A Van Like Alice

Meet Alice - the T4 Swamper on a mission to boldly take its owner where she’s never been before.

- Simon Cooke

Quite often I’ll start a feature with an introduction about the owner’s driving history and background with cars, before we get onto the VW we are actually featuring—such as their first car was a Beetle, and they got their first camper when they were forty, or when the kids left home etc etc. And this feature is similar, but not quite the same…

Kelly Noble from Gloucester does not have a great history of previous driving experiences. Twelve years ago she was innocently crossing a set of lights in her car, when another car ignored the red lights and T-boned her, writing her car off—physically she wasn’t too damaged, but mentally it really knocked her confidence, which is perfectly understandable. Since then she’s been in two more serious accidents, both as a passenger. The last one, another write-off was in August 2018. She’s even resorted to some CBT therapy to get her driving confidence up again; last year she almost turned down a promotion at work because of the driving it would involve, which would have moved her right out of her comfort zone. She needs to drive at weekends when she is often trading as VW shows with her custom illustrated creations— she used to look at show locations on Google maps before deciding to book a stand, depending on whether the roads for the trip looked ‘dodgy’.