The author makes a correct observation (trucks are getting bigger to circumvent emissions guidelines, not solely out of ego), but fails to address the underlying market demand: as trucks have gotten bigger, they've also gotten "meaner"[1]. Emissions requirements don't require a truck to look like it's going to beat you up.
In other words: consumer ego (wanting to drive a big, mean looking truck) is an underlying pressure in the market, even if the sufficient mover for the current size explosion is emissions dodging.
How do you decide what looks “meaner?” This guy fixated on the Chevy Silverado design, but I don’t see what’s wrong with it. It looks more squared off and masculine, and less curvy and feminine, which is a design trend it shares with Apple’s latest MacBook pros. Is Google’s chrome book pixel mean? https://www.zdnet.com/product/google-chromebook-pixel/
I think what you’re actually observing is the counter-reaction to all cars looking like jelly beans due to aerodynamic styling driven by emissions regulations. A squared off looking car stands out in the crowd. I drive a Toyota 4Runner, which looks like an evil Japanese robot, partly for this reason (my wife hates the jellybean trend).
Where I live - which my wife still questions our decision - the giant mean trucks aren't just giant and mean, but they are outfitted with what sounds like a freight train horn, and many myriads of flood lights.
Nobody knows why this is, because most people live in subdivisions and not farms, where you might feasibly need giant mean trucks with flood lights. And yet the big mean, loud, bright trucks are quite popular.
But isn't that sort of an easy thing to generalize? (forgive me). It's not about need. It's about want. Everyone surrounding you has a big truck, you need one too. You buy a bigger truck than them, now it's up to everyone else to step and make theirs bigger, meaner, louder, etc. You spit coal out of your exhaust? Cool, now I spit more. Pretty simple human behaviors, unfortunately.
I feel like this could also just be based off a "biased" sample set. Like you're more likely to notice a large truck with fog lights, meanwhile the Ford Maverick is sold out for the entire next year and it's fords nicest looking, smallest hybrid truck
This is definitely anecdotal and subjective, but I'd say the vast majority of trucks I've seen look really angry.
My unscientific guess: there was some sort of big angry truck trend that the people who style these things got stuck on, and the Maverick sells like hotcakes because it is styled for underserved "I want a little classic looking truck" market.
Doubly unscientific guess: A little electric Maverick would sell incredibly well.
Oh, absolutely biased! But not just trucks. Works for all kinds of other things. Sports cars too. Nice things. Athletic skills. Etc. People like to one up each other.
So, that's not all truck owners. Just thinking (anecdotally) that lots of "mean" truck owners buy them in part because of one-upping/status-seeking behaviors and wants rather than "I need to tow 12k pounds" requirements.
In my town (just outside NY City), seems like the status vehicle of choice is a 911. Buy one if you want to fit in with all your rich buddies!
> Nobody knows why this is, because most people live in subdivisions and not farms, where you might feasibly need giant mean trucks with flood lights. And yet the big mean, loud, bright trucks are quite popular.
Tail fins used to be a big things on cars, but no one knows why that was, because cars don't fly. /s
It is a prisoners dilemma, people want safety from all the dangerous cars, so they buy a bigger car to feel safe, this makes other people want even bigger cars than your car so they don't end up being crushed by you. The end result is less safety and more deaths and injuries.
I didn't detect any blame in the GP's comment, nor the claim that "I dislike it and therefore it's inherently bad."
The more accurate reading would be that the GP thinks that it's bad, and that's why they don't like it. But even still, the comment doesn't appear to contain blame, only bewilderment.
Tricked out trucks aren't my thing. But I can see the appeal of buying a rugged vehicle and tricking it out.
To the extent that I have an axe to grind with the big truck owners, it's because some (not all, and not always) these big truck drivers:
- Drive aggressively in urban areas
- Blast their excessive lights which is a hazard for cars in front of them
- Are intentionally disruptive with their giant horns
Put more plainly - assholes seem to be drawn to such things. But I don't think they create assholes.
But for sure, where I live, there are a lot of disruptive assholes with big trucks.
And I'm sure not all big truck owners tailgate. But when I am being tailgated, it is almost always by a big truck.
So it is I think many people shape their view of these vehicles. It could be a tiny percentage of the owners or large trucks, but we remember these interactions of bright lights, a cloud of coal, loud horns, and someone tailgating an inch behind us.
Certainly. Just relatively fewer where I live now, compared to the trucks.
Depending on where I've lived in the area, I've experienced the japanese cars more, or the BMW's more. BMW's weren't as bad when I lived in a rich town, but any flavor of SUV was really bad. If I had to pick a brand which was particularly preferred by assholes then, it would have been Lexus.
I don’t have a “wrong or not” claim to make. Only that trucks are manifestly more aggressive looking than they historically have been. Whether it’s a reaction doesn’t really factor into it.
I don't know about that - you can track the F150 over time and a 1980's F150 of pickup carrying pickup fame is significantly more aggressive looking than a 2022 F150.
Maybe we just have very different ideas about what aggression looks like, but the average 1980s F-150 looks downright homely to me. It basically comes equipped with a farmer in overalls and a wide-brimmed hat.
The 2022 F-150, on the other hand, has much more front-facing chrome, a much larger (and higher, and therefore dangerous to pedestrians) bumper, and much larger headlights. Some of these are probably good features! But they certainly feel more aggressive to me.
I don't think homeliness and aggression are negatively correlated. Look at a cauliflower eared fighter. You have an association of that kind of truck with farmers, but it could just as easily be rednecks with rifles. Doesn't have anything to do with the design.
The front of the truck is sharper angled, the hood is actually forward so it appears like a shark; the grille takes up a larger percentage of the front of the truck.
The modern F150 is rounder, with a smaller percentage devoted to the grille, and has a flat front. If you size up the 1980 F150 to the same size, it would be much more aggressive looking - you can actually see this because the 1980 truck, when lifted, looks positively mean.
You’re arguing possibilities, when all that matters is the cultural conception. Of course homeliness is not intrinsically tied to non-violence; all that matters is that the American conception of Farmer Joe is a homely, non-violent one. And Farmer Joe drives a beat up 1984 F-150.
If you’re a pedestrian crossing in front of one of these or sharing a narrow residential street while riding your bicycle
you might feel it. Last time I felt this was when I was in a shopping center parking lot and someone, parked gangster style (facing the wrong way in a no parking zone), pulled out much too quickly (it’s a frigging shopping center parking lot) in front of me on my motorcycle.
The curb weight can rival a light armored Humvee. And the grill is very high, promising to plow you under the vehicle.
Add lifters, 20+ inch rims, battering ram grill attachments, and all black trim…then you’re looking at the grim reaper of vehicular death.
The "meaner" look isn't just about aesthetics, but about physical size, which is increasing. The MacBook analogy seems flawed because the change in the design of the MacBook doesn't actually make it harder for me to avoid killing pedestrians while using it.
All vehicles are getting bigger, for various reasons including safety regulations. A 1985 BMW 3 series had a curb weight of 2,400 to 2,600 pounds. Today a BMW 3 is up to 3,200 to 4,300 pounds. A Tesla model 3, which is in the same class, is up to 3,500 to 4,000 pounds. The top end of both cars actually hits the bottom end of the current F150 range, which is about 4,100 pounds.
> the change in the design of the MacBook doesn't actually make it harder for me to avoid killing pedestrians while using it.
Actually the profile of the current MacBook Airs when closed is less “sharp”, reducing potential velocity and penetration as you swing it around wildly while walking down the street.
> ‘Powerful’ and references to powerful things was a theme that the GMC exterior designer referenced multiple times to describe the exterior direction for the 2020 GMC Sierra HD.
> “I remember wanting it to make it feel very locomotive… my first week in Detroit I was driving through downtown and seeing the fist of Joe Louis, and remember thinking that’s what this truck should look like – a massive fist moving through the air.”
or this bit:
> “The front end was always the focal point. The rest of the truck is supporting what the rest of the truck is communicating… we spent a lot of time making sure that when you stand in front of this thing it looks like it’s going to come get you. It’s got that pissed-off feel, but not in a boyish way, still looking mature. It just had to have that imposing look,” explained the GM designer.
---
I don't see any fix for this arms-race besides legislative. Bigger, more dangerous vehicles are threatening to smaller, greener vehicles, and we need to be greener.
While there are EV trucks coming, those EVs require like 3X as much battery materials as a normal-sized vehicles, and even normal-sized vehicles are too large for the dominant commuting use (single-passenger). That massive battery use is a concern since supply is constrained by real-world limitations.
Also, the larger vehicles create urban planning problems -- bigger vehicles means bigger lanes and parking spots, which hurts walkability. Again, we're back to climate change concerns.
But if you've got the money, the downsides of an oversized vehicle are wholly externalized to the other road users.
I don't really see any feasible way to solve this besides legislation. At the very least, large vehicles should be punished more heavily for highway infractions because they represent a larger risk to other road-users. Speeding in a truck is intrinsically more dangerous than speeding in a car - the larger mass, poorer bumper compatibility, and larger cross-section are a risk for others on the road.
But because of the culture war issue, no mainstream politician is going to ever have an adult conversation on the subject because it will come back to "why do you hate farmers/working men/whatever you latte-sipping urban liberal elitist".
Pickup trucks are the most popular vehicles in America. How many lives would be saved if everyone switched to jellybean cars? What’s the benefit relative to the cost?
Don’t forget that “green” EVs are also extremely heavy. At 4,300 to 5,000 lbs, a Model S is squarely in the same weight class as a Ford F-150. When you get hit by a 4,500 pound vehicle, whether it looks “mean” or like a jellybean doesn’t make much difference.
It's not obvious to me how "I don't really see any feasible way to solve this besides legislation." is any more or less of an adult conversation. The models involved - economic, societal, climate, etc. - are very large and complex and the behaviors and outcomes can evolve for all kinds of reasons. To me, "we must throw everything out and legislate" is simply a call to arms to abandon the discussion in favor of coercion to enforce, unconditionally, the proposition of a specific contingent. This is literally the definition of elitism and it doesn't strike me as very elegant.
Purely meaningless anecdata, but I've only known two people that put truck nutz on, and they were both women who did it because they thought it was utterly hilarious
For a very obvious case of this, observe changes in BMW vehicle designs. The new generation looks like it'll gleefuly ensure death of any pedestrian it hits.
All cars are getting meaner, it's not just fault of the Chinese market. These big trucks are sold mostly in the US and they still have these ever-growing grills.
Source? Everything I've heard is that the exact opposite is required -- that hoods are designed such that pedestrians will roll over them, and higher hoods increase hip injuries.
And why is it the current trend in automotive (specifically, truck) fashion?
This is a weird indirection to introduce: of course it’s fashionable. The observation is that it’s fashionable because aggression is itself fashionable, at least to the target market.
I used Jalopnik as a source, since they’re a well known car website. I’ll try to find additional sources; I seem to recall an interview with a Ford or Chrysler exec a handful of years ago where they said, point blank, that aggressive front designs are a key selling point to their customer base.
> This is a weird indirection to introduce: of course it’s fashionable. The observation is that it’s fashionable because aggression is itself fashionable, at least to the target market.
People in this thread keep dancing around it but I think nobody has outright said it yet. Maybe it's as simple as: aggressive, belligerent truck styling is uniquely fashionable in America because American culture is getting more and more aggressive and belligerent. Maybe I'm browsing too much r/PublicFreakout, but in the last few years, there's been a visible rise in road rage, people berating service workers, belligerent angry protesting, people trashing businesses over minor transgressions, people losing their shit on airliners, and so on. The public is turning into "that guy in the bar constantly looking for a fight." It shouldn't be surprising that trucks styled such that they look like they're about to bludgeon you are more and more fashionable. Admittedly, this is more of a political statement based on anecdotes than one that comes out of research and data, but hey, this is HN, not Nature.
It definitely feels like society as a whole has gotten more impatient, entitled and angry since the pandemic. Maybe it was all the time spent at home rather than interacting with strangers and taking part in society. I mean we're still not to pre-pandemic levels of socialization I'd say.
EDIT: Whether this has anything to do with current car design trends is a different question though :P
> The observation is that it’s fashionable because aggression is itself fashionable, at least to the target market.
It's just a big grille. I think the "aggression" aspect is more in the eye of the beholder (or the trolling concept).
> I seem to recall an interview with a Ford or Chrysler exec a handful of years ago where they said, point blank, that aggressive front designs are a key selling point to their customer base.
Assuming that's true, are you interpreting the word "aggressive" correctly? It has many senses besides "hostility", e.g.:
Whoever responded about a BMW sedan isn’t me. I’m talking about US pickup trucks, since that’s what the original post is about.
The “aggressive” in the exec’s comment is my paraphrase, because I’m still looking for the original. It might have been “angry” or “violent,” for all I remember. Either way, the implication was clear: the trucks are meant to project hostility, not flamboyance.
> Whoever responded about a BMW sedan isn’t me. I’m talking about US pickup trucks, since that’s what the original post is about.
The point is it seems to be a general trend not exclusive to pickup trucks, which some blogger tendentiously latched onto get clicks by stirring up controversy and exploiting pickup truck hate.
Sure: there's a general trend towards cars projecting hostility. But again, this feels like a distraction at the best: pickup trucks, especially American ones, are exceptional in adopting the trend. The fact that we can pick out another kind of car that also does it doesn't disrupt the pattern.
It sounds like you're taking personal umbrage at the fact that people don't like these pickup trucks. I think it's worth taking a step back: I don't mind pickup trucks; I'd even go as far so say that I appreciate them for their place in the US's culture and history. But that doesn't mean I can't observe a trend, one that dovetails with latent anti-environmentalism, general disdain or disregard for pedestrians and other road traffic, &c.
> Sure: there's a general trend towards cars projecting hostility. But again, this feels like a distraction at the best: pickup trucks, especially American ones, are exceptional in adopting the trend. The fact that we can pick out another kind of car that also does it doesn't disrupt the pattern.
I don't know why you're so invested in salvaging that blogger's clickbait, against pretty compelling evidence. If it's a general trend, it makes no sense to read it as especially significant when applied to pickup trucks.
> It sounds like you're taking personal umbrage at the fact that people don't like these pickup trucks.
No, I just don't think it's a good idea to take clickbait or some random hot take as showing some kind of essential truth, especially in an area where there are biases to profitably exploit.
What compelling evidence? Is there something more than a BMW model that I'm missing?
The Jalopnik article is indeed a random hot take. But that doesn't mean the underlying claim ("pickup trucks are designed to be visually aggressive, and are marketed to their target customer base on that basis") is factually incorrect. I'm not aware of any bias that that's exploiting, other than the general aesthetic displeasure I see at a car that looks like it hates everything outside of it.
> And why is it the current trend in automotive (specifically, truck) fashion?
Because European pedestrian safety requirements all but demand big bulbous front ends, it's uneconomical to design that much of a car or SUV twice and a fugly grill is the solution OEMs have deemed most effective at prettying that up. The trucks are all but forced to copy the same rough shapes because "brand identity" and "design language".
Aggressive styling and goes over the decades. You can make these cars look however you want with a little bit of black plastic and fake chrome with no impact on safety. The actual underlying shapes and dimensions that you are muddying the waters by conflating with aggression are driven by technical requirements.
This doesn’t follow at all: the American pickup truck industry isn’t dominated (or even particularly influenced) by European demand. They’re a tiny and shrinking part of the EU market[1] with plenty of domestic competition (with markedly less aggressive designs).
American pickup truck design is overwhelmingly influenced by American market trends, since that’s where they’re being sold. And the domestic market likes aggressive designs, and does not particularly care about pedestrian safety[2].
> the American pickup truck industry isn’t dominated (or even particularly influenced) by European demand
It is, however, influenced by European regulations to the extent that American pickup makers desire a) to sell in the European market at all and b) desire to minimise re-engineering costs.
"To the extent" being operative. It'd be good to have numbers substantiating this, because all signals indicate that US truck manufacturers have very little presence in European markets.
For the units they deliver to those markets. You haven't demonstrated that the US models are being adapted to European requirements, rather than companies selling European adapted models. My understanding as a lay-person is that the latter is much more common, since the European market requires adaptation anyways (more diesel engines, more manual transmissions, different driver side, &c.)
> ‘Powerful’ and references to powerful things was a theme that the GMC exterior designer referenced multiple times to describe the exterior direction for the 2020 GMC Sierra HD.
> “I remember wanting it to make it feel very locomotive… my first week in Detroit I was driving through downtown and seeing the fist of Joe Louis, and remember thinking that’s what this truck should look like – a massive fist moving through the air.”
or this bit:
> “The front end was always the focal point. The rest of the truck is supporting what the rest of the truck is communicating… we spent a lot of time making sure that when you stand in front of this thing it looks like it’s going to come get you. It’s got that pissed-off feel, but not in a boyish way, still looking mature. It just had to have that imposing look,” explained the GM designer.
For almost every single car model that has existed for more than 10 years, the old model is friendly, open, soft, "feminine." For the new one, the design language is angular, closed, hard, and "masculine." There's no way to say for certain why this is the case. In my opinion: aesthetic design of products reflects the id of the consumer. Our id has changed.
I’ve often wondered if this has an effect on wildlife. If we perceive the front end of a truck as “meaner”, does that apply to deer as well?
Curious if there is any data on the likelihood of hitting a deer with a truck vs a sedan. I assume this would be difficult to capture as areas with higher chances of hitting a deer are also the areas where drivers are more likely to be behind the wheel of larger trucks.
Deer don't avoid cars because their visual system shorts out when they see a light source shining directly in their eyes[1]. You could make the truck look exactly like a mountain lion and it probably wouldn't save any deer.
It's not just the headlights, but that might very well be the majority. There have been cases where I've had to stop for deer crossing the road at night, but they didn't look into my headlights and freeze, they just kept walking across the road. Also once I had a deer run out of the woods into the side of my car while I was driving.
I think they know cars are dangerous, but they don't perceive the speed and don't do a good job of extrapolating where the car will be. And why should they, they're deer. So they just bolt across the road knowing it's dangerous when a car is coming (hence why they're bolting) but often misjudge.
How long before LED headlights can simply shine around the deer (thus not blinding them), as they do for oncoming vehicles. On second thought that would mean the driver doesn't see the deer; maybe not the best idea!
I think they're pretty effective; they cut out the light beam exactly where the other car is. There might still be reflections from other surfaces though.
Truck design used to be such that you pretended to be a working man. Now, you just show everyone how big a jerk you are. There's an entire brand of truck rims that are just called "Hostile". Anyone who would buy such a thing should just be followed everywhere by the cops. http://www.hostilewheels.com/
I think the article would have done well to also discuss America's general lack of vehicle safety inspections. There's a reason people don't drive around in lifted pickups with ridiculous wheels in Germany.
Most of the newer trucks have front facing cameras because of that. I have a "Mid Size" truck which sits fairly high. Since it doesn't have front cameras, I often back into parking spots so I can make use of my rear view camera to assist.
Seems kind of crazy, adding a front camera (which the driver might not even look at) rather than just scaling down the front so they can see pedestrians with their eyes.
thank goodness we have these tiny technological devices called cameras, that can be installed in the front and rear of these mean bad trucks, so that the driver can see inside the blind spots.
now those poor babies, children and vertically challenged adults will be safe as safe can be... yipeee
What aesthetic? It seems like it's just the manufacturer's name. Having names that evoke some sort of exclamation like that is pretty common in the automotive aftermarket (Behemouth Drivetrain, Killer Bee Motorsport, etc). If you're predisposed to hate them of course you'll read meaning that isn't there into it but there's nothing "hostile" about those wheels. They're just marketing to the monster energy decal crowd.
They are a reflection of the attitudes of the driver and their intentions every time they climb up behind the wheel. And in California they are unlawful if they protrude beyond the body of the truck, which they invariably do because that's the only reason people buy these.
Slogan of the company is literally "There's no place for mercy!"
I dunno about meaner… (that's a personal feeling) there was a time cars acquired a bug-like appearance and depending on people some fear bugs more than others and could be interpreted as “meaner”; however it was mostly just an ‘organic look’ trend. To many others bugs look cute, so...
Lots of people don't like bugs, but I've never heard someone describe a bug as "mean" in the sense that "mean" is describing the appearance of these pickup trucks.
I guess you could say "big mean bug," but that's because "big mean" is a separate idiom in US English for "nasty looking." But we're talking about an aggressive aesthetic, which is both separate from nastiness and purely human in origin (unlike a bug that provokes a disgust reaction in someone).
"Bigger trucks pose a greater hazard to pedestrians and smaller vehicles"
It's an arms race.
I used to live near a couple who were both doctors in the ER and they both drive the biggest trucks that they could find because they saw that people in large trucks tended to be fare better in accidents.
I have a small sedan for myself and a smallish SUV for my wife and kids. I feel pressure to upgrade both to something larger.
Or, instead of the "fuck you get mine" mentality that I hate about living in the USA, maybe we could try to drive more safely and defensively with a sedan that doesn't roll over and has nice crumple zones?
That is great. Until you get smashed by a truck and you/a family member get seriously injured.
I don't drive a truck but my family has been in life threatening accidents and my parents both drive massive vehicles. All Black Secret Service like SUVs. I cant really blame them.
Sedans are gonna be gone in a few years. Ford already culled thier lineup of regular cars and all the other sutomarkers are working on that too. Trusks are also way more profitable than cars and thats another reason there are so many of them.
Yeah, I just want/need something in the Civic/Corolla range. My ego is not attached to my vehicle. It's a conveyance for me and others.
Rarely, I would say I need a pickup to carry stuff, and that's pretty rare. Maybe once or twice a year at most. And would be serviced by something in the old Ford Ranger class of light truck. I know Ford is bringing back the Ranger, but I don't know if it's in the same class as the 90's/00s Ranger.
The new Ranger is much larger than the one you remember from the 90's. However, Ford also introduced the Maverick - a compact pickup that is more similar to the old Ranger. I'm tempted by the hybrid version. As someone who has been treating a subcompact hatchback as though it were a pickup truck, a 40+ mpg compact pickup truck is an attractive concept.
Current Ranger is really far closer to the F-150 of 20-30 years ago than the Ranger of the 80s.
Even the Civic and Corolla have gotten huge. 2004 Civic was 4455 mm long and 1720 mm wide. The new Civic is 4674 mm long and 1801 mm wide. The new Civic is actually bigger than the 2004 Accord (which was 4665 mm long and 1760 mm wide)
Especially with car manufacturers putting huge screens in the middle of the dashboard and eliminating knobs and buttons. If anyone gave a shit about safety, screens, including phones, should be disabled while the car is not in Park.
try living in the south, these behemoths are everywhere and i feel like same way, feel like it is unsafe to drive my sedan near those big trucks. I think i'll invest in an semi truck, that'll show people who the man on the road really is.
Could you please not post flamewar comments to HN? You did it repeatedly in this thread, and it's what we're hoping to avoid on this site.
We've also had to ask you this before. Please just don't do it here. I don't want to ban you, but when accounts do this kind of thing repeatedly, we don't really have much choice.
We ban accounts that post like that, so please don't do post like that here.
In terms of the specific comment I replied to: even if we ignore your other comments, it seems obviously sarcastic and aggressive. If you didn't intend it that way, you should have written it very differently.
People sometimes think that their intent communicates itself when posting comments, but it doesn't—it has to be encoded into a message in a way that the reader can receive.
So when F150 lightning gets 5 star rating, it's within class. If you hit an overweight dumptruck you're going to have a bad time. Luckily dumptruck drivers know how to drive and that rarely happens.
However if you're in a ecobox compact, if you hit that dumptruck you're literally flat. If you hit one of the new electric vehicles which weigh in the area of 7-9000lbs. You're going to have a bad time.
If you were to properly measure safety rating not within class. It basically is just a measurement of size. So why do they do this? Clearly misrepresenting safety of smaller vehicles? It's entirely a political decision.
Bigger vehicles are more expensive. Transportation is one of the highest costs to society. So you dont want everyone driving the biggest vehicles. You want to adjust society so they choose smaller vehicles. The total cost of ownership to society is thusly less and you produce more wealth for your own people.
You can see where it's going. Private ownership of cars will remain, some people need full time access to personal transportation. However there's lots of people who really just need to be brought somewhere.
Municipalities can offer autonomous electric vehicles that say an elderly person can jump into and get to their destination much like a taxi at much lower cost than a taxi. The cost per trip is going to be measured in cents, maybe dollars with inflation? The cost of transportation to society dramatically decreases. We will be significantly wealthier.
> You’ll be happy to know that pickups are actually more dangerous for their driver. Mostly because they’re more likely to spin out or roll over.
Just a consideration: Would integrating 5-point harnesses and an rollover cage into these trucks help to mitigate this problem? (I am of course aware that the latter would make to truck even heavier)
That would make them considerably more dangerous for the driver. A roll bar will crack your skull if your head hits it and a 5 point harness will snap your neck. Race cars have them because drivers are also wearing HANS devices and helmets to prevent those injuries.
They are two very different approaches to safety that aren't really compatible.
A HAND (head and neck device) could help, as could a roll cage (most vehicles have some roll protection built in - you can see cars and trucks stacked on top of each other at junkyards). Five point harness is a bit better than a normal belt, but we already have a significant number of vehicle fatalities where the occupants are not wearing the belts provided already. So it could make it worse as five-point is more annoying.
Arguably the strengthening of the roll-cage in vehicles has lead to the a-pillar problem. https://www.thewisedrive.com/the-a-pillar-problem/ - my small modern car has a much wider a-pillar than my massive boat from the 60s.
The side-curtain airbag in the A-pillar is also a factor [perhaps a bigger factor than rollover strength] of the expansion of the A-pillar's view blocking in particular for pedestrians during turns.
Having relatively recently been in a rollover accident in a truck I found the rollover protection to be quite sufficient. The A/B pillars didn't appreciably deform and the roof didn't cave in at all.
Yes, because you survived. If you hadn't survived, you wouldn't be able to tell us this. Consider you may have just been lucky. Or would you care to repeat the experience a few more times so we can get data?
Really not an issue with modern stability control. There is still a higher chance of rollover from pure impact, but again, the bigger the truck is, the more likely you will be fine.
Modern F150s come with Advacetrack sport mode for TC/Stability that essentially lets you hold a slight drift angle if you want without letting the rear get out of hand - it monitors yaw, tire speeds, throttle e.tc.
Thank you for sharing this. I always loved that song (and most Rush songs, to be honest) but I never knew this was based on a short story! This entire website is a great read as a Rush fan.
Modern passenger pickups are only safer from a sociopathic perspective. The rate and quantity of property damage and persons maimed or killed is increased substantially when modern passenger pickups are out driving around in polite society.
The fraction of that damage and injury borne by the occupants of that vehicle, the only people with the power to make the decision to use that vehicle, is reduced.
The volume of damage, injury, and death borne by everyone else increases by multiples when a modern passenger pickup enters the mix.
You are fully correct, except for the moralizing aspect. Its not about being sociopathic - it is about being realistic. There is no way to enforce politeness in our society.
Higher mass means in a collision you "win" and have smaller accelerations than the other vehicle.
Larger potentially means even in a single-vehicle accident, there is a greater distance to decelerate over and things are less likely to intrude into the vehicle.
The IIHS, which systematically tests vehicles in simulated crashes, says:
> A bigger, heavier vehicle provides better crash protection than a smaller, lighter one, assuming no other differences. The part of the vehicle between the front bumper and the occupant compartment absorbs energy from crashes by crumpling. As a result, the longer front ends of larger vehicles offer better protection in frontal crashes. Heavier vehicles also tend to continue moving forward in crashes with lighter vehicles and other obstacles, so the people inside them are subject to less force.
Also safety ratings are only with respect to other vehicles in the same class. Great ratings for a sedan don't say anything about how well it will perform head-on against an F-150.
Even if it was, they could be objectively worse. For example, because they are more likely to be involved minor accidents. (Think of the well-known example of low-weight births having better survival rates for smoking mothers.)
According to the IIHS, trucks had worse occupant fatality rates throughout automotive history until about 10 years ago, but have had lower rates than cars since then.
> I feel pressure to upgrade both to something larger.
It's same for me - one really starts to double think choice of next car when someone clearly distracted, on the phone etc. stops in perpendicular street and huge ass grill or bumper is at the level of your eyes when looking at side window.
>both drive the biggest trucks that they could find because they saw that people in large trucks tended to be fare better in accidents.
People don't generally consider that the bigger cars are more likely to be in accidents in the first place even if they come out of it better. Ireland would have much smaller cars than the US but much better traffic record.
So bigger == safer -- isn't giving a nuanced story or understanding. For sure though bigger == less fuel efficient.
That's funny, but demonstrably untrue. The steering shaft used to be pretty much that and it caused a lot of fatalities. So they stopped building cars like that.
I looked into this in detail one time and my fermi estimate was that, if we banned trucks entirely, it might optimistically save like 40 pedestrians a year. It's clearly not worth bothering, just on the grounds that it would be politically expensive, and it's also pretty clearly not utilitarian either.
> In brief, Obama-era fuel regulations incentivized automakers to build bigger trucks.
I read a similar thing, many years before Obama, about the rise of SUVs - that emissions standards were tightened for cars, but not for 'light trucks' and SUVs could dodge the standards by claiming to be light trucks.
So this isn't the first time automakers have responded to tightened emissions standards by selling more products that aren't subject to them.
The article also claimed US vehicle makers had the quiet support of a lot of people in government, because Japanese automakers were kicking their ass at making sedans - but due to market differences and import tariffs [1] the foreign manufacturers weren't as competitive in the truck market. As the rise of bigger and bigger vehicles was bad for emissions but good for US automakers, legislators turned a blind eye to it.
Yep I remember Subaru specifically moving the outback to a light truck platform for this reason, years before Obama. I suppose bill Clinton was being blamed back then
You can't say it's definitely not ego. You can say there are regulatory issues that incentivize larger trucks, but if people didn't want them, they wouldn't buy them. Their mere availability doesn't explain it. It's a statement vehicle, that's how it's marketed. It's masculine, it's imposing, and it has the excuse of utility to assuage fears of appearing vain (a stereotypically feminine trait).
It can be other things, too: it can be useful to move shit around, it can be safe relative to the car you pancaked, it can lug your family around, it's the result of poorly thought out regulations. But it is also a vanity purchase. It's not bad as the justifications people would make when they bought Hummers back in the 2000s, but it's closer to that than a sheer calculation of utility and efficiency, which should be obvious because they don't have to be that goddamn big to move things around.
Disclaimer: I drive a Honda Fit. These trucks could turn me into paste. I'm irritated that I have to consider upsizing just to ensure my infant son survives a collision with a vehicle whose driver can't see in front of them. But I confess my car is a vanity statement, too. I bought it because I won't have to go to the shop as often (fingers crossed) and I won't have to buy another car for good long while. But it also has the vibe of being smart and urbane. Americans very much buy their cars based on image.
Also currently driving a Fit. I didn't own a car (of my own) for several years as my partner had one that we shared. When that ended and I bought a fixer-upper house, I initially wanted to buy a small pickup - think of the old S-10 or the older style Rangers and Tacomas - because it seemed to fit my needs:
- Rarely need to transport more than myself and one passenger
- Frequently need to pick up lots of supplies or drop off junk at the dump
- Drive in the city with lots of parallel parking/stop and go traffic
But used versions of those trucks were either quite old and/or still demanding quite a premium due to scarcity. All newer trucks were bigger than I needed, seemed to be focused on cab size over bed size, and a lot more expensive than what I had in my budget.
Instead I just got a Fit for under $10k cash. I've transported a full sized door and can even squeeze in a sheet of plywood or drywall if I cut them down the middle before loading. Most everything else is no problem. For the rare occasions where I need to haul something bigger, I just rent a truck for the afternoon.
I'd still love a small truck to make these trips easier, but I'm not currently willing to spend more or get something huge.
Also, I'm bummed that they stopped selling new Fits in the US. Great little cars.
I drive a Honda CR-V, and the thing that bothers me is that, even in an SUV, I CAN'T SEE AROUND THESE THINGS. I almost got hit pulling out of a parking space because you literally can't see past the front end of these monsters without sticking your nose out of the space.
I was traveling down the interstate not long ago, and had one of these new trucks to my left, and a semi tractor to my right. The front end of the truck was a FOOT higher than the semi. (These trucks has all the design finesse of a brick with a cutout for a bed.) I presume that the auto makers justify the ridiculous sight lines with all-around cameras and warning sirens or something.
I've long been a "hey, you do you" kind of person when it comes to vehicles and emissions, but I really, really resent this trend. I think it creates unnecessary hazards.
Also, have fun with paying for the gas, and good luck finding parking spaces.
This is a massive problem at street corners in many US cities, too. Massive trucks end up parked within a few feet of the street corner, and there's no way to see around them without pulling out into the road several feet. At that point... if there's a car coming, it's already too late.
I'll also frequently see massive trucks parked on the street that block all or most of the adjacent bike lane, further proving that a bike lane next to street parking is nothing more than a death trap.
But God forbid we give up any of our free street parking in US cities.
Fair, there are other visibility issues besides being behind a car. Maybe it's because I drove a Miata for many years - I couldn't see around anything, not just trucks. I just adapted. At lights, I would creep up if there was enough room and get a look. If not, I'd just wait until it was clear.
You're an outlier who thinks they know better and your standards do not reflect the average person, like all people who complain about "most" people's choices when it comes to subjective matters like risk assessment, the right way to cook a steak, what colors look good on a house, etc, etc.
Basically it's impossible for "most people" to be wrong here because the standard for what is reasonable is roughly defined by social consensus.
That would be the case if "too close" were to be defined only by establishing consistent expectations to be shared by all drivers. There are also compelling safety reasons independent of driver expectations to follow at a greater distance.
An idea for a regulation would be to measure the ratio of maximum weight of living things that a vehicle can transport / weight of vehicle when empty, and make this ratio grow progressively bigger.
The ratio is probably around 0.1 today on average (just an intuition, I don't have the actual numbers), and ideally it should be close to 1, or maybe over 1.
For an ebike for example, it's around 3.
Moving 2-5 tons of metal to transport just one human being is positively insane.
Honestly I think coming up with ways to get people to want smaller cars is the way to go. I don’t drive a big truck and I don’t understand the decisionmaking that goes into buying one. I’m hesitant to make rules that apply only to other people doing something I don’t understand.
Nationwide tax based on weight seems like the winner to me. You want a giant car that destroys roads just by driving on them? You'll have to shell out cash based on that impact.
You can always buy the smaller truck from OP's article if you truly just need to haul something.
My car can happily seat 4 adults (so let’s say 250kg) and weighs a touch over 1000kg, so the ratio is 0.25. 0.1 would mean that a car that seats just 4 adults weighs 2.5 tonnes, which seems extreme?
The average weight of a mid-sized sedan is about 1,500kg, and the average weight of all American cars is closer to 1,900kg. A 4-seater close to 1,000kg is exceptionally light by modern standards. The Mazda MX-5 is a 2-seater which is famous for being lightweight, and it also weighs a few kg above a ton.
Also going off maximum human capacity isn't great in context, as the average car journey has <1.5 occupants. Not to mention if this was codified, car manufacturers would simply put folding seats in the trunk.
The ratio is tricky. We don't really need vehicles to potentially carry more people -- we need folks to buy smaller vehicles.
If we try to penalize people for buying a two-seater truck, they'll just buy an even bigger extended cab with more seats. This is pretty much the exact kind of metric game the article cites as causing these giant trucks in the first place -- companies were penalized for building small fuel-inefficient trucks, so they just built big fuel-inefficient trucks that weren't penalized as much.
Wouldn't make much sense to restrict it to living things in the case of a truck though, since they're specifically designed to haul things other than passengers. Seems like a good heuristic apart from that though.
We own two vehicles, a tiny (4 seater) car and a larger (7-seater) MPV.
On the odd occasion that either I or my wife need to drive a car into town and don't have to take the family too, there is simply no way either of us would ever voluntarily choose the larger vehicle for the simple reason that it's much, much harder to park it.
The little car will happily fit in every single car park space known to mankind. It fits into car parking spaces that aren't even real spaces, too. It's the single best feature it has.
It's got a tiny engine, and is hopeless at accelerating hard - particularly up hills - but who cares? It gets up to four people from A to B in relative comfort and great efficiency. It cost us $10k, brand new.
Could it be that we should talk about setting higher taxes on more expensive and/or larger-engined vehicles? Downsizing our vehicles might be a way to help save the planet without compromising on personal mobility.
Not everyone's vehicular requirements are satisfied by a vehicle which is optimized for transporting human bodies to and from town. Many of us have professional or personal requirements which require e.g. the ability to move heavy equipment. I couldn't do 80% of my hobbies if I drove a Mini or something.
>Could it be that we should talk about setting higher taxes on more expensive and/or larger-engined vehicles? Downsizing our vehicles might be a way to help save the planet without compromising on personal mobility.
Don't fall for the Oil Lobby's trap of blaming individual consumers for Global emissions issues.
Not the person you're responding to but yeah, the Fit was the Honda Jazz. Sadly it has been discontinued. I'm not sure anyone makes a comparable car (must have fold-flat seats that also flip up for transporting taller items).
This seems like a classic example of taking one small part of a larger trend that agrees with the viewpoint you came in with, and massively overinflating its impact.
Trucks have been getting bigger since long before 2008, including light trucks. The Ranger's platform was ancient by the time it was retired -- it was going to go regardless. It does seem that the author has correctly picked out one of the many factors pushing things in that direction, but also during the time frame in question (2008-2020) overall American vehicle fuel economy increased (see the EIA's total energy consumption report). I realize that wasn't the direct point the author was making, but it seems like an important note.
The author's weird insistence on the "own the libs" snark really takes away from the impact of what this could have been -- a reminder of the importance to consider unintended consequences when rulemaking.
Vehicle tax in much of Switzerland is decided by the Gross Vehicle Weight (GVW). Important distinction of GVW is that it takes into account the maximum permissible operating weight, if the vehicle is fully loaded.
Drive a heavier car, pay more tax. Funnily enough, you don't see a lot of pickup trucks or minivans.
Most SUVs around there aren't based on trucks or minivans.
Over the last decade or so people are increasingly preferring SUVs.
Most of these are soft-roaders, and not trucks or minivans. They aren't very capable off the road. Some of them aren't even 4/AWD, and most are monocoques and not body-on-frames.
I always thought it was a combination of masculine insecurities and one upping your neighbors.
Edit: lifted trucks, after market front bars, louder exhaust with larger exhaust tips, truck nuts, American flags or thin blue line flags covering the rear window..
None of these are from government regulations
It's not as simplistic as "penis size" it's part of a culture where being manliness and independence is valued. People are also told we need to be tougher and how we are losing what makes America great.
For example "In the trailer for "The End of Men," Tucker Carlson worries about "the total collapse of testosterone levels in American men,"
Yes it is and according to what you linked to "According to Lokeshwar, potential causes for these declines could be increased obesity/BMI, assay variations, diet/phytoestrogens, declined exercise and physical activity, fat percentage, marijuana use, and environmental toxins."
Tucker Carlson is using it as a very thin excuse to basically make a series about how men need to be more like a particular cultural concept of men.
Here's the trailer for "The End of Men" nowhere does it mention that study or a testosterone drop. Maybe the show itself touches on that but in my opinion that would only be so people like you could justify what is basically a propaganda video for right wing masculine culture.
My wife has a large truck and we bought it when we had no neighbors living in the middle of nowhereville Montana. She bought it because she was terrified to drive her prius around because bigger trucks would tail gate, break too late and nearly kill her, and generally antagonize the smaller car. So she got a giant Dodge Ram and now feels safe to drive. Now that we've moved out to the city, she feels even safer.
I like that when I hit two deer in it there was zero, absolutely zero, damage to the vehicle. Thank you brush guard.
"The city"? That's not well defined because there are suburban areas where crime is greater than cities and vice versa.
As for safety
"In 2013-16, car occupants were only 28 percent more likely to die in collisions with SUVs than with cars" [1] So you are correct. There is one problem here and that's
"Although pickups are also less of a threat than they used to be, in 2013-16 they were still 2½ times as likely to kill the driver of a car they crashed into, compared with a car colliding with another car"
This reminds me of hoarding, thinking the way you or your wife does just keeps upping the game. Maybe you'll need an even bigger truck because all trucks are large to feel safe. Now everyone is driving fuel inefficient vehicles both wasting money and hurting the environment. You said you are rural so I wonder how much you spend on gas and what could you do with that savings.
can you expand on that? The lack of self-awareness because she would prefer to be in the big vehicle? She should lower how safe she feels because ... it would make a car driver safer?
I'd love to. Your story went from driving a Prius in the countryside to happily mowing down deer in your giant truck while living in the city.
Presumably others are now terrified to be around your massive vehicle, and you don't appear to have bought it for a practical purpose, so the premise that your wife was made to feel unsafe is then not an indictment of industrial sized vehicles making the roads less safe for others. Instead, it is embracing the stereotypical American pursuit of having the biggest baddest mfing vehicle on the road in a "fuck you I got mine" race to the bottom. It reads as a pretty good satire: "Woman in fear of being crushed by giant vehicle feels much better now that others fear being crushed by her giant vehicle."
In a comment that says "masculine insecurities and one upping your neighbors," I reply with an anecdote about a female feeling safer, showing that the statement is not universal.
You say the comment is lacking in self awareness because she has become what she feared. I'd say that is not lacking self awareness though it definitely feeds into the "race to the bottom." That is orthogonal to self awareness, it is tragedy of the commons. She has no obligation to lower her sense of safety to make others feel better.
The need for a CDL is one obvious reason. It looks like the internet disagrees on whether CDL requirements start at class 6 or 7, so we're really only talking about 1-5. And I've definitely seen 4s and 5s on the highway that have probably never seen a spec of dirt in their life. So there are certainly some people just looking to get the biggest thing they can legally drive.
Come on. Because they are exponentially more expensive to operate and much more complex to drive. You also can't park them easily, blah blah blah, CDL, blah blah. I get your sarcasm, but people buy the largest passenger vehicle because they fit within reason but still allow them to brandish themselves.
Assuming most don't offroad; There was a study that said trucks are used for hauling/offroad less than 20%~ more than once a year). I can't find it anymore so you can call me on that.
Lifting a truck reduces efficiency by creating drag and uplift (I believe that's what it's called). It also raises the center of gravity which greatly reduces handling and increases the possibility of rolling over
Chunky off-road tires wear out faster, are less efficient, and reduce handling on the road.
Extra lights, as well as lifting your truck without adjusting the lights, blind other drivers creating a safety hazard.
So more gas, more money, less safety for everyone, but the person stands out more, like large horns on animal, it's all about peacocking.
And yes, I know this is done in other ways, fancy loud sports cars, showing off money, clothing, etc. If that was going to your response, then I'll throw down the whataboutism card and do a double reverse move and point out those have less effect on the environment and safety. Yes, I know fast fashion is bad for the environment, kids in blahstan, but it's about levels not bad or good.
> One particular goal of the Obama Administration was to increase fuel efficiency through the typical political process: telling someone else to do it. To that end, the DOT and the EPA handed down a series of standards that nearly doubled the miles-per-gallon requirements for cars and light trucks.
As opposed to what? Having Obama and its administration build more efficient engines? Have them run a car pooling scheme across the US? Not transfer it to authorities with actual subject matter knowledge? They emitted policy, I don't know what else an administration can do.
The proper answer, if you want more fuel efficient vehicles, is to simply raise the gas tax and allow every company's engineering teams decide what to build, and every consumer to decide what they want. This keeps domain expertise where it belongs while achieving the stated goals, and does not strictly reduce choice. If engineers could not figure out more efficient designs, and customers wanted more efficient vehicles, they could simply make smaller trucks to sell.
Instead they demanded companies engineer vehicles to conform to weird mpg/area curves that accidently skew towards "huge." It was in effect backseat engineering.
That would have a devastating impact on existing vehicles, which just happen to be owned by voters. Consumers already decide what they want, if they can afford to. Many are locked into financing agreements for vehicles they can't afford.
> The proper answer, if you want more fuel efficient vehicles, is to simply raise the gas tax and allow every company's engineering teams decide what to build, and every consumer to decide what they want.
But that's bad politics. Voters don't like paying more for gas, and if you make it expensive enough to drive engineering changes, you make yourself open to attack on that issue.
Also, making gas more expensive would have a lot of perhaps bad follow-on effects (e.g. getting people laid off/lowering growth because you made many industrial/commercial activities more expensive).
> Instead they demanded companies engineer vehicles to conform to weird mpg/area curves that accidently skew towards "huge." It was in effect backseat engineering.
But that's good politics. You're saying "make things better."
Visibility and perceived personal safety I think are a big factor on why people are driven to prefer purchasing suv & truck models. American anecdote: when I am driving my sedan, I don't feel safe. I can not see through the windows of vehicles ahead of me due to the volume of large vehicles on the road, and a big part of driving safely is predicting traffic - I am at a large disadvantage due to only being able to be reactive to the back end of a vehicle in front of me instead of being able to predict what they are going to do by being able to see ahead.
Larger trucks & suvs also seem to have higher safety features these days in strength and crumple zone coverage. If so many other vehicles are so much bigger than my car, how do I fare in an accident in my ford fusion vs "everybody else's" f250. Someone else here called it an arms race and I absolutely see why.
I would rather drive my 4runner than my car even though my car is absolutely the better choice for practicality - I feel better and safer in my 4 runner.
This is in addition to edge case buying. Large vehicle purchases are also popular due to what those vehicles bring to the buyer, including: cargo capacity, towing capabilities, ground clearance for rural needs, and in the case of large vans&suv's extra passenger space.
> I am at a large disadvantage due to only being able to be reactive to the back end of a vehicle in front of me instead of being able to predict what they are going to do by being able to see ahead.
This is only a problem for someone who is tailgating.
If you're following a vehicle so closely that prediction requires you to be able to see through that same vehicle's windows (as per the parent's complaint), then yes, you absolutely are tailgating.
My truck doesn’t drive near pedestrian areas. A smaller truck cannot trailer my work loads or toys. My modern diesel with high-tech emissions systems intact gets 20+ mpg unloaded.
Perhaps some of you remember trucks of the 80s. Not much has changed dimensionally, without safety improvements. Those did ~8-10 mpg unloaded while making 25% of the power with half the tow rating of a recent truck and none of the modern safety features for collision avoidance, blind spot monitoring, etc. The armchair distortion is real here. Please visit the numbers before making blanket anecdotes—the manufacturer websites have good uptime for their brochures. :)
> The lightest 2016 Chevrolet Colorado outweighs the full-size 1986 version by about 260 kilograms.
> The Frontier and Tacoma never went away, but overall buyer preference for larger trucks brought an end to smaller models like the Ford Ranger and its Mazda B-Series sibling, Dodge’s Dakota, and Chevrolet’s S10.
Completely untrue. I have a 2003 GM 1 ton extended cab truck. A 2022 long bed, extended cab F150 is longer, hood is higher, has much larger blind spots, and significantly larger wheels. My truck is wider because of dual wheels but if it was single it would be about the same width.
Trucks have gotten unnecessarily large with ridiculous blind spots.
As for your other comments, my truck does get worse mileage unloaded but about the same while towing. I've upgraded the injectors and tuned it so it has a lot more power than it did stock. The $50k I saved over a new truck will pay for more than a lifetime of fuel.
It does, but diesel is more expensive in most places (even accounting for better energy density), due to the structure of US refining industry. This sets the stage, and familiarity continues the trend.
More people drive gas, so more gas vehicles continue to be available.
Biodiesel along with moving more of these passenger trucks to diesel would go a long way toward reducing overall carbon, but cost is the main issue there.
> Can somebody explain why people tend to prefer petrol engines for trucks America?
Fuel and maintenance costs. Gasoline is currently $3.58/gallon here, and diesel almost $5/gallon. Also, diesel isn't necessary for most pickup truck usage. I would consider replacing my gasoline truck with diesel if I had to haul lots of weight often. I would also have to upgrade from a half ton. I have no problem hauling most building materials that I need for work, but I wouldn't want to move for example heavy equipment on a regular basis with my (comparatively) small gasoline truck.
Demand for diesel has been higher as supply chains catch up. In general you are correct, but ULSD goes through a desulfurization process which makes diesel a cleaner fuel while increasing costs.
i heard some lady in the south say she wouldn't date a guy who didn't have a truck, those are the social forces putting pressure on a certain type of man to buy a truck. It truly is a macho thing.
Europeans still mostly buy mean looking BMWs to stroke their ego, more SUVs than sedans nowadays, but the pickup craze is also gaining some traction. We have the ranger raptor & toyota hilux on the market, although still a bit pricey and impracticle for us europeans imho.
Ego is why some people feel the need to come up with narratives where the reason other people drive better cars than them is due to some moral failure, and not due to rational decision-making.
Ego is why people buy trucks. Regulations disincentivize Chrysler from selling an economy cars.
Also, trucks have some of the highest inventory levels of any new vehicle type right now. If ego is the only way to explain this, why did folks buy so many more trucks last year? Did the American ego Change more than gas prices?
This is an interesting theory, but there's a way to test it: if it's true that trucks have gotten bigger to avoid the light truck definition, we should see a proliferation of light trucks just long enough to avoid the classification.
[Edit: I originally cited 280cm as the wheelbase cut-off from [1], but on a re-read, it's more complicated; see below.]
The best-selling vehicles:
F-series pickup[2]: 392cm
Dodge Ram[3]: 367cm
Chevy Silverado[4]: 373cm
Correction/Edit: The relevant definition for a light truck is based on a number of criteria which relate to the wheelbase but don't actually specify it. If someone wants a fun trig problem, you could determine whether these vehicles are designed to be just long enough to satisfy the requirements listed here [5].
> we should see a proliferation of light trucks just long enough to avoid the classification
That's certainly possible, but is that necessarily the outcome? What if there are two maxima for optimum truck size and the line that this regulation establishes is on the up-slope towards the higher of the two? E.g. It used to make sense to build a small, two-door truck, but now that trucks need to be at least x size, it's better to make an (x + 50cm) four door vehicle rather than an oversized two-door.
Anecdotally this would drive my purchasing if I bought a truck today. I started with an old 80s S10, and would love another “small truck” if someone made it. But I also need a vehicle that will transport more than 2 people. In the 80s, a third, small truck for the times you need a truck was a viable approach. Given the sizes it might be a tight fit to have 3 vehicles but it would be doable. Today, the size of trucks makes squeezing one as a 3rd vehicle in my parking areas would be impossible. So if it’s going to replace one of the people haulers, it has to haul people, which means it needs the extended cab space, and then needs to be longer still because buying a truck whose bed space is largely taken up by cab defeats the utility of the truck.
As I mentioned in my edit, it does seem to be the case that it's a more complicated formula, but we can still determine whether there's a proliferation of vehicles that are close to the boundary of that formula, or not.
I'm not saying that the article's theory is wrong, just that it is empirically testable if anyone cares enough to do some math (another day, I'd be up to the challenge myself. It would be a neat blog post).
I suspect that a driving force of "large truck" is vehicles getting expensive enough that people don't buy two - whereas in the past you might have a commuter car and a family van and a weekend hauler, now you have to get one vehicle that fits all those roles.
And nobody wants to drive a minivan so they opt for a truck (need the bed) but they also want to be able to haul four people, so they go for a crew cab.
> I suspect that a driving force of "large truck" is vehicles getting expensive enough that people don't buy two
I don't drive enough outside of work to justify the costs to keep my car on the road in addition to my truck. I would have preferred a cargo van instead of the truck though, but they were 4x the price when I was buying.
The TFA is exactly correct. It’s something I’ve tried to explain for a long time. But… no one wants to hear Obama’s green ideas on emissions where so completely wrong.
There were CAFE (emissions average over all mfg’s products) changes that also lead to some strange things.
Example… in order to make the 392 Wrangler, Jeep also had to make the plug-in hybrid (which is good. In order to make more 2-door Rubicon models they had to make more larger 4x cylinder JT model trucks.
The best thing to remember with regulations is that nothing is ever built to regulation, it’s built around regulation.
I'm very willing to believe that it's correct, but this article doesn't provide the evidence. A plot that showed that these top-selling vehicles just barely avoid the light truck cutoff would be a compelling way to demonstrate that. I'm afraid anything else will devolve into partisan bickering, even though this is an empirically testable theory.
This feels more like a political statement than a researched perspective. Is there proof that the F-150 of perhaps 2007 is smaller than that or 2012? Did the truck sizes change to become smaller once the emissions rule was revoked?
F-150 11th gen (2004-2008) SuperCrew 6.5' length: 5,989 mm, width 2004 mm
F-150 13th gen (2015-2020) SuperCrew 6.5' length: 6,190 mm, width 2029 mm
CAFE is a huge driver of truck sizes and this has been known for many years. There is consumer demand in there as well, and once one of the big three go bigger the rest have to follow, but if the CAFE rules didn't take size into account it would be far, far harder for auto makers to increase the size since there is a fuel consumption penalty for more mass and frontal area.
One of the big differences between pickups like the F-150 of the mid 2000's and now, is almost every truck now is a 4-door. Back then, they were 'extended cab' trucks with a very, very small bench in the back. And then for a few years (up till around 2006 or 07, they were uncommon, but had a small set of doors for the back seat (sometimes opening backwards so there was no pillar between, giving more room to climb in)
Feels very, very much like a clumsy attempt at a gotcha attack on Obama.
The truth, of course, is that ALL car and truck sizes in the US have been rapidly increasing for several decades now, and Obama had absolutely nothing to do with that. Pickup-truck culture had a lot to do with it, but isn't entirely to blame: look at the current Honda Civic vs. a 1980 model or a 1990 model.
most "1/2 ton" trucks like the F-150 have been near the legal max width (80") without needing extra lights for a long time, so that won't ever grow much bigger. Length looks to be very similar throughout the 2000s but generally it grew by a couple of inches depending on the config. Weight is also not hugely different. You would probably see a trend towards 4-door trucks that would elongate them on average and there has been a very clear trend towards increased frontal area and worse forward vision.
That said, this is the same time period where the old Ranger died which was one of the few compact pickups left. when it came back it grew to a midsize and it wasn't until a decade after the ranger died that Ford release the Maverick, which is compact but doesn't have the towing capability or long bed options of the decade old ranger.
So point being, I think there is a grain of truth to what the author is saying, but the evidence isn't well laid out and he should have presented more data about the various trucks available across the 2010's to make a stronger point.
I volunteer to help manage parking lots and I've definitely noticed that vehicles are getting larger and larger.
The emissions rule was relaxed/revoked by Trump, however California maintained the higher standard (and the auto manufacturers sided with California). So because California has those standards and manufacturers want to be able to sell in California, nothing changed.
Even if the rule was revoked and manufacturers could make cars smaller again, they wouldn't because of marketing. Who would want to buy a new truck that is smaller than the last?
So bad policy making rather than some inherent benefit?
> Smaller light-duty trucks were regulated out of existence by tighter fuel standards. Because regulations were made looser on larger vehicles, the easiest way for automakers to meet the standard is to build a bigger truck.
It's not a coincidence the law conveniently incentivizes vehicles with larger profit margins.
Also, it's a fine excuse, basically consumers avoiding responsibility for their own choices. `But it's the Fed's fault!` The size of current trucks and SUVs are completely sociopathic in most urban environments. Certainly because they're dangerous to other road users (as the current rise in fatalities bear out). And, if you wish, because they contribute excessively to carbon emissions. These vehicles don't purchase themselves.
We're trapped in a large vehicle arms race (cars are getting bigger too). Yes, at some level that has to do with ego, or at least, an atrophied sense of civic duty and responsibility.
> First and most obviously, personal vehicles cause tremendous amounts of harm.
Large vehicles are safer for vehicle-on-vehicle or vehicle-on-object crashes, and vehicle-on-pedestrian crashes are a very small fraction of total fatal crashes. The core objection of this blog post^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H paper is nonsense.
I refuse to take seriously anyone who talks about "moral issues" like cars on purely qualitative, opinion-based grounds. When you're talking about hundreds of millions of people, you need to use statistics, and that is a necessary but insufficient condition for you to be taken seriously (as most papers of this type don't use statistics correctly).
Not sure if it’s the intent but a large vehicle carrying a trailer with 10,000lbs. Is much more efficient than a small vehicle that might need to make 5 or 10 trips to move the same load. In that sense, the larger vehicle is more fuel efficient.
I think it's something like, a plane carrying 400 people over a long distance is more efficient than if those 400 people drove that same distance in 400 cars. Something like that.
Because vehicle weight is a major factor in fuel efficiency that’s inherent to the problem and can’t be regulated away. Meanwhile, some people actually need large trucks.
I will say large trucks are very comfortable. I think there must be more vertical room so you can sit in a more chair like position. It’s also great for bigger people in general to have wider seats and not have your head not be half an inch from the roof.
I will also note I switch between the family minivan and the large truck frequently and the difference in how other drivers treat you is jarring. In the truck people seem happy to let me in and coexist with me.
In the minivan I’m constantly being cut off or blocked from merging. I have people try to pass me no matter how fast I go.
> I think there must be more vertical room so you can sit in a more chair like position.
I'm tall. Yes, you sit more upright. There is more headroom sometimes. Nicer trucks mostly have a moonroof installed, which chops 1.5" out of the headroom. Where the seat is located relative to the rollover support (where the seatbelt is attached on the side) is important. A lot of trucks have this too far forward, so a tall person is shouldered up against it.
For the most part, though, the seating and instrumentation are all built for the same size people as cars. Before my current truck, I drove a saturn and then a prius. Probably the width of the truck is more helpful than any height.
The big benefit for me with regard to height is that I step up into the truck, rather than have to slide down into the car. Especially on those days when my back isn't feeling so great.
Well, so the solution should be to put the same regulations on bigger cars as well. Another thing is that I don't really see almost any pickups in Europe. Why do Americans love them so much?
OK but they are still making small cars. If all cars suddenly got bigger i'd get it, but the fact of the matter is that people are buying bigger trucks and not small cars despite both being available.
My pet theory is that among other factors, being the biggest on the road is desirable as a repilian-brain thing. Also selling larger vehicles that are just higher and wider for more money but that are not significantly different than similar but smaller vehicles is just easy money, really.
It's a mix of tragedy of the commons and needing to be the same size or bigger than everyone else.
The negatives of big cars are not paid for, in large part, by the people buying the car. A bigger car needs more space, making towns and cities less efficient and more expensive. They use more resources, and gas which the negative effects of are not paid for in pollution and CO2. Edit: Also the danger to pedestrians, and people in smaller cars!
Being a normal sized car, amongst huge trucks is dangerous and all over a bad experience. It's hard to see around them, in a crash you come off worse (all other things being equal). So to not suffer this everyone slowly gets bigger, just to not suffer. If people were limited to a standard sized car then everyone would be better off (assuming people don't need a van for work or a people carrier if they have a large family).
As far as I am concerned cities of 1m or more people should not allow any cars to enter. Delivery trucks and public transit should do it. Yes it will make cities more expensive. It’ll also make them a whole lot more pleasant.
I would agree, but my city is only 600k, and I want a car free centre here as well.
Getting things like a CAZ(Clean air zone), congestion charge, low speed zones, and pedestrianised areas should have full pedestrianisation as an end goal.
Not just charge but charge a lot. Take population of the city, divide by 1000, that’s the dollar amount you get to pay. I think smaller cities don’t need this but larger ones definitely do.
Is this yearly or per visit? I think yearly this wouldn't be a terrible figure. One issue, especially in the US is what counts as a city. For example, the SF bay areas has about 100 cities/municipal areas.
I decided that I wanted to own at some point in my life every type of vehicle except a mini van. When my crossover got totaled by a deer last December I decided it was time to buy an F150 as my first pickup. Before y’all crucify me for this:
1. I live on a gentleman’s farm and actually do use this vehicle for transporting construction materials and such. That bed is rarely empty.
2. I work from home and ride my motorcycle year round. My bike gets great mph compared to even electric hybrids. My truck is used for transporting stuff that needs a truck to transport or for short runs to get kids to/from school or camp on occasion.
With that, Ford walked away from making cars. They now make crossovers, SUVs, and trucks specifically because nobody was buying cars. I have read a bunch about why and mainly it comes down to the fact that cars are just not desirable anymore. The form factor isn’t fun or fashionable, you sit on a skateboard compared to everyone else on the road, and they feel cheap. They are absolutely the economical option the same way that 50cc scooters are, but they are not an option that people actually want. You can’t convince people to buy that little cab Subaru from TFA for the same reason: it just isn’t an aspirational vehicle. I think we will see most of that form factor die out in the next 30 years in favor of hatchback crossovers and small pickups like the Ford Maverick (which by all means looks like a car replacement).
My minivan is the best road tripping vehicle I've ever owned hands down. Better visibility than an SUV thanks to the column design and a nice soft ride. Gas mileage could be better, but it's still better than the SUV. It's also been quite effective at hauling things around. The second and third row of seats get out of the way giving you a very large storage area and the ability to haul things like plywood sheets easily and out of the weather.
Yeah I know. I’ve rented them and they are pretty great. But I have no interest in owning one. A full size conversion van on the other hand very well may be my next vehicle. Something that will easily seat 8, have room in the back for a kick ass lounge/bedroom, shag carpeting throughout, a ladder to climb on the roof, and ideally all electric. Would be cool as heck.
All cars are getting bigger. There used to be a handful of us at work who all drove Subaru's and we parked them next to each other in chronological order. Was crazy to see just how much bigger the newer cars were.
> Also selling larger vehicles that are just higher and wider for more money but that are not significantly different than similar but smaller vehicles is just easy money, really.
Large cars are also safer for the people in them at least. Car safety ratings are misleading because they're a relative measure based on the class of vehicle. So a "3 star" safety rating on a large SUV is considerably safer than a "5 star" safety rating on a smaller car:
> These ratings are only useful when you're comparing cars within the same size class. If a small car has a five-star rating from NHTSA, that doesn't mean it will protect you as well as five-star-rated large sedan. The same holds true for a Good rating from the IIHS. "The ratings are meant to be used to compare crashes with vehicles of similar size," said Adrian Lund, president of the IIHS. "You can't really go between the segments with these ratings."
People aren't dumb and they realize larger cars are safer for the occupants. That's at least one reason some people prefer larger vehicles.
We see so many examples of regulations having directionally wrong effects...
That regulation is adversarial (largest regulated entities are savvy and often propose the regulations), has higher order and long term effects, this all makes it a hard domain, but also is well known in advance.
What's the current best practice for validating regulation have their intended effects in advance?
They'll go with the grain for now. It's easier to sell people on "this truck is electric, but otherwise the same" than on "this truck is electric and smaller, but all you need".
Once the majority of trucks is electric they'll have an easier time finding their own identity, which likely includes getting smaller.
Bigger frame allows for bigger battery. Those huge trucks should have not been built, but once they are here and the people like them - probably as a class of car they are here to stay.
It is fun to see Toyota tundra in the middle of small European town - the streets are like upholstery to the trucks.
There is incentive to make small efficient vehicles, but also to make large efficient vehicles. Both will allow more large inefficient vehicles to be sold.
I think it's one of those problems where the minority of trucks owners forces non truck owners to have to upgrade to truck because otherwise you will lose the war if you ever get to a collision. And by lose the war I mean, your car will be much more wrecked than the other person in a pickup truck.
Again, the fact that this is a problem that only exists in the United States of America strikes me as odd.
Despite the fact that automobiles in Europe have also grown in size over the years, I feel that even their largest models are far smaller than the monstrosity.
Every now and then someone visits from Europe and has an idea of the "day trip" they are going to make. We have to explain to them it will take them 12 hours to drive that in one direction even if it is in the same state and there is no possibility of doing it by rail.
The miles driven are just much different, and much more necessary. Along with that comes the desire to enjoy the time spent in the car/truck.
Regulations like this don’t come from nowhere. There is no “clean room” process for working this stuff out.
They’re created by government officials based on feedback from industry specialists. The loop is almost completely closed.
The article already mentions the Subaru Sambar. That vehicle is also a result of government regulation.
But Japan’s regulations created a market for very small and cheap cars with real innovations in efficiency, while the regulations in the US resulted in very big and expensive cars, with innovations in passenger comfort.
Sure, that's one of the reasons. The other reason is that the people buying trucks prefer bigger trucks. Just the same as the people buying SUVs prefer buying bigger SUVs and people buying cars want bigger cars.
As always it's the Germans that get things right. Their class of high performance (200+ hp) 4x4 high clearance station wagons are just brilliant family cars. Think audi all road, insignia country tourer, Small-ish compared to the truck, you can cram a lot of stuff in them, relatively nimble and fun to drive, safe and can take on surprisingly challenging dirt roads. Unless you are construction worker or the like - probably most us SUV could be replaced by them. Of course they are the most unsexy and uncool cars there are
The headline on the page is "The Real Reason Why Trucks Are Getting Bigger" - and it is not supported by the item. The assertion is that Obama-era fuel restrictions on cars and small trucks incentivized manufacturers to make bigger trucks which conformed to a less onerous standard.
At the same time, though, we can all agree that there is at least some consumer preference for large trucks. The question is how do these compare? Is the state of play now 95% due to consumer preference and 5% to manufacturers trying to push larger trucks. Or is it the other way round, or some other mix? Todd offers no evidence either way.
What's weird to me is that this, again, is such a uniquely American problem.
While in Europe cars have also increased in size, I believe the largest of them is at least a magnitude smaller than the abomination that is Ford F250, for example.
Driving a truck like the F-150 would severely limit your mobility in most of Europe, even in rural areas. You would be unable to drive or park in most of the city centers, and rural roads are often fairly narrow as well. So you would generally be restricted to driving on major roads.
Further, American-style trucks are not considered "classy", those with $50-60K to spend on a vehicle would likely prefer something like a Mercedes.
When Englad still domain India, there was a lot of cobra there, that means a problem for the English people. The solution: pay directly to anyone who brings a dead cobra. The result: people raised cobras to kill them and get paid for that.
Always surprise me the incapability of some countries/governments of think in long term.
Another interesting case of the administrative state deferring to nice-sounding slogans over an incentives-based approach that produces right outcomes. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
Even as of 2022 EVs are probably less than 1% of cars on the road in the US. If we use Tesla as a proxy that number would probably be less than 0.5% back in 2020 when this EPA analysis is from.
I'd get the Subaru Sambar but the bed can only load 350 lbs, right? It's a bit risky to put two Yamaha YZ125s in them. But I'd totally buy the Sambar honestly, for other stuff. Does anyone know of a light truck that's small? I live in San Francisco and the big trucks are really infeasible here.
Yet another example of complex regulations creating unintended negative effects.
“Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.”
A reminder to all those bitching about constant construction. The reason why that road has to be torn up and replaced every year is because it was designed and built with avg vehicle weight in the 80s, and now avg vehicles are way heavier, and road damage increases with like the 4th power of axle weight.
Every time you choose that massive truck over a tiny corolla (Even that is massive nowadays!!) you are forcing everyone to deal with more construction.
People aren't going to stop driving to work or drop $40k on an electric car (especially during a shortage) in response to a short term price spike. However, if it persists people would eventually switch over to alternatives
Are you sure it didn't deter sales or driving? I don't have the numbers, but I suspect if we found them we would see that the average vehicle purchased used less gas and that sales of gasoline were lower than typical.
My post is built from two data points, my experience of driving and seeing as many trucks on the road as ever (and an increasing number of newer models, which are bigger and have distinctive grills), and extended family members explicitly griping about gas prices as they drove their trucks.
My understanding is that it’s simply that larger vehicles have laxer fuel efficiency requirements under the current automotive regulations. So manufacturers can side step parts of current emission regulations by simply making everything bigger
All vehicles tend to become bigger. Check any model year over year over year.
The problem isn't that the F150 is getting bigger, the problem is that the F050 hasn't come into the picture. (Arguably the Maverick may be an attempt here).
seems valid to point at CAFE, but I disagree with the exact framing
post is saying 'trucks are larger because it decreases their fuel target', I'd prefer a take like 'setting abrupt boundaries in policies leads to strange effects at the boundary'
Not sure why you'd want to regulate vehicles rather than taxing fuel directly, but even taking fuel tax off the table, a continuous scale would let manufacturers find a better balance than imposing a hard limit
I remember that when these standards were revised some german car manufacturers warned the EPA that they favor larger vehicles and will have an adverse effect of what was intended.
This post is really narrow-sited in terms of economics. The argument is essentially that "Absentminded regulations forced those poor truck makers into building bigger trucks and then consumers just had to buy them". Unfortunately, that's not actually how buying things works. The market being willing to buy behemoths is what validated the product experiment that the truck makers ran and is a much more potent force than what a company decides to make.
The real issue is thus: Trumpers don't actually care what happens to the world or the people in it and if something is "bad for business" then they'll do anything to get around it - regardless of the ethics. People should not be blundering idiots that are continuously drawn towards the next shiny thing; they should be accountable for what they choose to do.
If you tow heavy trailers, you need the vehicle in front to be heavier than the towed object for stability. By the time you are buying 3/4 ton or a 1-ton vehicle, fuel consideration is secondary. When loaded, you are going to have terrible mileage anyway. I own a Ford Escape Hybrid commuter car, a 4.2L V6 F-150 with 8' bed for light truck duty, and a 7.5L V8 F-350 for heavy towing with a 12' box. I also have enough land to store all these vehicles and I bought them broken and cheap.
Regular cab pickups exist and they get reasonable mileage these days. You can get combined 22mpg in an F-150 2.7L v6. It's a bigger truck because it is designed to tow 5000lbs and carry 2000lbs in the bed in its smallest configuration. If you launch boats or operate on wet construction sites, you need 4x4. Why? Your rear wheels will be on a slippery boat ramp. If you don't have 4x4, your rear-wheel drive truck's front wheels are useless and your truck can become a submarine by sliding into water.
It is difficult to buy a new truck with an 8' bed that's not a full-size truck. You need to in general look for a fleet vehicle. However, vans exist. My Grand Caravan minivan converts into a cargo van and fits 4x8 with gate closed. It's dead at the moment and so I got an F-150 to tow it home and drive around until I fix it.
So, if you want an 8' bed in a pickup, you are getting a minimum of a 1/2 ton truck. If you don't need one that long, 6' beds are available on smaller trucks. Your other option is to trailer something since they have 3500lbs towing capacity. 6' bed is perfectly usable for 8' loads with a bed extender.
So, why can't you get an 8' bed in a smaller truck? They are prone to getting overloaded. There's the legend of the immortal Ford Ranger that work much harder than they should. 20 sheets of 3/4" plywood is 1200lbs and that will fit inside a truck bed. Unless you have that 1800-2000lbs capacity, you'll overload it. Now, consider the weight of drywall, cement etc... Anything related to 4x8' items can unintentionally overload a small truck's rated payload capacity relatively easily.
Do you need an off-road 4x4 3/4 ton truck, which are huge and tall, for city driving? You do not. I need my 1-ton truck for towing a car trailer weighing more than 5000lbs. However, it's only driven when when I have to tow something that heavy.
I worked for Jaguar Land Rover for a number of years and we couldn’t bring the Defender to the US (I was told) because it lacked a proper airbag on the steering wheel. I’m sure it was slightly more complicated than that, but it makes for great story of regulation gone awry.
Don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying that I don’t think a driver’s side airbag is not worth it, I’m sure it is. But if that’s all it was, surely we would’ve just put a different steering wheel in the American version. The reality is probably more complicated, but it gets stuffed into this little anecdote.
Airbag unit itself, module, and the calibration for it. They need to smash a bunch of vehicles to do calibration. It’s not really worth it in the case of vehicles where development was shut down a long time ago.
I've heard that introducing a vehicle into the US market can be an expensive and time consuming process. Some of those foreign vehicles look interesting, though.
Overall, I think between the article and the comments, we cover a lot of the reasons (plural) and I think it's a combination of many of them.
People want a vehicle that works for every (edge) use case they have, even if they forget that usage only comes around once every third year. The bed has to be big enough for plywood, the cab has to fit six adults comfortably, and so on. SUVs are popular for this reason. And beds are getting left behind because it really is an edge case for most to need a long truck bed, while having family ride in the crew cab is at least kind of common. Not to mention, having a crew cab and then a long bed makes for a truck so long, it's really kind of a pain to maneuver it. (Source: Briefly owned a "smaller" double cab Silverado with a 6' 6" (198 cm) bed and it was already ridiculously long.)
It's amazing truck rental hadn't become a bigger business, while everyone gravitated towards nimble, fuel efficient cars, but there has to be a reason for that not happening, and I don't think it's fuel regulations. Among other things, there's an addiction to convenience. Everyone insists that the vehicle in their driveway covers every possible use, instead of the daily uses only, because there's a 20 minute round trip in having to go pick up a rental vehicle for special cases.
All of this is interesting to me, as GMC will reveal the bigger 2023 Canyon later this morning. (You can look at the 2023 Chevrolet Colorado[0] now for a good preview. And for those unfamiliar, it's a "mid-sized" or smaller line of trucks, like the Toyota Tacoma.) The redesign is basically the Silverado/Sierra from 5 years ago and they've eliminated all but one configuration - crew cab and 5' 2" (157.5 cm) bed. No more regular cab, no "long"/standard box. In the car world, the most popular configuration has the best profit margin, so slowly any variations get eliminated by bean counters until only the very middle of the bell curve is left.
EDIT: Also wanted to add that these smaller trucks are much less popular than the larger versions. One reason is the obsession with specifications and capability and features. A lot of times the price difference between smaller and larger is small when you consider extra payload and towing (that only one in ten buyers actually needs), or that features X, Y and Z are included on the larger model but left out on the smaller. Gas mileage is also shockingly similar between the sizes. But in the end, I think too many people buying trucks look around, see that everyone else has full-size, and justify it for themselves, when almost everyone would've gotten their needs met with the smaller options.
Just look at the popularity of the Maverick and Santa Cruze - there is a significant demand for smaller (or dare I say, mini) trucks. Safety regulations caused the 80's mini trucks to start to die out - yet Mazda still produces the Miata and it (thankfully!) adapted to comply with updated safety standards over the years yet keep to the same basic size and weight with only minor inflation in size/weight over the last 30 years now, so manufacturers could likely do the same with true mini trucks like the old Nissan hard body if they wanted to.
But why bother? With the chicken tax limiting competition and car companies being able to make higher profit on larger, fancier vehicles why would they leave the extra profit on the table?
Mahindra was going to enter the US market, but eventually backed out for a number of reasons - the chicken tax was no doubt one of many factors.
How much is that price though? A Ford F-150 in 1980 cost about $5800. Adjusting for inflation that's about $22000 which is exactly where the Maverick slots in. It's also still bigger than a Ford Ranger of yore.
Agreed, I have that vehicle and it isn't quite so big as the monster pick-ups. I've had a SportTrac since 2001. The key thing is that is only has a 4.5' bed. It isn't jacked up and without a 6'-8' bed, it is quite maneuverable. I hike and camp and kayak and hunt and and and... The smaller bed is problematic when I do need plywood but it just gets strapped down instead. The big problem with this new Canyon that you mention is the height and width (which is only need to combat the higher center of gravity) and engine box of this monstrosity. People don't need an engine that big for this "mid-sized" truck because they won't be towing that big with it. It is definitely big for big sake. It must be that the profit margin is a LOT higher on a $60K truck than a $35K truck. One new truck that is combatting this a little is the new Ford Maverick. It is the same size as my SportTrac and TOPS OUT at $35K all-in. It is not jacked up or with an oversized engine. It is funny that it is quite smaller than the new Ranger which was always the small truck line.
The reason truck rental isn't much of a thing is the same reason people drive into cities with public transportation: time convenience. You can't go when you want and come back when you want when you are dependent on someone else. They want to "just go" without planning. Like you said, most people never use the truckness of their truck and it is a status/ego thing.
There's also the up-sell - when you're looking at $x a month for a two door short bed, and it's only $y a month more for the crew cab long bed, and you might want to go somewhere with the family at times ...
Smaller car sellers should make a deal either with the dealers or with U-Haul or something - buy the small 4 seater car, get X days free truck rental per year.
My "dream vehicle" would be something like a cab-over minivan that was short as possible while still having towing capabilities; most "pickup uses" can be replicated by a trailer for those times.
The Ford or any truck in US/Canada may not need to be that big since they were not that big years ago. But the Subaru is too small for US/Canada roads and what is hauled.
Automotive EE here… I’ve been trying to explain this to people for a DECADE.
It’s all exactly correct.
Obama’s emission rules basically were impossible. So they made a CAFE-exception for footprint.
They told the mfgs “we’re going to grade you on footprint”, the mfgs said ok “we’ll give you footprint”.
Trump admin was 100% right, but this feel good bs damage is done. Biden admin has seemingly doubled down where Obama admin failed so badly. I want to believe it’s good intentions and they don’t know, but I’m pretty sure they all know the cause and effects here.
Basically no because California kept the same limits and it's easier for the manufacturers to just go with that.
The underlying problem of all this is it's nearly impossible for a new manufacturer to get off the ground (that's the most amazing thing about TSLA - not that they made electric cars, but that they made anything).
So the only way to get a new "vehicle type" on the road is to get an existing manufacturer to build it.
But I live in Montana, where easily 3 out of 5 vehicles are large SUVs or trucks. There is definitely ego there too. Whether it’s caused by owning such a large vehicle or the reason they own the same, it’s definitely there.
They largely hold you in contempt if you’re in a car or less, gassing you out with exhaust, high beams at eye level, or tailgating you until they can roar by in a cloud of exhaust.
They are bloody absurd as a single person vehicle, and even the recent high gas prices didn’t temper the number of pickups or their behavior.
The regulations where written by auto execs. The auto industries least profitable market got regulated out of existence just as their most profitable had regulations massively loosened and new tax relief for massive trucks seemingly every year?
Surely this is the result of inept regulators and not blatant corruption!
I don’t think Toyota lobbied to stop selling corollas. This likely was intentional from the Obama admin, my recollection is that the US government owned Chrysler and GM when they made so many rules that favored big trucks over efficient cars.
I agree with the article's point, except not to the exclusion of ego, and I also agree with all of your points. Part of their hypothesis is legal/political, but it's nowhere near a "political screed that doesn't belong on HN".
If you sort the wheat from the chaff, I think there's still a valid issue there. It's just being wrapped in divisive crap as is the trend.
In Ireland we had a brief period where the difference between tax on personal and commercial vehicles was significant enough that it paid off to register yourself as an LLC/sole-trader and get a pick-up. That loophole was swiftly plugged.
This genuinely sounds extremely similar - the loophole is more attractive than the incentive.
I also see how VW would now like to have their fine back, seeing how you were never serious about emissions, that being just an elaborate plot; and sue for damages.
> It’s not ego, it’s economics. Smaller light-duty trucks were regulated out of existence by tighter fuel standards. Because regulations were made looser on larger vehicles, the easiest way for automakers to meet the standard is to build a bigger truck.
The government skews yet another market with unintended consequences using regulations & intervention. Big surprise. The only solution is more government regulation & intervention.
> Democrats, having learned nothing, criticized the move as "anti-science."
The OP misunderstands: science, by its modern definition, is the ideas and policy choices that liberals want to pursue and exudes everything they oppose. Nothing more, nothing less.
[This is more a swipe about the corruption that happens when terms get swept up into becoming political labels, than a swipe at any particular party]
In other words: consumer ego (wanting to drive a big, mean looking truck) is an underlying pressure in the market, even if the sufficient mover for the current size explosion is emissions dodging.
[1]: https://jalopnik.com/we-need-to-talk-about-truck-design-righ...