this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
1627 points (93.2% liked)
Fuck Cars
9580 readers
189 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I agree with the idea with the exceptions of towing capacity, passenger capacity, and possibly (probably) bed weight capacity.
But if you’re one guy that doesn’t tow anything and needs to haul a few sheets of plywood, sure, it makes sense.
The percentage of trucks on the left I see actually doing that is functionally 0%
Oh that may be true- but if we’re talking to working craftsman and builders as opposed to “anyone buying a truck” I think it matters.
Most truck buyers don’t need one. I don’t have a truck but I do have a 3600lb pop up camper that we tow with a Honda pilot. It’s basically the exact same car as the Honda Ridgeline pickup but with a hatch instead of a bed. It’s also a kid and vacation mobile.
In my case I’m not a craftsman but still couldn’t get by with the little truck because of towing and passenger capacity, that’s all I was saying.
Yeah for the whole 3 times a year you tow that thing.
That's just it: 99% of the time these vehicles are not being used to their capacity.
And people think that 1% somehow justifies the entire other 99%
It's laughable.
Well first off, we go camping 3 seasons a year, sometimes twice a month. Renting a car for camping, sometimes hundreds of miles away a dozen times a year doesn’t make any financial sense. Second, it’s our only big car and it’s used every time we have to pack the kids, dog, and luggage to go somewhere. My daily driver is a 4 door Subaru, not a Tahoe.
If I only need to tow or pack a vehicle once a year, I’d definitely consider renting, but that’s just not the case. I just hauled about 1000 lbs of lumber from home depot today- it literally gets used for its purpose on a weekly basis.
I’m not arguing the point there are lots of pickup bros that just run around in a king ranch solo and spend their weekend polishing it and taking all the parking spots at the mall, I’m just saying I really don’t think it’s really 99%. I see hundreds of tradespeople and weekend home improvement warriors on a daily basis.
Every pickup bro think pickups are justified. And they trot out all the same points you just made.
I offer you challenge: count every pickup you see, and record whether or not it has a load. I actually did that for a month, and its literally below 1% usage.
If I'm hauling a trailer 1% of the time, and drive on the road 3x a day, then I'm hauling roughly once a month, which is a bit low for my usage, but it's reasonable. Pulling a trailer once a month is a legitimate need for a truck though, that's not daily, but it is often enough to need a vehicle for it, and I don't want to have to rent something on a monthly basis just because you think I'm inefficient. If I had space for a second vehicle maybe I'd get a smaller daily driver, but I don't, so I drive a truck.
That's what you sound like.
Yes, too many people have large trucks that don't really use them for their purpose, but some of them are not that different from a sports car or sedan when not hauling a load for mileage and shouldn't be expected to be used 24/7. SUVs are probably worse overall than trucks when it comes to excess unused space and mediocre mileage, but nobody complains about those.
Sports cars sure, but sedans? Buuuuullshit.
Why not?
Are you serious, people complain about oversized SUVs all the time. Please.
You've now reached the tone of desperate justification that people with oversized vehicles always fall back to.
It’s my truck and I shouldn’t have to haul things in it 24/7 to justify its use to you.
If you don't think you should have to justify it's use, then why have you made all these comments attempting to do just that?
Hahahaha this is literally every conversation with a truck/suv owner
Oh you have me mistaken. I’m not justifying my use of my truck to you guys. I’m simply informing y’all that despite what you believe, trucks are needed. I do believe that lift kits shouldn’t be a thing, they compromise the truck. But not everyone out here that owns a truck is an asshole.
People are wondering why I need a truck and it’s simple, I wouldn’t be able to do my job without one. But people in these threads often forget that and think “hurr durr trucks should be banned.”
Please lmao
I think ideally most people would prefer a smaller car as a daily driver and a larger one to be used as needed but insurance and registration costs wipe out any gas savings. And renting a vehicle for long trips is often prohibitively expensive. So that leaves this option of using a car that 99% of the time is not necessary.
We don't need a lot of anything bar food, water, oxygen and sex. I'm all for sensible cars Vs that monstrosity on the left, but as hobbies go - boating is not the most offensive.
The problem I have with boating is that it takes a number of related environmentally irresponsible "wants" and chains them together into a series of linked "needs". One "needs" the truck because they have a boat. That's expected to be the end of the discussion, but really it isn't because it is fair to continue to question the whole chain. People are bad at distinguishing wants and needs, or alternatively people are very good at presenting their wants as needs when a justification is needed.
As a person who likes boating, I don't understand people wanting to tow around their boats all the time. If I were to ride a boat sufficiently that owning one makes sense, it would stay at the marina. Because why would I want a boat in front of my house? Then again I just rent boats because I want to ride them in different locations.
Well now you know one person who uses their huge truck for the purpose it was designed for! 350 owner here. If I didn’t actually need it, I wouldn’t have it. I use it to haul pallets, trailers, sometimes I hotshot. Right now I’m restoring a house built in the 1870’s and it’s cheaper to haul the equipment myself rather than pay someone to deliver it.
Could you not do the same with the smaller truck on the right though?
The payload capacity is likely too low (never mind having cab space for a secure tool storage separate from the exposed hauling area in the box)
No, I can’t. I can haul more than 35k lbs with my truck, what’s the max for the one on the right? I doubt you’d be able to fit a pallet, let alone the 3 the bed of my truck can hold. I can pull a semi with my truck, can the one on the right do the same? What about a 5th wheel?
There are very valid reasons to own the truck on the left. And more often than not, if you’re going to spend $90k on a truck, it’s because it’s needed.
How often are people really towing that much though? Maybe a couple times a year at most? It would be cheaper to just rent a big truck for the few times you need it per year than have that absurd truck as a daily driver.
Well like I said craftsman and home builders do all the time. I’m a weekend home improvement warrior and I need to haul or tow a few thousand pounds of stuff at least once or twice a month, sometimes more. We have an suv with a tow hitch for that but the idea is similar.