The Tiny White Van

It occurs to me that I never wrote about the tiny white van due to the fact that I wasn't writing during the summer, and that's when the TWV happened. It was during the Cash for Clunkers program; in fact, it was due to the Clunkers program.

What we'd been driving to market for about nine years was a silver Chevy Astro van. I know, I know--Consumer's Reports hated the Astro, but for us it was a logical thing. It carried a lot of cargo (I used to have my two display tables in there, set up, so I could carry flats of plants on top of the tables as well as underneath, thereby doubling the useable space) and was easy to get into even for people with ageing knees (unlike the previous Toyota pickup, which was cute, but difficult to maneuver things in and out of). But over the years the Astro became, well, terrifying to drive. It always did drive like a very large box, and after the accident involving the snow and culvert, the box became slightly skewed due to the bent subframe. The alignment in front was tricky, and our mechanic kept saying, "It's as good as we can get it, but..." And it was expensive, with an MPG of 16, and power windows, locks, and all that. It was never made for driving dirt roads, so all those power goodies had a habit of breaking and needing repair on a semi-regular basis. I thought of trying to sell it, but it was evident that all the little and not-so-little items that needed fixing would cost a lot more than we would ever be able to sell it for. I wasn't sure what I was going to do; I'd been looking at various delivery/market vans, but what had been available was oversized, overpowered, and most of all, overpriced. Even used ones were clearly out of our price range. So I just kept plugging along in the Astro, trying to be grateful that it was still getting from point A (the farm) to point B (anywhere else) and almost always back.

But in early August the rear latch lock (part of the electronic locking system) broke again, and I was forced to take the van in to the local Chevy dealer to have it repaired, again, to the tune of $380+ dollars (I told you it was expensive). Meanwhile, Wendy had to go to Edgewood, 10 miles up the highway, for something or other, and when she came back to pick me up, she said, "You HAVE to come see this!" So without telling me what "this" was, she drove back to Edgewood and to the Ford dealers' there, and there was the Tiny White Van esconced on a little rise by itself. It was tiny, with about 2/3 of the Astro's space, but it was clearly built for delivering cargo, very square inside, and almost tall enough to stand upright in. And with doors on both sides in back and a double door in back, you could reach everything inside without having to climb in unless you really wanted to. Plus, it was rated at 25 MPG due to the fact that the engine was 4-cylinder, no frills, basic. Basic, basic, basic. No electronic locks to break, no power windows to fail (have you even seen a vehicle with old-fashioned crank windows in a couple of decades?). Automatic transmission, though (works for me), and all the standard safety features. And cute--European style, the sort of small van you can see anywhere around the world except for here, where we've been buried under a glut of monster gas-guzzling vehicles for 'way too long. In fact, the Ford Transit Connect, which this is, is built in Turkey, though Ford is making noises about starting to make them here.

So we went home, took a close look at our personal and farm finances, took a close look at the Clunker program, and took a deep breath. Two days later we went to the Chevy dealer, paid for the brand-new lock, and drove the Astro to the Ford dealer, where we clunkerized it, new lock and all. Poor Astro; I really felt sort of bad for it.

Not that bad, though, and with the money for the Astro, the cost for the Transit was under $19,000, far less than any of those used vans I'd been looking at.

Six months later the Transit begins to look like it lives on a farm, what with the mud and all. There are a couple of drawbacks to it (aren't there always?). The biggest is that it's front-wheel drive rather than all-wheel drive, so it fishtails in the mud and I'm less willing to take it out on really bad days (which ought to save me from getting stranded quite as often, anyway). And when I park it somewhere and want to lock it, that involves walking all around it so I can lock all five doors, and then walking all around it to unlock all five doors. I do sort of miss the electronic locking system, the digital thermometer readout, and the power rear-view mirrors. But I can live without them just fine. I love parking the TWV at the market, and I love my fellow marketeers admiring it (there are now three more of them at the market). It's fun to drive. I can fit 14 bales of straw in it. Even though it doesn't do jack-rabbit acceleration (in fact, I once saw a review that characterized the acceleration as "glacial"), it does get there. It has a good heart. For us, it's nearly perfect! We still love it, mud and all.