UKC

I have a VW van which is a 14 plate 2.0 TDi Blue motion long wheel base Caddy. It's done about 140,000 miles and I need to consider replacing it. Since I go to London a few times per year via car or van it would seem sensible to consider a hybrid successor. I do not want an all electric van, as I go to Scotland a fair amount (from Rutland), and I have little time for travel (I last went on the Saturday of bank holiday weekend and drove back from 9pm on the Monday, arriving back home at 5am before getting up at 8am), so charging en route might stop me going at all.

I have looked on the VW site and saw no signs of electric or hybrid vans (I may be looking in the wrong way?) but see none. I want the van for work and for general usage, but do not want one as large as a Transporter (I don't think). The Caddy is ideal, but it is wearing and things are starting to go.

What do others suggest? I'm not sure if there is an equivalent size with other manufacturers. I also own a 17 plate Peugeot which is too small and gives me a bad back (insufficient leg room). That van is for others to use, and they tend to not be as tall as I am.

Surely you don’t need a hybrid for ULEZ compliance, just a Euro 6 compliant vehicle like your existing adblue diesel?

Possibly, but we are all supposed to be improving on our environmental situation. I mostly go to London on the train, but occasionally there are no trains, or I need to deliver a large item to my daughter in SE London, or friend in Ealing.

I've just been had by a very poor ULEZ system in Edinburgh, as when we tried to deal with it online via mobile, the only option seemed to be to pay a fine via an account number. The signs along the roads were very poor as well.

The ULEZ is to greatly reduce NOx levels which are very harmful to health and nothing to do with climate change and I don’t see that changing. Self charging hybrids are less fuel efficient than equivalent pure petrol/diesel so will actually increase your emissions. You already use trains when possible so the best answer may be to get a Euro 6 petrol or diesel vehicle when it is time to replace your van

This is rarely true, there probably will be a set constant speed at around 55mph where a pure petrol engine can just beat a hybrid version of the same vehicle on mpg but for accelerating and most others speeds, particularly slow speeds, the hybrid should easily bear the pure petrol on mpg figures. This is because the petrol engine in a hybrid can spend the majority of its time at its most efficient speed and load whereas in a pure petrol engine its speed and load is constantly varying

In the real world self charging hybrids like for like are far more fuel efficient than their ice equivalent. The gap gets closed a lot as hybrids are usually petrol, and you could compare to a diesel, but in terms of NOx and particulate emissions they are miles apart.

Or just any old petrol made in the last 20 years. All Euro4 petrols are ULEZ compliant. I have a Euro2 car that's 24 years old that's ULEZ compliant, although not all EURO2 & 3 petrol cars are.

I checked some figures and I stand corrected, thanks

I don't look too often, but I don't think I've ever come across any hybrid option for vans. You may be best just going for one of the newer petrol engine Caddy models.

The Transit Connect and it's sister the VW Caddy are now available as plug-in hybrid. When the make a UK model no idea.

Weirdly, vans seem to be really behind the curve on both EV and hybrid options. I do have an electric van, it's a first generation EV, so a teeny weeny battery. But I was looking recently and discovering that even new ones don't have the same range as my Renault Zoe. Cars now have massive range available. I presume the electric busses must have reasonable range (otherwise they wouldn't be viable), but somehow the van market has been left out. 

So, no real help, but just a bit baffled that the van world doesn't seem to have kept pace with development elsewhere in the transport industry in general

Is this just down to aerodynamics? Most EVs tend to be quite carefully sculpted to minimise drag, but vans are basically brick shaped, and moving significantly away from that would be a massive compromise on other factors. You need reasonable height to get the storage volume without making the van really long. And you can't even point/curve the front much without significantly lengthening the whole vehicle.

All of that possibly compounded by the fact that even if you throw all the newest tech and design at it, it'll still be compromised by those factors, so maybe the current crop is good enough for the niches they're capable of filling and there's no point making them more expensive by trying to wring out every last mile of range because it's still not going to be very good.

I do see more and more electric vans around, but presumably they're mostly filling the local urban niche of short, stop-start journeys.

just noticed a neighbour with a new e-Berlingo  https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/citroen/berlingo/357952/citroen-e-berlingo-lo...

surprised to see going for as little as £6-7K s/h. how long does the battery last?

70k will get you a 270 mile range large van, thats longer range than a Zoe isn't it?

https://www.carmagazine.co.uk/car-reviews/mercedes-benz/espinter-van/

Others not bearing the Mercedes badge but with a similar range will come to market soon as well

There's no great mystery as to the poor range on many e-vans, they're heavy, and as Luke90 says they have awful aerodynamics. At high speed aerodynamics are the dominant factor in fuel efficiency. A lot of electric cars do sacrifice some practicality for aerodynamics. I have one and the boot opening is clearly designed with aerodynamics in mind over ease of use and is there more annoying to use than it could be. I'm sure that the Zoe has similar issues, it is a very small cars. Vans are all about practicality and are less willing to make these compromises.

They could make a 450 mile e-van tomorrow if they wanted, they just figure that not enough people will be willing to pay for the battery required for this

Most buses probably don't do more than 150 miles a day, and they have very set routes so when the local authority is buying one they're not worrying about the odd long journey that they may have to do which many van buyers will. They also know that they will be starting and finishing at the depot every day and possibly go there during the day as well. All of this makes it possible to spec the battery to be just the right size

Where are you seeing them at that price? Can’t find anything for less than ~£15k?

It's payload, vans carry stuff and the bigger the battery the less they can transport, there's no magic answer (even though the governments have agreed to make road-users lives more dangerous by allowing electric vans to be heavier than their i.c. equivalents.

Even VW had to shelve their camper conversion of the Buzz, it was overweight.

Mercedes likely researched average distance the average local drop driver does in a day, their recharge time is effectively a lunch break. Plus there's the licencing requirement on the larger batteried model. I'd expect it to be fairly well planned out. 

I gather (may be wrong) that the problem with electric vans is the sheer size of battery required eats into carriage space too much. 

I think that amounts to the same thing I was saying, just approached from the other side of the equation. Vans fundamentally aren't tiny vehicles, so they have space for quite a bit of battery without hugely compromising load space. But because the vehicle itself is big and brick-shaped (and potentially needs to carry a lot of additional cargo weight), a long range would require loads of battery rather than just quite a bit.

On the larger vans the batteries are under the floor and don't take any room, on the Caddy sized ones there was no space so the floors are higher/load room smaller. The weight is the problem, on the Transit sized vans you lose about 1/3rd the payload.

The reason small hybrid vans came late is they are derived from a car platform and all the major players (who went down the full ev route) had to suddenly develop new hybrid platforms when the full ev idea turned out to be unsuccesful. Toyota were probably the first with the Proace.

As others have said I am starting to see small cans derived from car platforms - maybe up to VW Transporter size. 
Another weight consideration on building a Transit size van with a decent range is that if you stuff it full of batteries and it gets heavy you could easily trip over the 3,5ton barrier. This means you need a different license to drive it and in some countries you have to pay road tolls for every journey you do. 

ZEV's (zero emission vehicles) licence weight restrictions were increased to 4.25 tons in 2018. There was no comparable requirement to increase their safety though which lead to considerable criticism.

"They are the same size and look the same" is how the half-wit in charge said. Don't ask how things go in an emergency stop from full speed.

I think it's the issue of powering a fully laden 3.5 tonne (or bigger) van. It's a lot of weight for a battery to shift, compared to its size, compared to a car. To get a 300 odd miles real world range in a van needs better batteries I think.

That's great news, I hope I'm on my last ICE van, but there's no way I can afford brand new, so hoping it will run until these can be had for a reasonable price second hand.

Take away 1/3rd of my payload and cut my range by 3/4s and I might as well not have a van. 

I currently run a Citroen Relay 3.5 ton. With me and the tools and equipment I carry it weighs in at 3.3 ton. Payload is 1900kg Most days I do around 150 miles. Some days will be 300 miles plus and being contracted to a 2 hour response time covering all of Yorkshire and a lot of my work being rural electric isn't going to work.

The electric version of my van comes in 2 sizes, 37kw with a 73 mile range or a 70kw 139 mile range, payload is 1400kg thing is these are the WLTP ranges, not fully loaded in the dead of winter.

For delivering amazon parcels electric vans are the buisiness but we have a long way to ge before they are viable service engineers vans. 

That Citroen Berlingo is not the van version. In any case, it is the older Berlingo (2017 plate) that gives me a bad back after not that long.

A lot of this thread has gone down the all electric discussion, and not much mention of a hybrid setup. For practicality and reasonable pricing, am I going to have to forego the hybrid idea?

Well I've told you the three models that will become available, never heard of any others.

Is it that illogical?

Historically if you went over 3.5T you're into pretty large vehicles where the skill required to manoeuvre is much higher. They tend to be top heavy, very long, terrible blind spots, large turning circles etc.

Not sure how making a transit heavier leads to any of the above as it's the same form factor.

The weight is low down so for ordinary driving handling is comparable.

Official stopping distances will be a bit longer but not by much. In the real world I'm pretty sure with modern ABS a 4T EV transit could outbreak a 30 year old 3T ICE transit in the wet with an ordinary driver. Safety systems have improved. Honestly can't see the issue.

I can see this being a big improvement. All the weight in a an these days is up front, when you rack them out and load the up it can raise the center of gravity massively. Having a big slab of battery running across the floor will lower the COG. 

I agree about the centre of gravity, but it also depends on where the battery is in the floor plan. I presume that they are all central when considering left to right (?), but if a battery is not central, and for instance more towards the back of the vehicle, then this will definitely affect cornering, how it may tend to twist or slide on corners.

Meantime, do I just look for a newish second hand petrol van, or is there a hybrid out there that fits the bill, at this moment (I cannot wait for some up and coming vehicles)?

I would expect the design for weight balance to reflect predicted average loading of the van.

You don't want full electric, Hybrid vans on the S/H market aren't a thing. (assuming your looking S/H) so if you want a van ICE is your only option. 

What about an estate car? Plenty of hybrid options. Does everything a van does but also you can use the extra seats if needed. Best of both worlds. Added bonus, tax. The Mrs wanted a berlingo van, about £300 a year to tax, the car version with the same engine £30 a year. 

Whether or not the handling is the same I'll have to wait  for the tests, the laws of physics under braking and in the event of a collision will not however have been changed.

What has changed in order to improve uptake of this type of vehicle is the previous requirement for an additional five hours training, that simply removing a safety measure to fullfil a political dogma.

The other skeleton in the cupboard is the licence change legislation does not actually say it must be a battery-driven vehicle at all, it covers a wide range of AFV's (alternative fuel vehicles), that is the current licence flexibility legislation defines ‘alternative fuel’ as: electricity; natural gas; biogas; hydrogen; hydrogen and electricity (hybrid). So an LNG powered van with no modification i.e identical to it's diesel counterpart can now weight 4.25 tons. Either both are safe to operate or they are not so why not allow all vans to carry more cargo and be more efficient?

Dacia Jogger

Ford Tourneo

Mercedes B250

VW T7

All come as hybrid versions.

Tax disadvantage you mean. A van can be claimed 100% against profits (So effectively 40%).

It's not "removing a safety measure to fulfil a political dogma", it's relaxing a safety restriction in order to reduce a different harm. Not unusual for politicians to have to balance different harms and considering only one side of it is intellectually dishonest. Somebody has made a judgement that the environmental harm from having the weight limit restrict moves to decarbonise the van fleet would have been greater than the road safety harm of allowing higher weights. Bearing in mind montyjohn's points about how vehicle safety has moved on over the years since the original weight limit was set, I wouldn't be surprised if that's a reasonable judgement. Upping the weight limit on conventional vans would also be less dangerous than it would have been back then, but it wouldn't be balanced by the reduction of another harm, or not to the same extent anyway.

Does this actually exist? Or is it entirely theoretical?

It is also intellectually dishonest not to consider the savings in emmisions to be gained by allowing the massively greater existing fleet of conventionally fuelled vehicles of modern construction to carry a greater payload. Either they are all safe or none are.

You'd already mentioned that, and that's what I was acknowledging when I said "or not to the same extent anyway". Because I can see your point about making that fleet more efficient, but it's not as significant a saving per vehicle as moving to electric, so therefore the road safety harm isn't balanced by as large a benefit elsewhere.

That's just absolutist and unrealistic. There's no such thing as perfectly safe. Greater weight will always come with some measure of greater danger. 3 would be safer than 3.5 but 2.5 would be safer still. It was always an arbitrary compromise balancing the level of risk against the level of usefulness. Now the government have decided to throw the environmental factor into the mix as well. Ok.

If the OP is talking about buisiness use yes. A private person can't claim anything back. 

I am the OP.

I have it for business use, on a daily basis.

Cash flow won't currently allow me to buy brand new, unless there's an incredible deal.

It seems that hybrid is probably w worthwhile compromise, as the battery won't be huge and change the functoin of the van too much: Yet there won't be a secondhand market. I also cannot wait for other models to come out. So am I best looking at petrol ICE vans, for now, and change later?

Blimey, imagine if all online discussion was like this. Marvellous. 

Have an up vote from me. 

Sorry I didn't go back to check. 

Is your current van still meeting your needs? 

What are the maintenance costs like on it? 

I get shut of my vans if my needs change or if they start costing in maintenance. Usually around 200k and 6 to 8 years old. 

Might be 2 or 3 years before decent s/h hybrids are worth looking at so do you think yours will last or needing replacing before then? 

Turbo is noisy and likely to go in the next 8-10,000 miles.

Dual fly-wheel doesnt look good either.