About three careers and as many decades ago when I was young, beautiful, directionless and unqualified, I drove a van as a job. More specifically I made a living making same-day deliveries around London of stuff that was too big to be couriered by motorbike. My dispatch-riding career started out on two wheels but a snowy winter, too many near misses and eventually a fractured forearm saw me changing delivery firms and swapping the ropey old Honda CG125 I had been riding for a brand new Citroen Relay. About one week later I smashed it up by driving into the back of someone on the A13 trunk road right opposite Ford UK’s Dagenham plant. I guess my subconscious was upset I hadn’t been given a Transit.
I loved the solitude and independence of that job, out on the road all day equipped with nothing but local radio for company, navigating by nothing but the Master Atlas of Greater London and a Sony Mars bar phone if I couldn’t find the delivery address. I made reasonable money but it wasn’t exactly a career: by the time I packed it to get a proper job with prospects I had such an encyclopedic knowledge of London’s streets I could probably have become a black cab driver. But then I would have been forced to converse with people, something I have an abject aversion to.
Since becoming a fancy-pants designer and writer I naively assumed my van-driving days were long behind me. Last spring I drove the World’s Greatest Transit and told you horrible lot all about it. Towards the end of last year I had to clear four decades worth of Mother Dearest’s hoarding and the remainder of my book collection from her house, down in the ashtray of east London. Reasoning this would require the biggest van my local Enterprise had available, I swiped the plastic for a huge, long wheelbase, high roof Transit. The 2.0 liter turbo diesel four and six speed manual proved more than up to the task of carrying a full set of wicker garden furniture and enough large format art books to sink a carrier, but steering this slab-sided box on the motorway was like wrestling an octopus for five hours. Economy wasn’t its strong point either; pushing all that frontal area through the air meant I put over a hundred quids worth diesel in it. Mentioning this when I took it back the chap behind the counter remarked “oh yeah, those big Transits like a drink.” No kidding, and with a list price of about £55k on the road ($69k) if you need all that load carrying capacity one way or another you’re paying for it.
A Job I had Been Putting Off For Nine Years
There’s long been another Transit-shaped job on my ever-evolving to-do list that I’ve put off forever. Remember when I talked about my Coventry graduation electric hot rod? That model is safely crated up in my friend’s garage, but my second model from my masters degree still resided at the Royal College of Art in London.
After the drunken excitement and tedious wearing of silly gowns at graduation I kept meaning to go and pick it up, but within a month or so I had moved back up to the midlands to start drawing Land Rovers and had simply not gotten around to it. That was nine years ago. Since then the vehicle design course at the RCA has changed names and format to become “Intelligent Mobility,” and decamped from the famous grade II listed modernist Darwin building in Kensington to a brand new more spacious building south of the river Thames in Battersea, taking my model with it.
I knew it was still around because it popped up in a couple of videos promoting the course on YouTube. Bumping into one of my old RCA lecturers at the end of last year reminded me I needed to get my shit together and make the one hundred or so mile journey all the way down to south of the river to pick up my bloody model. There was only one tool for the job. And because this is the Autopian I was going to use the wrong one.
The E-Transit Custom Sport is the sporty pure electric version of the Transit Custom, a battery powered rear wheel drive version of a normally front wheel drive van America doesn’t get. In Europe the name Transit now refers to a range of four vans: the Transit Courier which is Fiesta (RIP) based, the slightly larger Transit Connect (which you did get for a couple of years) based on the Global C platform, the Transit Custom (the latest model of the evergreen van that’s been around since 1965) and the big boy rear wheel drive model available in Europe and the US, simply known as Transit (this was what I rented to clear Mother Dearest’s house). Whatever you need to move and however you need to move it, somewhere in there is a Transit that fits.
The Transit XR3i
ICE models of the Transit Custom have a traditional transverse FWD powertrain. Lesser versions of the E-Transit mount a 136bhp motor on the back axle, but ticking the Sport trim level ups this to 214bhp – making the version I borrowed basically the Transit XR3i. Torque output for both is about 306 lbs. ft. Does a Euro fast Ford exist if it’s not stickered and spoilered? It does not, which is why the E-Transit Sport comes tattooed with a pair of up-n-over racing stripes and a tea tray jutting out above the tailgate.
You also get special black alloy wheels (ugh) and the merest hint of a body kit. Additional options on this test subject include a Bang & Olufson sound system which places six upgraded speakers around the cabin and a bass tub-thumper under the passenger seat, yours for £625 ($790). The Navigation Plus Pack including 360o cameras adds a rather stiff £1675 ($2122), a rear liftgate (as opposed to barn doors) another £275 ($349) and finally the 2.3kWh Pro Power outlets at £850 ($1076). This brings the total to a slightly eye watering £55,014 and 83 pence. One option that would have been extremely useful because I kept glancing up for it is the camera powered Digital Rear View Mirror. Yours for £900 ($1137) guvnor.
Normally when I torment you by reviewing vehicles not available in the U.S. I quote the price and it includes all relevant taxes and delivery. Here in the UK we don’t get a nasty surprise at the cash register like you do in America. However the Transit is a commercial vehicle so to that quoted price we need to add 20% VAT (sales tax), bringing us to a grand total of £66,017.79p or $83,634.58 as of Thursday lunchtime when I’m writing this. Bloody hell.
I can hear the tills ringing in Dunton from here. Hopefully your corporate card has a healthy limit, although UK business owners would be able to claim that tax back through accounting machinations I don’t understand or care about. For comparison the standard ‘Trend’ trim level with the lower powered motor in fridge white is about £52k ($66k) including VAT. Either way it’s a deep stack of notes, so the E-Transit is going to need to earn its keep.
You don’t get to be the world’s second best selling van of all time for nothing. This Transit has a gross payload of 2260lbs (1025kg) with a loadspace measuring 102.5” (2602mm) long and 69” (1775mm) wide, with 54.8” (1392mm) between the arches. So pile it high with sheets of 4’ x 8’ ply to your heart’s content. Towing is rated at just over 5,000lbs (2300kg). It comes as standard with a full height metal bulkhead which not only gives you an extra level of security but it also means you don’t end up wearing a woodchipper as a necklace under hard braking. The bulkhead is a no-cost option to remove but is required for the upgraded sound system. Hearing loss from music or cargo crashing about. Your choice.
It’s Whisper Quiet
Regarding noise, it feels redundant now to comment on the silent nature of a battery powered vehicle, but we’re talking about a van with 205 cu ft (5.8 cu meters) of steel walled echo chamber behind you. The bulkhead keeps things isolated in the cab despite the Transit having aerodynamics that would make Autopian commenter Toecutter’s mind snap.
There’s a faint hint of cordless drill when moving off, which soon dissipates and as befits a working vehicle meant to be driven all day, there’s no gimmicky artificial noise modes. Having briefly driven the Abarth 500e last year that would make my mind snap. Some back and forth shunting in tight spaces created a few haunted house door screeches from underneath, but I let that slide for the Transit having less than 900 miles on the odometer.
Despite being a van for urban combat the Transit felt a touch on the large side. Turning left onto Albert Bridge Road I was confronted with a 6’6” width restriction before I could cross the bridge, which had me creeping forward while holding my breath. Fucking London. A glance at the spec sheet confirmed my suspicions; at 198” (5 meters) long and 80” wide (2032mm) this is a big tub. Height is quoted at 77” (1959mm) so it will slip under most UK car park height restrictions but it will hang over the end of a standard marked charging bay.
We’re long since passed the point where EV versions of existing vehicles are just battery stuffed lash-ups. The E-Transit comes equipped with a 64kWh pack under the load floor. The platform was designed to accommodate this from the beginning so the internal dimensions are the same as the ICE model. With a stated efficiency of 3.3 miles per kWh that works out to a theoretical maximum range of 211 miles – Ford quote 209 being as far as you can go without needing to plug in. My original plan and pitch to Matt for this review was that I would attempt the journey to the RCA Battersea Campus and back on one charge – according to Apple Maps a round trip of exactly 206 miles. Matt agreed because he’s a horrible person who wanted to see me rolling to a halt with a flat-as-a-turd Transit somewhere along the M40.
Sadly for him and you, this plan was thwarted before I’d even set off. There’s a fast charger five minutes walk from my house – in a pub car park of all places – so I’m no longer reluctant to review EVs from manufacturer’s media fleets. It’s at this point we arrive at one of the fundamental issues to all EVs. Using fast charging up to 80 or 90% does indeed take barely enough time for lunch. But to get to 100% maximum range takes a lot longer in order to protect the cells. It took 13 minutes to go from 78% to 90% – but a further 40 minutes (and a cold walk back to the van to manually override the charging limit) to get to a full 100%. After stubbornly stuffing the Transit with as much electricity as it could take the indicated range was 186 miles. So I was never going to make it down to London and back without charging again. So I didn’t try.
It’s Remarkably Efficient and Great to Drive
Relieved of that burden, I didn’t waste all those precious electrons by bombing down the M40 to London foot to the boards. Sitting at an active cruise assisted 55-58 mph I saw an average of about 3.2KWh efficiency indicated – almost exactly what Ford says should be attainable. There’s plenty of punch still available – the Transit rocks up to its limit easily enough, and unlike the bigger model stays arrow straight when caught in the side wake of semi trucks.
The lane keeping assist was occasionally a bit boisterous but can be adjusted or turned off. The driver fatigue warning did drive me barmy by seemingly going off every twenty minutes until I found the menu to turn that off as well. Otherwise the E-Transit is an agreeable road companion – taut ride with none of the bang and crash you usually get with unladed commercial vehicles, genuinely hilariously fantastic steering and a planted feeling helped by all those batteries under the load area.
Size issues aside once in London the E-Transit like all EVs was as perfect an inner city weapon as you could wish for. There’s one pedal driving available – it’s a shade abrupt when reversing but otherwise perfectly judged, although the level of regen is not adjustable; it’s on or off.
Visibility is as outstanding as you would imagine, helped by mirrors the size of doors with a wide angle lens on the bottom quarter. The floor of the cab is completely flat, something that Ford says was inspired by a decorator who kept paint cans in the passenger footwell so he could keep an eye on them. What this means in practice is as well as giving you another potential storage area you can easily shuffle across the excellent seats and jump out the other side. Speaking of storage there’s plenty of places to lose your paperwork – two glove compartments, deep door bins and open storage slots on the instrument panel upper. Sadly this Transit wasn’t equipped with the one feature I was desperate to try: the Mobile Office pack which gives you the tiltable steering wheel-cum-desk-cum-table. As a small consolation the middle passenger backrest does fold down to make an impromptu flat surface which gave me somewhere to put my Autopian canteen gruel lunch.
[Ed Note: Holy crap this little Jeep model is amazing! Adrian, come over here! Yes, sit down. Yup, right there. Ok, now start typing a few words abut this model. No, you can’t just mention it briefly and not talk about it! Here, take the keyboard.
As you can see I managed to fit a Jeep inside a Ford, possibly the only time in automotive history this feat has been accomplished. This is the model I made for my masters degree final major project – made in exactly the same way as I did for my EV Hot Rod. Hard foam and rapid prototyped detail parts painted and finished by the same guys as before. The acid green which is much more hallucinogenic than it appears is the same color used for ambulances. I slightly cheated this time around though. One of my friends I graduated from Coventry with had gone on to be an Autodesk Alias modeler at Aston Martin. So I got him to create the model for me for mates rates. It took him days to do what would have taken me weeks, and I didn’t have that kind of time. The inspiration for a Jeep came about because I had come up with the front graphic that resembled a skull – the seven bar grill stretched vertically across the lower bash guard and front fascia with the headlights pushed out wide like eyes. The actual vehicle itself is a Jeep that off-roads autonomously: my thinking was that it was more likely self-driving would be more effective outside of the urban environment where there are less things to crash into. Also off-roading is somewhat specialist skill so this Jeep would make it more accessible. The open area on the back is for luggage or as a viewing platform, and the large side doors are gullwings with door panels that turn into hanging seating that drop down on straps when the doors are in the fully open position. As you can see it would probably have fit in my Mini, but that wouldn’t have been as much fun.
From the LED spot lights in the loading bay, to the Pro Power outlet which is cleverly designed to accept not just the UK 3-pin foot stabber but a variety of different plugs, it’s clear that Ford have listened to customer feedback and put a lot of thought into designing and building this latest Transit. This applies to the entire range, not just to this higher spec Sport trim. No longer does owning and using a van mean being making sacrifices in terms of refinement and comfort. Provided you can charge at home or work the E-Transit is perfectly capable of cosplaying as a car if the budget only stretches to one household vehicle. And with this Sport trim you can look cool as well. The E-Transit takes the traditional Transit values of supreme handiness and capability and gives them a thoroughly modern tech update. Not only that, EV commercial vehicles are becoming increasingly important as major cities across the UK and around the world start introducing clean air zones.
The M40 from the midlands to London passes a lot of non-JLR British motor industry firms, including Prodrive. Cruising past what was the Arrival factory in the electric Transit, with the signage long gone but the company name still visible was a stark reminder of just how much delusion there is around EV start ups. Come for the van King, you’d better not miss.
- This Glorious Diesel Transit Bus Used To Carry People To A Nuke Site, Now It’s An Extremely Affordable Camper
- One Of The Cheapest New Camper Vans In America Drives Like A Car, Fits In A Garage, And Won’t Piss Off Your HOA
- The 2024 Ford E-Transit Electric Van Gets A Much Bigger 89 kWh Battery Pack For Not Much Extra Money
- I’d Van-Life The Shit Out Of The New Ford Transit Custom Nugget But I Can’t Because I’m Not In Europe
That little spoiler… thanks, I hate it!
80 grand and no cupholders. Wild.
Cupholders are a singularly American obsession.
probably because of how much driving we do. i drove 250 miles today for work.
Yeah, US distances are nuts.
> About three careers and as many decades ago when I was young, beautiful, directionless and unqualified
Only two of these descriptors have changed.
Oh my sweet deity. I just test-drove an E-Transit (full size, on the other side of the pond) for shits ‘n’ giggles last week and while it would certainly beat this for space, no bulkhead meant it was…well, I wouldn’t say agony, but it was unpleasant. The fact you can just get a full-size van with a half-thought-out sound system from the factory over there fills me with envy.
The stripes are simultaneously corny and awesome. (Even if ours reportedly has 251 horsepower?)
And you get physical buttons over there…mine had climate controls all on-screen (albeit, a van is one place I’d eventually put up with that if I had to, since there’s not exactly 4-zone climate control with massage, heated, and ventilated seats).
Is the squircle steering wheel noticeable or cumbersome in operation?
Otherwise–glorious.
The steering wheel is noticeable, but I liked that fact you could tell how much lock you had on just by feel when in a tight spot.
Can you get the Shelby stripes as a by-themselves add-on or is it only via the package? They’d absolutely be ala carte available here in the states.
And really, how does this piece not end with a picture of Adrian sitting on aforementionedly teased wicker garden furniture, happily drinking tea like Hyacinth Bucket?
Only via the Sport package, which is only available on the E-Transit, not the regular ICE models.
I suspect he would sooner drink coolant that tea…
As an American, let me apologize for the US farmers who were selling chickens to Europeans for less than European farmers could sell them. Which happened before I was born, so it wasn’t my fault. Sadly, I suffer by not being able to choose from more than 3 vans.
3?? You’ve got the big Transit, the Express, technically the Savana is a separate vehicle, the Ram ProMaster, the Mercedes Sprinter, the Rivian EDV/ECV, the Chevrolet BrightDrop.
I mourn the Nissan NV, but other choices are slowly joining the market!
“my thinking was that it was more likely self-driving would be more effective outside of the urban environment where there are less things to crash into.”
Maybe there’s less things to crash into in th wild, but at least in the urban environment those things are usually signalled, codified and can be anticipated.
I never crashed into a tree stump in the middle of a city street…
Clearly you’ve never driven in central London.
I hear it’s a circus.
All of this has been quite entertaining and even informative, but I still haven’t found an explanation as to why Brits pronounce “St. John” as “sinjin.” Still waiting.
The same reason we pronounce Menzies as ‘Ming’ and Siobhan as ‘Shevorn’.
Then there’s Niamh.
That has to be the elegant type g connector I’ve ever seen. Most of the time they look like an Edwardian clown coming to murder you with with 69 IQ points while having an accent that is basically posh chav.
U WOT BRUV?
“Autopian canteen gruel lunch”
Heads-up, Hardigree: another moneymaker for the online gift shop! If these branded MREs are shelf-stable, you’ll sell ’em to us lazy bastards by the pallet!
Trust me the Marines get better quality food than we do.
And the American Marines can draw with the crayons in the MRE until they get hungry and need a snack.
Well, you *are* English, so it comes with the territory.
You can make your own with oatmeal and powdered soup. Just add boiling water. Maybe from a kettle plugged into one of the fancy power points in the e-Transit?
If you’ve got this lovely creative moderately batshit crazy model done up in tasteful screaming safely colors, why are we mostly being subjected to pictures of a white van? That model deserves a photo essay of it’s own.
No choice of colors when it comes to press loaners sadly. I should be borrowing something soon that’s available in some eye-popping colors. I bet they send me a fucking white one.
I considered writing about the Jeep project but apart from talking about what it is and does (like I’ve done here) it would be a retread of the hot rod story.
If you’re a member I can drop some more images in the Discord.
I still want a full photo spread of your master’s model. Doors up, seats out and all. That Jeep deserves more coverage.
Those features don’t exist on the model, only in renders. I’m not made of money. @me in the Discord and I’ll reply tomorrow.
Someone needs to photoshop it in blue with white stripes. I have a Capri II model from the 70s that is that
“69” (1775mm) wide, with 54” (1775mm)”
Go home, Adrian, you’re drunk.
69 2.54-cm-units are 1753 mm while 54 2.54-cm-units are 1372 mm.
Look I was doing a lot of conversions very quickly for you herberts. Count yourself lucky I even changed it to freedom units instead of the system that EVERYONE ELSE uses.
Everyone else but fucking London’s six foot six inch width restrictors.
It’s because we measure speed and distance in Imperial, sell pub beer in pints and everything else in metric. You tell me man, I only live here.
It’s such an embarrassing country to come from. We can’t do anything consistently.
Apart from drink.
The Australians appreciate your inconsistent efforts.
We are inconsistent too. We buy milk in gallons, but soda, wine and liquor in milliliters.
*Laughs in confusion from Canada*
Trust me, I would LOVE to use the metric system.
Here’s my favorite fun fact.
The US Customary Standard is all measured with the metric system, IN THE US. The NIST literally just stores a standard of measurements in metric and converts them to US. Meaning, they don’t have a 1 foot stick. That have a 1 meter stick and convert it to feet to ensure the standard.
It’s so fucking stupid we’re still using it I could scream. But no one wants to listen to a dork yell about measuring systems. But I don’t understand why people care so much about NOT using the metric system.
THEN THEN, with recipes, we insist on using VOLUMES for quantities of ingredients. If you need 1 cup of flour, is that 1 cup of lightly packed flour or 1 cup of flour packed so tight it’s now a brick?
Why did I just rant about this?
In the good ole USA we tried to go metric, I believe back in the Jimmy Carter days, low-brows wouldn’t have it! This is MERICA
The recipes-in-volume thing is infuriating. 1 cup of water or oil is always the same amount, because they don’t compress, but powdered sugar or flour or cereal or rice or so many other things?
Give me a scale or give me death.
Also, when aren’t?