#Econoline

(courtesy: Jan London Band)

Hman writes:

Howdy,

Long time reader, first time emailer. (Except for two published Ur-Turns.) Anyway, I’m in a two-piece “rock” band and we are doing a 6-week tour in April and are shopping for a van. I’ve long been a Toyonda/Hondota fan, but alas, they make no full size cargo vans, so I’m forced to go domestic.

A prior band of mine used a Ford E250 to great effect, and I’ll admit I’m partial to the brand. Craigslist is chock full of Econolines of all trim and year. I’d like to solicit the advice of the B&B here at TTAC ASAP! I.E., years to avoid, brands to avoid, etc. All suggestions welcome.

Mr. Singer/Songwriter/Guitarist has $3-4 grand to spend, so lots of miles is expected. All told we will have three people, one drum kit w/trimmings, three vintage Fender tube amps (Hi, Jack!), two guitars, one bigass pedal board, t-shirts, cd’s, vinyl, and clothes.

This will be a coast-to-coast-and-then-some trip, so reliability is paramount.

More than two decades before I owned a Dodge A100, I admired the boxy mid-engined cargo haulers and enjoyed photographing them. Here’s a shot from the parking lot of a now-defunct self-service junkyard in Hayward, California, circa 1991; this is Half Price Day and these are customers’ vehicles. Yes, it’s a Dodge A100 and an early front-engine Ford Econoline.

It just does my heart good to see a suburban Denver neighborhood in which there’s no meddlesome HOA to tell a man he can’t have a vintage customized Econoline on the street and a Mustang drag racer in the driveway.

Buster Keaton reached the height of his fame in about 1927, but Ford’s 1966 marketers must have figured that nostalgia for the allegedly wholesome silent-film era would be big, what with all the not-so-wholesome madness heating up in the United States at that time. How about we put Buster Keaton in the Econoline?

Back when two major self-service junkyard chains were locked in throat-slicing competition for the Northern California market, Thanksgiving Day always featured the sacred Junkyard Half Price Day Sale. Alas, Pick Your Part has pulled up stakes— which means that Pick-N-Pull has spurious “15% off all door panels” sales instead of the real deal— but in honor of the memory of Half Price Day we bring you some junkyard goodness from Denver.

Yes, I can muster some appreciation of Econolines of yore. But the painful reality is that the current E-Series is an ugly, primitive and inefficient pig virtually unchanged since 1974. The fact that the American light truck sector hasn’t had the same revolution that European design influences have had on passenger cars is a mystery. Case in point: Ford’s Transit (not Connect) vans are a (several, actually) giant development leap ahead of the Econoline, offering FWD, RWD and AWD variants in three wheelbase lengths, numerous configurations, and driven by the most advanced diesels that can get well over 20 mpg. The Transit outsells Mercedes Sprinter in Europe. What the hell is Ford waiting for?

History does tend to repeat itself, especially in the car business. Detroit’s more recent efforts to compete with import compact trucks was once a serious undertaking, and is now quickly dwindling away to nothing. The same thing happened once before, in the early sixties. In response to real (or imagined) incursions into the light truck field by imports, Detroit launched a barrage of new compact vans and trucks. Ford was the most prolific in the 1960-1961 period, offering no less than three distinct types of pickups. The most creative and nontraditional one was the Econoline pickup. Not surprisingly, it was the least successful (of Ford’s three types), and petered out after a few years. Americans know how they like their Ford trucks, and the Econoline was not it