Giant test
THE DEFINITIVE VERDICT
So you don’t want mud on that cream leather interior? Then forget your luxury SUV – for real sports and utility in 2024, you need a van
FORD TRANSIT I VAUXHALL VIVARO I TOYOTA PROACE I VW ID. BUZZ
A couple of years ago, a young family friend left the UK, looking for adventure. He travelled to Canada, bought a van and now his Instagram feed is nauseatingly idyllic: ‘Ooh, here I am waking up in the Rocky Mountains! Now a view of Banff Nationa l Park out the back doors! #vanfluencer #vanlife #iammoreinterestingthanyou.’
Scrolling through his images makes me realise two things: first, I made some poor life choices; second, vans are not what they used to be. Traditionally, vans were white and full of tools and they were the noble work horses for plumbers and electricians the length and breadth of Britain, and indeed many other countries. Now that’s changed: visit your local forest car park on a Sunday morning, for example, and the cyclists aren’t unloading their mountain bikes out of Range Rovers and XC90s. Instead, they’re in vans and hauling around lifest yle dreams like the British-built Cotic bikes in the pictures (an on-trend brand with lower carbon steel-framed bikes and a focus on recycling that even extends to re-using cable ties): driving them, sleeping in them, hash-tagging about them.
The w ider population has come to appreciate the qualities of these cargo-carrying boxes: vans are sporty and utilitarian, the ‘SUV’ for a new generation. Yes, they’re usually front-wheeldrive not 4x4, but vans are roomy by design, dow n to earth, cheap to run and they offer a driving position any emperor would approve of – high up, three abreast, cupholders ga lore.
But the vans themselves are also changing. Gone are the days of your base-spec panel wagon, only available in white with AM radio. Now you can pimp them up, adding alloys, metallic paint and electric powertrains.
The van-daddy of them all, of course, is the Ford Transit, first launched in 1965. It has since gone through eight or nine generations (Transit histor y is hotly disputed) and in 2012 the range was split bet ween the bigger Transit and the more compact Transit Custom. The Custom has been a huge hit – it was Britain’s outright best-selling vehicle in 2021 and 2022, beating all your Qashqais and Corsas, with around 50,000 units sold. In 2023 it was still in the top three, selling over 40,000, and that’s the outgoing model. Because now a new Transit Custom has arrived, redesig ned from the ground up.
The new Ford has many competitors, several of which are actually the same van in disguise. The Vauxhall Vivaro, Fiat Scudo, Peugeot Expert and Citroën Dispatch are all identica l beneath those Stellantis g roup badges, and even
