Hacker News Reader

> If you live in an apartment complex it's ridiculous to have a truck.

Many tradesmen that don't get company vehicles like to own pickups because they can haul stuff for work and their jobsite. Some of those people might even live in apartments. Imagine that!

The amount of arrogance on this site is ridiculous. Just because you might know how to hook up a NAND gate or write some javascript code doesn't mean you are qualified to decide what vehicle someone should own. Please just stop the judgemental posts.

I live in a rural area. I personally know plenty of people that own truck that shouldn’t, and plenty that actually use them.

Both sides are right. There’s a significant portion of the population that think trucks are “men’s vehicles,” even if they never actually use the bed. All of the dealerships around here (usually) have their front highway facing row all pickups and maybe one sports car.

> If you live in an apartment complex it's ridiculous to have a truck.

There's nothing "ridiculous" about people loving their toys. (People often own things not because they need them, but because they want them.)

Different argument but I can support that.

Point being people who live an apartment are far more likely to be buying a truck because they want it, and far less need for it for actual jobs & chores.

Also, plenty of people use pickups for work (plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc) and there's no reason they might not live in an apartment.

There's even a whole class of pickups for the people that find the occasional use but don't need the big ones, and want to fit easier in places designed for cars. The small pickup.

Toyota has pivoted marketing for the Tacoma as an adventure vehicle rather than a work vehicle. It is awesome for that. Small enough to get around in a city, but big enough to fit four sets of skiing/climbing/backpacking gear. You don't have all that crap in the cab getting snagged on stuff or falling into the foot wells. No skis knocking my elbows while driving. I've had mine packed up to the ceiling of the camper shell. I used to live out of it. Now I usually spend 10-15 nights per year in it rather than getting a motel for $100/night.

>Toyota has pivoted marketing for the Tacoma as an adventure vehicle rather than a work vehicle.

Toyota spends good money on market research. They know the difference between Tacoma buyers and Colorado buyers.

There's something worse than "ridiculous" for insisting on a toy that has so many drawbacks for the people around you while you're using it for your own enjoyment. It's selfish.

What are the drawbacks exactly?

They're basically custom-designed to kill pedestrians and bikers if you're not paying attention for one.

You're 5x more likely to kill a pedestrian in an urban area than a rural one, and 2x as likely to do so after 6:00pm.

The relative risk of being killed by a light truck compared to a car is only 1.45 (i.e. 45% greater) and is 0.96 for a heavy truck (in other words less likely than being killed by a car). Buses have a relative risk of 7.97.

So living in a city and driving at night is custom-designed to kill pedestrians and selfish to do so. Encouraging public transit is even worse.

Or you could just, you know, not turn this into a giant moral argument.

Just to clarify, he asked for a downside of trucks, I said they're far more likely to kill pedestrians and bikers than normal-sized cars in the event the driver hits someone (which is true). And the next logical step is "we should all live in the farmland and not leave the house at night"?

I think there's a difference between "One drawback is higher pedestrian fatality rates" and "They're basically custom-designed to kill pedestrians and bikers".

These things are not remotely comparable.

You're 5x more likely to kill someone in an urban area because more people live there (in fact, well above 5x more, so...)

> being killed by a light truck compared to a car is only 1.45 (i.e. 45% greater)

"Only"? "You're 50% more likely to die if a light truck hits you than a car, that's "only" a bit more!"

> and is 0.96 for a heavy truck ... buses have a relative risk of 7.97

People tend to bounce off of heavy trucks, for better or worse. Buses are 1) significantly different in design than most heavy trucks, and 2) for obvious reasons, operate in very heavy pedestrian environments.

Like bikers pretending they are in the tour de france amiright?

That would include most motor vehicles, due to brake dust, tire wear, and exhaust, since the alternative of using a bicycle is always available. If you need to travel long distances once in a while, you can always rent a car.

I hope you draw and quarter your friends who spend $50k+ on sedans/coupes/sports cars that have no reason for being other than to go faster than is legal and to burn extra gas.

It's a slippery slope to go down to say you know better than others what they should be allowed to own.

I drive an older "full size" SUV ('04 Ford Expedition), mainly because my parents' gave the thing to me when I graduated college. It's fairly easy to work on, so I kind of just keep the thing running. The fuel economy is very bad (like 17 mph highway, 11 in the city), but it's one of those situations where even if I bought a new car with double the fuel economy, it'd take me over a hundred thousand miles of driving to make up the cost difference in fuel savings alone.

It's also really nice to be in a situation where literally everything I own can be moved with it. Strapped my box spring / bed frame to the top of it once.

Yeah, but often the toys people want are ridiculous.

Depending on how you drive and what options you get (engine is the big one), the F150 may well get the same fuel mileage if you are barely getting 20mpg.

Though the real answer is a truck for times when you need a truck, and bus/bike for everything else. Too bad transit in the US is in general horrible.

I think if you are going to take an environmental stance all the city dwelling commuters (the ones who drive an hour+ each day) are the real offenders, Trucks or not.

I'm considering buying a Truck, but I work from home and drive only a few thousand miles each year or less.

>> If you live in an apartment complex it's ridiculous to have a truck.

Maybe better to say, if you live in an apartment complex, it can be difficult to keep a truck.

There are a lot of people in the trades (carpentry, construction, etc.) who can't afford to own a standalone house.

Have you considered renting a truck for a day or two around those events? I think the rate I’ve seen is like 20/day.

I have rented trucks and cars plenty.. it would be quite a bit of a hassle for a lot of these jobs though. The traveling back and forth to pick up the rental and then take it back would add significant time and require someone else to take me back and forth. $20/day would rent a truck like an F-150 plus extra costs for mileage. (not a big deal at all.)

It's not necessarily worth it with my Outback, which is itself a large car that city folks would sneer at.

But until this F-150 EV was introduced I was pretty much fully convinced I was buying a Tesla when my Outback needed to be replaced.

Spending $40-50k on a Model Y vs one of these F-150s is a whole different scenario, that's all.

Gas F-150 I'd feel like a jerk on my commute, EV F-150 I would not, I'd feel better than doing the same in my Subaru, and in many ways it would fit my use case better.

My Outback was < $30k and it's 8 years old. Putting dirty stuff in the back of it is not the same as putting dirty stuff in a brand new Tesla.

Agree. Bigger vehicles going EV quells a huge portion of my resistance from owning one. The safety tests of these for pedestrians being better would further the point for me. It’ll be interesting to see those tests.

Using a huge EV to commute one person to an office is still a waste of energy.

One thing I've noticed from doing WFH all this time during the pandemic is that I started noticing the inefficiencies of burning gasoline to move a one ton piece of metal to some store and do some minor thing like mail a package or buy some small items.

You can help that by shopping for an entire week at a time. I think some places will pick a package up from you too.

In general the first step to cutting emissions is electrifying everything that can be electrified. Whether moving lots of metal around in a vehicle is efficient regardless of energy source wreaks of the perfect becoming the enemy of the good - or in this case the perfect being the enemy of the critically needed change.

I think the first step to cutting emissions is cutting unnecessary energy use, regardless of the source of energy.

Try crunching the numbers: you'll see that it's not going to be feasible to replace all of the vehicles on the road with electric cars and trucks, while also electrifying everything else. We need to take a triage approach to energy use, strictly rationing the remaining fossil fuels.

Hah, I am in the exact same spot with my Outback (it's a 2010). These new EV trucks are very tempting, just waiting for the right one!

I live in an apartment and am about to move to a house, I wish I had a truck right about now.

The concept of “yard waste” that has to be exported in a vehicle should make you see a flaw in the system. Can you change your system to use trimmings on site or nearby?

There is not flaw in the system. Trees and large shrubs come down. Municipal compost sites have the space and equipment compost large amount of material that home owners can't deal with. The arrogance in this thread is unbelievable.

Its because environmentalism is quite literally a religion for a subset of users on this forum and they cannot believe that other people don't want to optimize their entire life around reducing their carbon footprint.

The attitude in this thread is even more ridiculous considering that this is the exact sort of product which could bring EVs main steam (so you would think environmentalists would love it), but of course this vehicle is unacceptable because you aren't forced to make a whole series of quality of life compromises to use it like you are with a bike, public transportation, or an impractically small car.

Religion requires penance, and there's no penance in a non-believer buying a quality product that they like based solely on its merit per value.

If someone's not buying their EV out of a sense of guilt (for the original sin that is exhaling CO2), then how are they supposed to exploit that guilt into other forms of behavioral modification?

People in the global south, who have a tiny fraction of the carbon footprint of those in the north, are the first to be devastated by the climate and ecological crises, which they're least responsible for.

If you're considering shopping for your next $40k monstrosity of a vehicle, try to take a broader perspective than your own short-term desires.

Instead of harassing the ancestor for not perfectly optimizing their use of resources (which has zero impact on the climate one way or the other) or harassing me for suggesting that an 80/20 solution to a problem is better than no solution, perhaps you should try to take a broader perspective and realize that most people are selfish: they aren't going to massively sacrifice their quality of life in order to help people in the global south that they don't have relationships with. Aligning incentives to help them do the right thing (e.g. by creating a vehicle with a form factor they can readily accept while still being an EV) is the smart way to go at the problem. Brow beating people for not being totally altruistic and demanding they make massive cultural changes is the dumb, ineffective way to tackle the problem, although it does allow the participants to feel morally superior as they fail to convert anyone else to their cause.

You can heat and cook with wood. If so much tree material is falling on your property every year, and you're carting it elsewhere, you're just throwing away a useful resource.

this is a weak argument on several levels. if you need to move things five times a year, rent a pickup truck. Unless you're moving things on the regular, there's no point owning a very inefficient and heavy vehicle.

You can't do that. You can rent a truck no problem, but a truck that you can actually use as a truck cannot be rented. They carefully check to ensure you didn't scratch any paint, and that means no hauling.

There are work a rounds, but they are limited (home depot will rent a truck but the fine print is only to go from home depot to your house, no other trips). If you have a CDL you can rent a commercial truck that lets you work it. However for general purpose I need a truck to be a truck the average person can't rent.

You can rent from U-haul and use it as an actual work truck no problem.

I damaged a U-haul once and it was fine, it was all covered.

We rented a U-haul this year and hauled about 2000lbs of stuff to the dump with it in one trip.

Home Depot et al also rent pickup trucks by the hour (something like $20) and they're quite capable and nobody checks the paint.

As long as you bring it back and it's not on fire they're unlikely to care.

You can even optimize by buying your own trailer so you can load and unload at your convenience, and only rent the truck to move the trailer - and trailers (even enclosed ones or dump ones) are significantly cheaper than trucks, and really only need tires as maintenance.

I don’t know about your state, but here in WA you can rent a “commercial” big box truck from UHaul, Penske and others with no CDL. I rented a 26 feet box truck for my move and drove it around town just fine. They do care about damage, but they don’t consider scratches to be damage.

This is just wrong. Besides Home Depot, who aren't going to literally sic the gestapo on you if you use it to run a 2nd errand, there are plenty of companies that rent beater trucks for hauling anything you like.

your comment is flat out wrong. Lots of places will let you rent a pickup truck and use it for work - that is literally the point of a pick up truck.

Who said anything about 5 times a year?

And most people on this site are driving ICE cars and SUVs which are much less efficient than an F-150 EV and are themselves very oversized.

There's a lot of things you can move with a car that are simply easier and less hassle with a truck.

And I say this as someone who owns a fleet of station wagons.

George Bush was giving everyone $10k back on new fullsized pickup trucks. Why not get one was my question at the time.

$10k and getting a brand new truck every tax year has to be one of the greatest and most successful "carrot" tax incentives ever conceived of by a government office.

This is also an argument against most people owning a car larger than a subcompact like the Honda Fit.