New Ford Transit Diesel

New full size Ford Transit van

Finally! After all these years, the light truck market is being forced kicking and screaming into the 21^st Century. Mercedes-Benz made a half-hearted effort with the Sprinter, but priced the truck too high to get any meaningful market share.

GM, Ford and Chrysler have been building essentially the same vans for longer that I care to remember. Although Chrysler finally dropped the Ram Van when they introduced the Sprinter here during the Daimler-Chrysler love affair, GM and Ford continued to soldier on with ancient Express/Savana and E-line trucks.

Both companies heavily fleet-discounted the vans and made excellent profits, since retooling and engineering costs were minimal. Fleet customers cared little for fuel efficiency and design quality, and rather looked for low carrying costs and cozy familiarity when it came to replacing vehicles.



5-cylinder turbo-diesel is rated at 197 hp and 347 lb-ft of torque



As a result, while the rest of the world has been building boxy, practical and efficient diesel vans, the not-invented-here syndrome continued to dominate the North American market.

Well, the tight economy is finally forcing businesses to look for efficiencies everywhere and Ford will introduce a new full size diesel Transit van late next year. Chrysler is working on a Fiat van version for North America and GM can’t be far behind. All the Big-Three companies have a wealth of experience building efficient light trucks all over the world and why it took so long to bring modern products to us is beyond me.

Autoweek: Ford Transit van gets five cylinder turbodiesel