Why We Use Toyota Siennas

Since we started Delifurry in 2021, we have gone through every type of vehicle you could use for pet transport. We have used big Sprinter vans, Dodge caravans, and even Priuses in the past. We discovered a few things along the way.

1) The Sprinter van was too expensive to run and needed to have roughly 10 dogs in it at one time to be sustainable. This is due to the fact that a proper new Sprinter setup is roughly $100,000 and fuel and maintenance costs are much more expensive than non Mercedes vehicles. 10 dogs is way more passengers aboard at one time than we would like to have for one driver. The service level of transport deteriorates when there are this many dogs aboard. The only way to increase your service would be to utilize team drivers. We always want to be the best service in the business. That is just impossible when you have to have at least 10 dogs aboard at one time in order to maintain your business. Also, we had several AC issues and spent $60,000 in a two-year period just maintaining and fixing vehicle issues. Although it looks nice, the Sprinter setup is just not ideal

2) The Dodge Grand Caravan was unreliable. We went through 5 transmissions between 2 vans in two years. The vans are inexpensive to buy, but they are not the best vehicle service wise as they will stop working at 120,000 miles. We can drive 20,000 miles in one month in a van. It just will not work out in the long run as you can only use them for a brief period of time before you breakdown on the side of the road and then have to resell them for pennies of what you bought them for.

3) The Prius was perfect. It was a hybrid, so it got good gas mileage and works off electric battery at night when we are stopped and sleeping. This lets us keep AC on at night but It also has a CVT (continuous variable speed transmission) which means that it does not have 6 gears, but just one big gear that never faulters. We have put many miles on our Prius and never once had a transmission, engine, or AC issue prior to hitting 200,000 miles. Japanese cars really are the best for longevity. The only issue we had is that we could only fit 4 passengers into it at a time. So, in order for us to use the Prius we would have to raise our prices as 4 at a time is not quite enough for a scalable business model without being the highest end price wise.

This is where the Sienna comes into play. The Sienna combines the best features from the other vehicles. It has enough space to hold 6 crates, (the sweet spot for number of passengers aboard), letting us charge reasonable prices while being able to give each passenger a lot of attention along the way. It is essentially a Prius but with more room. So we get all of the good things that come with a hybrid, like amazing gas mileage, a continuous variable transmission that never breaks down, dual climate AC, and cheap vehicle repair costs. We currently have two Siennas as our fleet and will continue to add only Siennas as we keep building our business.