There’s a line in Peep Show, Channel 4’s seminal comedy series, that kept coming back to me last week when the new Transit turned up. “You should just get a van,” says Super Hans. “With a van, it's like you've got an MBA, but you've also got a f*****g van. You're not just a man anymore - you are a man with a van. You get a van, Jez, we could be men with ven.” The connection between the white van and general blokedom in the UK could hardly be more tangible, reinforced by a long-running stereotype, yes, but also by sales reality: the Transit isn’t just Ford’s best-selling nameplate, it’s the best-selling vehicle in the UK full stop.
This, of course, is not a recent phenomenon. Ford has been building the Transit in huge volumes and bewildering variety since 1965. Several times in the not-so-distant past, someone with intimate knowledge of Ford board meetings once told me, the sheer weight of Transit sales helped ensure the European division’s long-term survival when the Dearborn bean counters came calling. Today, broadly speaking, you can have a Courier (the dinky one) or a Connect (the slightly larger one) the suffix-less Transit (the really quite large one) - or, the best-seller, the mid-sized Transit Custom.
The very latest version has been out for a few months now, but because testing vans without filling them is mostly pointless, we resisted borrowing one until one of us had a task worthy of it. And tasks for the average man on the street come no more humongous than moving house. The last time I did it, I had a bed and some bin bags with clothes in. In the intervening decade, I’ve assembled a collection of belongings roughly equivalent to one wing of the British Museum. Probably I should’ve gone the whole hog and asked Ford for the Transit proper, which comes with more than four metres of load length and a towering roofline. But they’re a pain to park in tight spaces and I was confident that the Custom - which is so popular precisely because it’s a bit more wieldy and a smidge under two metres tall - would see me through.
First impressions backed this up. The Transit's arrival in North America has given recent versions an oddly blobby, mid-Atlantic appearance - but there's still no mistaking what it is. And if you’re primarily used to peering into a conventional car boot, even a modest panel van seems positively enormous by comparison. The platform beneath the newest Custom has been significantly re-engineered to satisfy the packaging requirements of a fully electric version (there’s a plug-in hybrid petrol option, too) but it has also made the 'one-tonne' van up 200mm longer in the wheelbase. Ford reckons it’s 100kg lighter than before, too (assuming you’ve gone for one of four diesel variants, which we obviously did) meaning the one we had would accommodate up to 1,258kg of mostly worthless clutter.
That’s roughly the equivalent of a Mk8 Fiesta ST, and certainly it felt like I carried that amount out, albeit separated into umpteen boxes of varying sizes. While the physical toll on me made it look like I’d arrived at the back of the Transit after sprint finishing a triathlon, the van barely winced. As you might expect, the Custom sits high when empty - as if bemused by the senselessness of it not being used - and then slowly hunkers as you load it with what I can only assume was plutonium, packed by the mrs when I wasn't looking. I lost count of the number of boxes that went in, but suffice it to say it exceeded the number you could get in an E-Class wagon by a factor of about a billion.
As the first load was exclusively gaffer-taped cardboard, packed with pedantic, Tetris-like precision by yours truly, it ought to have been the perfect load for dynamic testing. Unfortunately, the new gaff is five minutes across town from the old, and she-who-must-be-obeyed insisted on being driven there at walking pace, less her lead-lined cardigans become ruffled. Nevertheless, driving a fully-loaded Transit - even on its new coil-sprung semi trailing arms (the rear leaf springs having finally been jettisoned) - is much the same as it ever was: i.e. impressively easy to drive deliberately and delicately, thanks to the canny weighting of the control surfaces and the low-down generosity of the short-geared (and mostly carried over) 2.0-litre EcoBlue inline four-pot.
Better then to reflect on the single cab interior, which is the other area Ford has endeavoured to improve. Some of the nattier enhancements, like a tilting steering wheel that rotates to become a stand for laptops (or a table for lunch) are optional and didn’t feature on the Custom we drove. But the new Sync 4-powered, 13-inch touchscreen was, and its do-it-all approach (familiar from other Fords) means that physical switchgear is notable for its near total absence - although, mercifully, a proper volume knob remains. The manual handbrake has gone though, replaced by a centre-mounted switch. If you’re anything like me, it’ll take quite a few goes before you stop reaching down between the seats looking for a lever.
That has much to do with the quintessential Transit driving position, which, despite Ford’s protestations about it being more car-like now, is still lofty and upright and very assertive. Whether or not you like the pedals-under-your-feet throne probably has much to do with how your spine takes to it, but personally I could sit on the Transit’s pertly-sprung seats for hour after unrelenting hour. Which is as it should be. The Custom feels airier and slightly more spacious than it has done previously, too, helped partly by the unencumbered flat floor. But it does perhaps want for some more obvious stowage; there’s plenty there when you go looking for it - the first roof-mounted passenger airbag allows for an additional cubby on top of the dash, for example - but the Transit does lack a conspicuous bin for you to immediately lose whatever it is you’re holding when you get in.
What it does not lack is the old-fashioned Transit nous for pushing on a bit. No stripe of Custom could be called fast by modern standards, and yet that is all part of its charm. Were it very much quicker than 150hp allows, the additional speed would just overwhelm the standard chassis’s ability to keep a vaguely adequate grip on its disobliging body - especially when you’ve finally emptied it of belongings. With 266lb ft of torque available for a lusty 1,000rpm, it’s just brisk enough to seem like you’re making exceptionally good progress when giving it death. And there’s sufficient accuracy (not to mention dynamic willingness) in the steering, gearbox, brakes and suspension to breezily accept the sort of punishment that tends to occur when you realise the dump shuts in 10 minutes. Or you’re late for tea.
This doesn’t make the new Custom anything more than another very good van in an almost unbroken 60-year conveyor belt of laudable Transits - but for what it’s worth, it does have a best-seller aura about it. There’s an underlying sense, as there is with many cars that are considered too big to fail by their manufacturer, that the Custom has been methodically developed and thoughtfully engineered to nail its brief. The result is no less fit for purpose than a BMW 3 Series or a Porsche 911. Not only did it make several desperately difficult days eminently more bearable (including a near-suicidal trip to IKEA in the aftermath of moving in), I gently begrudged giving it back. I could think of half a dozen more jobs it would be terrifically well-suited for the following week. It was like having an MBA. But also a van.
SPECIFICATION | FORD TRANSIT CUSTOM (L1H1) Limited
Engine: 1,996cc four-cylinder diesel
Transmission: 6-speed manual, front-wheel drive
Power (hp): 150hp@3,500rpm
Torque (lb ft): 266@1,500-2,500rpm
0-62mph: 13.1sec
Top speed: 109mph
Weight: 1,892kg
MPG: 38.7
CO2: 191
Price: £39,034 excl. VAT (as tested, £41,854)
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