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Comment by lutorm | Hacker News Reader

I, too, am a relatively handy homeowner and father, and we are finally upgrading our Prius to a ...minivan!

The only thing I've come up with that we wouldn't be able to do with the minivan but with a truck would be fitting a refrigerator standing up. The load floor in a minivan is also a lot lower, making it much easier to load and unload stuff. Not to mention that you can comfortably haul people, too, which is most of the use.

Which problem is it that you have to own a truck for?

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I own a minivan, too, as it's the only vehicle that the entire family will fit inside.

Like the pickup truck, our minivan is an extremely versatile vehicle, but there's just no way I'm going to put loose gravel, wet bags of mulch, or trash bound for the landfill in the back of it. Furthermore, I sometimes need to tow a trailer, and minivans simply aren't built for this.

That's what trailers are for. Minivans can absolutely handle trailers even if manufacturers claim they can't. Don't go hard on the gas, keep transmission temperatures down, have sufficient braking capacity. You can easily tell when trailer is overloaded if you have any reasoning skills whatsoever. The most important feature for trailers is trailer brakes, an easily retrofitted feature.

It is extremely easy to go over the tow and payload ratings for any minivan sold in the US market (and that's without getting into why vehicles with transverse engines make poor tow vehicles). Towing at or beyond design limits is more irresponsible than owning a pickup truck IMO.

I'm definitely planning to put that stuff in the van (but obviously not uncontained.) Doesn't a good floor liner solve most concerns in that area?

In the back of my truck, I routinely have:

  Gas cans
  Used oil containers
  Lawn and tree equipment
  Gravel
  Sand
  Soil
  Mulch
  Trash/refuse/recycling
  Mountain bikes

While a floor liner would certainly help, all that stuff is still going to destroy the inside of a family vehicle pretty quickly. And taking precautions to prevent that from happening means being extremely diligent about cleanup, whereas I don't care one bit if the bed of my pickup truck is dirty.

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