Gadgetory

choose it then in Basel Brown Pueblo Gold it's the name of my cover band okay so you're in the market for a commercial van no okay well let's pretend like you are for a second because today we're taking a look at the Ford Transit 150 now most of the times you'll see this van operating is sort of an airport shuttle or as a large panel van for construction crew or carpet shampooers or something like that but this model is an XLT model which means that it is sort of set up to be a little bit nicer than your standard white commercial van for starters we've got this pueblo gold paint which really is a nice way of saying beige but you got to admit it looks a lot better than the white that most of these vans are going to roll off the assembly line in we've also in the dashboard got a pretty nice tech layout it's almost as though Ford just wholesale ripped the dashboard out of a 2013 Ford Focus and dropped it in this van so here in the center of the dash we've got the MyFord Touch infotainment system with navigation hands-free calling I've sort of criticized the system for being a little bit slow in the past and it still is here and the screen is a bit smallish in this dashboard it just sort of looks pint-sized and really far away from me which makes it even harder to interact with here's a cool feature with the barn doors at the back of the van they've got a locking feature so you can lock them in their out position in case you're carrying something that's really long you need to hang out of the back of the van you can also unlock them and have the door swing all the way out 180 degrees for unfettered access to the storage area now commercial vans are very reconfigurable right now it's set up to hold about ten people and their luggage but those seats can be popped out to make room for more stuff or the entire interior can be stripped and outfitted by Ford for whatever needs you have with just me and one passenger in it over the weekend it got about 17 18 miles per gallon which isn't bad I imagine that it'll get a little bit less than that when you fill this thing up with people and stuff I don't spend a whole lot of time in commercial vans so the ergonomics of this vehicle are a bit weird to me now one of the things that is really odd for me is the sort of weird positioning of the steering wheel now I understand that I'm sitting high and the steering rack is way down low so you have to have a very steeply sloped steering column but in order to sit close enough to this wheel to drive the car comfortably I end up sitting almost too close to it which sets up the weird irony of there being all of this space in the van but I can't get in and out of it without smacking my knee on the adjuster for the steering column it's just a little bit odd the engine is as configurable as the box itself so you can get the transit 1:50 with a 3.7 liter natural gas engine or you can have it run on propane there's also a diesel option you can flip-flop the engine around when your spec in this vehicle out to match whatever needs for power or torque or efficiency you might have now under the hood we've got for its 3.7 liter v6 engine that's going to put out about 275 horsepower and about 260 pound feet of torque that's not in a mint amount of power in a vehicle that's this big so pricing a commercial vehicle like the transit 150 can be tricky because well every part of it is configurable do you want to gasoline engine or propane engine do you want sliding doors or barn doors are you buying just one are you getting the whole fleet it gets complicated so let's keep it simple and say that this model is going to start at around $33,000 and something well equipped like this XLT model is going to run you around 36,000 you