Although a reliable van, AVOID the Ford Transit like the plague. They start rusting immediately from brand new and it worsens rapidly. It doesn’t matter how much you under seal, waxoyl or clean, you'll still be left with a scabbed up pile of trash after 3 years.
Vauxhalls are great vans, very reliable and seem to hold off the rust.
We have found VW's to develop electrical senor and management faults that are regular and very expensive to put right. If you can put up with a dashboard of electrical fault lights, they are actually good vans.
Go for the Peugeot Expert. It looks modern and smart, not too big and is very reliable.
Ford have no parking facilities at the Southampton plant so they take them to the docks 3 miles away where they have lots of parking , the vans stay there for up to a year, on the exposed dockside, next to the salty sea, and a pile of road salt 50 metres high. I regularly pass transporters full of new transits with brown rust marks seeping from the sills heading up the M3 .
Then once bought , most go to rental fleets or corpoates and get ragged around by multple drivers , caked in mud from sites , no wonder they rot fast .
There is nothing inherently wrong with the vans , just the way they are treated from the minute they leave the factory , even by the manufacturer! On the transit forum some people get them built special ordered, they never get left at the docks , and are properly washed from day one , these vans remain rust free.!