Spacious Shuttle

With its cavernous interior, Volkswagen's new Transporter Kombi continues to major in space, practicality and family comfort

- Gareth Dean garethdean80

As we all know, few automotive firms operate in isolation - alliances between carmakers are common and are a genuine means of sharing development and production costs.

Consequently, many vehicles out there share some of their mechanical DNA with products from other manufacturers. And the latest Volkswagen Transporter is just such a car. The 2017 alliance between Volkswagen and Ford isn't some clandestine union, far from it. In fact, it makes complete sense: in sharing the burden of producing light commercial vehicles and vans, who better to align with than Ford, a company that holds a substantial portion of that market in Europe.

Here, Volkswagen shoulders the brunt of development for smaller models such as the Caddy and its Ford cousin, the Transit Connect, while Ford does most of the heavy lifting in the development side with the larger light commercials in the guises of the Ranger/Amarok, as well as the Tourneo Custom and the vehicle featured here: the seventh iteration of the Volkswagen Transporter.

This saves us having to go through the history of the Transporter, from its roots as a parts-hauling vehicle for the VW's Wolfsburg plant back in the 1950s and everything since – from being the chosen transport of the Flower Power generation and an upscale people/goods-mover thereafter – and allows us to take in the virtues of the latest model on its local launch in Mpumalanga.