5 ms·

I'm an European who lives in the conditions you described and I'm doing just fine with a small hatchback.

by entropyneur 5y ago

humanrebar 5y ago
Sounds like you're not a plumber and you don't do any landscaping on the side to pay the bills.
- entropyneur 5y ago
  That's correct, but it's a totally different argument.
  - humanrebar 5y ago
    I was just coming up with examples. I wasn't trying for an exhaustive list of situations where a truck is a reasonable lifestyle choice.
- herbstein 5y ago
  Right now I live in an apartment built in the last 2 months with most of the apartments around me still in various stages of being built. This is in Denmark. During the 8-16 time window the road is filled with plumbers, electricians, and other construction workers. There are regularly big cranes and huge belt-driven machines rattling everything in my apartment. The only pickup truck I've seen was not used for construction work, but rather was driven by an inspector wearing a suit under the high-viz vest and hardhat. Instead, the electricians, plumbers, etc. drive vans. They're smaller in footprint and easier to get things in and out of. Some have a covered and insulated shop inside (mostly the electricians) while others are purely for transportation. The materials and machinery that don't fit are too large be transported by a pickup too. Instead, lorries arrive with two or three pieces of machinery on a flatbed, or a single piece of machinery and a bunch of big pieces of material in a closed trailer. I can't tell where a pickup truck would ever be more useful in the construction landscape I'm seeing literally outside my window.
  - humanrebar 5y ago
    Again, the lower the density of life, the more pickup trucks are useful. Dense residential construction is one situation, but there are many others. I brought up plowing snow in another comment in this conversation. That being said, I don't really care to litigate the pros and cons between work vans and work trucks. I was mostly trying to make the point that there are legitimate uses of work trucks. It's very easy for the HN crowd to be in a kind of bubble where they wouldn't understand that, so I thought I'd add some nuance to the conversation.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  The serious plumbers have finally realized that vans, now more easily available in the USA, are much more appropriate for them than pickup trucks (with or without the usual work-truck mods). At least half of the serious landscapers that I see tow a trailer with their tools, bins and stuff on it. Wouldn't matter much what was pulling it, as long as it could pull it.

I'm an European who lives in the conditions you described and I'm doing just fine with a small hatchback.

humanrebar 5y ago

Sounds like you're not a plumber and you don't do any landscaping on the side to pay the bills.

entropyneur 5y ago
That's correct, but it's a totally different argument.
- humanrebar 5y ago
  I was just coming up with examples. I wasn't trying for an exhaustive list of situations where a truck is a reasonable lifestyle choice.
herbstein 5y ago
Right now I live in an apartment built in the last 2 months with most of the apartments around me still in various stages of being built. This is in Denmark. During the 8-16 time window the road is filled with plumbers, electricians, and other construction workers. There are regularly big cranes and huge belt-driven machines rattling everything in my apartment. The only pickup truck I've seen was not used for construction work, but rather was driven by an inspector wearing a suit under the high-viz vest and hardhat. Instead, the electricians, plumbers, etc. drive vans. They're smaller in footprint and easier to get things in and out of. Some have a covered and insulated shop inside (mostly the electricians) while others are purely for transportation. The materials and machinery that don't fit are too large be transported by a pickup too. Instead, lorries arrive with two or three pieces of machinery on a flatbed, or a single piece of machinery and a bunch of big pieces of material in a closed trailer. I can't tell where a pickup truck would ever be more useful in the construction landscape I'm seeing literally outside my window.
- humanrebar 5y ago
  Again, the lower the density of life, the more pickup trucks are useful. Dense residential construction is one situation, but there are many others. I brought up plowing snow in another comment in this conversation. That being said, I don't really care to litigate the pros and cons between work vans and work trucks. I was mostly trying to make the point that there are legitimate uses of work trucks. It's very easy for the HN crowd to be in a kind of bubble where they wouldn't understand that, so I thought I'd add some nuance to the conversation.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
The serious plumbers have finally realized that vans, now more easily available in the USA, are much more appropriate for them than pickup trucks (with or without the usual work-truck mods). At least half of the serious landscapers that I see tow a trailer with their tools, bins and stuff on it. Wouldn't matter much what was pulling it, as long as it could pull it.