Comment by helsinkiandrew
Comment by helsinkiandrew 2 days ago
Reminds me of the ad I saw for the Ford transit van - whose steering wheel can be converted into a 'desk'/laptop table:
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a45497067/ford-transit-ste...
Comment by helsinkiandrew 2 days ago
Reminds me of the ad I saw for the Ford transit van - whose steering wheel can be converted into a 'desk'/laptop table:
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a45497067/ford-transit-ste...
It is very common. The foreman on a larger project drives a truck and uses it as an office. They need a truck for some activities so it can't be a car (often because the tools are in the back), but they are spend a significant amount of time in the truck doing paperwork. Large jobs will have mobile offices brought in for the job. Even if you are a small company (think pouring a sidewalk), you still need a place to fill out the paperwork so you can bill the customer.
I can see that 10 or more years ago but these days I'd think that would all be done on a laptop or tablet.
It looks like a great steering wheel that won’t fly out the window while driving.
There are a lot of work that a transit van can do that a mini-van cannot. There is some work a mini-van is better at. Don't make universal statements just so you can snark on someone else.
The only thing it can do better than a minivan is haul more boxes of bagged air and fit a bigger Amazon decal on the side. They're all around under-built and under powered (and high strung for the power they do make) for work vehicles (beyond light parcel delivery or passenger service) and are utterly inappropriate to be upfit into box trucks, or any other heavier work vehicle. Whether you're talking about Fiat, Mercedes or Ford they're all rife with engineering tradeoffs that are moronic unless you intend to sell into a market where government inflates the cost of fielding an older fleet and your customers will turn their fleets over rapidly (Europe) or a market where gas is expensive and labor is cheap (ME, Africa).
Want me to go over each make/model and their characteristic failures?
They're all crap that will be run circles around by a GMC Savannah in every category except fuel economy.
The transit has 3060-5110lbs cargo capacity. The pacifica minivan 1700 (that seems to be the most though I didn't look them all up).
maybe you think they are under powered but the ratings allow it and they seem to have no problem when I see them. Winning races isn't the point.
> They're all crap that will be run circles around by a GMC Savannah in every category except fuel economy.
Well, when gasoline is nearly $10 a gallon a good fuel economy kind of becomes the primary goal.
Its like complaining European and Japanese cars are bad at everything except being small.
Good luck finding parking in Paris or Tokyo with a Ford F150 or Dodge Ram.
Explain how to fit a GMC Savannah into a compact car parking space that's 5 feet shorter than it, with vehicles on both ends of that parking space and also the GMC is two feet two wide for, and I'll listen to how the Nissan NV200 or the Ford Transit van isn't a two ton truck.
Obviously if you're hauling a 4 ft cube of depleted uranium, it's not going up be up to the task. But getting 25 mpg vs a two-ton work truck's eight mpg adds up. A lot if you're driving 300 miles a day. If you're a locksmith in a city your hauling needs are different than the general contractor or someone more specialized, that actually has one ton of equipment and a trailer generator to bring to the job site.
The argument that light work vans are small and underpowered so no one should use them is the same argument as big pickups are big and stupid and no one should use them, just from the other direction. Different strokes, as appropriate, for different folk who have different needs than you.
I've rented pickup trucks before and I've always been so fascinated with the hanging folder rails in the center console. I have no need to work out of a truck but the fact that you could turn it into a mobile office is very cool.