There’s a new Supervan, and it’s a 2.5-litre Audi RS3-engined VW Transporter

A company that specialises in customising Volkswagen’s venerable Transporter has revealed plans to make a ballistic, limited-edition performance van using Audi power. Welcome to the new ‘Supervan’.

It intends to do this by injecting the 2.5-litre, multi-award-winning five-cylinder powerhaus from an RS3 into a T6.1 base, thus creating a very unique way of transporting humans from A to B and then possibly straight on to Z using a very specific engine canter.

Van Haven (geddit?) is partnering with the RML Group for this project, who you definitely will have heard of. That’s the British team behind the stunning Short Wheelbase Ferrari 250 tribute, that mad 911 Turbo S thing, the McLaren Senna GTR, Bizzarrini 5300 GT, and Nissan Juke-R, to name but five.

Other than the fact it’ll be a limited-edition road-going van you can actually buy, capped at 30 models, we do not know much more. We haven't even got a picture yet, so that thing above is just a standard VW Transporter Sportline. Over to Van Haven’s MD Paul Kilbride: “Supervans have traditionally been one-offs, built once and never repeated.

“Putting one into limited production means a customer can order one, and that’s the point. The engine will get the attention, but repeatability is the real breakthrough.

“At its core are two donors: a VW Transporter T6.1 and an Audi RS3, complete with its 2.5-litre five-cylinder turbo engine. Both were chosen deliberately, not by chance, as the starting point for an ambitious limited-production engineering programme.”

RML principal engineer James Nurse added: “Van Haven brought us a problem nobody in this industry has solved: how to make something as extreme as a Supervan repeatable, safe and homologated, without losing what makes it special.”

They’re currently trying to figure all of that out right now ahead of the finished product arriving at some point in 2027. Reckon Ford should be worried?