Published:
8 January 2016Like its immediate predecessors, the Caravelle is available in regular or long-wheelbase versions and with up to seven seats, with the more utilitarian Transporter Shuttle minibus offering seating for up to nine. While at the other end of the spectrum is the California which keeps the camper tradition continuing with all the mod cons. It’s unlikely to appeal much in visual terms, being necessarily tall and slab-sided, but for what it is, the car looks very neat and tidy.
The process of ordering one is more like that of a custom commercial than a normal passenger car, with VW offering to leave in or take out both the one-piece folding and sliding third-row bench seat and the two swivelling, removable ‘captain’s chairs’ in the second row – and that is just the tip of the cabin specification iceberg.
The long and short of it is that your Caravelle can probably seat as many full-sized adults as you need it to – as well as accommodating more than 4000 litres of cargo in two-seat mode and short-wheelbase form.
At less than 4.9 metres in length and only just over 1.9m in mirror-excluded width, the Caravelle is actually shorter and only a couple of inches wider than a Vauxhall Insignia Sports Tourer. And at just under two metres tall, it is possibly not too large to fit in a typical single-car garage or into a regular UK parking space.
Monocoque construction, independent telescopic front suspension and a choice of transversely mounted 2.0-litre diesel engines in 148bhp or twin-turbo 201bhp states of tune make most of the Caravelle’s mechanical fundamentals pretty car-like. The Caravelle comes with an independent rear suspension, fitted with coil springs and load sensitive shock absorbers, similar to its Transporter siblings.
