I may be in the minority but I hate trucks. I always will have a smaller sedan. Am US.
I don’t see how that could be a minority opinion. Don’t let the “Americans are bad people” posts get to you.
It’s not getting to me at all. Just saying where I am, majority truck central is a thing.
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That’s because Ford neglected their products, choosing instead to invest in higher margin trucks. Everytime they came out with a successful car, they waited until obsolesce before producing a proper replacement.
P much same. Have a crossover bc poor and that was the only used car in my area that was clean title, under 200k miles and not a shitty American-made brand, but it averages 32 mpg and I’m wanting my next vehicle to be a hybrid at minimum.
Seeing pristine baby coddling pickups pisses me off every time.
Am not US but otherwise felt the same, for a long time.
Now recently road conditions have been deteriorating quite badly where I live. With potholes everywhere, sedans and other small cars with delicate suspensions just get damaged all the time by the road. This, along with heavy snow and slush in the winter, has caused me to rethink my stance.
Fool! Sedans are the worst form factor vehicle there is. LONG LIVE THE LONG ROOF! Wagons and hatch backs 4 life
Trucks are demonstrably more dangerous than other vehicles on the road.
My unpopular opinion is that truck drivers should pay a higher penalty when they’re involved in accidents. Every moving violation in a truck gets bumped up, one degree, from civil to misdemeanor, from misdemeanor to felony. By driving a pickup truck you are choosing to endanger other drivers on the road.
They’re also not performance vehicles, but everyone tries to drive them like they are and none of them care to give you any indication of what they are intending to do.
And people pay 80k plus for those. It’s ridiculous. I can’t imagine just throwing away thousands a year on gas, maintenance, insurance, truck nuts etc. all while renting an apartment.
Not a silver bullet but we seriously need to reform the CAFE standards that reward automakers for producing vehicles with larger footprints.
Trump just lowered the standards lol
Make it illegal to build vehicles that aren’t crash compatible with average sized sedans and coupes, get rid of the light truck exemption that allows regular people to drive work vehicles (pickups trucks) on public roads without a truck driver’s licence or work permit.
One of my primary use cases for even owning a truck would be an 8ft long bed single cab so I could drive to the hardware store and pick up sheets of drywall, plywood, or lumber.
You really think I need a commercial driver license or whatever a work permit is to do that?
Absolutely. Extremely few people need a truck that size full time. I was a cabinetmaker for years and I actually needed a truck so rarely that I saved a ton of money just renting one every few weeks and had the option to get a van (which is what most people really want anyway) if I needed one too. Most proper home renovations require a permit so you could tie that to it. I actually had a lot of options for free lumber and sheet stock delivery which is a huge time and money saver even it in the boonies where I lived and of course to my shop in the city. Most people really don’t need a truck, they just don’t take advantage of the services offered to them.
I don’t really understand the difference between the size of an F150 or a Sprinter van for example in your proposed policy.
No hard feelings either way. I don’t own a truck and order material from Lowe’s or Home Depot for that very reason.
Size? Vans are often less vanity sized, bumper height wise. But that’s not really what I meant. When I want a vehicle that can store a bunch of stuff, sheltered from the elements and thieves, like materials or tools overnight, a van comes ready for that, stock. I don’t need to add a whole shell or a flimsy cover, they’re just good. And I can stick lumber all the way to the front of my passenger seat and not have to have it sticking out of the back. Vans are just superior in most transportation cases.
Your original reply proposed driving pickup trucks should require a CDL or some kind of building permit to operate. Should the same apply to vans?
Any home owner should own a truck. I don’t, but I’ll say that my Subaru identifies as a truck (regularly haul trash in it, have used it to move bucked up logs about riding on the bump stops) but I have on a couple occasions had to borrow friends trucks. If I didn’t have friends with trucks, id probably have to get rid of my jeep and replace it with a shitty lil ranger or s10 or something of the sort.
marketing works.
i drive a small hatchback, and everyone who isn’t another small hatchback owner makes passive aggressive commentary about my car. The social pressure to conform and buy a mid-sized or larger SUV/truck is insane, and most folks cave to it. (and now the new thing is ‘you have to buy an EV’ social pressure).
especially as a well-paid middle aged person, the implication is that I am an economic failure at life, and ‘self-respect’ demands I drive a large expensive vehicle to display my status. Like I have had many folks lecture me about how at my age/money I need to own a ‘nice’ car (e.g. 50-60K+ MSRP)
I am in the market for a new car and I am going to get another small hatchback. I have looked at small trucks and other vehicles but the economics don’t make any sense. I’d pay a lot more money for no additional benefit.
FWIW my first car was a 10 year old hand me down SUV. And I absolutely hated driving it. It was huge, slow, and got like 8mpg, but my idiot parents insisted I had to drive it because it was ‘safe’.
This comment reads remarkably similar to my own situation and past. Driving an '89 blazer while broke was enough to make me never want to drive anything wasteful of gas again. And yeah the SUV roll factor somehow was ignored by my parents too.
We say that, but if the prices maintain habits will change. After the Iraq invasion in 2003, I saw people buy more and more smaller city cars over the next half a dozen years (at least in Canada).
Even GM, Chrysler and Ford were bringing small cars to the market until 2008-2010.
Once affordability and credit dry up, there’ll be demand for small hybrids, economy cars and electric cars. SUVs and Pickups are just popular because car loans were so cheap. And gas prices have never been as low as the last decade.
Its already happening. 2000 f350 7.3L ZF6 4x4 rust free is worth less than 4k, trying to sell it for a recently widowed person and it sucks. Truck value, especially diesel, is shitting the bed.
The beauty of consumerism, every possession immediately changes to adapt to the times
The older I get, the less and less heed I pay to supply and demand Econ101. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Americans “choose” the most profitable kind of vehicles.
Supply and demand is a framework, not a model. It doesn’t say anything.
Apparently the entire internet failed to learn Econ101.
Supply and demand is correct in isolation. But so is advertising, they have spent decades learning human psychology to make people want certain things, hence creating demand for things that they want to sell. And they have also learned to create scarcity to Jack up prices.
I’ve always said they try to compensate for something because I can’t for the life of me understand why’d you’d need a massive pickup truck and you live in the suburbs
Maybe I’m an outlier, but I bought a used 2011 Tundra with 230k miles on it for $7k. It’s the base model, bone stock except for replacing the broken radio and I use it to tow the RV I live in and transport my ebike that’s the size of a moped or small motorcycle.
I’m also non-binary and stuck some cutesy cat stickers on my back window. 😂 The idea of spending over $50k on a truck is just insane. I found the original dealer window sticker in the glove box and mine sold for $21k new in 2011.
I live in Texas and pass these huge lifted trucks with the super wide-set tires and always wonder how they can even load anything into the bed. And if MY truck gets 17-18mpg on a good day, what is THEIR monstrosity getting? 😭
I just looked up the Toyota Tundra and it’s still a large truck.
Funny sidenote, this week I saw a VW Eos pulling a caravan.
An Eos has a 1,500kg rated towing capacity. How big was the caravan? Seems kind of dangerous, but I’ve definitely seen people with worse towing setups. 😂
My RV is 8,000 pounds dry (3,600kg). I wanted a smaller truck for better gas mileage, but I wouldn’t have been able to tow with it, as they were mostly rated at about 5,500 pounds (2,500kg).
They’re rated differently here in Germany.
I regularly see setups like this here
But I truly appreciate you converting your measurements
Here’s a recent picture of mine on moving day. The RV is 30ft long (9m), with dual axles.
Prius go wooooosh
And they will keep guzzling gas and you’ll like it!
Rivians sell pretty well from what I hear.
Wish they’d sell them in Australia.
You know, when you tuck your balls into themselves, both these faces look like they’re from the same person. Like different expressions, or some shit.
I find myself right between “you suck because you drive a truck” and “you suck because you don’t drive a real truck”
I have a Honda Ridgeline. It’s the smallest thing I’ve driven that I am comfortable in. We also have a Honda Civic, which is fun to drive for short trips but being wedged inside it gets painful for me.
We’re probably going to get rid of the Civic. We had it mostly for the kids to drive, but they are all grown up and have their own cars now, so we can’t justify the expense of keeping it around for no one to drive (my wife doesn’t drive anymore for medical reasons).
When my previous Ridgeline was totaled (stopped for a school bus dropping off kids - the guy behind me didn’t), I ended up driving the Civic for a couple months. It was unpleasant driving in Philadelphia.
It’s nothing new. I drove a VW rabbit in Philly in the early 90’s when I was in college, and noticed how everyone just drove like you didn’t matter. When the VW was being worked on, I borrowed my dad’s suburban, and all the other drivers suddenly became polite. When everyone drives like a bully, I understand the desire to go bigger.
It’s hard to find small cars in the us these days and if you do they are always clapped out shitboxes. Therefore your options are truck, suv, or a crossover.
corolla, mazda3, civic, elantra are all great cars and not shitboxes. what are you talking about?
it’s your mentality that drives people to drive huge cars they don’t need. a base level small car is 25K and you can lux them up to be luxury cars at around 30K, all without losing the mileage and safety.
I had a mazda 3, you’re right it was great but the used market is full of clapped out shit boxes and no one can afford to buy new these days. The people who can afford new cars are buying giant suvs and trucks.
25K civic is affordable for anyone on a salary 50/60K. The average salary in the USA for a single person is 48K…
yeah, it’s true that stupid people buy cars they can’t afford, rather than cars they can. the issue is people making 50K are buying cars that are 50K.
fwiw I’m looking for a used car 2-3yr old used in the 25K price range, and there are tons available in my area.
I have no clue what you’re talking about or what would illicit an upvote here. There are plenty of small cars here. I have only owned them for 20 years now. I have seen them go from being the standard in cities to being on the downslope but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Wtf is a “clapped out shitbox” anyhow?
