The other voters each gave it one mercy point. That would be for its dreadful single-clutch automated-manual transmission. It is the only vehicle in any comparison test in memory to receive zero points in a subjective category from one of our voters. The Ram ProMaster, a Fiat Ducato with ram-head logos, is a detestable, shovel-faced thing that appears to have been cobbled together from spare parts. Not that any of the vanners seemed to differentiate much between them. The idea was to make them, as much as possible, candidates for modern van customizers. We chose low-roof models to diminish the commercial-van look (fat chance!), and no dualies or four-wheel-drive or super-extended models were allowed. And then the Ford showed up with windows anyway. Also, we weren’t running a shuttle service, and we didn’t want people looking through the windows at us as we snored.
We specified windowless cargo versions of each entrant because they seemed somehow more in step with the custom vans we expected to encounter at the Nationals. Heavy-duty versions are still available, but the Express was deemed too out of step with the modern vans to include anyway. Chevrolet has dropped its light-duty full-size Express van because it was dragging down the company’s fuel-economy average. This choice effectively knocked Nissan’s NV2500 out of our test, since the company offers only gasoline V-6s and V-8s in its big hauler.
