The UPS delivery van ... Handsome and practical. Photograph: Ron Wurzer/Getty Images.
Without thinking anything special of them, you've probably seen legions of those smartly uniformed, chocolate brown and gold UPS delivery vans, with their chunky bonnets, sliding doors and chequerboard stainless steel cabs, negotiating towns and cities as distant as Bristol and Aberdeen. In fact, you can find them - all 92,000 - patrolling the streets of towns and cities of some 200 countries worldwide. Always clean. Always dent-free. As handsome in their own distinctly, and highly functional, transatlantic way as US school buses and Leatherman multi-purpose tools.
And yet, although very different from commonplace Transits, Renaults and Toyotas, and curiously distinctive, the UPS van is as anonymous as an army truck. Study a standard-issue UPS van from bumper-to-bumper, and what you will be unable to find is a badge or logo beyond that of UPS itself. And, herein, lies the quiet design genius of UPS vans. They exist to service and advertise UPS, the world's largest express courier and parcels delivery company, with no fewer than 407,000 employees - and no one and nothing else.
These all but timeless vans turn out to be made, to strict UPS specifications, by what was once Grumman Olson and is now Morgan Olson, a company that is as unknown to most of us as Ford, Nissan or Mercedes-Benz are famous. Grumman once made the peerless Hellcat fighter and Avenger torpedo bomber (flown by George Bush Snr during the second world war). It also built the Lunar Module, which took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the Moon in 1969. Not surprisingly, UPS vans are beautifully made. The Routemasters of the delivery world, their walk-through aluminium and fibre-glass bodies are rust free. They last for decades. And, although originally V8 gas-guzzlers, the latest generation of UPS vans are being fitted with diesel-hydraulic hybrid engines that promise to be very clean for this type of vehicle.
These smartly uniformed, practical and long-lived vans are a classic of commonplace design. If you have any other suggestions for such classics, do let me know.
