This one is not a food truck. Carson Tahoe Health, the not for profit hospital system in Carson City, Nevada, asked us for a pair of Ford Transit high roof vans to do youth mental health outreach and to record podcasts out of. Same methods we use on every truck, completely different job.
Two of them went out together, identical except for a few details on the wrap. They belong to a fleet Carson Tahoe calls Vehicles of Change, built around four ways of reaching kids: food, play, art and sound. The ones in this video carry the Play It Forward wrap.
We do not only build kitchens. If you need a vehicle that turns up somewhere and does a job, we can build that too, and most of the organisations that need one do not know anybody builds them.
Walkthrough video
Why a hospital system buys a van
Nevada is last in the country for mental health. In Mental Health America’s 2025 State of Mental Health in America the state ranks 51st overall out of the fifty states and the District of Columbia, and 47th for access to care. As of 2023 roughly 87 percent of Nevadans lived in a federally designated mental health professional shortage area, with shortages in every county in the state.
In a state like that, a building does not solve the problem, because the problem is distance and the fact that people do not walk through the door. Carson Tahoe serves a quad county region from a 199 bed medical center in Carson City. A van gets the service to the school, the park and the community centre instead of waiting for the family to drive to Carson City.
The evidence behind mobile units is better than most people expect. Mobile Health Map, the research project run out of Harvard Medical School that tracks 1,372 mobile clinics, puts the return at about $13 for every $1 invested, and reports that 42 percent of the people served are uninsured. The vehicle is not a gimmick. It is the cheapest way to reach the people who are not being reached.
What a van like this has to do
Strip away the kitchen and the list of requirements is shorter but not softer. The van has to arrive somewhere with no power, run all day, be comfortable to sit in for hours, be quiet enough to record in, and be something a teenager will actually walk up to.
So the build is:
- A Ford Transit high roof, which gives about 81 inches of interior height. An adult stands up inside it. That sounds obvious until you have tried to run a session bent over in a low roof van.
- Rooftop solar panels, with a ladder on the back so somebody can actually get up and clean them. Panels nobody can reach stop making power by the second summer.
- A battery pack with a transfer box, so the van runs on battery and can be switched over to generator power when a day runs long.
- A TV, used for playing video rather than as a menu board.
- An awning, which is the difference between an event that carries on and an event that packs up when it rains.
- Speakers, tweeters, woofers and a microphone.
- A rubber floor, one inch of insulation and nine sixteenths plywood behind the walls.
- All wiring in conduit, every outlet on its own breaker, and trims between the panels and along the floor line.
- Cargo space for the kit that comes out at an event.
Power that does not drop out at two in the afternoon
On a food truck, losing power means losing a service. On an outreach van it means a room full of children watching an adult apologise. So the power system is the part of this build we spent the most time on.
Solar on a van roof is honest but modest. A 400 watt array in good sun returns somewhere around 1.2 to 1.6 kilowatt hours a day once you allow for panel angle, heat and conversion losses. That will carry lighting, a TV, a sound system and charging all day. It will not carry heating or cooking, which is why a van like this one has neither.
The battery is what makes the day work, and the transfer box is what makes the week work. Switch to generator when the battery is low or the day runs past dark, switch back when it is not needed. The vans we build this way usually carry an EcoFlow PRO class battery, which stores around 4 kilowatt hours per unit, delivers 4,000 watts continuously, and will take charge from solar, shore power or a generator at the same time as it is powering the van.
Every circuit has its own breaker and all of it is in conduit. That is not decoration either. The electrical article written for recreational vehicles requires cable passing through metal to be protected by bushings or grommets, cables secured within 12 inches of a box and supported at least every four and a half feet, and overcurrent protection sized per circuit rather than one lump breaker for everything. A vehicle shakes for its whole life. Wiring that is loose, unprotected where it crosses metal, or impossible to trace is the thing that fails in year three, a long way from the shop.
Recording a podcast inside a metal box
This is the part that surprised us. A van is close to the worst room you could choose for recording. Bare metal walls are hard and parallel, so sound bounces, and in a space that small the reflections come back within milliseconds of the voice itself, which smears speech and adds a boxy ring that cannot be fixed afterwards.
The fix is not a microphone, it is the wall build up. An inch of insulation plus plywood behind the panels does two separate jobs. The mass and the decoupling cut the road, car park and street noise that would otherwise sit under every recording, and the lined wall gives you a surface that absorbs rather than reflects. Acoustic treatment and soundproofing are different problems, and a van needs both. The rubber floor helps with the same thing from below.
Put another way, the insulation in this van is not there for temperature. It is there so the recording is usable.
What about licensing
This is the first question a health system asks, and the answer depends entirely on what happens inside the vehicle.
Nevada does regulate mobile units. The administrative code at NAC 449.97024 sets out a licence application for a mobile unit, and it wants the vehicle’s registration certificate, a statement of whether it is a parent or an independent facility, every service and procedure it will provide, every location it intends to visit, and the name of the manufacturer that built it. That framework hangs off the medical facility types listed in state law, which suggests a vehicle doing non clinical outreach, information, referral, peer support and recording, sits outside it.
We could not find a Nevada guidance document that says so plainly, so treat that as a question for the Division of Public and Behavioral Health rather than an answer from us. Ask it early, because the answer changes the build. A vehicle that will deliver clinical care needs a different interior from one that will not.
The other one worth raising at the drawing stage is accessibility. The ADA’s definition of a facility explicitly includes conveyances and rolling stock, so a vehicle used to deliver a public service is inside its scope, and the regulations contemplate alternatives where physical access is not readily achievable. For most outreach vans that means planning how somebody who cannot climb into the van still gets the service, usually by bringing it out to them under the awning. Decide that on purpose rather than discovering it at the first event.
Who else should be buying these
Hospitals and health systems are the obvious ones. So are county health departments, school districts, tribal health programmes, libraries, food banks, workforce programmes and any non profit whose problem is that the people they serve cannot easily get to them.
The build thinking transfers almost unchanged from a food truck. Power that will not drop out halfway through the day, wiring you can get to, insulation so the inside is comfortable to sit in for hours, and a shell that survives being driven several hundred miles a week. What changes is what goes inside. A grant funded outreach van and a jerk chicken truck are the same engineering problem with a different payload.
What a build like this costs
For reference, our custom food trucks start at $55,000 and custom food trailers start at $40,000, with a typical 16ft truck around $72,000 and a 22ft around $110,000.
An outreach van is a different mix. There is no hood, no fire suppression, no fryer, no water system and no plumbing inspection, and all of that comes out of the number. What goes back in is the solar, the battery and transfer gear, the audio visual kit and the finish, because this vehicle is a room people sit in rather than a kitchen people work in. Vehicle cost depends on what the chassis costs on the day.
Build time is about six weeks from order. If the vehicle is being bought with grant money, start the conversation earlier than that, because the specification usually has to be written before the money is awarded and that is the stage where it is cheapest to get it right.
Frequently asked questions
Do you build vehicles that are not food trucks?
Yes. The same build methods apply to mobile outreach vans, mobile clinics, podcast and media vehicles, mobile offices and event vehicles. This pair of Ford Transit high roof vans was built for a Nevada hospital system to do youth mental health outreach and to record podcasts in.
Can a van run all day on solar and battery?
For an outreach van, yes. A rooftop array of a few hundred watts returns roughly 1.2 to 1.6 kilowatt hours a day in good sun, which covers lighting, a TV, a sound system and charging. Add a battery of about 4 kilowatt hours and a transfer box to switch to a generator and the van will work a full day anywhere, including places that do not allow generators. Cooking and heating are a different matter and need a generator or shore power.
Does a mobile outreach van need a licence in Nevada?
It depends on what happens inside it. Nevada’s administrative code sets out a mobile unit licence application at NAC 449.97024 which asks for the vehicle registration, every service and procedure, every location and the manufacturer, and it attaches to the medical facility types in state law. A non clinical outreach vehicle appears to sit outside that, but we could not find published guidance saying so, so ask the Division of Public and Behavioral Health before you build.
Can you record a podcast inside a van?
Yes, if the walls are built for it. A bare metal van is acoustically poor because hard parallel surfaces reflect sound back within milliseconds, which blurs speech. Insulation plus a plywood lining adds mass against outside noise and gives a surface that absorbs rather than reflects. A rubber floor helps too.
Does a mobile outreach vehicle have to be wheelchair accessible?
The ADA’s definition of a facility covers conveyances and rolling stock, so a vehicle used to deliver a public service is in scope, and the rules contemplate alternatives where physical access is not readily achievable. In practice most outreach vans plan to bring the service out of the vehicle, for example under an awning, for anyone who cannot climb in. Decide it at the drawing stage.
How long does a van build take?
About six weeks from order. If the vehicle is grant funded, start earlier, because the specification normally has to be written before the award and that is the cheapest point to change it.
More reading
- An all electric coffee van built for Hastings, Nebraska
- A 10ft Sprinter van conversion built for Chicago
- All electric builds, a builder’s guide
- A 14ft boba truck with three power sources
If you are writing a specification for an outreach vehicle, a mobile clinic or anything else that has to turn up and do a job, call or text and we will go through the power, the walls and the layout before anything gets drawn. We have built around 500 food trucks, trailers, bus conversions and van conversions, and we deliver nationwide.
Jacob Varghese
Zion Foodtrucks
719-722-2537