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Comment by namdnay | Hacker News Reader

I guess the fact that's it's electric is a good step. But it seems insane to me that we don't do more to discourage massive consumption of what should be utility vehicles. I'm willing to be 80% of people buying an f150 or similar never have been and never will be building contractors or lumberjacks.

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I take it you've never had to:

1. Take a bunch of trash/old furniture/whatever to the dump

2. Move furniture

3. Pick up materials for a home renovation like 16 foot long baseboards, drywall, a few dozen boxes of laminate flooring, etc. (no need to be a professional construction contractor here)

4. Tow a camping trailer

5. Much, much more

I'm literally using my truck tonight to pick up ~500 square feet of flooring material, which is saving me ~$300 in shipping costs. The truck itself only cost me $3,700 to begin with, and between this and several other home improvement projects it has saved me ~$2,000 in shipping/moving/other costs so far in just the two years I've owned it. And I'll be saving a bundle in shipping costs on new kitchen cabinets in a few months as well. That's before you get into the convenience factor of not having to rent/borrow a truck anytime you need to move something big.

of course I have for (1-3), as have nearly all home owners across the world.. and honestly for this type of stuff a dedicated light dump truck is way more useful (especially for emptying massive quantities of building or garden debris at the tip). and that's what? 100 dollars a day? how many days a year are you really going to need to do that? 3-4 ?

> saving a bundle in shipping costs on new kitchen cabinets

Both Lowes and Home Depot offer free delivery for orders over $45. I've also done several home improvement projects, and never needed to pay a dime in shipping. Are you buying directly from the manufacturer or something I'm missing here?

I'm buying from a custom builder nearby who charges for delivery

Unfortunately compact pickups aren’t really a thing any more.

As a homeowner and a parent this would be a great vehicle for me — having the utility of a truck bed.

Not everyone that owns a home does work on it themselves but trucks are very useful. Today my only options are rent a truck or put a trailer hitch on my van and pull a trailer when I need to haul stuff. That’s so much more hassle.

Check out the Hyundai Santa Cruz. Looks like they took the Honda Ridgeline concept and down-sized it a bit.

I currently own a Ridgeline - it's not quite compact, but rides better than a Taco or Ranger and the trunk under the bed is useful.

If the Hyundai existed earlier this year, I'd probably own it instead.

This is a regulatory consequence, no?

My understanding was that classification meant there was a disincentive for manufacturers to build smaller trucks (fuel efficiency and/or emissions?).

Honestly, I'm not handy at all and I've only owned my home for a couple of years, but the desire for something with a truck bed grows more every summer, it's just so damn useful to be able to do something as simple as pick up a lawn mower or a ladder or not worry about the size of the flat pack we're getting from Ikea.

I do quite a bit of DIY and I have a skoda octavia combi (which would be considered small in the US). honestly the only thing i have difficulty with is drywall panels, i have to tie them to the roof bars.

obviously a truck would be much easier, but if I'm redoing a house I'll need to rent a light dump truck anyway for at least 1-2 days just to get all the old junk out, so I do the big material buy at the same time

Ford ranger is back Chevy Colorado and gm canyon Tacoma ...

Only in name.

2003 ranger:

188-203″ L x 69″ W x 65-68″ H

2021 ranger:

211″ L x 78″ W x 71-72″ H

2003 F150

207-244″ L x 79-80″ W x 71-77″ H

I've never been one of those things, but they're still useful. I had an F150 for a while that I only used to transport things like mulch or helping friends move or moving myself.

I still have an old Ranger that I use for those purposes today.

It seems insane to assume you can be the judge of what's "useful" or "utility".

A truck is great to have for all kinds of reasons. I think the issue is that a combination of automaker marketing and various regulatory and tax incentves/loopholes drive people to purchase more trucks than they otherwise would.

Specifically, the Section 179 deductions available on vehicles that weight in excess of 6000lbs. A business doesn't need to prove need to make use of the tax advantage. This encourages real estate agents, sales people, etc to buy new large SUVs instead of leasing or buying second hand sedans that would otherwise be suitable (Mercedes E-Class, etc). And contractors that could use smaller vehicles (Transit Connect, Ranger) to buy F-150s or large vans.

It's basically a massive kick-back to Ford and Chevy.

I think you're being a bit unfair. We all agree that they're useful, but surely in a world win which we need to

a) reduce road and parking space in order to encourage better forms of transportation ,

b) reduce our consumption of natural resources

,maybe we need to discourage individual ownership of 3000kg utility vehicles?

In the US, discouraging individual ownership of vehicles is probably not going to succeed. I don't want to give up my car and I suspect that electric vehicles and self driving vehicles (when they get here) are going to drive the cost of trips way, way down which will increase the number of trips by a similar amount. The number of vehicles on the road is going to increase.

Because of the increased demand on raods, reducing road space probably won't happen. When cars can get to and from parking spaces by themselves, parking space can move into central towers or edge lots, but the number of spaces is probably going to increase, not decrease.

We all want better forms of transportation, but there's a lot of disagreement about what's better.

> I think you're being a bit unfair. We all agree that they're useful, but surely in a world win which we need to

>a) reduce road and parking space in order to encourage better forms of transportation ,

I don't see that happening. SUV's and pickups are so popular in the US because most cities are more similar to Houston and LA than NYC or Chicago.

We probably just need fewer people.

Nice anecdote. Here, I'll add mine:

My wife at the time bought an SUV, a Toyota Highlander. She never went off road, we didn't have any children, she never hauled anything. 90% of her driving was to and from work on paved roads, a job that could have been accomplished with a Honda Civic.

Now let's play another fun game: how many truck and SUV owners do you think are like you, and how many do you think are like my ex-wife?

F150s are amazing vehicles. It seats six with an extended cab, haul tons & tons of crap in the bed, gets roughly the same fuel economy as a minivan, it can tow pretty much anything and It will also hold its value insanely well.

Compared with, say, a Honda Odyssey, the F150 is a better family vehicle in many cases. The only reason I can think of to go with the Odyssey (which is another vehicle I love) is vehicle footprint and long-term reliability.

There's a reason the F150 sells so many units in the USA: it's the ultimate vehicle, and it comes with almost no drawbacks.

> 80% of people buying an f150 or similar never have been and never will be building contractors or lumberjacks

Yeah, I feel this. I used to have a big work truck, but it was for work. Everyone has a truck in my hometown (seemingly). Last week I saw a big F-250 super duty pull up and the dude that got out was in scrubs (a nurse).

Friends of mine have considered the super duty’s for towing, but now they’re interested in the lightning for the same reasons.

I thought it was due to fuel standard requirements and loopholes between autos and light trucks like the F-150.

Cars and mid size SUVs all seem to be converging on the same shape with minor differences where as trucks still have some individuality.

So I went to check this supposition out and whew, I’m confused.

CAFE standards, harmonic means, compliance flexibility, offset credits are all more than I can wrap my head around from my smartphone.

Not to mention trying to read the actual CAFE regulation is very convoluted.

Anyways, I thought I had an answer for you but all I’ve got is a rabbit hole in crawling out of.

https://reason.org/e-brief/cafe-standards-in-plain-english/

I liked this line in that article:

"For example, Ford sells both the Focus, a mid-size car that gets 31 mpg on highways, and the F-150, a midsize truck that gets 25 mpg on highways."

I mean, just think about how similar those numbers are given the vehicles. Pretty wild.

The same could be said of sports cars - most people don't race them or push them anywhere near their potential.

But selling cars has always been the business of selling a story as much as it has been about selling a transportation technology. This goes back to the earliest days when cars were hulking machines owned by the uber-wealthy.

> or lumberjacks.

Hah, I bet a puny pickup truck isn't very useful for lumberjacks' actual work. I think they use giant tree felling machines and specialized trucks instead. Pickups seem more like small support vehicles for them.

Loggers use pickups to haul fuel to their heavy equipment, and to commute on sometimes quite rough logging roads and muddy log sort yards

The proportion of pickup trucks (especially the light duty ones) that are purchased as "lifestyle" products rather than for utility use is probably significantly higher than 80%, if that were measured honestly.

Oh well, there's a lot of people doing illogical things out there.

Folks who sit in their Civic every day for a couple of hours because they need to live here and work there.

Folks who own Subarus who rarely, if ever, make use of the AWD.

Folks who never ever use the back seat of their cars and might as well have a car that's 3 feet shorter.

Folks who own cars that can go over 70 mph.

you do you.

Yeah, +1 this. I mean, if you're genuinely in the country pulling logs, or even just in the US, then fine. People drive around my tiny country town in England in these tanks. I just find it obnoxious. It's wasteful and it's intimidating for others on the road. And it starts an arms race, because now being in a small car you can't see past other drivers and you feel more vulnerable.

Saddest emblem of modern Eurocapitalism that I know: the BMW "Mini". It's a vast, charmless travesty of the original.

I'd love to audit your life and make sure you also aren't using any more resources than are absolutely necessary.

It's changed, and recently. In the last 10-20 years the utility of pickups has changed substantially, as well as the fortunes of the people who used them in their jobs. Construction, lumber, and similar are familiar as part of the market of an industry that I'm working with. Until 10-20 years ago, you could hop into a new pickup's bed, or reach the bed floor over the rails. New pickup beds come with folding ladders built in, because they're so high off of the ground it's a requirement for many owners.

New pickups do still get used for construction - but only by the owners and some management can afford a new pickup. New pickups on construction sites pull trailers to put cargo at a human accessible height.

Pickups in lumber jobs are also a luxury. Any vehicle driven to lumber sites will effectively be destroyed, they get bent, bashed, and permanently embedded with filth. The rank and file drive what they can afford and don't mind destroying due to the nature of the job, or they ride in with the rest of a crew, or more and more often they don't drive to a site because they're forced labor rented from prisons.

People who need pickups for everyday, practical uses are using vans, trailers, or buying older pickups. 20 year old pickups are so much more practical than new that certain models in excellent shape will sell for more now than they did when new. New pickups and their predecessors are entirely different vehicles.

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