Peugeot J7: an unknown star of #vanlife

Cars Culture

a Peugeot van spot has me wondering how many other wagons we have not known...

Peugeot J7? Never heard of it.

At the time of writing we are, as many of you will be, on the road for the Summer.

And the Basque coast is one of the hotspots of #vanlife. Wagons of every kind are invading the coastline. They are variously stuffed with surfers, non-surfers, ragged Scandinavian families, stern German sporty couples, ramshackle Dutch clans and super cool, shrugging Gallic trusties.

We are, as any reader of this blog will know, car geeks with an extra penchant for twin cylinder motorcycles and surf wagons. So it was a huge surprise to see a mass-produced van this morning that we had never seen or heard of before.

J7

A quick rag through the webs served up a corrugated surprise. This lovely, beautifully proportioned van is the Peugeot J7 and was produced in as many as 350,000 units.

It was never sold in the UK, but it still shocks me that I’ve never come across one before.

One of the holy grails of Van Life is to walk the fine balance of dimension and angle. You don’t want something too big to handle – but you want to cram all the practicals in it.

With its almost perfect box shape and sliding doors, this J7 looks like it could accommodate a full standing six footer and still negotiate tightest of lanes. Job done in the van search department.

How then, had it slipped our attention?

We suppose we missed the Peugeot J7 because of the ubiquity of Transits and Transporters – and the fact that French fancy was most often accommodated by the Citroen H-Van in its corrugated niceness.

We’re thinking that in the rarity and retro stakes, it would be good to find a cache of clean H7s in storage somewhere.

Perchance to dream.

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