To haul dirt. To haul junk out to the dump. Etc.
Do people load their Transits with piles of dirt and mulch? I doubt it.
I live in the US and have a small house in the city, and I haul stuff like this all the time.
Yes, you can rent a pickup truck as needed from U-Haul, but that gets old real quick.
Yes, I would love it if there was a nice small or mid-sized truck with an extended bed available, because most trucks are overkill for my use case.
But this idea that no normal person needs a pickup truck a dozen times a year is just weird.
I am from the UK but live in Canada. I only see three types of businesses using those Transit style vans here in North America: food delivery, parcel delivery and landscaping businesses. I assume the landscapers are carrying dirt at least some of the time.
Trucks think only trucks can tow.
I tow a 24 foot boat with an Audi Q7. Reasonably frequently, truck guys say something like "You tow that, with THAT?"
Uh, yeah. 7700 pound tow capacity (nearly as much as a base F150). Tows really well.
For personal use, like you mention, people use a small trailer. You own one or borrow it freely from many places, hitch it to your car, haul dirt, and then detach it. No need to drive a truck everywhere because you need to haul some stuff once a month.
> But this idea that no normal person needs a pickup truck a dozen times a year is just weird.
Yet the US is the only country where office workers own trucks. The only real use of a F150 style truck is offroad hauling, which is not something most people have to regularly do.
Not sold (really) in the US. There's the VW electric van but that's more of a gimmick than anything else.
In the US, there's also just a pretty big infrastructure around tooling trucks for professional work. Not that that doesn't exist for vans in the US, it's just somewhat more common to see trucks having full toolsets on the side for quick access with a decent sized bed. The F350 is a major workhorse for that sort of thing.
Really? ... I'm seeing them adopted more widely in Europe now by businesses. Perhaps as second hand or lease prices are coming down. Maybe that doesn't translate to the US ...
Quite nostalgic seeing them run around Central London with business signs on their side... much like the originals. My point: not a gimmick in my experience.
It'd be nice if it could be a reasonable price too and not include a lot of the bling, though I'm perfectly aware a huge percentage of the truck buying audience cares about that a great deal vs having their truck all beat up and just wanting it to go forwards/backwards/left/right on demand reliably with a bunch of random stuff every day. But it'd be good to see anything at all that tried to work with the advantages of electric vs the limitations and both give a good truck experience and improve the experience for others that share the land, like with greatly enhanced visibility and better shapes that enhance safety for pedestrians. Don't need a ginormous engine to have very good torque with electric. I'm hopeful somebody will get there eventually but I guess the path has proven more winding then I'd once thought it'd be, I'd expected the iteration to be going pretty hard and fast by now (in America/EU I mean, it does seem to be moving real quick now in China).
Anyway, hope that gives some answer to your question. Just one solitary data point, I don't mean to do any extrapolation from this to the wider market, but I do actually use my truck pretty hard for truck things. We have compact efficient cars as well though for long distance travel and the like, my truck at least will spend 99% of its time within a 150 mile radius for work or any other use.
1. you don't need straps and bungees for the van - ours can take pipework, framing lumber and other "long" stuff up to 16', straight on the floor, fully interior.
2. you don't need the gate down - it handles 4x8' sheet goods with all the doors closed, either vertical or horizontal
3. security concerns are much better
4. weather concerns are much better
5. for some folks, you can have highly effective work space inside the van (granted, I've seen some loose equivalents on custom work trucks)
6. mileage is generally significantly better
From my POV, the two wins of the truck form factor are (a) easy of loading/unloading bulk material (e.g. the van is 100% useless for gravel) (b) tall loads. That said, I don't think I've ever need to move anything that was too tall for our Sprinter - worst comes to worst, it gets laid down.
Not a big deal, but things still slide around in a van.