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> pickup truck should just be max utility Except the main demographic buying F150s is suburban dads driving to their office job.
by groundzeros2015 10mo ago
> pickup truck should just be max utility
Except the main demographic buying F150s is suburban dads driving to their office job.
- bluGill 10mo agoAnd using the truck on weekends to tow the boat, or do other work with it. Not every weekend, but once a month in summer.
- jeffbee 10mo agoThere are 5x more households with trucks than households with boats, so this hardly explains it.
- bluGill 10mo agoThere are a lot more uses of a truck than towing a boat.
- astura 10mo agoUsually the imagined uses are very aspirational at best. The imagination doesn't fit reality. I've seen it firsthand, many years ago my dad got the fancy pickup because he "needs the utility." Whenever an opportunity presented itself for him to use his truck as a truck though, he'd pay the extra fee for delivery because he didn't wanna bother. It did make his reckless driving more dangerous for the innocents, though.
- Der_Einzige 10mo agoI'll go further, Most Americans who buy stuff like boats don't use them anywhere near enough to justify the purchase. I'm pretty sure well less than 30% of boats are being used at least once a year. America is so full of hoarding and objects that go years without anyone touching them. It's profoundly sad.
- wffurr 10mo agoGas doesn't cost enough.
- groundzeros2015 10mo agoI think the problem is Trucks are a visible lifestyle preferences that does not align with yours.
- wffurr 10mo agoYou can have all the weird lifestyle preferences you want that don't involve conspicuous waste of natural resources and accelerating anthropogenic climate change.
- chroma205 10mo ago> You can have all the weird lifestyle preferences you want that don't involve conspicuous waste of natural resources and accelerating anthropogenic climate change. you’re right. but I’m still not changing my habits. fuck the environment
- derektank 10mo agoAre we not talking about electric vehicles here?
- chung8123 10mo agoI find most people with critical looks at trucks have not looked at their own habits the most. Some have but I bet there are a lot of meat eaters here talking about how wasteful trucks are.
- groundzeros2015 10mo agoIt’s very hard to not see how any resource using activity falls in that bucket including: boating, shopping, having kids, going on vacation, having a home, ordering exotic things, eating at restaurants, using AI, etc. The primary limiter is on how many resources we give people.
- cmtm4 10mo agoI think the reason this take gets push-back in discussions (including here) is that it's highly regional. I've lived in parts of the US where I doubt more than 10% of pickup trucks on the road (and there were a lot of them) were really justifiable purchases as trucks. They were aspirational purchases, and/or were selected for status/class/politics signaling. I've lived other places in the US where the whole region had far fewer trucks (but a hell of a lot more Volvos... like, easily 10x as many as the other place) where I bet at least 50% of pickup trucks saw enough truck-use to really be justifiable.
- potato3732842 10mo agoThis. Where I live the suburban dads wouldn't be caught dead projecting the "fullsize truck owner" image. They buy a Tacoma. Or they did until the Maverick came out.