Ford e-Transit review

The electric version of the Ford Transit, the ubiquitous background decoration of modern Britain for decades. In that time it’s been propelled by any number of petrol and diesel engines, but the introduction of this battery-powered one in 2020 was the most radical change yet.

How come? Well, there are those who think if it’s not diesel, it isn't a working vehicle, citing range and flexibility over everything. Until recently they might've had a point: some of the big stuff was rolling into the party with real-world range of 80-ish miles and a list price that would make Jeff Bezos flinch. Tough sell.

That's no longer the case, and you've now got a variety of proper full-size electric vans pushing 200+ miles of range. And have you seen the price of diesel lately? No wonder fleets everywhere are making the switch.

Do electric Transits come in all shapes and sizes?

They sure do. Smallest (and the smartest looking) of the bunch is the e-Transit Courier, which starts from £27,000 excluding VAT. It’s targeted at small businesses, delivery drivers, anyone who needs a little runabout with a big (ish) loadspace for getting around cities. Underneath it gets a 134bhp electric motor mated to a 43kWh (usable) battery for up to 181 miles.

There’s no electric Transit Connect so next up is the e-Transit Custom, your classic mid-size van, which starts at just under £45,000. It’s available with three, five or six seats in varying lengths, while under the bonnet you get the choice of 134bhp or 215bhp electric motors, both paired with a 64kWh battery for a maximum 204 miles of e-range.

Alternatively there’s the schporty MS-RT version, which ups the ante with 281bhp but a significantly reduced e-range, and asks for around £20k extra in change. Yikes.

So what’s the e-Transit up against?

How long have you got? The Connect has competition from the likes of the Citroen e-Berlingo, Fiat e-Doblo, Peugeot e-Partner and Vauxhall Combo Electric from within the Stellantis megacorp, not to mention the copycat Toyota Proace City Electric. There’s also the Renault e-Trafic and LEVC NV5 to consider.

The e-Transit Custom’s biggest rival is Volkswagen’s Transporter, but that’s fundamentally the same car in disguise and gets identical electric gubbins beneath. Otherwise you’ve got quintuplets from Stellantis and Toyota – the Citroen e-Dispatch, Peugeot e-Expert, Fiat e-Scudo, Vauxhall Vivaro Electric and Toyota Proace Electric – while a slightly posher option is the Mercedes-Benz eVito.

Supplying a boutique outfitters in Pall Mall? How about an ID. Buzz Cargo? Or how about a Kia PV5 Cargo?

The biggest fish are the Renault Master E-Tech and Mercedes-Benz eSprinter. From China, we've seen a lot of SAIC-owned Maxus eDeliver 9s out and about.

My head hurts. And we've not even got to the big boy...

Well remembered. The big cheese Ford e-Transit panel van starts from £49,545 and comes in all the usual variations of the standard vehicle. So you can mix and match three lengths and two heights, and then there’s a bare chassis cab for glueing specialist equipment onto – tipper bodies, mobile workshops, cranes… use your imagination. There’s a multicab version for moving bodies and gear.

There are two available battery sizes – 68kWh or 89kWh – mounted low under the floor, with the motor stuffed between the rear axle, so yes, the e-Transit is rear-wheel drive. For which we rejoice for no specific reason. There’s independent and heavy duty rear suspension too, so it rides better than the live-axle and leaf-sprung stuff.

In theory (and depending on which version you’ve got, obviously) you can get up to 249 miles of WLTP range (196 with the smaller battery). That’s an estimate for city driving, mind – overall WLTP is 211 miles.

In any case, the e-Transit should have enough capacity to cope with what businesses need to do, although we'd fully expect one filled with bags of cement in winter to do considerably less. There’s between nine-and-a-half and just over 15 cubic metres of loadspace available from the panel van, by the way.

Why would I want to switch to electric?

Well, it probably doesn’t help that the UK government keeps tweaking the goalposts with the grants. But very broadly, small e-vans can get up to £2.5k off the new price, and the larger stuff gets £5k off, but you’re limited to 1,000 vehicles. That’s not a problem for Dave’s Plumbing (other Daves are available), but if you’re DPD or Amazon with fleets in the tens of thousands, it makes a big difference.

But the fact remains that electric delivery vans are absolutely suited to their main use cases. They’re quiet – no dieselly idling during stops – they’re easy to operate and monitor, they produce no local emissions, they can slip into low-emission zones without charge and they generally end up at a depot at night for cost-effective refuelling.

Start to do the sums, and even though they cost a bit initially, the TCO or ‘total cost of ownership’ over a period with a properly set up fleet can start to look very attractive. If electric is to make sense, then delivery stuff that has a set usage profile and tends to be bombing around within a 150-mile a day boundary is a cracking place to start.

This makes sense. Am I really on TopGear.com?

To be honest, it’s a bit of a no-brainer. Where fossil fuels are at their least efficient – stop/start traffic and in town – electric is in its element.

There’s also a lot to be said for the general ease-of-use: the cab feels more like a nicely specced car, and given the general quiet and torquey electric motor you can imagine delivery drivers scrapping over who gets the e-Transit rather than the diesel. Especially when there’s a full day's work ahead.

Does the e-Transit make financial sense?

The big initial purchase price is softened somewhat by the electric one being 40 per cent cheaper to service, way cheaper to run on electricity per mile and likely chunkier figures on the residual side.

Looking at the full-sized e-Transit here, which gets the biggest batteries of the lot, if you take advantage of off-peak home (or depot) tariffs starting at under 10p per kWh, it's around £6-8 to charge. That's the kind of pocket change you'll find under the seats most days anyway.

But rely on fast public points, which typically cost at least 50p per kilowatt-hour (and then some), and you're looking at five times the price. Minimum.

There’s also an eight-year/100k-mile battery warranty on the e-Transit, so Ford isn’t overly worried by battery issues. Is anyone? That myth has long been busted.

But probably of equal significance is Ford ramping up its ‘Ford Pro’ ecosystem, which aggregates everything from buying the actual vehicle to financing, sorting out the monitoring and telematics software for individual businesses and servicing. Ford will help you set up a charging hub, look at your infrastructure, and recommend how to work out strategy. If you’re a fleet manager, that’s invaluable as you try and green up your fleet. Boring for the rest of us, though.

The Ford e-Transit is adaptable, practical and eminently fit for purpose, but more to the point it’s comfy, well equipped and a joy to spend time in – and we don’t just mean compared to other LCVs. This is a van you look forward to driving because it’s so in-tune with what you ask it to do and has a commanding presence on the road. The only time you’ll resent it is when you need to squeeze into a standard parking space.

If you ally that with the Ford Pro scheme, it starts to make all kinds of sense. Shouldn’t all the shorter range (and by that we mean vehicles not zooming up and down the motorway network) and multi-drop carriers be electric? If the numbers stack up, then yes. And the e-Transit is currently one of the very best, as you’d expect.