Mercedes Vito van review

Re-sale values are excellent, and you get full-blown Mercedes truck levels of service

What’s hot

The obvious hot item here is the three-pointed star on the front of this van. As with Merc’s cars it’s taken as read that this vehicle is built to the highest quality standards and is pretty much guaranteed to have used buyers queuing at your door when you want to sell it.
You get the curious feeling when driving a Vito that it may actually have been hewn out of a single chunk of metal, such is its solidity. And on the road the engine proves quiet and efficient, with a real ride-on-rails feel.
In fact, if you don’t want to undertake any journeys fully loaded up and down hills we’d be tempted to recommend the 95bhp model. It’s no mean performer and costs £1310 less.
Meanwhile the seats are typically Teutonic – they feel like slabs of concrete when you first sit on them but after a couple of hundred miles you realise that they are in fact very comfortable and supportive. Clever people, these Germans!
Mercedes-Benz comes up trumps on service, maintenance and repairs (SMR) too. As its offerings go right up to the Actros at 44 tonnes GVW, you as a commercial vehicle buyer get truck levels of service too. If you want your van serviced at 3am, you’ll get it done (which means less downtime) and during the day you won’t get stuck in the queue behind Mrs Smith wanting her A-Class looking at. (Click here for an example of a business that switched to Mercedes because of the quality of service.

What’s not

Despite the fact that this van has a Euro 5 engine, it’s lagging behind the latest opposition now in the fuel economy stakes.
The new Ford Transit Custom ECOnetic, for example, officially returns 44.8mpg on the combined cycle against our review van’s 36.7mpg. This equates to a possible fuel saving of a whopping £2450 over 80,000 miles. The Transit is actually cheaper to buy as well – £19,245 against £19,540.
The designers missed a few tricks – so the load area won’t take 3m lengths of pipe or timber for example
Of course, it must be remembered that these official figures are calibrated with the vehicles empty and on a rolling road, so you won’t get anything like them in real life once you’ve factored in cargo, hilly roads and heavy-footed drivers. But suffice to say that on paper the savings are significant.
In the back end, volume is on a par with the rivals at 5.2 cubic metres and the loading lip is pretty low, meaning cargo can be slid in and out easily…
…but the Vito loses out on payload to the Ford Transit Custom (930kg against 1083kg) and it won’t carry three-metre lengths of pipe and wood (load length is 2420mm). With the Transit Custom, you get a little hole in the bottom of the bulkhead so that items like this can be slid through into the cab so it will carry anything up to 3055mm long.
Even extra long wheelbase Vitos only deliver a 2.9m load length
Problems like this just go to show how quickly van technology is progressing. Ford started with a clean sheet with the Transit Custom and the boffins seem to have factored in a whole lot of handy items (such as the aforementioned bulkhead hole and roof rails that fold right down into the roof when not being used) which older rivals just don’t have.