H-m-m-m-m,
Some good points raised so far.
On fuel consumption, you might be able to compare the advertised combined fuel consumption figure and then compare it with a magazine/newspaper road-tested figure (try it for both cars and vans). As GENERAL rule, I take the advertised figure, then multiply it by 1.2/1.3, to arrive at a real-world figure. In the case of the new HiAce, the best advertised fuel consumption for the small diesel is 7.5L/100 km, whilst that for the petrol engine is 12.0L/100 km.
On the negative side of diesel fuel cost, is that the price does not vary very much. This is due to the fact that transport companies can claim a rebate of about 8c/L on their tax. The fuel companies know this, so the bowser price remains high. The price of petrol is more volatile (can vary by 20c/L in Vic), so there could be a case for buying a petrol-engined van, if you buy petrol at its lowest price.
To get the best fuel consumption, chose a van with front wheel drive (more efficient than rear wheel drive), one with the roundest front (to reduce wind resistance), the smallest kW engine, keep the tyre pressures on the high side (to reduce rolling friction) and on trips, keep your top speed to 90kph. Finally, keep loads off the roof (to reduce wind resistance and drag).
After knowing all the above and giving this advice, once I enter the car/van showroom and take a test drive, I ALWAYS start making compromises to what a thought I wanted, at home.
Hope this helps.
LPG! Now you have got me started!
Our Government, in it's wisdom. allows companies to export billions of Litres of LNG overseas for as little as a cent or two a litre. That is the most shocking criminal exploitation I have ever heard of. Then they say we don't have enough gas for domestic use, so we must Frack our land and ruin our most precious water resources to get more for domestic use, and so another multinational company can charge us exorbitant amounts for destorying our agricultural land and potential.
We should have reserved a big chunk of that NG for domestic use and changed to running most of our road fleet on LPG 30 years ago to rid us of reliance on imported petrol. Natural Gas is readily converted to LPG, but many vehicles can be converted to run on NG directly from the domestic supply.
Of course, there are many vested interestes that don't like that idea, including any governments addicted to Fuel excise.
Unfortunately, the window for converting to LPG has well and truly passed us by due to Government incompetence. And this just when liquid LPG fuel injection technology for cars has started to mature (catch up with efficiency gains made by injected petrol cars).
A change to electric powered cars is going to rely on a serious commitment from governments for enabling legislation and incentives for the consumer and industry. But is is hard to see any govenment that is addicted to fuel tax wanting to rush into it.
I am pretty sure electric will happen anyhow, but it will be very slow and be driven by outside forces, overseas legislation and industry, and Australia will be severely disadvantaged in the long term, as usual, with no domestic industry. We will again be hostage to overseas interests and developments.
I see a company is trying to gear up to build electric cars in Australia. Unfortunately, they won't succeed without a lot of government driven incentives and investment. The rules of mass production (huge volume = low costs) still applies too, like it did with Holden/Ford/Toyota. To simplify, if it costs $100,000,000 to build a factory to produce cars, and you build 1000 cars, the capital cost for each car is $100,000, before labout and materials costs. But if you can build 1,000,000 cars, the capital cost is $100 dollars per car. That is purly and simply, why the Australian car industry died and has almost nothing to do with Australian Labour costs. We could not make and sell enough cars for them to be cheap enough to compete, simple!.
We need visionary government with long term commitment to Australia's best interests, not short term personal and political gain.
Unfortunately, such a government is a Unicorn.
Meanwhile, I will continue to travel the land in my 18 year old 'Bitsaremissin' petrol van with 485,000Km on the clock that costs me nothing in depreciation, but only normal running costs, and sucks up 13-14L of petrol every 100Km. And there is still no economic incentive for me to change it to run on LPG or buy into electric.
The problem with electric is our big wide land.
Saw a blokes calculations for the requirement for charging, based on how many cars travel a major route from perth to Albany - about 400km. At the petrol station along the way it will need 85 charging bays. Anyone in the group of rocket scientists at the Govt thought about that when they said WA must be 30% electric in a few years?
And again, I am yet to see any of the greenies pushing electric actually do the real sums = to generate the power needed how much emissions? It can't all be solar wind and wave. Then, the cost of mining the flash minerals needed for ulta hi cap batteries and ultra efficient electric motors.
Its all very emporer's new clothes at the moment
There is an Oz caravan start up building a powered caravan with battery setup. One in Germany too. The revolution is coming my brothers
So, having little to do today, I thought I'd just see what other vans were available and found some very good new vehicle offers. The one that jumped out was the Mercedes 111 CDI SWB. Comparing vans with near-equal load volumes:
2019 HiAce, diesel, 130 kW/450 Nm, 7.5L/100 km, 6 speed manual, 6.0 cub. m. load volume, on-road price $46040. Petrol engine,
207 kW/351 Nm, on-road price is $42443. Service intervals on the HiAce are 6 mths/10,000 km.
Mercedes 111 CDI SWB, diesel, 84 kW/270 Nm, 7.2L/100km, 6 speed manual, 5.8 cub. m. load volume, ESTIMATED on-road price $41422. Service intervals on the MB are 12 mths/25,000 km.
Could not get a true on-road price over the phone from an MB dealer for the 111 CDI, so I took the on-road cost from a current offer new MB311 CDI and worked backwards to its RRP, then applied the difference ($2982) to the MB 111. The actual delivery price may be even cheaper.
My van's engine is rated at 114 kW/305 Nm and it's over kill for the 5 boards and sails etc. that I carry, so the MB, even with the lower-power engine, will do the job.
Renault too, has special pricing on models at the moment that may be worth checking out.