What's Your Favorite Van?

Aside from all of the horrible things happening in the world, this week has been absolutely incredible for one major reason: Mercedes-Benz revealed the VLE, its new electric luxury van that replaces the existing V-Class and EQV. The market for this sort of vehicle is huge in Asia and Europe, where the V-Class are already extremely popular, but in a bit of a shock move, the VLE will be sold in America.

That is excellent news for me, and probably for many people reading this — contrary to what normal folks might expect, car people usually love vans. We love minivans, we love big cargo vans, we love small MPVs, we love all the weird stuff in between. There's just something cool about overt practicality and the ways vans achieve it, and over the years there have been so many vans with genuinely great designs. That brings me to today's question of the day: What's your favorite van?

I'll allow for a pretty broad range of "van" definitions for this answer. Like, I don't think a vehicle needs sliding doors to be considered a van — the original Renault Espace is definitely a van, and I'd probably consider the Mercedes R-Class to be a van (or, at least, an MPV, which is basically the same thing). Is the Peugeot 1007 a van? It does have sliding doors, but is it really just a hatchback? For the purposes of this exercise, I think that's a van, too.

When it comes to my personal favorite, honestly, the VLE is up there. It's been one of my anticipated cars of the decade, and I'm obsessed with the design and high-end interior accoutrements. I almost said the original Volkswagen bus, the General Motors dustbusters of the 1990s, or Citroën's retro-styled vans. There are so many incredible kei vans, plus bigger luxe vans like the Toyota Alphard. And who doesn't love the Previa, or the Nissan S-Cargo?

But my favorite van is really an easy pick, and I imagine it's what many of you were thinking of saying: the 1994 Renault Espace F1 concept. The first few generations of Espace were revolutionary (the first-gen one is another favorite of mine), but they were pretty normal when it came to powertrains. To rectify that, Renault stuffed the Williams Formula 1 car's 3.5-liter V10 into the middle of a second-gen Espace. Well, it wasn't even really an Espace, instead using an F1-derived carbon-fiber chassis, but it did have four seats and look like an Espace from the outside, albeit one with a wild aerodynamic package. Best of all, it was fully functional. I've spent all of my life ogling the Espace F1, and will continue to do so for the rest of it.

So, what about you? What's your favorite van? Because I went for a concept, I'll even let you do the same. Let me know your picks in the comments below, and I'll round up my favorite answers later this week.