Climbing the summit in the 2026 Ford Transit Custom Trail

There’s a particular type of madness that sets in around lunchtime on a Friday, and usually involves a map and a lot of unqualified ambition. With snow season upon us, where better to put the Ford Transit Custom Trail through its paces than the highest point in the land.

Every year, like pilgrims, adventurers and families from around Australia make the journey to Perisher Valley for ski season, the parking lot of which is an eclectic mix of everything from self-contained off-road campers to rally-spec sports cars.

The mission was simple: be the highest car in the state, except for one crucial detail. We were not, under any circumstances, driving through Canberra. This eliminated the only highway option we had, and that was by design.

The Hume-Monaro slog is the automotive equivalent of a hotel breakfast, adequate, forgettable, and something you’d rather not do twice in a weekend. So we traced a finger west of the coast, through Bungendore, past a dot on the map called Krawarree.

From there it was out the other side towards Cooma. It looked like a road on the map. Reality was more similar to the way that a cattle grid is a musical instrument. The vehicle for this exercise, Ford’s Transit Custom Trail, at $61,990 before on-roads.

It’s the most interesting thing to happen to the medium-van class in Australia in a decade. It is, in essence, a long-wheelbase Transit Custom Trend that has been to a survivalist retreat, where it gained some goodies.

That includes on-demand all-wheel drive via an electronically controlled clutch pack in the rear axle, extra underbody protection, matte-black 16-inch alloys, a blacked-out grille, and a set of yellow decals that promise more than 118mm of ground clearance can strictly deliver.

Under the bonnet sits the familiar 2.0-litre EcoBlue turbo diesel, delivering 125kW and 390Nm, driven through an eight-speed automatic. Packing the van was a breeze, with 6.8 cubic metres of cargo room and plenty of storage inside the cabin.

Our bags, gear, supplies, and snacks had plenty of open space and covered cubbies to be stored in, and with five interior cup holders, there was no shortage of homes for beverages. We left at noon. By four we were on dirt.

Nobody had told us; rather, we had not thought to ask, that the run south of Krawarree towards Boogy Plain surrenders its bitumen for almost 100km of unsealed road, much of it climbing over the Great Divide in a series of cambered bends.

Those were last graded during the time of a different prime minister. The sun went down about a third of the way in. The temperature gauge, which had read 19-degrees in Sydney, dropped to two. This is where the Trail quietly begins justifying itself.

The full-LED high beam is superb, throwing a broad, cold wash of light far enough ahead that you can pick a line through the corrugations. The all-wheel drive system is unobtrusive to the point of invisibility.

You never feel it engage, you simply notice that the front end has stopped scrabbling the way a van normally does. And the diesel’s range becomes a genuine asset out here, where the nearest fuel is an hour of dust away in either direction.

Ford claims 8.5-litres/100km combined for the AWD Trail, half a litre worse than the FWD variant on account of the extra hardware. We never saw it go above 8.0-litres all weekend, which on a 70-litre tank puts a theoretical 870km between fills.

We arrived in Jindabyne at 7pm with well over half a tank and no anxiety whatsoever. Credit, too, to the independent rear suspension, a genuine point of difference in a class where live axles still dominate.

Unladen vans traditionally hop and skitter over broken surfaces; this one merely got on with it, the dampers doing enough to keep 5.45m of body from tying itself in knots. When the fog rolled in past Numeralla, the Quickclear heated windscreen dealt with it in mere seconds.

Heated seats, on. Climate control, sorted. It was, by any reasonable measure, a triumphant first leg that brought us safely and without excessive fatigue to our accommodation at the foothills of Mount Kosciuszko, in Jindabyne.

That first leg uncovered a few things too, albeit most of them small inconveniences, including the fact that the adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist are a weak link. The former’s sensors are particularly intrusive, braking for shadows and roadside signage.

The lane keep assist steers you to the side of the lane before complaining that you haven’t corrected it and switching itself off. There are a couple of blanks (the plastic fillers where switches should be), which are really obvious too.

When you are spending more than $60,000 on your brand new van, you’d hope the car maker would put more effort into hiding such things. The 13-inch SYNC 4 touchscreen infotainment system is another one.

It looks magnificent, but responds like it’s thinking about something else, with a half-beat of lag that only makes itself more obvious because Ford has hidden almost everything inside it. Climate, drive modes, vehicle settings: all in the glass.

Only a volume knob and a small cluster of shortcuts surviving as physical switchgear. And then there is the elephant in the cab: as darkness falls, the calamity that is the rear-view mirror makes itself painfully obvious.

The only thing you can see behind you after dusk is a bright reflection of the infotainment screen. All those little things aside, the Ford Transit Custom Trail offers an otherwise very impressive experience. We woke to a van encased in frost.

It started first turn, no complaints, and within a couple of minutes the heated screen and the climate system had chewed through a genuinely thick sheet of ice on every pane of glass. By 10am we were in Thredbo.

The Alpine Way is a proper driver’s road and the Trail is, absurdly, quite good on it. The steering lacks feel but the ratio is quicker than you expect, the body control is well-judged, and that independent rear end means it settles into mountain corners.

You are never going to mistake it for a hot hatch. You will, however, keep up with traffic and enjoy doing so. Lunch, back down at the pub in Jindabyne, exposed the van’s only other issue – its 3.5m wheelbase and van-sized blind spots.

Parking is done almost entirely by camera, and the Trail’s rear-view camera, even with its 180-degree split view, gives you no top-down visibility. Translating a fisheye image into real-world centimetres in a busy pub car park is a skill, and one I did not acquire in a weekend.

It’s worth noting LDV will sell you a Deliver 7 with a 360-degree camera for around $16,000 less. While our MY26 tester didn’t come with one, Ford has added it across the entire MY26.50 Transit Custom range, including the Trail.

The afternoon was better spent on a steeper trail down to the lake’s edge, where the extra clearance got us onto sand. Nobody should mistake the Trail for a Ranger, the tyres are commercial-grade light-terrain rubber, the spare is a space-saver, and the clearance runs out well before the traction does,

Within those limits though, it is far more capable than any van has a right to be. The plan was to be at Perisher for sunrise, which in July means an alarm at three and a windscreen that needs scraping before it needs demisting. The road up was a wildlife documentary shot through a headlight beam.

Kangaroos in packs, wombats trundling along and rabbits with far too much confidence. We crept up at 40km/h, scanning for black ice, with the autonomous emergency braking and the van’s suite of driver aids keeping a quiet second watch.

Nothing was hit, but danger was never far. At the top, in the dark, the road turns to compacted snow and ice. This is where the story should end with a phone call to a tow truck. Instead, we selected Slippery mode, and wound the throttle response down.

The Trail walked past parked cars wearing chains and studs while riding on its stock rubber. It did not lose traction once. Not even for a split second. It pawed its way through powder and over ice. And it did it all the way up to the highest point in NSW.

Or at least the highest point to which a member of the public can legally drive a car in winter, and at exactly that moment, the sun came up over the Main Range. A grey Ford van. The highest-driven car in the country, for about twenty minutes.

The Ford Transit Custom Trail is a slightly ridiculous proposition that actually makes complete sense. In a segment where Toyota’s HiAce takes roughly half of all sales because it’s dependable and dull, Ford has built a mainstream medium van that hits different.

It will genuinely take you somewhere interesting and bring you back. If they can fix the cruise control, and add more physical buttons and an armrest, this writer would take one over any dual-cab ute on the market.

This article first published on Exhaust Notes Australia.

Once you've found the right car, the next step is sorting out car finance that actually works for your budget. Credit One is Australia's best-reviewed finance broker, with 3,000+ five-star Google reviews from customers who've been through the process. Check out Credit One reviews to see what people say, or head straight to the loan repayment calculator to see what the numbers look like.