Cancel that stretch Caddy you were planning to take out on the town tonight—tell your prom date, fellow bachelorette partygoers, or power-brokering negotiation team that you're taking the Ford van instead.
The van? Yep. These days you're just as likely to see celebrities and dignitaries being pulled around in glitzy Suburbans and limos based on the Mercedes Sprinter as an elongated sedan. The future of luxurious livery vehicles is looking up—as in more of them are tall vehicles you can walk into (or others can, er, dance inside). It seems Ford is champing at the bit to get in on the action, too, having enlisted the world's largest Ford dealer and renowned conversion-van firm, Galpin Auto Sports in Van Nuys, California, to help design and build its first official super-luxe Transit-based concept, the Skyliner.
Unlike the ostentatious limos seen trolling up and down Hollywood Boulevard with coeds vomiting out of the windows, stealth luxury is the theme here. The exterior isn't particularly showy—there's no windshield visor, no side graphics, no billet grille insert, no illuminated ground effects, and nary a single teardrop bubble window. The dress-up bits are essentially limited to a few gloss-black trim pieces, two-tone silver paint, and custom-designed Forgiato 20-inch wheels.
Once you open the passenger-side sliding door, however, you're greeted by hardwood floors, walls padded with white leather, a gorgeous dry bar, and a quartet of futuristic-looking Galpin-designed thrones that we're not sure we'd want to ride in all the way from, say, L.A. to Las Vegas, but they're still pretty bitchin'. They can be arranged conference-style around a motorized folding table or face forward to catch a movie (or DirecTV programming) on the 52-inch drop-down screen, with audio piped through a Focal Utopia 7.2 surround-sound system. All of the aforementioned goodies, as well as the motorized window shades and LED mood lighting, are controlled via a trio of iPad Minis.
As for the driver, he's on his own, secreted away by the white lacquered divider that swoops around from the back of the bar into the space where a passenger seat might be found on lesser Transits. The dashboard features contrasting stitching that we're sure we'll never see on workaday Transit vans, but it otherwise looks pretty stock. Power is from the Transit's most powerful gas mill, a 3.5-liter twin-turbocharged V-6 with an estimated 365 hp and 420 lb-ft of torque.
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No one at Ford would venture a guess as to how much a saleable Skyliner would cost, but with limo vans like this regularly commanding prices of $250K or more, it wouldn't be cheap. Not surprisingly, Ford says it has no plans to put anything remotely close to the Skyliner into production. But if you really want to have one, we're quite sure that Galpin Auto Sports, which has been building custom and conversion vans since the 1960s, would be happy to accommodate.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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