YR72 XHU

Nice find, I've only seen one of these so far, it was on the bus to college so I couldn't get a good picture. I still find it weird how these at VW based

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In 2020, Ford signed a collab agreement with Volkswagen to form an alliance on marketing LCVs, working on autonomous driving tech and selling electric cars. The third gen Tourneo Connect was actually a result of that alliance, despite the fifth gen Caddy has been around since early 2020, while the Ford came in late 2021 during the start of Ford-VW's partnership.

To be honest, I'm totally fine with these automaker alliances and their rebadges, as long they've made enough changes to differentiate their models each other, the same way what I've feel about the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance. I may agreed that Ford looks kinda too rushed on differing the third gen Tourneo Connect apart from the Caddy, I think the blending between VW and Ford's design language is a mess. I know LCVs like this, including other examples like Stellantis' vans and the Nissan Townstar, don't get much extensive changes from exterior to interior, but just take a look at the latest Mercedes-Benz Citan/T-Class that was based on the Renault Kangoo, in which for the second generation, Mercedes tries to differ the Citan even more in terms of exterior and interior designs, and tech, so it won't be just a Renault Kangoo wearing Mercedes' four-pointed star logo. Mercedes has done a great job on differing the Citan away from the Renault.

That was the start of Ford-VW's partnership, the next-gen Transit Connect will follow the same as its private passenger variant, when basing the VW Caddy cargo van. They will differing their cars even more further down the line in the future; the second gen Volkswagen Amarok already have enough big differentiations away from the second gen Ford Ranger T6 that was based on. Meanwhile, Ford released the second gen Transit Custom and Tourneo Custom, and I'm hoping that Volkswagen won't mess up the next-gen Transporter when basing the Transit Custom, which confirmed that they are doing it. Ford will release a new electric SUV based on VW's MEB platform, but however, they've recently announced that they won't use VW's MEB platform more often, because they want to build their own dedicated EV platform, so I expect that we would likely to see just one or two Ford EVs based on the MEB platform.

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