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Comment by ElijahLynn | Hacker News Reader

I recently visited Portugal and it was so refreshing not to see huge near monster trucks on the road. Which have a very intimidating vibe to them.

I was like oh look at people can actually function without big trucks, wow! What a surprise!

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Very urban perspective. If you are a contractor or farmer in rural America, there is no way to survive without a good sized truck.

There’s plenty of rural Europe too, but Europeans mostly use vans (tradesmen) or tractors (farmers) instead. Both have much better visibility than those tall trucks with a long hood, at least from my experience.

Did you know that only 1,6% of US population works in agriculture compared to 5% in Portugal? See https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/employmen...

Uh huh, and how far away is everything? What kind of work?

Plenty of oversized trucks and SUVs in urban areas. The majority of the population in the U.S. is considered urban, so why exactly is the "urban perspective" not legitimate?

Well from my experience visiting Portugal, there's tons of farming there and they didn't have all these oversized trucks. I wonder how they do it...

It seems uniquely American to have these huge trucks and most of the people here don't even farm. They just use them to flex.

I dunno, my dad was a farmer when I was a kid, and he did fine with a series of compact pickups. (Some 80's Toyota thing, then a Nissan hardbody, then a Chevy S10.)

So why do they they have these useless American pickups like Ford F150s?

You can't put anything in them. They've got a load bed that I could *just* about fit a couple of sandwiches in.

Everyone here in the UK uses Ford Transits. How do you use something like an F150 to move plasterboard sheets?

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