Here’s Mercedes-Benz’ Other Funny-Looking Doorstop-Shaped Car: The Vaneo

I think my current strange fascination with extremely wedgy, one-box vehicles comes from earlier this week when I wrote about the two times Porsche shoved an engine from the 911 into a van, and one of those vans chosen for such an experiment was the Volkswagen Sharan, which is a one-box van with an extremely wedge-shaped front end, where the line from the hood to the A-pillar is just about an unbroken line forming a pretty dramatic angle. Overall, these sorts of cars never really caught on, which I think is sort of a shame, because they’re striking-looking and tend to have excellent internal volume. They have had some success, which may be why these doorstop/wedge of cheese-shaped machines keep popping up. I learned of one of these today that I hadn’t previously known about, and it seems like the big brother to one I did. It’s the Mercedes-Benz Vaneo.

Before we get to the Vaneo specifically, let’s talk just a bit more about this category of vehicle, which I think we can comfortably call the Doorstop. It’s an interesting category, because it’s one of the few fundamental vehicle design layouts that has been used for everything from vans to microcars; it can scale unusually well, perhaps because it’s already so peculiar-looking, it doesn’t really suffer from being scaled up or down.

Examples of Doorstops range from big, American-scale minivans like the Oldsmobile Silhouette to city cars like the Renault Twingo or Mercedes-Benz A-Class, and down to microcars and quadracycles like the Lieger JS4 or the Dutch Canta microcar. Hell, I bet if you really felt inclusive, we could count bullet trains like the Japanese Shinkansen as the most extreme expression of this design concept.

I think the reason I was unaware of the Vaneo is that every time I may have seen a picture of one, perhaps fleetingly, I think I thought it was just an A-Class:

It’s very much not, though, despite how similar the front end looks. It does use the same basic platform as the A-Class, and was built contemporarily (2001 to 2005) but it has a sliding door and a longer wheelbase and is about two feet longer than the diminutive A-class. The drivetrains were similar as well, 1.6- to 1.9-liter inline-fours driving the front wheels and making between 81 and 123 horsepower.

I’ve always liked the weird little A-Class, and this just seems like that concept more fully realized. It’s small on the outside and roomy on the inside, tall in an almost Japanese Kei-class sort of way.

Look at that! You can shove trees and dogs and ladders in there! And there’s a cooler, and look at the slide-out floor! That’s really clever!

Here, let’s see one of these in action, set to music:

That’s a soothing commercial, isn’t it?

I also like how the brochure shows what looks to be a loaf of bread trapped under a net, for your safety. That’s probably German wildes Brot, or “feral bread,” a form of wild, untamed bread sold to daring and bold sandwich-crafters with a taste for danger.

Also interesting is how Mercedes compensated for the very short hood, safety-wise, where it appears the whole drivetrain, already canted significantly, was designed to drop down to the ground below the front seat passengers in event of a collision:

Why am I so taken by this minivan? It wasn’t really a success at all, it’s not that unusual, but it just seems like such an honest and clever solution to the basic haul-people-and-their-crap problem that I find myself quietly impressed. Plus, look, you could get it with upholstery that looks a bit like movie theater or casino carpet:

And look how flexible that interior is! Wow!

Here in America, Mercedes-Benz is primarily known as a luxury brand, and still carries a lot of cachet. And yet, somehow, they’re among the only premium brands that sells in America with a brand identity flexible enough to include vans like the Sprinter and the Metris, now darling of the US Postal Service. Why is this? You suggest a Bentley or a Maserati minivan or mail-hauling van to people and they look at you like you just had a dozen salamanders crawl out of your mouth. But a Mercedes-Benz van? Well, somehow that’s okay.

I guess it’s one of the great mysteries of life, like wondering if and when the next attempt to sell a Doorstop-shaped vehicle will come. I hope we don’t have to wait too long.

 

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