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Comment by orthecreedence | Hacker News Reader

Weekly? No. But it has happened enough times (20+) in the last eight months to justify a vehicle that can do it, among all the other things the truck can do that my honda cannot. Also, depending on the weight of the loads you're hauling in your trailer (lumber is obviously fine), you could be putting a lot of people on or around the road in danger. The brakes on a WRX are not designed for towing.

I don't understand the weird fascination with people trying to convince others that they don't need a truck. Does it occur to you that I was aware that trailers existed before getting the truck and that their existence factored into the decision?

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Pure interest: would you mind listing the things you transported in more detail? Maybe not so much the raw materials but the end purpose.

I don’t live in rural US (neither rural nor US). Here in UK you see more 4x4s in the countryside, part fashion, part poorer roads - but there is definitely plenty of countryside perfectly well served by regular cars, and you do see a lot of them about. Few trucks meanwhile.

So my imagination can’t quite figure out the difference.

I think it's easy to underestimate just how large and undeveloped the majority of the USA is.

England has a population density of 275 people per square kilometer, 281 if you consider the entire UK. UK also has an agricultural area of about 23 million acres, at 70% of available land. That means that a huge majority of UK land is developed and actively used, and over an area of 23 million acres.

The US population density is 36 per square kilometer. That is about 1/8th the population density, which is already a huge difference. In addition, the total USA land used in agriculture is about 900 million acres, which is nearly 40x greater an area. So we are currently at 40x the agricultural land, at 1/8th the population density.

The kicker to this is that the US agricultural land use is only 44%. So not only do we have 1/8 population density, 40x the agriculture land mass, we also don't even break 50% of land use for agriculture purposes. This all combines to mean a few things.

1. People that have land in the USA tend to have a lot more land.

2. There tends to be large amounts of unused land all over the place with no development.

3. A lot of land is being developed for the first time, instead of redeveloped.

This doesn't directly answer your question as far as needing a trailer vs a truck, but it should give you an idea that the USA is much less developed and a lot more rugged than the countryside of a much older and more established and smaller land mass like the UK. Trucks make it a lot easier to handle all the unexpected situations that occur from having the land situation we have.

One other point I'll add at the end of this. The USA also has extremely different and varied climates compared to the mild oceanic climate of the UK. This means more of every type of weather and bigger extremes. This takes huge tolls on both the roads and how tame undeveloped land is. For instance, in the midwest, it is not uncommon for large semi trucks and pickup trucks with huge tires to be the only cars capable of driving on the highway as the highway is covered in a foot of snow and they're the only vehicles capable of driving in it.

Sure. A 3000LB (dry weight) travel trailer, a few larger deliveries where the driver didn't want to come to the house but instead wanted meet on a main artery, I mentioned the base rock (several days, multiple loads) to fill in a retaining wall, a decent number of loads of firewood (1 cord per load, generally) since we are primarily wood-stove heat in the winter, a lot of construction debris from renovations (not sure on the weight, but certainly more than a honda could pull on a tailer) and green debris from clearing the property (fire season, yay) sent to the dumps, etc. When building the retaining wall, I could have tamped the base rock down by renting a tamper and spending an afternoon...OR...drive the 4000lb truck back and forth over it for 15 minutes until it's completely packed in (the honda would have gotten stuck likely).

There have also been a number of mudslides in the neighborhood that block the only exit road in the past, and having a 4x4 vehicle would be the only manner of escape. Similarly, it's in the forest, so a when a tree falls across the road (and they do), freedom is only a truck, some straps, and a chainsaw away.

So how much of this could have been done with an SUV? Maybe 60%. And SUV and a trailer? 90%, and a lot more of a pain in the ass to deal with. So why get an SUV and a trailer when the workload specifically calls for regularly hauling oddly-shaped or bulk items? That's exactly what a truck is designed for. If I already had a vehicle capable of towing a heavy trailer, the truck would have made much less sense. But given the needs, another vehicle was warranted, and mid-size 90s 4x4 truck checked all the boxes.

Interesting, thanks! It seems the difference is indeed that rural US is a lot more rural than rural UK (England for sure).

Around here (semi-rural WI, US) it's not so much the terrain where you're going as what you need to haul. 4'x8' sheets of building materials are one that get me a lot; I recently had to cut a sheet of styrofoam in half in the parking lot of the home improvement store to get it to fit into my car. There's also pieces of equipment that won't fit in the trunk (boot), like lawn aerators, rototillers, sod cutters, and stump grinders. (They might fit in a van or CUV, but then you have to deal with gas fumes and dirtying/damaging the interior.) Dirt and compost could fit but would be a pain even with a tarp.

I see a lot of fashion trucks but most of them also get used for towing or hauling on the weekend, and a lot of that stuff wouldn't fit in a car and would be unsafe on a trailer. A lot of people around here also have motorboats that would be too big to safely pull with a car.

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