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As a European living in a big city I never quite understood just how huge these things are until I finally saw one stuck in traffic in a tiny Parisian street. These things are massive!
i’ve only ever seen VW amaroks, these are already pointlessly huge.
Dude these things struggle to fit in American cities! My mother in law was taking my wife and I to a concert in Chicago and last second we had to change plans and drive our car because hers was too big to park in our reserved parking space. My small crossover which is tiny by rural farming community standards was a tight squeeze. Her truck also took up literally half of our 3.5 car wide driveway (my house is a former rental)
The bed of that stupid thing is about twice as high as the useful one, so you have to lift the cargo twice as high.
bold of you to assume they’re using it for more than their weekly groceries
Groceries are enough cargo to need a truck, of course. You can’t possibly hold that much in a sedan.
Hey, in the winter they put sandbags back there to help balance out the traction.
You’re discounting most of the use that bed sees.
Ever notice how other vehicles don’t usually do that, even when they can? It’s possible to do in a wagon too, but that’s uncommon to see. You should look at the physics sometime.
If your bed is empty, your vehicle will have less weight. Larger vehicles need that extra weight for traction, as their centre of gravity is higher. Smaller vehicles will have a lower centre of gravity, so they usually won’t need that extra weight.
I’ve never seen that aspect described as a “pro” before. In the past, I’ve mainly only heard pick up drivers complaining about it being a pain in the arse to do.
Edit: I think this might have been a joke lol. It’s too early. I’ll leave this up anyways
It was a joke, my brother had a truck and found that part really annoying in the winter.
But I appreciate the explanation
You would have to, if you ever used it for work.
Not to bust anyone’s bubble, but you can thank the EPA and their MPG guidelines for all these stupidly huge trucks. Why we can’t have small trucks
I mean, this is a factor I’m sure, but the reality is people want the big trucks. The big trucks sell. That’s the major factor. If this were the real reason the EV trucks would be small, right? Well they’re not, they’re gigantic. You can hava long and wide wheelbase without a 5 person cab, you can have an extended bed. You can have a long and wide wheelbase without a giant front end you can’t see over. The footprint doesn’t mandate a tall, luxurious cab.
Do people want big trucks or have they been manipulated through clever marketing to want big trucks because they’re more profitable for the manufacturers (marketing included)?
The guy with the deep voice told me I wanted it, and as he was describing that it has “hemi” I figured that was a good proxy for having a functional dick as I would ever get.
Why are the contents of the cab in question here?
Just because the market is doing something doesn’t mean the consumers are enjoying it. For some reason humans have to have the shiny new thing, whether or not it checks all the boxes. I’m sure the market is split on this subject.
And why would an ICE vehicle company change the wheelbase of a model just because of the drivetrain? You need to keep models similar to help keep costs down.
Yeah, blame the governmental entity that gets its hands tied behind its back by protectionist lobbyists and corrupt Supreme Court Justices, and not the the big 3 reaping the rewards. Just like the IRS and the USPS.
Actually, most of the nerfing and defanging of the three letter organizations has been pulling of their funding by certain leaning politicians. The EPA made the rules with the help of the big three, they are all to blame.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Why we can’t have small trucks
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
There’s this dude on YouTube called oats Jenkins and makes better versions of things, he made a “traffic 2” video and in it he said something along the lines of “oh and you will need a permission ticket for a pickup added to your driving licence if you want one, so that only people who need a pickup truck can have one”
This is absolutely genius in my opinion, and I saw these big ass pickups spreading into europe, and like where I live (pretty small far away town of which there’s a ton of in Europe) they would take up somewhere to 3/4 to the full damn road (I saw someone drive one and it really went like that those things are as big as a bus)
In the Netherlands you need to register one as a company vehicle to be able to import it which seems like it’d be a pretty sizeable limitation… yet I still see these pieces of shit everywhere, being used as personal vehicles exclusively
these big ass pickups spreading into Europe
Just wait until you see the guys with the extended length mirrors so they can cosplay driving a big rig. They stick out over the lines in Canada.
So, do they get smashed often by traffic in other lanes? If so, which baseball bat is recommended for this glorious pastime?
I’ve seen a fair few cobbled together with tape, but I can’t say whether that’s because the driver needs the extended mirrors and sucks at driving or the get smashed.
They’re supposed to be for when you have a trailer to decrease your blind spot, but I never see them used with trailers.
“Status symbol”
Every time I see a bro dozer I automatically assume dude’s absolutely drowning in debt and either being propped up by his poor wife or living in a trailer park and 4 months behind on rent.
In my experience, everyone I know that lived in trailers were doing actual work and drove actual work trucks. Everyone I know that lived off parents money and drove to an office and never did a lick of manual work drove the big truck.
This is my observation as well. Most people driving these abominations fairly well-off people from the suburbs, in my experience.
I think it’s because the people doing real work know they’re going to fuck this thing up by transporting stones and furniture and tools and lumber and dirt and mulch in the back, so why spend more on a new thing just to fuck it up.
My father in law has a junky truck he loves. He bought it for cheap and he works the hell out of it. I scratched the liner in the bed pretty badly moving patio stones and apologized to him about it, and he laughed and said that’s why he bought it.
More than once I have thought about getting a bunch of business card-sized notes professionally printed that say “I love how S H I N Y your truck is!” with tons of glitter and a rainbow-colored font for the word “shiny” to put on the windshields of all the clean trucks I see in the city near me
I can’t express how much I love this idea
I have this visual of some guy reading the card and making a huge show of ripping it up
I really love the design aesthetics of older trucks. They were uniquely cozy in their own kind of way. I wish you could buy new small sized utilitarian trucks, but literally nobody in the industry sells them anymore because the consumer keeps buying these behemoth trucks and so luxury has become the standard when it should have only encompassed a small portion of the truck market share.
What’s fucked is it wasn’t even the consumers who caused the trucks to get bigger. It was poorly thought out emissions taxes. The US decided to tax car makers more for high emissions cars, but didn’t tax more for large truck emissions… So the car makers decided to make the light trucks bigger instead of trying to make the emissions better. People wanting luxury is a factor, but it’s not why they are nearly semi sized these days.
Just look at the first image, the truck on the left is from the Japanese market where they taxed car makers less for cars and trucks under a certain size, those trucks are used in greater abundance than American style trucks as it is more versatile. If they had the option, I’m sure a lot of consumers would choose the smaller truck. Leaving the big trucks for status symbol pricks and people who actually need a big truck for towing.
I wish that 20 years ago, we had a serious discussion about emissions requirements. Catalytic converters increase CO2 output through a variety of direct and indirect means, but they reduce all other types of emissions. It would have been nice if we could have had an adult discussion about letting off some of those requirements in order to reduce CO2.
Not much point now.
Honestly I think they made the right call wrt catalytic converters. The stuff that they turn into CO2 is a much more potent and urgent threat than the CO2.
The CO2 problem should have been solved with fuel efficiency, but as we’ve discovered here, it wasn’t. After realizing the unintended consequences of their laws, they refused to go back to them and admit there was a problem, because admitting means they were wrong and they can’t have that.
(Also passengers cars aren’t really the problem. At least they’re small fish, that we’ve been tricked into focusing on so that the real polluters can avoid scrutiny).
Hell I miss little SUVs like the old RAV4. Great visibility and it can park in compact spaces.
Modern SUVs are even bigger than older generation full sized trucks
One of my friends in high school had one of those small trucks, and I always thought it was so cool. I’m not sure how often she used the bed, but it got decent milage still, it looks cool, and I’m sure it came in handy eventually. If I was looking for a truck, I would totally buy one. But I’m sure as shit not buying one of those pointlessly giant ones. Nothing about them is appealing.
Ford Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz
Frat boy house mate from Brooklyn in college had a dualie. Completely unnecessary for where he lived (home or at school). Dad was a biz kid, he was a biz kid…
I asked him one day “what’r ya haulin’?”
I am no longer friends with this man.
Aaaaaaah yes, the pavement princess. Drive like they own the streets, but never done a day’s work in their lives
So I’ve used huge stupid trucks for work a lot. Bush work. So shitty roads in the middle of nowhere, heavy loads.
Here is what I’ve learned:
The beds are undersized proportionate to their size, so it’s pretty common to put canopies on them, which raises the center of gravity even further than it already is (which is pretty goddamn high). Rollovers are common, and loading the things is in itself hazardous. I’ve loaded a lot of shit in and out of these things, and had a bunch of close calls. It’s a long way to fall, and you’re more likely to fall than in a shorter vehicle.
The build quality is overall pretty bad, so the pillars are huge. Stupid large, which creates really big blindspots where there just don’t need to be.
These trucks aren’t really designed to go off road, so things like traction control tend to really get in the way. That whole system is built off of ABS (which doesn’t work in situations where your traction is limited), and this will effectively kill your power when your tires start to spin. You have to override the default settings of these trucks to get them to work as advertised. It will make you stuck when you don’t need to be.
The high hood is dumb. You have to look far ahead to maintain safety, because the blind spot in front of your truck is huge. Do you know what happens when you’re on a steep climb around sharp corners? You straight up can’t see. The only safe way to go is to get out of the truck and drive from memory. It’s legit fucking stupid.
The blind spots in the rear of the truck is enormous. I’ve driven trucks with empty beds where I can see out the rear view mirror, and I’ve driven trucks with canopies that cover up the rear window. There’s basically no difference in visibility.
What’s a guy gotta do to get one of those cool little cab over trucks in the US? I looked into it a while ago and it seems like they’re only made overseas.
In 2011, the CAFE standards were adjusted, and fuel economy standards started being based on the vehicle’s footprint. So small trucks suddenly had to have absurdly high fuel economy. At the same time, instead of having to make trucks more and more efficient every year, they can just make them bigger.
It’s why the Ford Maverick base model is a hybrid. Making the hybrid the upgrade and the gas engine standard would keep Ford from meeting CAFE standards. But it’s also the reason the Ford Ranger is now the size of an older F-150.
Isn’t there some exception for vehicles over 5000lbs or something too, which is why all half ton trucks and big suv/crossovers are all over that weight, so they don’t have to have good mpg
Fun fact you can get the rear wheels off the ground from braking too hard.
There’s a place the town over from me that sells them, most with just a flat bed and no sides.
https://minitrucks.net/products/2000-subaru-sambar-firetruck-2
Omg this thing looks like you could have a lot of fun!
$4.5K CAD for a 1999 truck is higher than I’d expect, but actually quite affordable (hopefully the upkeep isn’t too bad)
Thank you! Bookmarking for future reference.
I saw one of those with TWO cab extensions yesterday, there was like 2 feet of bed and the rest was just all cab. I cannot wrap my head around the thought process of whoever built that piece of shit.
Oh it’ve very simple, they’re exempt form CAFE standards if it’s a utility vehicle. So they can build hummer esque land yachts and not have it tank the average fuel economy of their fleet.
There are way too many pavement princesses where I live.
Big ass truck
Used for one person to go to their office job and back home.
Maybe 1/100 of them actually are used for actual truck tasks and they’re not the massive ones
My sedan has seen more dirt roads than most of these trucks combined
Same here. People erroneously associate these climate changing monstrosities with Republican-voting, rural America but I’ve seen these in my supposedly liberal city way too many times. The worse offenders are college frat boys with inflated egos wasting their tuition on lift kits and oversized chrome wheels. And you’re right about their usage. My dad once had two pickups: an F-150 King Ranch and a Nissan Frontier basic trim. You would think that, even with the luxury features, the F-150 would do the heavy work, right? Nope. The Frontier was always doing the dirty work while the King Ranch was my dad’s crown jewel (before he sold it).
I like to call those huge trucks in pristine conditions, “Glam trucks”
Pavement Princess
I think that any Vic exempt form CAFE standards or protected from import competition by huge terifs, should require a commercial license to operate. Give the automakers a choice, sell the vehicle outside of their special safe space, or shrink the market that can buy it drasticaly.
or protected from import competition by huge terifs
Europe never opened their chicken market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
The Chicken Tax is a 25 percent tariff on light trucks (and originally on potato starch, dextrin, and brandy) imposed in 1964 by the United States under President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to tariffs placed by France and West Germany on importation of U.S. chicken.[1] The period from 1961 to 1964[2] of tensions and negotiations surrounding the issue was known as the “Chicken War”, taking place at the height of Cold War politics.[3]
Eventually, the tariffs on potato starch, dextrin, and brandy were lifted,[4] but since 1964 this form of protectionism has remained in place to give US domestic automakers an advantage over imported competitors.[5] Though concern remains about its repeal,[6][7] a 2003 Cato Institute study called the tariff “a policy in search of a rationale.”[4]
Largely because of post–World War II intensive chicken farming and accompanying price reductions, chicken, once internationally synonymous with luxury, became a staple food in the U.S.[12] Prior to the early 1960s, not only had chicken remained prohibitively expensive in Europe, but it had also remained a delicacy.[13] With imports of inexpensive chicken from the U.S., chicken prices fell quickly and sharply across Europe, radically affecting European chicken consumption.[13] In 1961, per capita chicken consumption rose up to 23% in West Germany.[13] U.S. chicken captured nearly half of the imported European chicken market.[13]
Subsequently, the Dutch accused the U.S. of dumping chickens at prices below cost of production.[13] The French government banned U.S. chicken and raised concerns that hormones could affect male virility.[13] German farmers’ associations accused U.S. poultry firms of fattening chicken artificially with arsenic.[13]
Coming on the heels of a “crisis in trade relations between the U.S. and the Common Market,”[13] Europe moved ahead with tariffs, intending that they would encourage Europe’s postwar agricultural self-sufficiency.[14] European markets began setting chicken price controls.[13] France introduced the higher tariff first, persuading West Germany to join them—even while the French hoped to win a larger share of the profitable German chicken market after excluding U.S. chicken.[3] Europe adopted the Common Agricultural Policy, imposing minimum import prices on all imported chicken and nullifying prior tariff bindings and concessions.
Beginning in 1962, the U.S. accused Europe’s Common Market of unfairly restricting imports of American poultry. By August 1962, U.S. exporters had lost 25% of their European chicken sales.[13] Losses to the U.S. poultry industry were estimated at $26—$28 million[3] (equivalent to $251.53—$270.88 million in 2022).
TTIP came probably as close as things have been, but ran into opposition from European poultry farmers again.
ran into opposition from European poultry farmers again.
And consumers. We don’t want your chickens because the EU has standards.
They’re placed to block competition. It’s called a non-tariff barrier to trade.
So we don’t block you cos we have standard on food safety? We block you as part of a trade barrier? We force our own farmers to follow rules on food safety but if we tell the US to do the same we’re putting up barriers to trade?
Do you see how arrogant you sound? The EU has strong consumer protection laws and reputation.
Petty tit for tat terrif policy isn’t the point. The US truck market is deeply distorted by that terrif in a way that makes it difficult to get smaller utility vehicles. Especially considering that the terrif is on all trucks, even ones made in countries outside the European market that do buy American chicken, like Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
Besides most American chicken can’t be sold in the EU anyway due chlorine washing being illegal there.
