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Comment by village-idiot | Hacker News Reader

It’s not hard to make those fuel efficient, it’s hard to make them fuel efficient cheaply all while maintaining the performance that customers expect.

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It's hard to convince customers that they don't need huge SUV or pickup truck to drive solo to work in the office. On top of that there is clear, design trend especially in pickup truck world to have biggest, most vertical grill that is possible. Moving such wall trough the air at highway speed is far from efficient. No matter how badly Fiat wants to sell cars like small and efficient Fiat 500, Tipo, Alfa Romeo Giulia etc. that can be sleek and good for environment, in USA they will mostly sell huge RAMs, Jeeps and muscle cars.

When you sell a work truck for $25k and as much as $60k for a fully equipped fancypants truck, you aren't going to be very motivated to convince anyone of anything other than buying more fancy trucks.

Some of these trucks are being driven solo by people who live on an onion farm just FYI. Also, my truck gets better mileage than a Giulia. I live in the midwest and sure there are guys who don't need a truck but most of us do.

My metric is always, "Does your truck still look new after you've been driving it for awhile?"

It fails for the towing use-case, but I feel like if your truck isn't being abused you probably aren't using its hauling or off-road capabilities to any significant degree.

I can pretty much guarantee a beat up old FWD car will tackle pretty much all towing and farm driving (having lived and worked on a farm). For the really gritty stuff on the farm you have your tractors and earth movers and whatnot.

What makes the biggest difference is the tyres you have on a vehicle are suitable for the terrain you are using them in.

In the US, Australia, Canada etc - pick up trucks or utes are just a symbol of working class just as much as Tesla and Prius's are for the green-friendly crowd.

Eh, there are applications. A pickup truck mostly becomes necessary when you need to do both "heavy" and "far", when your alternatives are a car and a tractor. There are some loads, eg, towing a livestock trailer to market, where it is too heavy for a car (or even too small of a truck) to tow, and a tractor would be infeasible from a "speed" perspective.

(But yeah, you definitely don't need to be using your 4x4 pickup as a people-mover most of the time, and even most hauling applications a truck performs can be handled by a car with a rather modest trailer.)

Correct. But if you already have a truck that seats 4 or 6, there's not a whole lot of incentive to buy a car for commuting.

Really? What kind of "beat up old FWD car" would you recommend to pull a 7,000lb horse trailer and two Clydesdales?

I agree and I'll take that a step further yet. You can do it with RWD. I worked on a farm as well, and farm or not, we made it through many winters with RWD cars too. People have no idea anymore about what is actually required to get things done. I have friends who live in a city or town, and think they need 4x4 or AWD in the winter. Even out in the sticks, studded tires or chains do wonders in the winter, and on the farm you're either taking the dirtbike (or ATV) to get to the confinements or if you need to move a lot of hay.

"Trucks were built for a purpose, and some folks use trucks to fulfill that purpose!" Hmm, imagine that, Midwestern farm folk using trucks to haul shit. Now let's go take a look in the beds of the pickups in the parking lot of my suburban workplace and see if we can find any scratches, trucks that were driven by a solo driver with no passenger and nothing in the bed.

That's why I specifically said about office job. If you need your truck for work, haulin onions or for your hobby like mountain bike etc. then that's great, this is the actual truck for you but there is huge amount of people that are using them to get groceries at most. Another thing is, why you need to buy that, huge RAM, wouldn't just a normal height car like australian style pickups aka UTEs (kind of modern El Camino) be sufficient to get your onions/mountain bike to your destination? I don't know the truck you are driving but base model of F150 have a highway fuel consumption of 26 US mpg, base Gulia have 39 US mpg, that's a bit of a difference.

I hate this about HN — the preachiness. People are generally good at evaluating their own needs and spending their own money. If a truck wasn’t valuable and useful, so many people wouldn’t buy one.

Maybe it’s “city slickers” not understanding that a lot of people own boats, or trailers, or jet skis, or just plain haul shit every day and they need a bed in the back and real towing capacity that will handle well with a trailer attached on the highway.

If you don’t have a lawn, so much as a lawn service, I guess it’s easy to forget why anyone would need or want a truck?

Looking forward to the Rivian and Tesla trucks hitting production and for so many minds to be blown by how much fun and how capable they are.

The Federal regulations are based on a fleet wide average emissions. Large trucks and SUVs will always, ipso facto, have higher average emissions than sedans and compact cars. If your product mix skews to SUVs and trucks — and they aren’t EV — then your fuel efficiency numbers will in aggregate be higher.

Efficiency technology shifts the whole emissions curve down across the fleet. The curve invariably goes up and to the right when graphed against gross curb weight, regardless of emissions technology.

The targets were set with the assumption of a shrinking truck and SUV market. When gas was pushing above $4/ga and everyone was saying it could hit $8 there was even a time when that started to happen. But at $3/ga the consumer preference is strongly skewed toward larger vehicles, higher off the ground.

How much was it the assumption of a shrinking large vehicle market and how much was it a push for shrinkage?

Don't forget to take into account that fuel economy standards get more and more lax as GVW increases in a step-wise fashion (at least in the US). If you look at historical data, cars and trucks have been increasing in size and GVW at a rapid pace.

Car companies are quite literally incentivized to make larger vehicles (and pass that materials cost onto us) while lowering R&D costs for their powertrains, and as a result, killing the environment even faster.

Thanks, I wasn’t aware of the “footprint” based calculation in the 2012 CAFE standards.

https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/new-cafe-stand...

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