Transit through time
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t hardly seems like 30 years ago that the Hawk was invited to Langley to see the first Ford Transit roll off the production line. The two-month wait before the van went on sale seemed like an eternity—but the intervening 30 years and 3 million units have come and One in the blink of an eye.
The Transit went on sale on 8 October 1965, replacing the 400E, and the rest, as they say, is history Even the Transit's inception became the stuff of legends. There are stories of US product planner Ed Baumgartner locking his team in a room until they reached a decision about the van.
Fred Ray was Ford's chief engineer of chassis design back in 1962. He retired in 1971 but was reacquainted with his protege at a 30th birthday party: "I'd forgotten that we didn't have pendent pedals at the start," he says. "Without a track for high-speed testing, this was carried out at night on public roads (the blanket 70mph limit came in a few months later).
"So perhaps the Essex Constabulary didn't keep stopping the prototypes on the Al2 just to find out how the tests were going, they may have been practicing."
With unprecedented space and a good turn of speed, it wasn't long before hauliers, pop groups and bank robbers alike were queuing up to buy, bon-ow or steal a Transit
But speed, as with many things from the past, was relative. Against a bobby on a bicycle, the ubiquitous 73hp 1.7-litre vee-four was fast— but bank robbers and pop groups preferred the 85hp twolitre version.
When the Transit came out, it was the short-wheelbase models that were in demand. In the sixties diesel Transits were rare—the front panels had to be extended to accommodate the 42hp Perkins engine available in the short-wheelbase version.
Today more than half of the Transits produced are on the long wheelbase with 95% powered by diesel. An SWB 120 Di Custom with Ford's 2.5 diesel engine, the closest equivalent to the £747 22cwt