Citroen Berlingo L2 LX 1.6 HDi long-term (2)

As you can imagine from a vehicle that has been voted Fleet Van ‘Van of the Year’ for two years running, there are very few complaints with our long-term test Berlingo after eight weeks here at Fleet Towers.

Those weeks have been spent driving up and down British motorways, lugging various items of cargo around that are too big to go in cars and generally being a very useful addition to the test fleet.

It’s a tad muddy and grimy now it must be admitted (you can’t really take vans through automated car washes), but our Berlingo certainly shines like a star on the performance front.

Even now I’m still finding useful little items, like the torch that’s clipped into the side of the cargo area and which charges itself as the engine is running.

How many other manufacturers have thought of that brilliant piece of kit?

And various cubby holes and cup holders keep coming to light which I hadn’t previously noticed before, all of which serve to raise this van up another notch or two in my estimation.

The free sat-nav unit is coming in handy too.

Regular readers will know what a technophobe I am and it’s heartening to discover that I can use this unit without going to university and gaining a degree in electronics first.

You simply tap the picture of the little envelope on the screen, key in a postcode and off you go.

The only grumble I can find so far is that there isn’t anywhere to lodge my mobile phone while it’s being charged from the 12v socket on the dashboard.

We’ve had a minor blip on the reliability front – but that was a flat tyre so we can hardly criticise the manufacturing process for that.

We’ve also managed our first proper fuel consumption test and, before revealing the figure, it’s worth mentioning that the official one – 48.7mpg – is recorded on a rolling road with no cargo so it’s nigh on impossible to replicate this on the open road with a load on board.