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Look, if people made rational decisions all the time, economics would be a real predictive science.

Based on utility, most minivans beat all SUVs in tasks not involving going off-road. Minivans definitely beat pickup trucks for moving people, and often for moving stuff -- but not always.

Purchasing a vehicle in the USA is only partially based on function, for most people. Price and culture figure in a lot more.

Depends on the "SUV" you're referring to. Full size SUVs like the Suburban can tow heavy loads, have lots more storage capacity, have actual 4wd (snow), and generally have a powertrain that's going to outlast a minivan.

The minivan has the space but only if you plan ahead and allocate the space to hauling. I've underplanned trips in my minivan for large/bulky items (e.g. beverage fridge, ikea bookshelf) several times and had to do impromptu adjustments of the seats/positions to get items in. It doesn't help that I have a bunch of kids car seats to deal with when converting to "hauling mode".

Much less futzing w/ the truck I'm sure.

The advantage of a truck is you can carry more, or taller things, and they don't get the inside of your vehicle dirty. imagine you just mowed a wet, muddy lawn, do you want the mower in the back of your minivan, or in the bed of truck? Also, many tall things that you might haul in the back of truck can't simply be reposition into a minivan (tall and long or tall and many).

Ah yes, that's a good point. Other than tall or dirty objects, is there any reason to get a truck? Genuinely curious, because at some point I'll have kids and wonder what the trade-off is between minivan (more people) and truck (more hauling) is with an electric vehicle.

For a family, a minivan is very practical. Not only for your one, two, or more kids, who will easily be accommodated in a 7-seater or 8-seater (if you add the optional middle seat in row 2), but when taking their friends along to the park etc.

My minivan is a Chrysler with the stow'n'go fold-down seats; in about 5 minutes I can fold all the passenger seats down into the floor and have 8' x 4' cargo space, which is more than most pickup beds.

Pickups have the advantage of height, as pointed out previously; if you need to move a refrigerator or a Harley, probably a pickup is better. Also, pickups can tow trailers & RV's.

But for taking my family on holiday, or when transporting a sound system, musical instruments, and 2 other musicians all in one vehicle, the minivan works best for me :)

One problem here though is the combo of family holiday and moving lots of objects. When you need all the mentioned cargo space, the van becomes a two-seater. A crew cab truck can move 5 adults comfortably as well as a full load in the bed. Huge advantage for camping. I know you can use roof storage on a van, but i'd argue its more of a hassle, with less capacity, and more dangerous as the vehicle is much more top heavy.

I like vans and own a van. However, in addition to the bed being outdoors, lined with a shell and having no roof, truck suspension can also receive heavier loads without risk of damage. They also have a higher clearance, which has some utility off of roads as well as allowing the truck to settle with a heavy load without affecting its safe path or speed as much.

It’s a good thing for consumers that the two vehicle types have so much overlap in utility.

There's a certain lifestyle aspect where my high school friend dropped a pulled junkyard engine in the bed of his truck and shoved it into place and strapped it down and he doesn't care about the interior of his truck bed, its "outdoors" for hauling "outdoors" rated objects.

Technically my wife's van could carry that engine very easily but the process would almost certainly destroy the carpet and leather seats and maybe some windows and the bumper cover etc.

My buddy had hoists on each end of the trip to insert and remove the junkyard engine. This is widely understood in industry and construction in general and using a crane with a pickup truck is no big deal. With a van I guess you could use a forklift and pray the inevitable damage to the interior doesn't turn the vehicle into an instant insurance writeoff, but ...

Imagine for example how easy it would be to wipe out the stereo speakers or the wiring for the GPS in the back of a van vs a seemingly indestructible truck bed. The older the truck the tougher they were built and the more likely the owner doesn't care if its beat up, so you can toss bricks into trucks and similar behavior that would not be tolerated with a van.

I will say the best way to haul 1000+ pounds of yard landscape rock is to pay home depot $59.99 to have truck delivery with a forklift drop the pallet within inches of where I asked. I could have bought a $75K pickup truck and loaded and unloaded all that rock myself by hand, but sixty bucks sounds like a better deal LOL. If I had a full time landscaper job the numbers would be different...

Yeah I have a U-Haul nearby and can rent a bench seat pickup with an 8 foot bed for <$100 to do what I need to do around town. I have to keep this in mind when looking at trucks and trying to justify the utility aspect. $50K is a lot to pay for convenience and I don’t regularly tow anything…

Speaking from the perspective of having generally owned older trucks (currently a '97 Dodge Ram 1500, previously an '84 Ford F350) - conventionally built, body-on-frame pickups are easier to repair and maintain. Most minivans are monocoque, whereas full-size pickup trucks have enough space between the internals to make DIY repairs straightforward. On my 84 F350, I could fit my head between the tire and the wheel well to bleed the brakes easily; on my current '97 Ram, you can replace body panels using a socket wrench.

EVs may tilt the equation, but one thing Big Three US automakers have absolutely perfected for their trucks over the last 40 years is maintainability. Go on autotrader.com, search "Ford F-150" or "Dodge Ram 1500" and sort mileage high to low - can a 20 year old minivan travel roughly the same distance as the moon and back?

source: https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtm...

Beyond the practical reasons re irregularly hauling something to the dump or picking something up for a Reno, two reasons we got a truck that don’t seem mentioned here are for (a) visibility on the road (it is just nicer IMO to be up high) and (b) my wife has long legs and often sits between our kids in the backseat on long drives and it has as much legroom as a Bentley.

Ford is making an E-Transit: https://www.ford.com/commercial-trucks/e-transit/2022/

The initial models have a far smaller packs than the F150, however, given that most of these will be for business use locally, not distance hauling. If Ford were to make a model of the transit with a large pack, you'd have the much larger bed space along with towing. This would likely be a hit with the van-life community.

> why a minivan couldn't tow like a truck

Length. The size of trailer you can pull behind a tow vehicle is very dependent on the stability of the tow vehicle, and a lot of that comes down to wheelbase. As long as people want to tow 30+ foot long RVs, they will have to have tow vehicles the size of HD pickups.

If you are hauling concrete or mortar mix, you wouldn’t want the dust getting into the cabin. You can of course get vans that partition the passenger space away, but then that would make it impractical as a family car.

Minivans are not “cool.”

It pains me. They are cool. Anyone who thinks they aren’t needs to test drive a Chrysler Pacifica with powered stow-and-go seats.

I am hoping that the E-transit is a sleeper hit and I can someday pick it up in a nice passenger configuration.

The Pacifica is nearly as good as a pickup truck with stow-and-go. I was sad when I realized the hybrid version lacks that feature because of the batteries being in the floor.

Trucks have the ability to use fifth-wheel couplings. They also have higher ground clearance.

I suspect the first is rarely used. The second is paraded as a feature, for reasons which escape me.

I love my minivan for its versatility but it can't haul gravel, or dirt, or bark dust, or sand, or manure...

This is the big one for my wife and I. We've been using an old Buick Rendezvous (somewhere between a van and SUV) with the back seats removed as our "truck" for a while now and while you can actually load quite a bit of mulch in the back, you have to load it all by hand which is pretty awful.

Ground clearance is another issue in a lot of places. Our Rendezvous is higher than most minivans, but I've still scraped the bottom before, and have had to turn back from a water crossing on a dirt road.

Generally my experience has been that the Rendezvous can do most of the same things my old Ranger did, but not as easily and with a lot more anxiety about breaking things. Ohh and come to think of it, it actually gets worse gas mileage.