I’m a little guy who normally hauls little stuff. I often look foolish in big trucks with big engines, especially in city traffic. But I get paid to drive them.
What I’ve noticed in my years of writing about cars and trucks is that lots of little guys worldwide spend their workdays hauling little stuff — usually in congested cities where big pickup trucks and vans make little sense. They use little trucks, or other smallish conveyances that better fit their work and living environments.
One of those little trucks, in wide use in Western Europe, is the Ford Transit Connect. It has an appearance reminiscent of the Colorado River basin’s humpback chub, a small fish with a long snout and a pronounced hump behind its head.
The humpback chub is built more for maneuvering between rock crevices and through other small spaces than it is for speed. The design of the Transit Connect is based on a similar concept. It is meant to move efficiently through man-made canyons of concrete and steel — to pick up and deliver without appreciably worsening the congestion found in those places.
But the Transit Connect, equipped with a 2-liter four-cylinder engine (136 horsepower, 128 foot-pounds of torque), also fares well on expressways and highways, assuming it’s driven with a modicum of common sense. That means maintaining residence in the slower lanes — right and middle. It means staying out of the acceleration lane, the left lane, unless it is absolutely necessary to use that strip.
I fell in love with the Transit Connect in London and Rome, where I noticed its ability to deliver and collect goods with much greater ease than larger trucks. The little trucks were in and out of pickup and delivery spots in a fraction of the time of the big trucks, many of which were carrying similar amounts and types of packaged and bundled goods.
The Transit Connect simply makes more sense in urban spaces. It’s to Ford’s credit that its executives have overcome the bigger-is-better mentality of the truck market in the United States and brought the Transit Connect here.
It’s also a risky business decision in an environment where the urban transportation of anything, including flowers, seems to require a medium-size or large truck, van, or sport-utility vehicle with six, eight or more cylinders.
Maybe, now that “going green” is American chic, the little Transit Connect has a chance of making it in a country that grew fat and rich by supersizing everything from hamburgers to houses.
I hope so.
I drove a 2010 Transit Connect panel van for a week and am eagerly looking forward to driving future models, especially if Ford decides to bring a diesel version to these shores.
Today’s advanced diesel engines come with low tailpipe and noise pollution. They also are 30 percent more fuel-efficient than gasoline-powered models. Installed in the Transit Connect, that means a delivery truck with big utility, a small footprint, reduced tailpipe and noise pollution, and increased fuel efficiency in an urban setting.
There also is the possibility of a gas-electric hybrid, or an all-electric model.
Am I proselytizing here? Yes.
Not all trucks need long wheelbases, wide tracks or body-on-frame construction. Not all of them need six-, eight- or 10-cylinder engines. It’s time to end automotive overkill in the nation’s cities. The Transit Connect is a way to start.
Brown is a special correspondent.
