To be fair, this is the vast majority of truck drivers. Exceedingly few trucks sold today will ever be asked to do something that requires a truck, most are commuter vehicles driver for social status reasons. A few occasionally might tow a boat.
In a sign that the universe has a sense of irony, the F-150 factory promptly caught on fire when they announced this.
A F-150 was sold in 2018 every 35 seconds. They sold 450,000 of the things in 2018, and that’s not even counting any other truck made by Ford or anyone else. I guarantee you a huge percentage of those do nothing but commute.
And that’s not how status symbols work. It would be more accurate to say that luxury trucks are status symbols, not trucks. Nobody buys a truck as a status symbol, but maybe they buy a nice truck as one. The same statement applies to cars.
Truck owners are buying trucks largely for the feeling of self sufficiency, a fake one given the sheer amount of resources required to operate a modern vehicle, which is what makes it a status symbol. Its exactly the same as someone who “needs” a Jeep because it occasionally snows, even though their neighbor’s Honda Civic is doing just fine in the same conditions.
Also, the idea that a truck is a good snow vehicle makes me giggle. My Subaru always outperformed them in snowy conditions.
But if you want to attack my vehicle choices; I ditched the Subaru when I left Colorado, a location where it was useful, and switched to a small sedan when I moved to LA. More reasonable, more efficient, and cheaper to operate.
Kind of like all of the "never been off-road" "off-road vehicles"?