Van of the Year is an award given each year by a jury of commercial-vehicle journalists to the newest and most significant van launched in Europe. It is a genuine, well-run award, and it is worth almost nothing to somebody buying an eight-year-old van. The winner is always brand new, usually expensive, and often built around technology that is still settling down. What the award is useful for is telling you which vans the industry rated when they were new — which is a different question from which van you should buy today.
This guide sits under our van reviews, part of the Van Guides hub.
What Van of the Year actually is
The award most people mean is the International Van of the Year, run by a jury drawn from commercial-vehicle publications across Europe. Each year the jury considers the light commercial vehicles launched since the last award and votes on one overall winner. There are other van awards from magazines and trade bodies, and their winners often differ, which tells you something useful in itself: there is no single objective best van, only vans that suit a panel’s criteria.
The official site is the International Van of the Year award’s own page, which is the place to check who won in any given year rather than relying on a headline.
Who judges the award, and on what
The jurors are working motoring journalists who cover vans specifically, which is a real qualification — this is not a popularity vote. They assess vehicles as new products: how much they carry, how they drive, how efficient they are, what safety and driver-assistance equipment they bring, how much innovation they represent, and what they cost to run over a fleet life.
Notice what is not on that list. Nothing in the criteria measures how a van behaves at eight years and ninety thousand miles, what its parts cost when they wear out, or whether an independent garage will happily take it on. Those are the questions that decide whether a used van is a good buy, and no new-vehicle award is designed to answer them.
Why the winner is rarely the right used buy
Three reasons, and they compound.
- It is new, so it is not for sale used. A winner announced this year will not reach the ordinary used market in any volume for years, and when it does it will be at the top of its price band, not the sensible middle.
- Innovation cuts both ways. Awards reward what is new — new drivetrains, new electronics, new architecture. New is exactly what has not yet been proven over a working life, and early examples of anything tend to carry the faults that later ones fix.
- The criteria are a fleet’s, not yours. Whole-life cost over a three-year fleet cycle is a genuinely important measure — to a fleet. If you are buying one van with your own money and keeping it for six years, you are optimising for something else entirely.
More than three-quarters of everything we sell is a small or medium van, and they are rarely the ones that were collecting trophies when they were new. That is not a criticism of the award. It is what happens when the people buying with their own money pick on running cost, parts availability and how much a repair will hurt.
What a Van of the Year badge is genuinely useful for
It is a good shortlist tool, used the right way round. If a van won its award seven or eight years ago and is now sitting in the used market at a sensible figure, the award tells you something worth knowing: at launch, a panel of people who drive vans for a living thought it was the best thing in its class. Whether it aged well is a separate question — but it is a reasonable place to start looking.
It is also useful as a marker of where a class moved. Awards cluster around genuine step changes: a new size class, a big jump in payload, a real improvement in safety equipment. If you are trying to work out whether a particular model year is worth the premium over the one before, the awards of that period are a decent map of where the meaningful changes landed.
How long it takes an award winner to reach the used market
Realistically, five to eight years before a winner is available at the kind of money most working buyers spend, and longer before there are enough of them for you to be choosy about specification and condition. Fleets buy them first, run them on a three or four-year cycle, and release them into the trade together. That is the point at which an award winner becomes interesting to a used buyer — and by then it is being judged on exactly the things the award never measured.
It is also the point at which the boring questions decide everything: what it costs to insure, whether the parts are on a shelf, how much a clutch or a turbo comes to. What counts as too high a mileage on a used van is a far more useful read at that stage than any award list.
The award winners we do actually sell
The Ford Transit Custom is the one that shows up on our forecourt with an award history behind it, and it is genuinely a good van — which is why we have written about it twice. Our piece on the Transit Custom taking Van of the Year covers the award itself and why the jury went that way, and why the Transit Custom still rules looks at how it holds up as a used buy, which is the more useful question here.
If you are weighing a Custom against the rest of the Ford range, our Transit, Transit Custom and Connect comparison is the one to read — the three are very different vans that share a badge, and the award history belongs to only one of them.
What to judge instead of an award badge
- Whether it fits the job. Length, height, payload and access, measured against what you actually carry. The gov.uk explanation of vehicle weights tells you how to read the plate on the van in front of you.
- What parts and labour cost. A van that any independent garage is comfortable with will cost you less over six years than a cleverer one that has to go to a franchise.
- Its own history. Service record, advisory pattern, and what work it has been doing — these decide far more than the model does.
- Emissions standard. Whether it drives into a charging zone free is worth more per year than any equipment list.
- How many are out there. A common van means choice, competitive pricing and a supply of parts. A rare one means neither.
The full process is in our guide to buying a van, and our guide to choosing the right van covers size and shape. When you want to look at real vans rather than award lists, see everything we have in stock, or go straight to the Fords we have available.
Common questions
What is the Van of the Year award?
It is an annual award voted for by a jury of commercial-vehicle journalists from across Europe, given to the most significant light commercial vehicle launched since the previous award. Other magazines and trade bodies run their own van awards with their own criteria, so the winners frequently differ from one another.
Does winning Van of the Year mean it is the best van to buy?
Not for a used buyer. The award assesses brand-new vehicles on payload, driving, efficiency, safety equipment, innovation and fleet whole-life cost. None of that measures how a van behaves at eight years old, what its parts cost, or whether an independent garage will take it on — the things that decide a used purchase.
How long before a Van of the Year winner is available used?
Usually five to eight years before there are enough of them at the money most working buyers spend. Fleets buy them first and run them on a three or four-year cycle, then release them into the trade together. Until that happens, the award is information rather than a shopping list.
Should I pay more for a van that won an award?
Only if the van in front of you earns it on its own merits. An award from several years ago is a reasonable reason to put a model on your shortlist. It is not a reason to accept worse history, higher mileage or a thinner service record than you would from a rival that never won anything.
Where can I check which van won in a given year?
The International Van of the Year jury publishes its winners on its own website, which is the reliable source. Be careful with headlines, because several different organisations run van awards and the same year can produce more than one legitimate winner depending on which award is being reported.