Inflation is crushing rural America and may even drive people to the cities
npr.org
npr.org
I'm half joking here, but having a massive lifted vehicle has become a part of masculine identity in the country at a really bad time, and these people could size down just a little to even a Jeep and do better on fuel bills. I'm not even suggesting to ditch the truck! Just save it for the weekends and the mudding trips.
It decides on its own, you can't do it manually.
It gets 22-23mpg on the (flat) highway.
(You’ve probably seen the memes re Wranglers being less aerodynamic than cows and lobsters. They are wheeled boxes, horrible for wind resistance. Add lift, armour, and a few other things, and mileage goes from bad to terrible.)
The noise OP mentioned is a real problem in some communities.
America badly needs a return to the much lighter S-10 and Ranger of the past, with a 4-banger and a small back seat. These behemoths with V8s are not necessary for most people, and neither is the level of temporary luxury they convey. Let's face it: after a couple years your shiny new truck is just as noteworthy as every other truck on the road, which is to say, most people don't care about it / aren't impressed by it anyway.
That’s a strange way of saying large vehicles are intended to do more work. I haven’t seen a Toyota Prius yet that can practically trailer a load of crops to market or carry construction equipment.
It’s also strange to me someone would mention tire particulate pollution in a grand comparison. The EV poster children wear through tires quicker than their comparable gasoline counterparts—softer tire compounds (road noise reduction) and weight.
> more likely and more lethal when they happen
Those also pay more for insurance.
> That’s a strange way of saying large vehicles are intended to do more work. I haven’t seen a Toyota Prius yet that can practically trailer a load of crops to market or carry construction equipment.
More work you say? Great! It's odd that all the big lifted trucks I see are never hauling anything. It's almost like most of the people who drive them just like having a big truck and don't have any actual need for it.
Blame your state DOT. Those trucks pay much more in taxes based upon their gross weight rating when they tow/haul. Costs of doing business.
> all the big lifted trucks I see
Nobody lifts a truck conspicuously to do more work, this somewhat compromises the suspension’s ability to handle load. A lot more people would know this if they knew anything, other than some anecdotes, about the topic they want to regulate.
This seems very confused: nobody in this thread is talking about people who are actually hauling heavy loads. It’s about the people who buy a huge truck and use it as their daily driver but never use the full bed capacity except going to Costco/Walmart.
That can be justified if you actually need to do something which a smaller vehicle cannot do - nobody expects a cattle rancher to pull a trailer behind a Prius! - but the vast majority of the larger vehicles Americans are buying will never be used for something which requires that extra capacity. The extra bling added to justify those price tags makes them worse for the ostensible reasons people buy them, too - who’s going off-roading with premium rims and delicate flair?
This is the classic externality problem: people are buying massive trucks and SUVs for emotional support reasons which would be an amusing personality trait except that they’ve reversed a half century of road safety improvements and the pollution they generate affects billions of people other than the buyers.
> It’s also strange to me someone would mention tire particulate pollution in a grand comparison. The EV poster children wear through tires quicker than their comparable gasoline counterparts—softer tire compounds (road noise reduction) and weight.
This similarly is arguing against a different point: my statement was simple fact - bigger vehicles pollute more, no matter whether that’s a large EV full of batteries or an oversized truck.
This is a famous drawback to EVs, along with the CO2 used to create them and the mining for battery components, and one reason why both environmentalists and urbanists are careful to say that the future should be more transit, bikes/scooters/etc., and walking because the model of everyone driving themselves everywhere in a private vehicle is inherently unsustainable. EVs solve the downsides of cars the same way that methadone solves opiate addiction.
> > more likely and more lethal when they happen > Those also pay more for insurance.
Again, this isn’t the point. Insurance can’t resurrect a dead person and it pays nowhere near the cost of lifetime impacts for people who are seriously injured. If they’re lucky, victims will get enough to pay for their immediate medical bills - the rest, often majority, of the cost is fobbed off to society just like all of the other negative externalities of driving.
I've got no problem with the landscapers and plumbers and electricians and farmers and so on getting a truck to support their work. They're paying the price, and they're relying on what the trucks can do for them.
I've got a problem with the 90% use case in my area, which is unsafe drivers driving unsafe vehicles unsafely, apparently for the image.
So what are pickup truck used that cannot be done by a sprinter?
Between the two designs, I'd rather have a pickup. With a flatbed, I'd worry about things rolling/blowing off.
The fuel consumption is a separate issue; there are pickups that get good mileage. But that was (until recently) less of a concern in America because we had lower gas prices (and for the most part, the people who buy pickups don't worry about climate change).
1: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=sprinter+with+flatbed&iax=i...
It is very useful when you destroy a wall, you can haul the brick to the junkyard, or if you bring sand in bulk for building a wall.
Either way, HN has a serious delusion about rural life and while it is ok to make observations, HN tends to infuse those opinions with condescension and prejudice.
It happens every time we have a discussion about trucks.
Maybe you’re feeling defensive and are trying to ignore a well-documented change in buying habits. It’s not a secret that people are buying high-margin vanity trucks at unprecedented numbers - there’s even something of a spike in used sales for the kind of smaller pickup trucks which used to be ubiquitous because they’re cheaper to operate and fit in crowded spaces. I’m thinking of the Datsun my grandparents used for their camper which got close to 30mpg on the highway and carried at least as much cargo as I see on easily 75% of the 15mpg vanity trucks.
Did you not have people constantly getting ragged on in high school for “being a pussy” if you didn’t drive a pickup?
Growing up, my Dad couldn’t have been more proud of his F-150, not because of whatever testosterone fuelled fantasy you’re talking about, but because it meant we could pull city people out of the ditch when they came down our closed road in the wintertime. He never accepted any money from them either, but it made his day whenever someone knocked on our door and he got to bundle up and go out in the snow to help them out.
Just a reminder that there are millions of very real rural Americans out there who are nothing like the stereotype you described but would still gladly go out of their way to help you, despite your seemingly low opinion of them.
>"Some people are contemplating moving closer to a city, moving to the suburbs, or moving to a small community 45 minutes from a city. So yeah, it will probably, if it continues, accelerate rural depopulation in parts of the Midwest and Great Plains."
Once again, the heart of the issue is the American commute.
This is kind of interesting: at the same time as white collar workers from the city are fleeing out towards the suburbs, you have blue collar workers feeling pressure to move towards the city.
Two years ago no one was driving anywhere and the oil market was in a death spiral.
I read some of the other work put out by the author, Ben Abrams, as well as some of the work espoused by the expert referenced in the article, professor Dave Peters. Abrams appears to be a cookie cutter left leaning journalist that doesn't appear to have spent much time in rural America. Professor Peters is focused on "rural change".
I don't think either of these people really understand rural America and this feels like signaling rather than reporting.