Rebirth for the mighty Transit
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• by Toby Clark There was a rather transatlantic flavour to the launch of the Transit. This shouldn't really come as a surprise as the vehicle is now the responsibility of Ford's USbased truck division, and was largely designed and engineered in Detroit.
But Ford is keen to stress that the new van has been designed with European needs very much in mind— there are no current plans to sell it in North America—and that the development team included more than a few British engineers, many of whom were involved in previous generations of the Transit.
The development process also included an enormous amount of practi cal research: 300 prototype vehicles covered more than three million kilometres of development testing; this is said (by Ford) to be equivalent to nine million kilometres of real-world driving.
A team of more than 400 people was working on the Transit at any time. At the beginning of the project every European-based team member was required to spend a day a week with potential drivers and operators, and more than 200 customers were involved in the design of the interior.
So is the new vehicle a masterpiece of engineering, or simply, like the camel, a horse designed by committee?