Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

ethbro

> A well compensated white collar professional will get judged hard for driving a pickup in some social circles

Is this a fact in (I'm assuming) NorCal?

I'm in one of the parts of the country where everyone drives pickups, so it kind of boggles my mind.

Does no one tow or haul things there?

View on HN

Not really.

I'm a well-compensated white collar professional in the bay area. I drive a 23yo bigass diesel pickup that I use for offroading, towing, hauling, camping, etc.

I don't get judged hard at all. Most folks thing it's quirky. I'd say I get judged more positively than not.

In NorCal outside of the bay area there are plenty of pickup trucks and the culture that goes with that.

I live in the same part of the country, and while everyone has a truck, I'd say about 1 out of 5 owners actually use them for utility purposes.

The rest are pristine showroom objects that have never even touched a gravel road, let alone dirt.

> The rest are pristine showroom objects that have never even touched a gravel road, let alone dirt.

And that haul one single person to the office and back every day at 12 MPG. Hooray.

My 2016 f150 gets 12.7 l/100km highway, closer to 27 mpg.

edit: woops 12.7 l/100km is actually 18.5 mpg. All these years I thought 10l/100km was 30 mpg! must have done the conversion wrong once and been basing my whole life off it ever since. It's great to find out something you thought was true is not sometimes.

That's OK. My 2019 Ridgeline gets 30 MPG highway, about 20 MPG city. That's an advantage of living in the US -- our gas mileage formula is more intuitive.

I don't see how you can claim that MPG is objectively "more intuitive" than L/100km....

I need x-much gas to go 100 km... Seems pretty intuitive to me.

Don't forget his lunch box! That thing can get heavy!

You don't need to own a pickup truck just because you need to haul or tow things three of five times per year. You can own a more economical car and rent a pickup if / when you need it.

fwiw I live in a place where everyone owns a pickup (I use mine to plow snow, pull a gravel dump trailer, and to collect large items from Costco) but I never hear of anyone renting a pickup. I'm sure it's possible somehow but I doubt you can just roll into Hertz and sign out an F-250..

Not sure about Hertz, but everytime I go to Home Depot I see the F250s for rent in the parking lot.

https://www.homedepot.com/tool-truck-rental/load-n-go-truck-...

U-Haul and HomeDepot is where I’d go to rent one.

If I had to rent a pickup truck on short notice, I'd hit up U-Haul, who has a bunch of them.

Last time I had to leave my car in the body shop after it was hit, my insurance got me a rental car from Enterprise. The only rentals available at the time were F-250s, so I drove a pickup truck to work and back for a week.

Why do you think that pick up trucks are unrentable?

At the Hertz down the street from work I can rent a cherry-picker or a forklift if I want (definitely not an airport Hertz). Pretty sure a pickup wouldn’t be asking too much. I’ll check next time I walk by. Me, I just rent my trucks from Home Depot.

I rent a pickup from Uhaul when I need one.

I can jam quite a lot of lumber in/on my Mazda Protege though, so it’s rare I need an actual truck.

I'm a big fan of sticking things on the roofs of station wagons. A lot of things (sheet material and long things) are easier to haul this way than in a truck bed or minivan.

That said, having more vehicle than you need is definitely a means of social signalling and if you're regularly shoving 5 people in your 5-seat compact or regularly hauling large things on the roof of your car or regularly burying your AWD mom-mobile in the mud you will give off lower class vibes so I understand why a lot of people buy more vehicle than they strictly need.

You can rent a 26' F-650 (6.8L V10) from any Uhaul with stock. They require ~$50 on a credit card and a driver's license (standard, not CDL).

It's "technically" 1 lb shy of the GVWR requiring a CDL.

It has enough power to sheer off a 3/4" utility pole climbing spike, in reverse, with a slight tap of the gas. Don't ask me how I know.

Hmm. Around here I can easily rent telehandlers and excavators but not pickups. Perhaps because everyone already has at least one pickup?

You can actually. Friends of mine rented one for a group camping trip a couple years back. Worked pretty well. A quick google search shows that Enterprise and Avis will both rent you one.

> I'm sure it's possible somehow but I doubt you can just roll into Hertz and sign out an F-250.

I don't know about an F-250, but the last time I rented a car it was a walk-in at an Enterprise in Harrisburg, PA and I walked out with a Nissan pickup 30-ish minutes later.

Also, your average Home Depot or U-Haul typically has pickups for rent, specifically for this use case.

Norcal? The occasional toy hauler or boat. But no. For the most part they don't. Not that many trucks around tech buildings either.

Other parts of CA you'll get a lot of campers, boats, dirt bikes, mountain bikes... so yeah.

I'm a bay area pickup owner. Maybe everyone is judging me behind my back, but no one has ever said anything even slightly negative to my face.

Nah.

If anything I get asked if I'm a contractor.

I live in Norcal and had a little Toyota pickup. I had more than one lady from the city be very impressed "oooh a truck, its so manly!". Where Im from a little Tacoma truck is not really a truck. Truck culture is not really a city thing out here.

I doubt it was the size of the truck that impressed, but rather how you handled it. ;)

There are a few perks to being country in the city.

I've always refused to own a truck due to the "image" that people often have of pickup truck owners (which are everywhere here). I'd drive this.

Come now. Most of the people who drive pickups rarely if ever use them to tow or haul things. They drive pickups because driving anything else means you're gay, or communist, or smoke marijuana.

I know plenty of pot smoking gays that drive pickup trucks. Not sure of they're communist, but likely they have a socialist bent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com