One of these has definitely hauled more than the other, and i guarantee you it’s not the ford.

    • The sad thing is that they’re not even that roomy. Something like a skoda superb beats this ford truck hands down when it comes to leg room.

      So:

      • not that great off-road (too heavy, too wide, too long, not enough weight on rear wheels)
      • not great at transporting stuff, because the load bed is open.
      • not fuel efficient (and low range)
      • less safe (higher chance of roll over, takes longer to stop, lower safety standards compared to regular cars)
      • poor visibility (too high, don’t see pedestrians + low obstacles)
      • not that roomy
      • not that comfortable
      • poor handling

      A common argument is ‘it can tow stuff’, which is also silly because you can do that with a far smaller car too.

      So it’s a fashion statement or virtue signaler. I mean, obviously we all hate it, but the people that buy these kind of trucks usually get off on that. They’re virtue signaling to their (internet) friends.

      •  Bo7a   ( @Bo7a@lemmy.ca ) 
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        1 year ago

        I would love to see the smaller car that can tow a 35 foot 5th wheel trailer.

        Or the van that can haul 12 foot logs stacked 6 feet deep.

        Or carry two 1000liter water totes and allow them to be filled from the overhead hose that is provided by the municipality.

        Or pull a trailer with a rented excavator.

        The point here isn’t to argue. But I do get pretty tired of these threads just shitting on trucks for fun. They don’t make sense for non tradespeople living in a city. But I could not do with one vehicle if that vehicle wasn’t a pickup.

        I’m building a homestead from scratch where I had to cut the trees of the forest down in order to make room to put my trailer to live in. Without the truck I could not haul the trailer all the way to the mill, all the milled wood back, and carry all of the things that I need to build the house. While still giving me 4 seats so that my nephews have a seat when I pick them up.

        Edit to add: Mine is also dirty, dented, scratched, and abused. I don’t have time to make a work machine shiny, I have work to do.

        • You have a point. It’s also clear that the Ford pickup in OP’s picture hasn’t done anything remotely close to any of the things you mentioned and likely won’t be, even once a year.

          Frequent campers, contractors, farmers, builders/carpenters, junk and scrap haulers, landscapers all have a use for a pickup truck. Most others don’t.

        • As someone else pointed out already, yes, there are people who need a truck. They don’t need an oversized death machine. There is little to no reason for a truck to have that much bulk, the bulk doesn’t add power.

          However, most “need a truck” is either shit that could be done in much less vehicle, or done so infrequently that it makes 0 sense to OWN said truck. I sometimes need a truck… so far thrice in my life. I rented said truck. My wagon covers almost all of my hauling needs, rental covers the few outliers.

        • You can tow an excavator, etc etc, with a Ford Transit. Hell, they can still drive ok if you stuff enough crushed cars in the back to get a curb weight of 3 tons.

          Meanwhile a 1/2 ton pickup looks like it’s struggling with half a ton in the tiny tiny bed.

          • You are going to want to check your numbers on that transit van.

            My 250 has three times the towing capacity of the transit, and the transit can’t pull a 5th wheel.

            And an E45 bobcat (which is small relative to some machines I pull )is twice as heavy as the tow capacity of the transit, without considering tongue weight or the bulky trailer needed to haul such a thing.

            I get it. Most people don’t need it. I do.

      • I‘m always surprised at how well those 2 wheel drive Fiat Panda‘s perform. We mostly use it for our farm because it can‘t really get stuck, or we haven‘t managed to get it stuck in 11 years. They also fit a decent amount of luggage!

      • Can we stop humiliating men for having small dicks? Penis size is something people don’t choose and can’t change, like their skin color or their sexual orientation.

        Those trying to project a “tough guy” appearance are deeply insecure. They have this idea that if they show vulnerability then other people will think less of them and they will be victimized. People don’t learn this sort of coping behavior when they are raised in a loving nurturing environment.

        They don’t have small dicks. They are scared.

    • You never know. Maybe he needs if he works in the near by forrest. While I agree on the first part about not taking it seriously, I never want to assume people are pieces of shit without talking to them first.

  • What I dislike about these threads is that it always devolves into shitting on blue collar workers. Of course pickups are useless city cars but have you all ever met somebody from a town of 1,000 people where every single person works in a blue collar trade? These things do work that you can’t do in a different type of vehicle.

    Threads like this are echo chambers of privilege. Maybe instead of shitting on tradespeople, shit on car and oil companies who enshittify the whole system.

    Also pickups in 2023 that look like this are more powerful and more fuel efficient than more modest looking pickups from 90s or 00s. You may not like the aesthetics of it, but who fucking cares, you’re not driving it, you’re just the one judging someone else for having different taste.

    • Yes, there are legitimate uses. However, trucks and SUVs account for 80% of car sales in the US. 80% is NOT representative of the number of people who actually need a truck or SUV.

      Trucks and SUVs kill more people, because they are bigger and heavier and have less visibility. They run over more children, because the hoods are so high you could lose track of a whole kindergarten class standing in front of them. They are more efficient than they used to be, but still drastically less efficient than a sedan or station wagon.

      I don’t judge someone for having different tastes. I judge someone for letting their aesthetic choices cause them to do more harm to the planet, and endanger more people, and risk the lives of their own children (because that’s who they’re most likely to run over because they can’t see them).

      If you need a truck or SUV for your job or because you actually haul a lot, or maybe because you have accessibility needs for a bigger vehicle, great. Enjoy. But that is NOT 80% of people.

      •  kozy138   ( @kozy138@lemm.ee ) 
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        241 year ago

        Also work vans are superior to pickup trucks in almost every way.

        And the comment you’re replying to didn’t mention anything about how over the years, the size of truck beds has shrunk, while the cab has grown. I’m sure that has a lot to do with it’s utility…

      • I haul stuff sometimes… So I got an older AWD wagon. Fantastic visibility, could haul more than I need, decent MPG. I do not understand these cars getting bigger and bigger. The newer version of my Outback is a monstrosity as well. I’m pretty sure I’ll be driving cars 2010 and older till I can’t get them anymore.

    •  BaumGeist   ( @BaumGeist@lemmy.ml ) 
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      1 year ago

      I grew up in a city of ~30,000 in the rural south. Every fucking one of my guy friends needed a truck… except the only work they did with it was mod it to be intentionally louder and less gas efficient, and go off-roading. The extent of real work put into them was occasionally hauling some furniture when helping people move: something that 1. could’ve worked with a day rental, and more inportantly 2. Only needed a f150 sized vehicle and not the Ferd F-teen-thousand with quintuple cab space and a v8 diesel hemi lifted on off-road dually tires blowing black smoke all over the other cars.

      Most of the adults who didn’t buy into all the annoying “truck guy” modifications still had the biggest gas-guzzling, space-hogging pieces of emotional support vehicles permanently shined and bed emptied, never doing anything with it but driving to their office/retail job and the grocery store.

    • I live in a small village in the mountains, most of my neighbours are tradies or cobtractors. Their weapon of choice (along with the farmers here) is the Citroen Berlingo.

      It can tow a lot, long stuff can use the cargo hatch at the back of the roof, and it can do pretty serious off-roading. They’re also good family cars.

    • @SlamDrag @TDCN both Chevy and Ford are abandoning the sedan market and focusing on selling trucks to a blue collar aesthetic, not that the global market for cars/trucks is anywhere near a majority of rural that the pickup owners in cities are aspiring to virtue signal. The US became a majority urban nation in the 70s, the world population became majority urban (as opposed to rural) in the 00s. If consumers keep LARPing as small town people in cities, co’s are going to keep selling them trucks

      • Oh i know, we had to get a car since we live in the Midwest. Our options were overpriced Honda, Toyota or Mazdas or barebones subarus or kia boys favorite hyundai or kias.

        Also, blows my fucking mind that corollas have a markups of 5k at the local dealers.

        There are literally 5 cars below $25k OTD if you’re lucky

    • Wasn’t this mostly because of the semiconductor shortage?

      Takes nearly as many components for a small cheap car as it does for a massive expensive one, so they focused the manufacturing on the big one and they’ve even had to cut back on that.

      • No, the F-Series has been the best selling vehicle in America for 30 consecutive years or so.

        A good portion of those sales are for commercial fleets, but plenty more are just for suburban parents to drive from parking lot to parking lot.

        Last year wasn’t an anomaly.

        • Yeah, it’s been a trope for years, lampooned by The Simpsons with Canyonero, even Robocop with its 6000 SUX.

          I don’t really understand why though. Maybe it’s just because America is huge and people think nothing of driving 100 miles to go to work so want to do it in comfort, or maybe it’s the really low taxes on fuel. Maybe if they were paying UK levels of petrol duty (52.95p/litre, that’s 263 cents/gallon, plus 20% VAT), those big trucks would be quickly abandoned, along with dreams of sprawling suburban hell-holes with no pavements.

          I know exactly one person who has one in the UK and we all laugh at him and call it his Fall Guy truck. Mostly because I’m old enough to remember that.

          • It’s due to generations of propaganda that cars=freedom and how that’s affected every aspect of American urban policy.

            Most state government departments of transportation don’t fund public transit and see cars/highways as the only available option to move people from point A to point B.

            This affects every level of American life. So much so that not only is gas in the US not taxed at levels seen in other developed nations, it’s subsidized.

            Pickup trucks now are a defacto status symbol, and on roads where cars are getting bigger, many buyers who would consider smaller alternatives also buy bigger trucks and SUVs than they would have otherwise.

            Additionally there’s a loophole in the car efficiency standards that are more lenient on SUVs and trucks than cars. This has led most manufacturers to focus on marketing Trucks and SUVs rather than cars. GM and Ford current don’t sell and have no plans to sell new cars in the US market. Their entire fleet is SUVs and trucks.

  • Especially when following the law that the larger the car, the less capable the driver.

    I went to the philharmony last Sunday, and the number of people with large and expensive cars who were less than capable to park them properly in an underground car park was hilarious.

    •  Lucien   ( @lucien@beehaw.org ) 
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      21 year ago

      Parking a large truck is also just plain harder.

      • Parking spaces are smaller relative to the size of your car
      • Sitting high up with a huge hood in front means there’s less visibility in front
      • Longer cars make it more difficult to judge distance using your mirrors, somewhat eased by the requirement for parking cameras.
      • Longer cars generally have a longer wheelbase, making a worse turning radius

      The only saving grace as a driver is that heavier cars can be safer for their occupants, at the cost of everyone else’s safety… which most would consider a negative.

      • Parking spaces are smaller relative to the size of your car

        Nope, the caris too big to park in a normal parking lot.

        Sitting high up with a huge hood in front means there’s less visibility in front

        No, the car was built in a way it shouldn’t, because it does not allow the driver to drive responsible

        Longer cars make it more difficult to judge distance using your mirrors, somewhat eased by the requirement for parking cameras.

        No. One can learn to adapt to any size of cars and trucks, but most fat pickup drivers don’t care to invest the brain capacity to do so.

        Longer cars generally have a longer wheelbase, making a worse turning radius

        Well, if you cannot drive, you cannot drive. If the problem that you cannot drive is because of a design failure of the car, you chose the wrong car.

  • I’m pretty tall. I move a lot of family members around on rare occasions. I go for week-long trips out of town in my car. I barely drive it in town (usually evenings and weekends and not even every evening or weekend). My car isn’t quite that behemoth but it is large enough for what I need. I have helped with over 4 home moves in that car and even used it to transport a fridge to a civic waste site.

    It does the job fine. I’ve never felt the need to get a pickup truck. Some people probably have genuine use cases. The majority probably don’t. Those things are wild.

    • Well I never said I was worked up. I never stated I hated the man or speculating wether or not he has a small pp. That’s irrelevant to me. I just noted that the size difference is comically large, meaning I don’t understand how these cars have any practical means of existing in a dence city where a small family car would do the job driving to work just fine and grocery shopping is literally 100m away. I do agree that the comment section in general is getting pretty heated. That’s also Something funny to me because those geting so angry are no better people.

  •  Nobsi   ( @Nobsi@feddit.de ) 
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    31 year ago

    For a few seconds i was thinking of importing a Nissan Armada to Germany. Then i came to my senses and got a Taycan.
    Why did i want an Armada? What happened in my brain that made me go “big car cool need”