I wasn’t sleeping). The wind picked up something fierce in the night, and while sleeping up so high emphasized the swaying motion, I found it quite comforting.
Morning greeted me with an epic view from the rooftop tent’s three big windows. I eyeballed the chemical toilet—journalistic thoroughness dictates I should at least try the thing—but elected to follow the lead of the coyotes for my morning ablutions, and, shall we say, table the bigger business until I could return to more civilized plumbing arrangements. I headed down the hill to meet up with our test crew at the proving grounds, where I used the Grand Bohemian’s kitchen to cook cinnamon French toast for the crew (and no help needed from Martin this time, thank you very much).
I was genuinely impressed by how much living Storyteller packed into the small space of an Ineos Grenadier. I was able to comfortably cook, clean, sleep, and chill in and around its confines, and I could have even showered using an outdoor attachment had I been willing to bare all to the snakes and coyotes. And yes, Storyteller provides for elimination—that diabolical toilet is included in the price—though one would think a $200,000 RV could provide better bathroom arrangements than those offered to medieval prisoners.
The problem with the Grand Bohemian is that it’s just too darn cramped if you’re going to spend any large amount of time inside it. Even if you leave the toilet home, storage space is at a premium. It felt like every task was preceded by a need to move stuff out of the way. And while a Grenadier will no doubt go as far off-road as one wants, with only 10.5 gallons of fresh water, how long can you stay away? The Grand Bohemian’s 23.7-gallon fuel tank and 12–15-mpg fuel economy—plus the furnace and hot water heater, which consumes a gallon of gas every eight hours—are also limiting factors. And while I keep coming back to that so-called toilet, largely for its entertainment value, we must seriously consider the pack-in-pack-out ethos. For $200,000, do you really want to drive around with your own droppings?
If overlanding is your goal, spending the same money on a van-based camper would get you more living space and less frustration, and as our yearlong Mercedes Sprinter AWD taught us, these vans will go further off road than you might expect. (Or you could spend even more money and add an off-road trailer to haul gear, we suppose.) The Grand Bohemian is a really cool idea, and it proves that an SUV can be a tiny camper. It doesn’t prove that it should, except perhaps for those who pack extremely light.
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