Since Sprinters are so high, they would have had to custom build that carrier to fit them on the lower level. Interestingly, when Dodge ended their original van after 2003, they threw away the market for full size family vans or work vans for those who would garage them, since no Sprinters fit in a regular garage.
The tallest Sprinter is actually shorter than the tallest (‘high roof”) Ford Transit. And the lowest ProMaster is surely no taller, or at least not significantly, than a B series Dodge/Ram van. Same with the low-roof Transit, which has very different sheetmetal and glass above the belt line than the mid-roof and high-roof Transits (and not just in height).
I’ve noticed similar gaggles of vans (Sprinters, etc.) often in the past several years. I’ve stumbled over parking lots filled with them at airports and in other nondescript industrial locations. There’s a Maaco bodyshop near my office that has a parking lot full of them and they’re always lined up several deep at the bay doors.
Amazon.
The vast expansion of Amazon home delivery in the past 2 or 3 years seems to have generated a huge need for vans. I suspect that Amazon is buying many of them on the used market and refinishing them for their use. It’s pretty amazing.
Most of ours seem new or newer but there always seem to be at least a couple of Amazon branded ones (Sprinter, Transit, Promaster, I guess soon to be EV Rivians(?)) roaming our neighborhood at any time of day or evening. I’m waiting for the day (can it be much longer?) that they offer the reverse service, i.e. package pickup for whatever outgoing shipments a resident may need, i.e. many of those packages that are currently shipped via UPS or FedEx or the USPS – with the amount of vans/drivers out there, and the infrastructure they seem to have built up, the pickup part of the equation would seem to be almost gravy and then just insert that extra volume of packages into the normal Amazon shipment channel once the van returns to base.
I’m clearly a broken record but with Amazon, the USPS, FedEx and several commercial van-leasing places all going the high-roof Euro van route, it’s still amazing to me that GM has no similar offering over here. The Savana or Express old-style vans seem to go to U-Haul or used as cutaways. no delivery service seems to use them, at least not in any significant volume, even the airport shuttles seem to be going Transit or Sprinter these days. I’m sure they are insanely profitable to build, but it seems that offering the newer style (in addition) would be pure gravy.
I agree that GM is missing the boat on the van sales. I was converting my fleet to all Ford Transit and Transit Connect vans. The variety of sizes and the shelving systems and ladder racks designed to fit them made of fitting them much easier to equip. Plus the tall vans with the added space and height was a real plus for some of our operations.
GM is going to transition directly to EV vans, They have a whole new division: BrightDrop. Two sizes of vans. They’re already signing up dealers. They started early production back in September.
Good, it’s about time! I look forward to seeing these around then. If they and Rivian can make inroads these I assume the e-Transit will come over before too long along with the e-Sprinter.
The e Transit went into production in the US on Nov. 15, 2021. Get your order in!
The e Sprinter is not coming until 2023, when the next gen printer arrives. The current one’s range was not deemed sufficient for the US.
3SpeedAutomatic
Posted December 13, 2021 at 5:15 AM
Thanks Paul for the heads up on the BrightDrop. First time I’m hearing about it. Considering GMs big push to EVs, I now understand why there’s no rush to replace the Express with a Euro type ICE van.
The BrightDrop looks very interesting…almost worth a CC story in itself.
Near me FedEx seems to still use some GM vans but they seen to be using more step vans like UPS lately. The Express still seem to be preferred by contractors near me (plumbing HVAC, electric, etc) but that seems to be slowly changing. I know the commercial electricians that work on our building say one reason is towing, because the tow man lifts etc for warehouse work.
Dont you have courier pickup service? its a simple booking via trademe here, you dont really think drug dealers hang out on street corners peddling their wares hell no,unregistered technology and door to door pickup and delivery has been in use for decades.
Jim, I have expressed the same curiosity about GM not offering a “modern” van in the past, and I got schooled.
Thing one: GM no longer has a European branch from which to crib such a van.
Thing two: There are many things about the existing van that some van buyers find preferable. A buyer can choose a honkin’ 6.6 liter V-8 or a 2.8 liter I-4 turbo diesel. Full-frame construction. 10,000 lbs max towing capacity (I don’t think any of the Euro-style vans go that high, or at least not with enough power).
Yeah, you’d think that a company that produced such gems as the “Malibu Classic” for example might look at offering two offerings in the class, the Modern Van and the Van Classic… If I were buying a van I’d look at the modern vans and ignore the old ones since I don’t tow with one. If you offered both styles I’d look at one of them.
I get that they don’t have one to bring over which after decades of “not invented here” might seem to indicate a preference to just home-grow one anyway but I now see above that they are (finally) doing that with their new brand BrightDrop for an EV tallish van. Good for them, looking at that site though they seem to be trying to not have any visible link to GM itself. I understand why that is (stock valuation) but wonder how that will work in regard to fleet management sales/familiarity to those with existing GM van fleet.
Every once in a while I’ll see an old style van actually towing something but it seems to be relatively rare, at least compared to the amount of commercial businesses towing with pickups instead.
I’m not too far from a large fulfillment center and used to work across from it. They are using new vans. Several times I saw caravans of them coming from one of the near by rail yards window stickers present and all of the upfitting done.
A few weeks ago I was going to a store in a strip mall and found 20 or 30 new Transits, fully upfitted for Amazon in the parking lot. They do have a way to big parking lot and are next to a dealer, but it is a VW dealer and that is what I’ve seen there in the past. They are not affiliated with any Ford dealer in the area, so I found it a bit surprising. The also had a bunch of used white Promaster City wearing NJ plates for some reason. (I’m in WA)
But yeah Amazon is a big reason for the increased demand and sales for cargo Vans. In the early days of the DSP program they let the contractors pick their vans and it wasn’t uncommon to see a random van with magnets with the Amazon logo slapped on the doors. Now they seem to mandate that the DSPs use the full Amazon delivery Livery and trademarked color.
Yes many if not most of those Amazon branded delivery vans are not owned or operated by Amazon.
The contractors thing is a big part of the expansion. Fed ex has done the same with their ground service for years, the results are often mixed to poor for service but cheaper then operating in house like UPS. You often see very mixed reviews for Fed ex because of this where if you have a good local contractor it’s great if not its awful. Amazon likes to have a lot of control over its contractors so we will see how it works in the long run. I gather recent studies show UPS as the most on-time service compared to Fedex DHL USPS and amazon, and a lot of that seems to do with a consistent workforce, and cuts at USPS.
Near my work a local Amazon contractor stores his Vans (almost all Promaster now but last year they still had some express (with ghost outlines of a previous life at Uhaul) My understanding is that Tractor trailers from Amazon show up early in the morning and load the vans in the Parking lot. But that may change soon as Amazon adds more nearby warehouses (there are now 3 amazon warehouses within 10 miles of my house soon they will be as many warehouses as Walmarts.).
Amazon expansion has been crazy. The used market for cargo Vans has grown in value like crazy. West coast friends tell me most Amazon vans are sprinters, here in CT they use anything they can get their hands on (transit, promaster, express, sprinter, etc) they seem to prefer the promaster and transit as I see fewer and fewer express and sprinters lately.
Where are they going? I guess the boat is headed downriver on the Rhine towards Rotterdam. Are they transferred there to ocean freighters? Are they for the Dutch market?
There is a Sprinter factory in Dusseldorf; they can load on the boat there. But do they need to be shipped to North or South America? There are also Sprinter factories in South Carolina and Argentina.
The vessel was heading west on the river Waal, probably on its way to Rotterdam, indeed. Maybe Sprinters for the UK and Ireland, too far away to see if they were RHD.
I wonder of they are diesels under warranty repair jobs, being returned?
If that seems a bit mean, the Euro vans of all stripes don’t have a glorious reputation when they’re upside down here. And in a modern diesel especially, there’s just an awful lot of expensive hardware to give trouble, whether EGRs, DPFs, turbos – never hugely long-lived, it seems to this amateur – intercoolers, or injectors. Not to mention DSG-type boxes, that seem to quite variable in service life.
Be interesting to know some stats of how these Euro top-sellers do outside of that zone.
Locally at least, Tesla service is using Sprinters. When we bought our new high roof Transit last year, we were warned that delivery from the Kansas City assembly plant to our dealer in California would take a while, due to limited numbers of rail cars, and delivery trailers, that could handle the high roof. Which turned out to be the case. Ordered on July 4, delivered on Sept 22. But that was much better than later in the year, and in 2021, when Amazon orders were prioritized and customers couldn’t get vans at all, let alone worry about delivery delays.
Since Sprinters are so high, they would have had to custom build that carrier to fit them on the lower level. Interestingly, when Dodge ended their original van after 2003, they threw away the market for full size family vans or work vans for those who would garage them, since no Sprinters fit in a regular garage.
Such river vessels are also used to transport farm tractors, among others.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/wordless-outtake-landlubbers-taking-a-river-cruise/
The tallest Sprinter is actually shorter than the tallest (‘high roof”) Ford Transit. And the lowest ProMaster is surely no taller, or at least not significantly, than a B series Dodge/Ram van. Same with the low-roof Transit, which has very different sheetmetal and glass above the belt line than the mid-roof and high-roof Transits (and not just in height).
I’ve noticed similar gaggles of vans (Sprinters, etc.) often in the past several years. I’ve stumbled over parking lots filled with them at airports and in other nondescript industrial locations. There’s a Maaco bodyshop near my office that has a parking lot full of them and they’re always lined up several deep at the bay doors.
Amazon.
The vast expansion of Amazon home delivery in the past 2 or 3 years seems to have generated a huge need for vans. I suspect that Amazon is buying many of them on the used market and refinishing them for their use. It’s pretty amazing.
Most of ours seem new or newer but there always seem to be at least a couple of Amazon branded ones (Sprinter, Transit, Promaster, I guess soon to be EV Rivians(?)) roaming our neighborhood at any time of day or evening. I’m waiting for the day (can it be much longer?) that they offer the reverse service, i.e. package pickup for whatever outgoing shipments a resident may need, i.e. many of those packages that are currently shipped via UPS or FedEx or the USPS – with the amount of vans/drivers out there, and the infrastructure they seem to have built up, the pickup part of the equation would seem to be almost gravy and then just insert that extra volume of packages into the normal Amazon shipment channel once the van returns to base.
I’m clearly a broken record but with Amazon, the USPS, FedEx and several commercial van-leasing places all going the high-roof Euro van route, it’s still amazing to me that GM has no similar offering over here. The Savana or Express old-style vans seem to go to U-Haul or used as cutaways. no delivery service seems to use them, at least not in any significant volume, even the airport shuttles seem to be going Transit or Sprinter these days. I’m sure they are insanely profitable to build, but it seems that offering the newer style (in addition) would be pure gravy.
I agree that GM is missing the boat on the van sales. I was converting my fleet to all Ford Transit and Transit Connect vans. The variety of sizes and the shelving systems and ladder racks designed to fit them made of fitting them much easier to equip. Plus the tall vans with the added space and height was a real plus for some of our operations.
GM is going to transition directly to EV vans, They have a whole new division: BrightDrop. Two sizes of vans. They’re already signing up dealers. They started early production back in September.
https://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2021/sep/0928-brightdrop.html
Good, it’s about time! I look forward to seeing these around then. If they and Rivian can make inroads these I assume the e-Transit will come over before too long along with the e-Sprinter.
The e Transit went into production in the US on Nov. 15, 2021. Get your order in!
The e Sprinter is not coming until 2023, when the next gen printer arrives. The current one’s range was not deemed sufficient for the US.
Thanks Paul for the heads up on the BrightDrop. First time I’m hearing about it. Considering GMs big push to EVs, I now understand why there’s no rush to replace the Express with a Euro type ICE van.
The BrightDrop looks very interesting…almost worth a CC story in itself.
Near me FedEx seems to still use some GM vans but they seen to be using more step vans like UPS lately. The Express still seem to be preferred by contractors near me (plumbing HVAC, electric, etc) but that seems to be slowly changing. I know the commercial electricians that work on our building say one reason is towing, because the tow man lifts etc for warehouse work.
Dont you have courier pickup service? its a simple booking via trademe here, you dont really think drug dealers hang out on street corners peddling their wares hell no,unregistered technology and door to door pickup and delivery has been in use for decades.
I think the US this market is now owned by Uber.
Jim, I have expressed the same curiosity about GM not offering a “modern” van in the past, and I got schooled.
Thing one: GM no longer has a European branch from which to crib such a van.
Thing two: There are many things about the existing van that some van buyers find preferable. A buyer can choose a honkin’ 6.6 liter V-8 or a 2.8 liter I-4 turbo diesel. Full-frame construction. 10,000 lbs max towing capacity (I don’t think any of the Euro-style vans go that high, or at least not with enough power).
Yeah, you’d think that a company that produced such gems as the “Malibu Classic” for example might look at offering two offerings in the class, the Modern Van and the Van Classic… If I were buying a van I’d look at the modern vans and ignore the old ones since I don’t tow with one. If you offered both styles I’d look at one of them.
I get that they don’t have one to bring over which after decades of “not invented here” might seem to indicate a preference to just home-grow one anyway but I now see above that they are (finally) doing that with their new brand BrightDrop for an EV tallish van. Good for them, looking at that site though they seem to be trying to not have any visible link to GM itself. I understand why that is (stock valuation) but wonder how that will work in regard to fleet management sales/familiarity to those with existing GM van fleet.
Every once in a while I’ll see an old style van actually towing something but it seems to be relatively rare, at least compared to the amount of commercial businesses towing with pickups instead.
I’m not too far from a large fulfillment center and used to work across from it. They are using new vans. Several times I saw caravans of them coming from one of the near by rail yards window stickers present and all of the upfitting done.
A few weeks ago I was going to a store in a strip mall and found 20 or 30 new Transits, fully upfitted for Amazon in the parking lot. They do have a way to big parking lot and are next to a dealer, but it is a VW dealer and that is what I’ve seen there in the past. They are not affiliated with any Ford dealer in the area, so I found it a bit surprising. The also had a bunch of used white Promaster City wearing NJ plates for some reason. (I’m in WA)
But yeah Amazon is a big reason for the increased demand and sales for cargo Vans. In the early days of the DSP program they let the contractors pick their vans and it wasn’t uncommon to see a random van with magnets with the Amazon logo slapped on the doors. Now they seem to mandate that the DSPs use the full Amazon delivery Livery and trademarked color.
Yes many if not most of those Amazon branded delivery vans are not owned or operated by Amazon.
The contractors thing is a big part of the expansion. Fed ex has done the same with their ground service for years, the results are often mixed to poor for service but cheaper then operating in house like UPS. You often see very mixed reviews for Fed ex because of this where if you have a good local contractor it’s great if not its awful. Amazon likes to have a lot of control over its contractors so we will see how it works in the long run. I gather recent studies show UPS as the most on-time service compared to Fedex DHL USPS and amazon, and a lot of that seems to do with a consistent workforce, and cuts at USPS.
Near my work a local Amazon contractor stores his Vans (almost all Promaster now but last year they still had some express (with ghost outlines of a previous life at Uhaul) My understanding is that Tractor trailers from Amazon show up early in the morning and load the vans in the Parking lot. But that may change soon as Amazon adds more nearby warehouses (there are now 3 amazon warehouses within 10 miles of my house soon they will be as many warehouses as Walmarts.).
Amazon expansion has been crazy. The used market for cargo Vans has grown in value like crazy. West coast friends tell me most Amazon vans are sprinters, here in CT they use anything they can get their hands on (transit, promaster, express, sprinter, etc) they seem to prefer the promaster and transit as I see fewer and fewer express and sprinters lately.
Where are they going? I guess the boat is headed downriver on the Rhine towards Rotterdam. Are they transferred there to ocean freighters? Are they for the Dutch market?
There is a Sprinter factory in Dusseldorf; they can load on the boat there. But do they need to be shipped to North or South America? There are also Sprinter factories in South Carolina and Argentina.
The vessel was heading west on the river Waal, probably on its way to Rotterdam, indeed. Maybe Sprinters for the UK and Ireland, too far away to see if they were RHD.
I wonder of they are diesels under warranty repair jobs, being returned?
If that seems a bit mean, the Euro vans of all stripes don’t have a glorious reputation when they’re upside down here. And in a modern diesel especially, there’s just an awful lot of expensive hardware to give trouble, whether EGRs, DPFs, turbos – never hugely long-lived, it seems to this amateur – intercoolers, or injectors. Not to mention DSG-type boxes, that seem to quite variable in service life.
Be interesting to know some stats of how these Euro top-sellers do outside of that zone.
Locally at least, Tesla service is using Sprinters. When we bought our new high roof Transit last year, we were warned that delivery from the Kansas City assembly plant to our dealer in California would take a while, due to limited numbers of rail cars, and delivery trailers, that could handle the high roof. Which turned out to be the case. Ordered on July 4, delivered on Sept 22. But that was much better than later in the year, and in 2021, when Amazon orders were prioritized and customers couldn’t get vans at all, let alone worry about delivery delays.