Why a van is a box
A VAN is shaped the way it is for a reason that comes straight out of geometry. For a given length, a box holds far more than any curved shape, so a tall, square CARGO area swallows several times what a car boot of the same footprint would. Make it tall enough to stand up in and a COURIER can walk about inside instead of crawling over the load.
Everything else follows from that. SLIDING DOORS take up no space when open, which matters on a narrow street. The floor sits low so heavy LOADING does not need a ramp. The windows behind the DRIVER are usually panelled over, because parcels do not need a view.
One measurement decides a surprising amount of it. Goods move around Europe on standard wooden pallets 1.2 metres wide, so vans are built with at least that much space between the rear wheel arches. Get it wrong by a couple of centimetres and a whole industry cannot use your van, so rival models from different makers end up with suspiciously similar load bays.
The last mile is the expensive one
Moving a box from a factory in Asia to a warehouse in Europe is remarkably cheap per item, because ships and lorries carry vast quantities at once. The costly part is the end of the journey: one DELIVERY van, one DRIVER, one PARCEL at a time, up the path and back again. The trade calls it the last mile, and it can swallow a large share of what the whole delivery costs.
A busy driver may make well over a hundred stops in a day. The route is usually planned by software, and some firms deliberately design out left turns across oncoming traffic, having worked out that waiting to cross wastes both time and fuel.
The camper that began as a sketch
In 1947 a Dutch importer visiting the Volkswagen factory drew a rough idea in his notebook: a simple box body sitting on the Beetle's mechanical parts. The result went on sale in 1950 and became the split-windscreen bus that turned into the world's favourite CAMPER. Versions of it were still being built in Brazil in 2013, more than sixty years later.
Add a bed, a sink and a cupboard and a van becomes a house that parks anywhere, which is the whole appeal of van life. Fold rows of SEATS in instead and you have a MINIVAN, quietly the most practical family vehicle ever built, whatever anyone says about how it looks.
Britain's electric fleet delivered milk
Long before electric cars became fashionable, Britain ran the largest fleet of electric vehicles in the world, and it delivered the milk. Milk floats were battery-powered because they were quiet enough not to wake a street at five in the morning, and because they only had to crawl from house to house before returning to the depot to charge. There were tens of thousands of them by the 1960s.
That is precisely the job electric vans do well now: short, stop-start routes with a predictable distance and somewhere to plug in overnight. A DIESEL ENGINE is at its worst in that pattern, so delivery fleets are switching over before anybody else.