End of the Ford Econoline marks a new era for great American vans

If you ever wanted to really get to know a Ford E-Series van, better hurry. Because after a long — check that, absurdly long — run, it's finally retirement time for America's most famous and most geriatric hauler; take a bow, you body-on-frame, mostly V-8 people mover. It's so old it always looks like it's starring in some '70s Quinn Martin production or an episode of Dragnet.

When the former Econoline receives a gold watch for service at the end of the 2013 model year, Ford will finally begin building for the American market the unibody Transit van they sell in Europe and around the world. It's a big deal, and although many of us can't help holding a sentimental, snuggly soft spot for the Econoline, the cue for this old stager to shuffle off comes not a nanosecond too soon.

Like the upcoming Chrysler Ram vans, based on a couple of Fiat's home-market schleppers, the Doblo and the Ducato, Ford's Transit launch in the U.S. is what counts for meaningful progress along the slow road to a more rational U.S. fleet. Here's why:

What stands out in this look back is a remarkable reluctance to move beyond a formula that works. While European buyers have always been able to look forward to new models every five or six years, the American van buyer has had to wait dozens of years and usually more for the sorts of big improvements only a redesign with the latest thinking and technology can bring. In the same time frame as we've gotten to know, for instance, eleven complete redesigns of the Toyota Corolla, pens have been lifted extensively but two or three times in service of the vans of the formerly Big Three since the '60s.

One central irony: Faced with serious competition abroad, American companies started offering better vans to their customers outside the United States in the '60s and '70s, with great strides made every decade since. But here at home, competition was stayed, as was progress. Van design, like a woolly mammoth in a late 1960s ice floe, was frozen in time as the companies collectively appear to have agreed, with the willing assent of the federal government at its bipartisan best, to call a truce amongst them selves, skip a development cycle or three, and collectively supply their countrymen with less than the best vans known to man.

It was as if we Americans were suddenly third-world citizens, offered an inferior product at a greater profit to the sellers, who were in this ironic instance, our countrymen. Like consumers in less developed lands, the choices in the U.S. market were substandard and limited, because, basically, they could get away with it, just like in less privileged lands.

Remember the vanning craze of the 1970s? Long before families were being directed to profligate, cheap-to-build SUVs by Detroit, they were being invited, in an experimental sort of way, to get into thirsty, cheap-to-build vans as family transport and personal party palaces, the flames of desire stoked by automakers who knew easy money when they saw it. Only later when it emerged that SUV desire was much easier to flame than van lust, did the van start returning more fully to its utilitarian roots, which thankfully for the industry (or not) required it to work and invest even less.

One way Detroit helped itself maintain the status quo in van-dom for so long was to lobby for exemptions from federal passenger car safety and emissions standards for vans, much like early SUVs enjoyed. This allowed superannuated van designs to soldier quite a bit further down the road than they ought to have. And while they were doing so, Ford, GM and Chrysler were making the funny money that comes only rarely in corporate life when you have a product that runs forever, with its capital costs fully amortized, development and production lines fully paid for and a customer base that keeps turning out to buy it.

The appeal is obvious, but to sell an ancient product with a straight face, you need to know you won't have any competition. The customer has to need you, and having virtually no other choice than you, history tells us, helps. It really does.

There may not be enough proof to meet the legal standard for proving the elements of felony collusion — although there might -- but how else do you explain the smart and talented engineers of some of America's biggest industrial corporations managing to go dozens of years without redesigning their vans, in the ways you would have wanted to, for reasons of safety, efficiency, environmental impact and utility?