Sprinter Van Phone Mount + Better CarPlay-Compatible Cable Situation

This is the stock look of my 2021 Sprinter van front console area:

If it’s not obvious, there’s no great place for a phone.

You’ve got the cup holders. Those are actually sorta workable, except for this boss battle: wired-only CarPlay. Wired CarPlay is not ideal, but that’s all this van has. I expect upgrading the whole system would be super expensive or potentially not even possible. Wired isn’t that bad. Wired CarPlay means more immediate response from actions and heck, it charges the phone too.

The problem is where that wire needs to go.

Up on the dashboard, there is this little cabinet thing with a door that opens up toward the windshield.

The ports are inside that cabinet, one of them being the one that has to be used for CarPlay. I’m sure the engineering thought is: plug it in, put your phone in the cabinet, shut the cabinet.

And that’s kinda fine. I don’t like fiddling with my phone while driving and CarPlay means I don’t really need to. But it’s still inconvenient. I often forget my phone up there when getting out of the van. If I do need to fiddle with my phone while parked or because something just absolutely has to be done on-device, it’s extra obnoxious to get my hands on it.

Step 1) Get the Cord out of the Cabinet

The answer is this little guy. A 3D printed part from NEXUS.

This slides into the cabinet and now the cabinet door doesn’t full close, it closes onto this, leaving little slits to bring the cords out from.

Step 2) Make the Weird Cubby Hole a Ball Mount

We’re ultimately going to move the phone to a mount, and then the question is where and how to mount it. Fortunately NEXUS is on the case again with a 1″ Ball Cubby Adapter.

That weird looking thing has nothing at all to do with your butt! It’s a clever device that fits perfectly into the useless weird cubby on the dashboard and provides this general purpose mount.

3) The Phone Mount

NEXUS doesn’t make a phone mount. I think on purpose? The Winnebago Revel has all these RAM^® Mounts all over. I had never heard of all this RAM^® stuff before. They make a bunch of mounts and stuff. To me, it all feels like a little step up from the home 3D printing feel of NEXUS. Not quite industrial, not quite hobbiest.

I was happy to stay in the kinda happy path ecosystem, so I bought the RAM^® Mount with the ball.

4) The Ball Connector

Astute readers will notice… now we have two balls. And, we have two ball mounts! Those two ball mounts won’t actually connect to each other. The magic of the ball mount is that you get this 360-degree(ish) adjustability. I don’t really need that much movability, but I’ll take it. The final bit here is to get the connector to get the two balls together.

Everything Together: A Nice Phone Mount!

And it doesn’t occupy any other useful space on the dashboard. Love it.

Order list:

NEXUS 1 Inch Ball Cubby Adapter	$44.95
NEXUS Cord Console	$39.95
RAM® Quick-Grip™ XL Phone Holder with Ball	$28.49
RAM® Double Socket Arm	$18.49
Total	$131.88

Kinda pricey for a phone mount. But I think it’s worth it. Its a slightly tricky situation and this solution is (1) long term in that it will fit any future phone (2) opens up the idea for mounting other things with ball mounts (3) allows for more cables out of the dashboard cabinet to come out smoothly.

There are other options! There are other/cheaper ones that clip onto the cubby mount that look OK. There are ones that mount into the cup holder nicely. Honestly this one is super minimal and clever.

And Now For My Debut as a Van Life Influencer

I’m not good at this, which is basically why I just blogged it instead of like TikTok’d it or whatever.