this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
1542 points (89.9% liked)
Fuck Cars
9580 readers
567 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
It seems like a lot of people here don't understand that circumstances might be different in different places. This post itself assumes the only reason is to transport people, but the truck can do more than that.
If I lived in a rural place and needed something that could tow, transport, and go over tougher terrain, I could see the usefulness of having a truck around. Not everything is in a comfy city where everything is within a couple miles.
Now where I currently live, I'd never dream of getting a truck like that. So much hassle and the roads are too small. But I could see it being useful for someone else.
The truck still doesn't need to be that big. Trucks have gotten absolutely massive with no appreciable difference in bed size. Yes yes, of course, bigger truck = more towing and load capacity, but honestly there's got to be a reasonable limit where something becomes a commercial vehicle, and the limit needs to be much lower than the current standard.
Reminds me of the ever growing number of blades on a mach razer.
Bigger, longer trucks are also more stable for towing, which is particularly useful if you're towing livestock. Animals moving in a stock trailer are much less stable than a trailer full of equally heavy equipment.
But that's honestly pretty niche. The average pickup driver doesn't own horses.
Excuse me sir. This is a /c/fuckcars. We are just here to fuckcars because for reasons. We are not here for nuance. If people need big cars because their lives depended on it the they should change their lives /s
We all understand there are actual uses for a large truck. The issue is A) these trucks keep increasing in size well beyond what is practically needed, and B) more and more people who don't have a practical use for these vehicles are commuting to work in them. The average person driving a large truck today does not live on a farm. They live in the suburbs and use it to commute to their office job and occasionally to grab a can of paint from home Depot.
These tanks aren't safe around pedestrians or smaller cars, they take up way too much space and either don't fit in most parking spots or necessitate the building bigger and bigger parking lots, they're fuel inefficient, their headlights are obnoxiously high and blind everyone else at night, etc.
They're obnoxious, dangerous, harmful to the environment, and simply unnecessary for the vast majority of people, so fuck 'em.
You can't possibly know each person's reasoning on why they may need or not need a particular thing. Saying someone cannot get it at all will end up hurting the little guy. The person why can't go through all the hoops to get some random exception for their specific use case.
You talk about it being dangerous, doesn't every driver go through roughly the same certification process for that state? If you're problem is the quality of their driving, you should be pushing for higher standards for getting a license
You say they are wasteful on gas. Wouldn't that mean the owner would need to pay extra money out of pocket to maintain it's use? They are bearing the cost extra cost of ownership, so why not let them use it? For example, you are probably paying for internet. Should I be allowed to stop you from using the internet you paid for because I don't agree with your reasoning? No, and that's completely ridiculous.
I absolutely can. Look at trucks from 50 years ago and compare them to the monstrosities of today
The trucks being sold today are ridiculously oversized and I can say pretty confidently that no one actually needs a vehicle that size for 99.999% of use cases. Car manufacturers are the only ones that benefit from this arms race to sell bigger and tankier vehicles to people for commuting.
They're dangerous because of their size, not because of who drives them. A collision between a giant truck and a small passenger car has a high likelihood of severely injuring or killing the occupants of the small passenger car, A) because of the weight of the larger truck, and B) because the collision safety features of a small car are only engineered to protect well in a collision with another similarly sized vehicle.
Also, the sight-lines for these behemoths is pathetic. The Abrams M1 Battle tank has better forward visibility than a modern F250.
We're all paying for the environmental impacts of hydrocarbon usage. Low-efficiency vehicles should not be used for commuting.
Looked at the image you provided. I can see your point about some of the sightlines. For regular commuting in most circumstances, I'll give you it. But that's the thing, you seem to be assuming a very specific circumstance and applying it to everything. You are trying to take a role of a general passenger vehicle for daily commute and applying it to a vehicle meant for work.
So yes, for regular commuting I'd say you are 100% right. But there are uses outside of such a limited scope.
So everyone agrees then?
The only difference between you two is that you have different beliefs about the owners of these vehicles.
I also believe that these are mostly not used for work, but rather as ego-boosting commuter vehicles.
I was pushing back against the idea that the vehicles shouldn't exist and nobody should have them. I definitely seen some people who probably don't need it.
From my personal anecdotal experience, I know someone who lives out of a trailer and they are mobile all the time. It doesn't make sense to have a truck + sedan because they move around all the time. So instead they have one of those big trucks to lug a home trailer that they can drop off and then go do anything else they need in the area. Very specific niche case, probably would be ridiculed here if seen driving on the streets.
People who need trucks hate these things