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.
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.
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.
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.
>Explain how to fit a GMC Savannah into a compact car parking space that's 5 feet shorter than it
The same way you do a Sprinter. <eyeroll>
You are confusing the Transit and the Transit Connect. I actually really love the Transit Connect.
I am complaining about the Transit, Sprinter and their ilk.
As an aside, the Ducato is ironically actually best in North American markets because none of their the diesel engine options are great in terms of ownership cost or frequency of downtime but the Pentastar they got when they bought Chrysler is ok, if over-taxed to the point of lesser reliability in such an application.
> I am complaining about the Transit, Sprinter and their ilk.
Good thing you specified that in your comment [1] then, where you wrote
> Fiat, Mercedes or Ford
and never used the word Sprinter once, so of course I should deduce that was the vehicle you were talking about, along with the full size Transit, especially since the linked Road and Track article was discussing the Transit Custom, which has never reached the states and is of the smaller NV200 size class, so please forgive me for the confusion.
The great thing about the Sprinter is that it's big and tall and spacious inside. Unfortunately, the problem with the Sprinter is that it's big and tall, which is a real problem in high wind conditions. Yeah it could stand to have a bigger engine and beefier chassis, no argument from me there, but I have a carpenter friend who uses it to haul around his tools and lumber and he loves his so much that he bought a second one. The Sprinter's not got the powertrain of a GMC Savannah or RAM 2500 or F-250 Super Duty, but saying it's only good for moving boxes full of air is hyperbole.
As far as vehicle turnover goes, given the stronger union protections that workers in the trades in Europe get, not having to drive a busted 15 year old work truck that veers to the left because the suspension is shot and gets eight miles to the gallon doesn't seem like, to me, a bad thing! The most brilliant electrician I know owns his own business, but is driving a 15-year work truck that should have been replaced 10 years ago, but he can't afford to replace it.
IMO, the real question is who's going to be first to come out with a work truck/van that's comma.ai compatible. That thing makes driving long distances so much more stomachable. Not going to hold my breath for Waymo or Tesla or anybody else to compete there. Well except Mercedes, but that still likely to be a premium Mercedes car feature for a long time and not something on any of their brands work vehicles. Supposedly some F-150's can take it, but afaik those ones are the premium package, already have Blue Cruise, and aren't fleet vehicles anywhere (I'd love to be wrong though!).
The opinion that these vans are too light for the uses into which they are sold is not a novel one. It is probably the predominant one among people who turn wrenches on both the old ones and the new ones.
This is just hubris. These vans are used hard every day by people all over Europe. It's not unusual for one to be caught loaded to double it's GVWR. Mechanics like what they know. The fact that the US manufacturers are building vans designed in the 90s using engines designed in the 50s undoubtedly means they are easier to work on.
I didn't say you couldn't screw them. I said they screw you back in terms of repair/maintenance costs (and don't save enough fuel along the way to make it worth it).
By the late 90s the domestics had refreshed their vans to use engine architectures designed in the early 90s. They all have a bunch of tasks that are shit to do depending on the model and options. 6.0 Ford head gaskets are legendary in that regard. Ford is generally bad since so much stuff is a "pull the cab" problem which is a much bigger problem on a vehicle with a box truck body that extends over the cab and their infatuation with OHC engines makes things naturally more cramped. But it's just a lot less of a problem when you're not shitting out turbos every now and then or dicking with all the potential leak points of an cooling system that has 3x the components it needs to (looking at you Mercedes) or R&Ring a rear cylinder head in a transverse application (Fiat obviously). I'm not saying they're unreliable, but if you have a fleet of 5/10/20 there's always gonna be something that needs fixing and "needs fixing" is generally more expensive on the euro designs. And it's not really the engines. It's the whole chassis that has stupid stuff randomly distributed around it.
The Mercedes door tracks and tearing a suspension mount off on a minor sideways slide/bump that should've just required a change of underwear and maybe a tire/rim weren't things I made up, those were examples I've cleaned up after. Another example that comes to mind is how the Front of a Transit is 10lb of shit in a 5lb bag. That doesn't leave a lot of room for oopsies. Can't really bump them into anything without causing problems. I've seen a GMC van (Uhaul truck specifically) eat a deer at highway speed without even popping a leak because they had the foresight to put a whole bunch of dead space there. Imagine not having to incur $$$ downtime in that situation.
They're fine vehicles when new, have a lot of space, are as ergonomic as anything else out there but if you aren't buying a huge fleet that will be strictly managed so nothing gets routinely abused/overloaded, can't afford to pay games depreciating over 3yr and then trading in can't easily use rentals to cover downtime (<cough> Amazon <cough>), walk into your local Chevy dealer and say "I want what Uhaul has".
Sure, none of this matters if you're paying the mechanic/autobody rates in Turkey or Lithuania to keep them going or trading in every 3yr before MOT starts screwing you at every pass through but we can't all be that lucky.
From bumper to bumper these euro vans are designed with stereotypical european "well if anything outside of spec happens the customer will bring it to the dealer/call a tow truck/solve it immediately" and "the customer will never exceed any rating" set of assumptions. This is bad for the american customer because these assumptions run counter to and are in conflict with the American customer's assumptions for how much fudge factor is built into commercial products. The OEM of course pockets the difference.
>The transit has 3060-5110lbs cargo capacity.
I assume that's half ton through 1-ton single rear wheel (because 5k would be comically low for a DRW).
The axle they put in the half ton (ford 9.75 semi float) isn't gonna live a long life at 3k + vehicle weight. The bearing just isn't up to it. They use the same assembly on the E-150 so lateral move there. The full float is good, but they nerf'd it by spec'ing the bare minimum for tube diameter/thickness so you're one "oops that's a way bigger pothole than I thought" away from expensive problems though they did a very good job on the spindle and hubs. I don't think anyone even knows what the realistic capacity of a single rear wheel E-350 is. The axle tube, hubs, bearings, spindles, etc, are solidly in the 10k ballpark, but you literally can't buy a single 16" tire that'll get you there. The front suspension is also way more maintenance intensive and less stupid proof over its life than the I beam system in the E-series though I'd say the GMC is comparable. Brakes are probably a lateral move but the general unibody construction is just gonna have less margin for stupidity/error when operating at/above rated capacity. Do that habitually and you'll eventually break something that you're not supposed to break whereas the legacy van with it's body on frame construction will just wear out parts fast. Like imagine you get a little sideways in an icey parking lot at 10mph. In the old van that's just a bump and a scare. In the new van that could be a replacement subframe. The customer is expecting the former.
>maybe you think they are under powered
It's not that they're under powered so much as they're unnecessarily high strung and over-engineered in the name of fuel economy for whatever power level they do have. On the Fords you're gonna deal with stupid ecoboost problems, wet belts and that stupid valve that makes the transmission warm up faster (probably doesn't even pay for itself over its life) that you have to drop the transmission to replace and the 9.75 rear axle being generally unsuited to hauling (though maybe they've fixed that at this point, all they needed to do was spec a different bearing with more smaller rollers) and unnecessarily expensive brake jobs. Ironically, if you embrace the low end (which most buyers don't because on paper the ecoboost options will save you enough fuel to be worth it) Ford's NA V6 is actually really good.
Then on the Mercedes side everything is typical german engineering. Tons of "gotta replace X before Y or it will Z" gotchas on the 07+ sprinter platforms. You basically wind up replacing everything outside the engine but in the engine bay over 200k. And everything inside it likes to fall apart. Mercedes loves to use over-engineered plastic for everything so it works great for the design life until the 1-millionth slam after which the door won't shut or whatever. Typical "Klaus got a bonus for reducing part count or labor operations" type behavior that the germans are stereotyped for. They generally buy decent transmission from ZF so those are solid
>when I see them
When was the last time you saw an 00s Sprinter? They're probably outnumbered by the Dodge vans they replaced at this point. When was the last time you saw a Transit that wasn't in "new enough to still be kinda nice" condition. There's a reason you see old E-series and not old Transits despite the overlapping production years putting the last of the E-series and first of the Transit right about what should be perfect "old work van" age.
The problem with these Euro vans is that every maintenance event has one more digit in front of the decimal than the more well rounded north american vans they replaced and they don't require any less maintenance so they're a money suck to own unless you're turning your fleet over rapidly (like swanky airport shuttles and property management companies and whatnot do). This obviously doesn't matter if you expect your average customer to trade in a 5yr due to MOT nitpicking and the trade in will be sold to Africa where any work it needs can be done for peanuts.
In conclusion, I'm not talking about a categorical difference, but European vans are just not properly engineered for the North American customer. Yes, the customer can make do, but they're making do with something that's a little worse across the board and will spend a little more time in the shop over its life and with higher bills for marginally better fuel economy they don't benefit from and interior space they weren't constrained by. This is why GM still sells the Savannah and Ford still doesn't consider the Transit a replacement for the E-series when it comes to selling cab and chassis vehicles.
Commercial vehicles are used hard and long. They wear out much faster than private cars. Sure they tend to go a lot more miles, but the time is not long. I don't see many vehicles from the 00s - the ones you do are either rusty (road salt gets them where I live), or they are collector vehicles that are rarely driven.
I almost never see Dodge cans either - and when I do they don't look roadworthy.
Because they want to be known as Türkiye and have been actively requesting. The United Nations officially agreed to recognize the country's new name in 2022.
They don't, and nobody's patrolling the Internet to smack people who say Turkey. But in many areas of the world, names of places can be intensely politicized, so organizations like the article source ("the energy dedicated portal that aims to deliver up-to-date news and analysis across the energy agenda in 20+ countries in Central and Southeastern Europe") prefer as a matter of style to conform to official pronouncements. If they'd been around in 2019, they would have talked a lot about "FYROM" or "the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia": an incredibly unwieldly name, one that has probably never been used colloquially, but was necessary in order to avoid taking sides between Greece and the country now known as North Macedonia.
But as the person had epilepsy, which happens as a result of "abnormal electrical brain activity", I wonder how general those results are. I'm surprised this hasn't been done on a 'healthy' patient
The Ferrari 296 GTB weighs about 1500kg and the sports version 1300kg. For the cars YASA produces motors for it's much easier to increase the power to weight ratio by reducing weight than increasing power. I imagine an important design point for all of its components is to reduce weight.
Also as mentioned by another comment, Mercedes produces Formula 1 power units, and engineers would kill for a savings of a few kilograms in Formula 1. Those savings are not easy to come by.
> Energy prices have risen roughly at the rate of CPI since 2022, perhaps we got used to the relatively flat prices for the previous decade:
That statement seems to be upside-down. Energy factors into the cost of almost every other product, that is, the rise of energy prices causes much of the inflation elsewhere, which is then reflected by the CPI.
Also notice, 2022 is when the data-center and AI boom started, that too fits the premise of their culpability.
But then we live in a bizarre world where inflation is good, and the price of everything rising together is just wholesome and natural.
And while it's certainly an unpopular concept to present, electricity right now is a whole lot cheaper (on average, in the US) when viewed through an inflation-tinted lens than it has been at many times in the past.
I find that FRED (from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) is pretty useful for visualizing that kind of data, in part because it shows folks exactly what went into producing the chart. The citations and any maths are all included for inspection (see the "Edit Graph" link). It's hard to use FRED to present information disingenuously: It simply is what it is.
(wherein: It can be plainly seen that the 1980s were very dark times indeed, and the first ~half of the 1990s weren't so great either. We're currently somewhere around turn-of-the-millennia in terms of how much our electric bill hurts compared to how much everything else hurts.
(And none of this should be construed to mean that I'm ecstatic about paying my power bill or something. Everything is fuckin' expensive these days -- including electricity.))
So if a government agency or court (presumably the US government) makes a data request with a non disclosure order (FBI NSL, FISA, SCA) - Google and Amazon would break that non disclosure order and tell Israel.
Wouldn't those involved be liable to years in prison?
I imagine it depends on which country makes that request, its legal basis, and how their gag order is written.
I find it hard to imagine a federal US order wouldn’t proscribe this cute “wink” payment. (Although who knows? If a state or locality takes it upon themselves to raid a bit barn, can their local courts bind transnational payments or is that federal jurisdiction?)
But from the way it’s structured—around a specific amount of currency corresponding to a dialing code of the requesting nation—it sure sounds like they’re thinking more broadly.
I could more easily imagine an opportunistic order—say, from a small neighboring state compelling a local contractor to tap an international cable as it crosses their territory—to accommodate the “winking” disclosure: by being either so loosely drafted or so far removed from the parent company’s jurisdiction as to make the $billions contract worth preserving this way.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a45497067/ford-transit-ste...
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