For Sale: 2010 Dodge Grand Caravan With Exposed Mack Truck Turbo
Just try to find a better street-side conversation starter for $2,600.
Car creativity truly has no bounds. With the amount of weird, wacky, and just bad cars that get listed on online marketplaces, you can always come across something unexpected in even the most cursory of searches. For today's case in point, someone was bored (inspired?) enough to build a 2010 Dodge Grand Caravan with a huge turbo sticking out of the hood.
The seller, Josh Sprung, claims to have built the van in just five days and chronicled his brief build process on his personal TikTok. Sprung says that he spent a maximum of three to four hours per day installing a turbocharger from a Mack truck onto the 3.3-liter V6 of the Grand Caravan, which is currently listed for sale on Facebook Marketplace for 3,500 CAD ($2,600). Even with the claimed speedrun-worthy build time, it has a complete list of supporting parts and some truly shadetree-level engineering.
Installing a turbo is a much harder task than folks give it credit for, and the two most difficult parts are plumbing and supporting the turbocharger. It’s often easy to find a cheap manifold to mount the turbo, but supplying it with oil might take creative machining work if there’s no suitable oil pressure feed and oil return feed. What Sprung did was mount a plastic tank behind the front bumper with some AN lines and an inline liquid pump to feed the turbo with oil, separate from the rest of the system. In principle, it technically works. But without an inline cooler and that cheap-looking tank, I suspect that heat failure may be in its future.
The rest of the turbo is supported with a custom exhaust manifold, a Tial external wastegate with screamer pipe, an adjustable blow-off valve, a manual boost controller, larger fuel injectors, a small air-to-air intercooler held on by zip ties, and a short exhaust that dumps right out of the turbo. There’s no mention of any engine management, so it's likely running off of a combination of the manual boost controller and some luck. The turbo is positively huge, and is probably oversized for the 3.3 liters of displacement.
Truthfully, what you're buying for the $2,600 asking price is a lowered, rusty Grand Caravan with a nice hood ornament. But if having a wild minivan floats your boat–and you live in Ontario, Canada–look no further.
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