When I was in US I drove to nearest big box store, loaded my pickup and drove to my place. Easy, unfortunately no other country I've found such convenience and this makes me wanna go back to US.
For the rare occasions when that wouldn't be feasible, they'll deliver for a moderate charge. It would make no sense to pay all the costs of keeping an extra vehicle (or a much larger one than I generally need) just to avoid a couple of deliveries per year.
People who need it barely once or twice a year for home take an estate car, rent one for a taxi, borrow a trailer off a friend, or get the store to deliver - because owning your own van or pickup just for that reason would be considered completely insane.
In the UK we have the Ford Transit van and people that can do things for you. You get stuff delivered or collected. The guy with the Transit van gets a high level of utilisation out of it. People can therefore have normal cars and SUVs. Or a bicycle.
We don't have those man size trucks with dual tyres in the UK and certainly not at US prices. You can buy Ranger and Hilux size trucks and those are a bit too large for UK roads. In the US these would be toys, not man size at all.
In the UK you can play a game watching cars and counting how many have more than one person in them. In the US you can count how many trucks are hauling stuff. They ain't.
OTOH, in 41 years I had exactly 0 times needed large MDF boards or wood planks or steel pipes...
You do this like once every 10 years? I wouldn't choose a car on this.
A couple of years ago I did maintenance to my garden. I ordered planks and bags of cement from Amazon for next day delivery because I couldn't even be bothered to order from a specialist store.
But if I wanted to, there's a store with bulk construction supplies literally at the bottom of my road, and a more retail oriented one 20 minutes away.
But I don't even have a drivers license. Never felt worth the time.
[looks at personally-owned half-acre of forest] [looks at car]
I own a car so I CAN own & preserve substantial undeveloped natural land. You get more city space by me not being there at all.
Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem.
Unfortunately, highways require a certain minimum vehicle size. The best you could possibly do is have a short coupe with 2 seats. It wouldn't significantly influence the size of the vehicle but waste more resources for the few times where you need a 3-4 person vehicle. The savings to be had are way too slim. However, driving a pick up truck for your commute is absolutely a waste of resources because there are smaller and more aerodynamic cars that are commute worthy.
>Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem.
It's the only solution. Building a von Neuman architecture style city is absolutely stupid for society since the world is inherently parallel. There is no logical reason to have massive central work place districts. Each office building is a cpu core and each residential building is a memory chip in its own right. We don't need to put all the cpu cores next to each other and put the memory somewhere else. A distributed development pattern is significantly more efficient since data and computation are next to each other.