According to a report by the Mexican daily newspaper La Jornada, the small truck is expected to cost 150,000 pesos (around 7,600 euros).
The new vehicle is intended to bridge the gap between motorcycles with their limited cargo capacity and conventional light commercial vehicles with higher acquisition and operating costs. Due to its dimensions, the Olinia Carga is suitable for short, low-speed routes in urban traffic.
How is this better than a small-medium panel van? Unless you need to do serious off-road stuff or carry bulk cargo regularly, a panel van seems more practical in every way (shorter, lower load floor, better fuel economy, more convenient sliding door, more capacity, easy access to the cargo area from passenger area if desired). I guess it makes sense if there’s a sea of lightly used pickup trucks from idiots using them for commuting, so you can get them much cheaper than a van.
Most farmers here in europe rely mostly on beat-up panel vans to carry most supplies to fields and produce away from fields. Pick-up trucks are used specifically for carrying bulk. It just makes the most sense.
I never claimed it’s better or more practical than a van but it definitely is more fun to drive and better looking. This is both my personal and work vehicle. Life is too short to drive a boring car.
Do you have an example of a model in mind? I suspect that those vehicles simply couldn’t pass US fuel economy regulations, which paradoxically rewarded bigger vehicles with a larger fuel economy allowance, and completely hollowed out the US market for either small cars or small trucks/vans.
I don’t remember the exact model number but the short wheelbase second-gen Ford Transit (not Transit Connect, just a regular Transit) is the most popular vehicle in Georgia (the country), used by almost all tradespeople and farmers. Granted it is probably on the medium rather than small side of the scale, but it would work great for the kind of loads pictured above & also for towing. I would be surprised if a Ford product was not available in the US.
The current generation Ford Transit is pretty long (3.3 m wheelbase in the base model, 3.75 m wheelbase in the long model) and tall (2-3 meters tall), and is one I would consider to be a fairly large vehicle. At least the North America models.
I’m not sure whether a short wheelbase model was ever available in the U.S., at least under that model name.
Looking at the parent comment’s truck, that looks to be a Nissan Frontier, maybe mid-2000’s or so? I think that’s a smaller vehicle than the contemporary Ford Transits of similar timeframe.
Either way, my point is that the development of electric drivetrains and the abandonment of fuel economy standards in the US market might actually lead to the creation of more small trucks/vans, which were difficult to justify in the previous state of the technology, the market, and the regulations. But there is a huge gap from around 2010-2025 model year for smaller vehicles in the US.