Volkswagen has made an interesting looking van

We do like a van at Top Gear. Be it a ginormous Ford Transit to swallow all of your belongings or a, um, ginormous Ford Tourneo to swallow all of your relatives, we love their wanton practicality, normally at the expense of most other things.

Yet this dinky new Volkswagen Caddy comes with a feature we don’t normally associate with vans. ‘Styling’. It comes with a reasonable amount of the stuff as standard, and is arguably more interesting to look at than numerous actual cars in the VW empire. Especially painted in Metallic Muddy Puddle, or whatever this colour happens to be called.

The news only gets better. There’ll be a normal panel van, a passenger-focused people carrier and a campervan, too. A campervan that’ll be wee enough – and therefore fast enough – to not create a string of traffic traversing most of the British countryside when there’s the first semblance of a summer. Given how much we like VW’s bigger California, we’re shamelessly excited for a fun-size version.

You want nerd facts? This is the first van based on VW’s ‘MQB’ platform, which means it ought to have the polite road manners of a Golf. It also makes fitting clever new safety tech a piece of cake. Among the Caddy’s spec highlights are digital dials and 19 (yep, nineteen) driving aids, including one for helping you reverse with a trailer attached.

There are engines, and they are diesel. This is a van, after all. Power outputs vary between 74 and 120bhp. A petrol and gas version are also available, and we’d expect – in time – for the Caddy to go electric, too. But enough geeking out. The Caddy looks good. Are you with us?