A Southampton-based company is about to take the commercial vehicle industry by storm with an affordable fuel-saving conversion for the market leading Ford Transit to fight for survival amid rocketing overheads. with an affordable fuel-saving conversion for the market leading Ford Transit to fight for survival amid rocketing overheads.

Costing from just £2,500 plus VAT, the diesel-LPG fuel blend conversion for the 2.4-litre Euro 4 emissions diesel Transit is claimed to cut fuel bills by up to 29 per cent, extend the van range to up to 1,000 miles and give a cleaner combustion with substantially reduced particulate emissions.

This has the bonus of cutting downtime for depollution filter (DPF) cleaning.

For a 50,000-mile/year van or chassis-cab derivative, whether a pick-up or motorhome, payback can been achieved in one year and then the savings cut in.

It is a far cry from the hydrogen-fuelled experimental Transits being trialled by Southampton City Council – an energy mode which on a Royal Mail trial in Scotland was giving zero emissions but just an 85 mile range with 250kg weight penalty for a £45,000 per van conversion.

The man behind the diesel-LPG project is Will Putter, commercial director of Prins UK, the Sholing-based specialists in liquid petroleum gas (LPG) conversions who put LPG-fuelled Ford Focus racers on the podium in the 2010 British Touring Car Championship.

Subsequently his company has been providing the official dual fuel LPG conversions for the petrol Mazda6 on the fleet market with great success.

But this could be the biggest move yet, already being trialled by a public services company and a major water company.

Mr Putter is delighted with results from the “real world” independent trial by the services company in which a 29 per cent fuel cost saving was achieved over 611 miles use, which would equate to paying off the conversion overhead in just over 40,000 miles.

He said of the development: “This is going to be massive – the first professional fully sequential LPG-diesel blending injection system using a green fuel, giving a better burn and real economies from more sustainable resources in a volatile global fuel market where the differential in cost of diesel over LPG and petrol keeps rising.

“What’s potentially more important is that in the UK we have accessible natural gas resources for decades to come, and this system is not just for vans but can be extended to HGVs for compressed natural gas (CNG)/biomethane too.”

The Transit system involves an LPG “donut” tank of 70 litres capacity that fits in the spare wheel well, the gas feeding through by computer control link to the van’s engine management computer (ECU) for vapour to be injected into the inlet manifold just above each inlet valve to replace a carefully regulated volume of diesel.