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Comment by TexanFeller | Hacker News Reader

I'm thrilled that they're finally looking at these issues. I would like to own a tiny pickup, like the old Tacomas, but the way the regulations are written prevents anyone from manufacturing something small and efficient, all trucks are behemoths now. I'd love to kill the trend of making everything an SUV as well. Bring back the more efficient sedans. Families going to soccer practice should have a station wagon or minivan, not a four wheel drive Suburban.

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Those little trucks with long beds are awesome. On a related note, people here in Hawaii have been importing Japanese kei trucks like crazy!

I would KILL for an entry level EV Ford Ranger for our farm. I was close to pulling the trigger on two Chang Li EV trucks, and just keeping one on the charger and hot swapping them if one ran out charge.

FORD RANGER! But the little tiny ford rangers. Or even a Bronco II.

I have a soft sport for the old Rangers, but they had some serious safety shortcomings and lack many of the factors that drive modern truck sales now, like large size, higher up, and a correspondingly smoother ride.

It's a work truck, and in the US modern trucks are luxury vehicles, effectively mid-to-large-sized SUVs with a flatbed. I worked in Australia for a while and their 'ute's were quite stripped down in comparison, save for a few models (like the new Ranger, which IIRC was a model first developed for the Australian market).

I seem to remember the Ranger being absolutely horrifying at speeds over 25mph with unstable road surfaces. Like wildly zigging this way and that.

Still a super fun truck.

I’ve never understood the purpose of high beds on a pickup truck. Maybe for carrying ATVs on bad roads?

If I were regularly carrying large or heavy loads in a pickup truck, I think I’d much prefer a low bed for ease or loading and unloading and for a lower center of mass.

Unlike SUVs, pickups don't have an adjustable suspension (pneumatic or hydraulic springs) so if you had a low bed on an empty pickup, it would have likely compressed the shocks completely under a heavy load, or, alternatively, you'd had shocks so stiff that they would not move without load at all. Most people who carry heavy loads in their trucks prefer neither and opt for the "lifted" look due to the long shocks, which work both empty and loaded.

I wonder why. You can buy adjustable-height suspensions for pickups, but they don’t seem to be factory options. This feature exists for plenty of passenger vehicles.

Surely some truck maker could make, and charge more for, a pickup truck with a low bed, excellent handling at any load condition, and the ability to carry increase ground clearance as needed for off-road use.

A bit of searching suggests that the Dodge Ram, the Rivian R1T, and, hypothetically, the Tesla Cybertruck have adjustable suspensions.

A passenger car is usually under 6000 pounds itself and rarely has more than a couple hundred pounds payload. A truck like Sierra 2500 that I most often see lifted, is over 10000 pounds with the payload. A reliable air suspension for that kind of weight is likely too expensive to get any customer demand on a work vehicle and unreliable one is to expensive for the warranty. That would be my guess.

> regulations are written prevents anyone from manufacturing something small and efficient

This isn't true. The regulations set a minimum allowed MPG is based on size. Manufacturers have decided it's cheaper/easier to build bigger vehicles with worse MPG, than build the previous size with better MPG.

Manufacturers are just following the incentives created by the regulations. Government policies very frequently backfire and create perverse incentives and unintended consequences, hilariously illustrated by the Cobra Effect and the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre.

>Bring back the more efficient sedans.

Is that a type of wagon I am unfamiliar with?

Wagons have hatches, sedans have trunks.

But I thought hatchbacks had hatches.

Really though, a wagon checks all of the boxes an SUV does other than the need to be bigger and higher

Room for the kids, the cargo, and the dog. Decent interior. Good ride quality.

Hatchbacks have three pillars, wagons have four. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillar_(car)

But that article also describes a 5-door hatchback that has the same pillars as the wagon.

These terms are not fixed and not mutually exclusive.

I’ve always considered wagons to be based on sedans and with the same length as the sedan but with the trunk expanded into an open cargo area with a hatch/door.

A hatchback is similar but typically, the cargo area is shorter than the sedan and often the hatch is less vertical and contains less space.

An SUV was originally designed like a wagon but built on a truck platform and typically given 4WD.

A CUV is generally a tall wagon build on a sedan/hatchback chassis.

A crossover is more vaguely defined but is built on a sedan chassis with expanded cargo space but less boxy than a wagon and typically only slightly taller than a sedan. A lot a vehicles that are sometimes called SUVs would really fall into the crossover category (Mustang Mach-E, Hyundai Ionic 5)

SUV's can tow, which is a very useful feature if you have a family and also need to tow something.

I have been needing to tow an excavator for the past few months. Renting a truck to haul the excavator back and forth gets extremely expensive, like $200 per day for just the truck, not counting the trailer or the excavator itself.

Making tools, like a vehicle that can haul, more expensive just hurts middle class DIYers. This entire thread is basically people saying "other people don't need to own big nice things, only rich people should be allowed to do that".

If you need a truck, you need a truck, and there's no argument from me. SUVs do make sense for a lot of situations too.

Edit: I've seen exactly zero SUVs pulling trailers in my life though. Mini vans, yes. Trucks, yes (wish they were cheaper). SUVs, somehow I'm not seeing them. Everybody I know with an SUV considers it a car.

Towing though, sometimes I wonder if we're just too cautious. It doesn't take a Ford F-teen-thousand to pull a little something.

Before SUVs were everywhere, cars could tow. Admittedly, old trucks weren't near as capable as new trucks, and some of those old cars were just different bodies on truck frames.

A Jetta with a trailer is pretty standard around the Irish country side, I'm told. I've seen people pull 1000s of pounds behind a 2000 VW Jetta, which is a pretty small car. I'm not saying it'd pull that excavator, but I've seen a dump trailer on one.

I tried to find some towing capacity numbers for my 2013 diesel Golf Sportwagen. Some places say 3500lbs for a braked load. I found a lot of "not recommended for towing" in North America.

Did they build the Euro version better? Some safety standard that holds back the US? Maybe it is lawyers?

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