I may be in the minority but I hate trucks. I always will have a smaller sedan. Am US.
I would like a small, pre-2012 truck that is just used for hauling shit I need to the house, like wood, pellets, feed, etc.
What I find are dick-measuring vehicles where you have to lean forward to ensure no pedestrians are in front.
Still searching…
Theres a reason first gen Tacoma’s are still over $20k for a decent one. and they usually have over 300k miles. Such a great sized, good driving, easy to work on little pickup. (Minus the stupid frame recall).
Everything made today is shit. So hold on to your 90s cars guys.
Ford maverick, size of the old rangers with 40 mpg
That cab though lol I legit just want a single cab truck with no gimmicks, but “the market” all trends to “big car with bed” because they can mark up the price.
While true, they have a lot of issues and are way too techy, and fwd. Give me the ranger.
The current ranger makes my 85 F160 feel small. Or at least low.
My dad has a '93 Ford Ranger
4 cylinder, 7ft bed, single cab with a bench seat. Gets around 20mpg, which honestly isn’t too shabby even by new truck standards.
Over the years it’s moved a lot of furniture, picked up a lot of bulky lumber and such from the hardware store, picked up a few decent sized loads of firewood, and generally done everything most normal people would need or want a truck for.
The bed is pretty low compared to modern trucks so it’s easy to load and unload, back it up to a curb and you can pretty step right off the sidewalk into the bed with the tailgate down
I have complaints about it, but they’re nothing most people couldn’t live with. It’s 0-60 time is probably best stated as “eventually,” especially if you’re carrying anything significant in the bed. And with no weight over those rear wheels it’s kind of shitty to drive on anything besides dry paved roads so 4wd would be nice. And of course after 30+ years it’s got some quirks and little things that are broken.
But if I could buy basically that exact same truck today, maybe as a hybrid or EV, I’d jump on it. I don’t need more performance, I’m not going to use it to haul a bed full of gravel or anything, we’ve never had to tow with it, and when I’ve towed with my own car it’s never been anything more substantial than a teardrop trailer that a Prius could probably just about handle if they came with a tow hitch.
I really like the maverick, it checks a lot of boxes for me and is overall pretty similar in size to my dad’s ranger but that short bed annoys me, I can’t fit a couch in that.
Liked my s10 but that was the biggest complaint that engine belongs in a small car not a truck.
I don’t remember typing this today 🙃
Edit: read “absolutely 100% the main usecase”
Much like seeing one of the new post trucks, it’s a fun game to point at “small” trucks and exclaim “look, normal-size truck!” It’s just sad that they’re getting rare enough to point them out.
Slate truck. Ford Fathom. Only options I’m aware of in the USA.
Trucks started getting giant in 1991. The f350 was different than the f250 in one primary way, it was lifted 3 inches on blocks. The f series drove the height gain in trucks. The next super duty generation had like a 5 foot tall grill in 1998. And it was all uphill for truck sizing from there.
GM stayed smaller till ~2008. My 2001 3/4 chevy roofline is the same height as a new f150 hood. Its nuts.
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
I actively despise those massive pavement princesses and lose respect for any person who has one. They’re a must-have in the “macho insecure man-child” starter pack.
Externalizing their “alpha” BS.
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.
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.
Problem with the pickup truck thing is that you would also nuke those of us driving older trucks like my 01 Tacoma, my fucking hood is shorter than the back bumper of some modern pickups. Mind you that could be corrected with height and tonnage specifications.
Yeah I feel like if it is crash compatible there’s no problem. You could also let current truck owners be grandfathered in and have no new trucks sold to the general public.
There’s really a ton of options other than just letting people get bigger and bigger trucks that really just kill more people.
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.
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.
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.
Same. For me its also an easy choice. Large vehicles suck ass to drive and are 0 fun. Theyre also much more unsafe for everyone. Give me a hatch that can zip, stop, and handle great. WAY better.
Maybe it’s because I am in tech, but not a single person in my friends group drives a pickup truck. Even now that I’ve moved to Wyoming, there are no truck owners. To be fair, pickups suck in our weather. A lot of Subaru and vans though.
I guess what I am saying is that maybe gas guzzling pickups aren’t an American thing as much as they are a specific type of American thing.
Shh, American bad!
They’re popular with a certain personality. White males who need to demonstrate their mannitude. Hell of a lot of money to pay for performative machismo.
It’s blue collar cosplay. They want to be seen as a “working man.” Ironically I think most actual working vehicles have switched over to vans.
Just tell those “personalities” that you can afford driving a small car, because you don’t need your car for compensating something. They’ll know what.
I also work in tech (shocking, I know). Pretty sure the only truck drivers in my org are a few men in the c-suite and one dude who has a small daily driver Ridgeline haha.
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
For the 2027 model year, GM/Chevrolet are bringing back the
350408! 6.7L of V8 power, up from a measly 6.2L!350ci is 5.7l
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.
If I could teach everyone on Earth one thing, it would be how to read a supply and demand diagram. So much is wasted because we as a people don’t understand elasticity and surplus.
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.
Prius go wooooosh
Rivians sell pretty well from what I hear.
Wish they’d sell them in Australia.
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
I do actually want a truck. I like to thrift shop and do home projects. being able to move furniture and construction materials would be nice. Too bad they’re stupid big, full of tech garbage, and 30K. I just want a little ford ranger or something. There’s no reason it should cost as much as it does when the only people using it are tradesmen and posers. A truck is meant to be the work horse of vehicles. Somehow they convinced enough people to pay a premium price for a thing that has near no versatility.
The trucks useful for actual hauling are nothing like these awful pavement princesses. They’re smaller, lower, with a small cabin and bigger flatbed.
Unfortunately they are much less common nowadays. Wonder why that is.
The upcoming Slate could be what you want.
I have a lot of hope for the Slate. I’m worried about a dozen different things happening to it as a new company. I wish I could see their financials but it’s a catch-22. If I can see their sales numbers it’s more likely some big shitty company tries to hostile take over them (because they’d be publicly traded.) Getting one would be cool. Getting one and then having the company shutter (or get eaten by Amazon), not so much.
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? 😭
