What if you have to help a friend move a couch once every 5 years? What then?

Well what if I need to prove my dick is tiny tho?

Dude real shit I work in construction and I can tell you that you don’t even really need a pickup for that either.

I mean it depends what you’re doing ofc but vans are what’s actually used as work vehicles for the most part. And those are generally company vehicles so for personal use you can drive whatever vehicle you want.

I have a crew cab pickup (half ton), and yeah it has come in handy numerous times over the years. But I do agree those larger, “more rugged”, trucks are not for the people who own them.

“The only thing better than owning a truck is having no fucking reason to own a truck”

It’s a statement. You don’t need to work; but you still could if you wanted to.

What if I never transport people? WTF do I need all these extra seats for? A giant grocery cart in the back is much more useful.

And even for construction purposes, most trucks nowadays are kinda pointless. A 4ft bed is good for hauling like 1 bike placed diagonally, much less a typical sized piece of lumber or plywood.

Can’t beg a place to sell you a 6ft bed unless you want to wait for it to come off the manufacturing line.

I believe it was in a not just bikes video, but he talked about how some large percentage of truck owners openly admitted they never use their beds for hauling.

Camping, hunting, dirt bike riding, moving, general utility and many other things done by most adults that don’t like to rely on other people. I don’t want to pay a moving company if I move, I don’t want to ask someone else if I want to tow my trailer out to camp. I don’t want to call some construction company everytime I need so much as a 2x4 to repair my home. Anyone who doesn’t own a truck will at some point rely on someone who does. It is not dumb as shit to own a truck for everyone. Not everyone lives the same life you do. I live in a rural area, I spent 6 months at one point in my life without a truck, I will never do it again. Probably 95% of the time I don’t need a truck, but when I need it, I need it. My daily driver is a beater car, most of the time, depending on logistics and weather. But if I had to only have one vehicle it would be a truck. A truck will haul 5 people, so will most cars but a truck can drive through weather and haul things when you need it. Although I am a middle aged dad in a rural area. 🤷‍♂️ I must be dumb.

for real. had a friend with a big relatively-new truck with a stubby bed try to have me help him move. I show up with my 2003 ford ranger, made before trucks primarily became male fashion accessories. he’d teased me about it before because it’s apparently a “small truck”. yet somehow barely anything fit in his toy truck and my “small” truck handled his couches and mattresses fine. teased him about his truck in return, used the ol “not the size it’s how you use it” line, and have never heard him talk shit about my little truck again.

Blame CAFE, the EPA (I like most of the EPA), and the Chicken Tax. Those three have basically made it to where the US can’t get the smaller trucks the rest of the world gets, has a fuel economy loop-hole for larger vehicles, and basically makes it incentivized for companies to make boxier, bigger vehicles in order to lower their average fuel economy standards. Most people I talk to want the ford Ranger from the 2000s brought back in size, but we literally cannot. The closest we got was the maverick (still too big comparatively) and that’s because they gave us a hybrid option and based it off the escape.

I swear their beds are about as long as the one I had in my 1987 Ranger.

So I asked my aunt for help hauling things back and forth to a convention this past spring. She has an enormous Ram pickup, I have a tiny little xB. A lot of the stuff I was bringing was stored in 45 gallon totes, and I knew from past experience that I could fit three in my car with the back seats folded down, and have room for thinner containers on top.

Imagine my surprise when we go to load up the truck and find that it fit the same number of totes in the bed, and they just barely cleared the bed cover. The cavernous back seat helped make up for it thankfully, but I was floored that the cargo areas were comparable.

Those Rangers were death traps in anything more than 35mph. But then again most cars back in 87 were. So nevermind. Lol.

I’ve had trucks and now I have a mini cargo van.

90% of the time the van is better, but that last 10% can be a big deal.

Uhhh isn’t the whole point of a bed that you can put things of whatever height you want in it because there isn’t a roof or anything?

I absolutely do not believe this. Those bed covers role right up.

Handymen around here drive transporters like this:

You can get them slightly lifted and with AWD, I really don’t get how a pickup with an open bed is better than that.

I read somewhere that farmers have started to buy very tiny Japanese pickup-trucks, because for most of the work they have to do during their day these small ones are much more practical. But American car manufacturers only make these oversized mob atrocities anymore, so the only solution is these Japanese ones. In size they’re basically these little busses where there’s no space between the two front seats.

Most vans have a greater payload than a lot of 4 door duel cabs, they offer more storage, more security，a lower loading floor height, more accessibility with side access and greater resale.

But yeah gotta get my Chevy.

I used to be a tradie, most of them don’t need them either, and unsurprisingly, there are always tradies around whining their tools got stolen from the back of their Ute.

The funny thing is that the biggest badasses I met don’t drive these kinds of cars. In fact, I can’t recall any guy here in Australia who has demonstrated an ounce of courage who does drive a larger ute, and its generally a reliable indicator imho that they need fashion accessories to impress people.

Also yeah, they always suck at parking. Not because they can’t, but simply because they don’t care

When I was a teen, I think pickup looks super cool and would definitely buy one if I could.

Now as a more practical adult, I don’t think I’ll ever buy a pickup because I have no use for them and there’s a lot more downsides to it (higher tax in my country, higher maintenance, bigger footprint, lower fuel efficiency). But I still think they look cool.

I ended up renting a brand new f150 lariat since it was the cheapest option available at the time and honestly I kind of get it. The thing was comically huge but I felt like a king in there. Super spacious interior too, my 7 yo nephew was standing up without his head even hitting the ceiling. I would never buy one since they’re ridiculously expensive and too unnecessary, but man if I didn’t like driving it.

There are certainly practical reasons for them, like if you do a lot of ATVing, you can negate the need for hauling it in a trailer and just drive it up into the bed. It can definitely be nice to have a truck bed for certain things, but many people buy trucks for stuff they do once a month (if that), and not something they do every day, like commuting.

That’s fair, I have a truck but I also have a ladder rack on it that gets used often…

I bought one when I moved to a rural area. Since I worked from home I used it mainly to haul dirt, pig feed, yard equipment, and garbage a couple times a week. I spent about $12,000 on an older Chevy in relatively good shape and drove it until it rusted out from under me.

I bought a truck primarily for off- grid camping. Much easier to get a single vehicle into places.

I’ve found it extremely useful for truck stuff on nearly a weekly basis. One advantage it has over a van is the bed space is physically separate. I keep a porta potty in the back for my young kids. Never have to worry about it stinking up the cab.

I bought one to tow a 5th wheel RV. Since I sold the RV, I didn’t need the truck so I sold that as well. Nothing wrong with owning a large truck.

Oh yeah, the base model F-350 starts at almost $50k and the top trim more than doubles that.

In Australia the “Liberals” are the centre right capitalist centric party. We do have better terms like social progressives, socialists and social-democrats, but even with this, it’s all relative terms. Everyone’s different in their own ways.

So does everyone else in the road.

Seriously, ever since I drove alongside one of the new 2024 GMC Sierra Denali trucks and realized its hood was as tall as my entire car, I’ve been utterly terrified of being anywhere near them. You probably can’t see anything less than 10-15 feet in front of you, which is absolutely bonkers for a noncommercial vehicle. To say nothing of how getting hit by one is going to be like getting smacked directly in the face like a brick wall, because there’s no way you’ll be knocked up onto the roof to dissipate the force of the impact.

Car companies have absolutely lost the plot with this whole arms race of BIGGER BOXIER TALLER MANLIER trucks ever since Ford got made fun of around 2000 or so for making a car that was too “feminine” because it dared to have a more rounded exterior. The next generation refresh made it bigger and boxier, slapped a 12" Ford badge that was 2-3x the size of the badge on the previous generation, and it’s been all downhill ever since.

it’s not just light trucks

They kind of have to do that.

Safety rules frown upon vehicles that crush everyone inside in an accident, so a modern vehicle’s roof is required to be able to support the entire weight of the vehicle. If it’s a big vehicle, that means very chunky pillars.

Unironically it would be fun to see. I don’t like the mpg but reusing it is better than sending it to a junk yard I suppose

How is own the cons not a thing. I need politicians to own the cons