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Truck bloat is killing us, new crash data reveals
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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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Why do people feel the need to have a $60K+ massive behemoth? 99% of the time if I glance in the bed it is spotless. It is probably only used for commuting and carrying groceries. It might haul a load of mulch once a year. The things are so high that if they hit a car they are going to ride up over the hood and crush you. At least my state finally got its act together and banned those goddamn frontend lifted trucks that made it impossible to see anything within 50 ft and guaranteed a deadly collision. Now I know someone will say "But I need it for my building job/farm/etc", you are the exception, the vast majority sold are not being used for that.
"reasoning that these vehicles are safer for drivers in the event of a crash" Sounds like an arms race. Soon we will be driving armored personnel carriers.
It is bad enough they make them with ridiculously loud exhausts as bad as muscle cars and fart exhausts. Electric cars and trucks quieting everything can't come fast enough.
As someone who uses their truck as it's intended I can say your absolutely correct. I get comments from other truck drivers when they see the dings and scratches and they'll be laughing while I'm looking at their spotless $80,000 truck that the heaviest thing they haul is a gallon of milk. I hope they downsize these trucks some day soon because when mine goes I don't want a physically bigger one. These trucks also take up 4 spots everywhere they go for parking.
I've had a 95 V8 f150 and a 94 4cyl ranger that I consider to be about the perfect expression of the two most useful trucks ever made. There just isn't anything like them anymore.
A big part of the problem is that they just don't make small affordable trucks anymore.
The tiny little Ford ranger of the 90s used to be the cheapest car at a Ford dealership. The current ranger is only a couple inches smaller than the f150 and costs a couple grand less, if you can even find one.
There's clearly some demand for small trucks, too. I've been seeing an increasing number of imported kei trucks around me.
I had a 1986 Mazda B2000 for a while. Very useful, tough little thing, even though it only had like 75hp.
Personally, I'm a pretty big fan of smaller everything. This trend to make everything larger and larger annoys me. There's only one exception to this and that's mainly in living space. You shouldn't feel crammed into a suitcase when you're at home. It should be a place to relax and unwind, not a claustrophobic's nightmare.
I remember when people started to pick up old Hummers and I couldn't understand why, for the life of me. Then they made the considerably smaller H2, which took off. The original hummer had it's place, in extreme terrain and conditions; the Hummer doesn't really have a place where you're exclusively driving on roads. Military applications are exempt of course, since they don't know when they will need the versatility, but civilian ownership is dubious at best. I'm sure there's exceptions, but exceptions are going to be a fairly trivial amount of the population.
H2 was a glorified SUV, and it got weird after that.
But the enbiggification of things doesn't stop there, electronics are a huge contributor as well. Massive 80+ inch TVs for your studio apartment are kind of ridiculous, you basically cover most of the useful wall surface with a single television that displays a single program at a time. Meanwhile, 30-40 inch TVs from the broadcast TV era (mid 80's through the 90's) usually had features like picture in picture so you could watch more than one program at a time. Such features only exist in history books.
Another big offender in my opinion is cellphones. I understand that mobile devices have become a massive link that ties us together and has supplanted many other potential technologies, acting as a catch all for a lot of devices that simply are no longer required (like calendars, calculators, planners, books, lists... Even video enabled telephone devices and such things) a phone is a general computer in your pocket that can be reconfigured for all these purposes through the use of software. The thing is that all of that doesn't require additional space inside the phone since the technology advances at a reasonable speed relative to the software capabilities, but screens keep getting larger, batteries get bigger, but you don't get any additional run time for your phone as a result. It takes up more room in your pocket and provides nearly no benefit for it's increase in size beyond "mines bigger"....
And I'm not just talking about the biggest phones available, all phones are expanding, the base Nexus/pixel phone has had increasingly larger sizing over the years, same with Samsung, same with Apple, same with pretty much every other manufacturer. It is to the point of being unable to get a device with less than a 5" screen even if you try, and the devices that are 5" or even 6" are horribly outdated in technology or have so many corners cut so they can be budget devices that nobody really wants and would only buy to save money.
The argument can be made for just about everything.... Except maybe boxed and canned goods at grocery stores.... But that's a different rant for a different day.
You know the answer. It's insecure man children.
I drive trucks for years, but now that I'm hauling less plywood and more camera gear I use a van.
The thing about the trucks is I usually didn't need them to be trucks - maybe once or twice a week. But it's not like I was gonna pay insurance on 2 cars, and even only using it occasionally as a truck it still made more sense than a Civic.
I think more trucks like the Ford Maverick would be a hit. Small, affordable 4-door hybrid that has a short bed.
Well, yeah. It is an arms race. I drive a "midsize" SUV, and a large part of the reason is that these trucks are going to be on the road no matter what. Statistically, in the event of a collision between a truck and a car, the truck driver will live and the car driver will die, no matter who is at fault. Is it more dangerous for drivers of small cars and pedestrians? Absolutely! But it's safer for the person in the tank. Ergo, if you want to maximize the safety of yourself and your passengers, be the one driving the tank. Am I selfish for driving my SUV? Probably--but it's hard to make a moral argument that defeats "This is more likely to keep me alive."
I live in a rural area, so walking isn't an option even if we had the infrastructure (which we don't), and I dream of a future in which we have commuter rail here. But until then, I'm going to be in the thing that's most likely to keep one of these monsters from killing me, and once my son is old enough to drive, you bet your ass I'm putting him in one too, because these things are on the road whether I like it or not. The tragedy of the commons is that everyone contributing to the calamity is rational.
All of these ridiculous trucks should be off the road, and I will cheerfully give mine up--once everyone else has, and not a moment sooner. Until then, anybody selling APCs yet? It looks like that Abrams has better sight lines than a 2500. Where do I get a road legal one of those?
This is similar logic that 2A people use to claim citizens should have access all weapons that the military has. My man, no citizen needs a swarm of deadly drones, but since the guy up the block has an AR 15, I gotta keep up. The truth is, nobody really wins a war against a military superpower with small arms unless they have tenacity, balls of steel, support, and organization. Unless the gravy seals are digging tunnels, eating rat meat, they are not going toe to toe with the army like the Vietnamese. You could give them all weapons in the world and they still can't find grit, tenacity and balls. Key ingrediesum.
Anyway...
That's why I still drive my Corolla, and also, coincidentally, I can't afford a big suv.
I have a simple question for people: if the truck bed can't hold an eight foot wooden stud without half of it sticking out the back, why do you have a truck?
My dad always said that it should fit an 4x8 sheet of plywood laying down. Also that if you don't need to haul 4x8 sheets of plywood on the regular then you probably don't need a truck.
I've never owned a truck, and there honestly hasn't been mant times when my Mazda 3 wont do. . Six drawer dresser - check. Queen size mattress-check. Hockey bags and kids- check. Visitors from the airport and luggage- check. Ikea furniture-sometimes sticks out the back.
There are a lot of uses of trucks beyond transporting construction materials. I wouldn't want to tow a trailer loaded with round bales with a car, or try to put a big block chevy in the trunk.