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US car culture is weird as fuck.
In Europe damn near everybody would think you're a douchebag if you drove one of those in the city. European cities just aren't built for those monstrosities.
You can't drive these bastards anywhere except wide-ass American roads.
European cities just aren’t built for those monstrosities.
I once drove around Kyoto with a couple friends of a friend. That wouldn't be at all notable except for the fact that we were toolin' around in a Camaro in Kyoto. This was the early 1990s and I didn't know the word virtual reality but I experienced a meta form that day. Inside was America and outside was Kyoto but when we pulled over and go out - were were actually in Kyoto.
Their English wasn't that good so I never quite did learn why the car owner bought a Camaro. He lived in Kyoto and that car was basically ridiculous for Japanese cities. Driving around was like being in a big yacht on a very small river.
I mean that or car manufacturers could just start making small pickups again
there's some federal mpg requirement loophole that applies to small trucks but not large, which is why the small truck is mostly dead
For out of five new cars sold in Canada are a pickup truck or an SUV. When you get out of the cities literally everybody and their mother is in a fuck-off huge tricked out truck, and the vast vast majority of people aren't using them for anything more arduous than going through the Tim Horton's drive through.
going through the Tim Horton’s drive through
But those donuts weigh a ton.
The ever increasing size of vehicles to make sure you "win" the car crash is so horrible for safety, for the environment, for our infrastructure. We really do need some remedy to make sure if you're driving a huge and deadly vehicle, you actually have a reason to be.
My neighbor is an enthusiast and he imported a beastly sized truck to my European ass country. It looks so out of place here, lol. It's like twice as wide and high as the average car in my street. Its also doesn't fit our standardly sized parking spots so it's a pain when he parked near my house.
As an American my best advice to you (which I naturally offer unsolicited) is to do your best to ensure that he always, always feels out of place and like he is taking up too much space. Never let him feel entitled to take up that much space, in the streets or whatever. Do not let that shit take root. If you want, maybe try to subtly enlist other neighbors in this effort by bringing up how large and awkward it is.
Never let that become normal.
It's like in "A Fish Called Wanda" when the American character drives all over England in this gigantic Cadillac. It's hilariously out of place and further serves to illustrate the character and how clueless he is about Europe.
Don't they get fined for parking outside the designated spots? You can't legally park an eighteen-wheeler wherever you want and I assume the same should apply for oversized trucks.
It is also worth noting, the US has literally zero pedestrian safety regulations with regard to new vehicles.
Though American regulators considered adopting similar [to the EU's] pedestrian safety goals years ago, they have resisted them. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reports that NHTSA studied pedestrian safety regulations from the 1970s through the 1990s, but never acted.
“The agency never made clear its reasons for abandoning the idea, but the motivation for it likely faded as pedestrian fatalities continued to drop on their own,” IIHS wrote in 2011, when pedestrian deaths were about 25 percent lower than they are now.
as a pedestrian, can this country stop trying to fucking kill me? A crosswalk does not mean "swerve around the pedestrian"
I will commit myself totally to the overthrow of this nation's government for this :amerikkka:
Yeah....they dropped cuz everyone is afraid to walk anywhere anymore....
I'm reminded of a point in this debate where the libertarian is like, "should the driver be responsible when a pedestrian walks into the road?" and the obvious answer to him is "no."
I sat in a pickup at work the other day. It's the same size as a car, because I live in Europe. Why in god's name are American pickup trucks so massive
A very psychologically, economically and ecologically expensive concept of masculinity
Not just pickup lol. A full size SUV in Europe is considered a compact crossover in the US. Like wtf lmao.
Only a few have different names like Nissan Rogue being called Qashqai. It's also smaller than the Rogue we get in the US. A KIA Telluride gets called three row compact SUV in the US. That thing is longer than what they mostly get in Europe.
No way are those considered compact. They are larger than many trucks. Wtf
I make my living hauling heavy things around in a pickup.
The article explicitly states exceptions for work trucks, sweetheart
Oh geez egg all over my face for reacting to the headline and not realizing how nuanced the real message is.
I'm imagining myself directing a farmer to set a fruit bin on the roof rack of a subaru. The farmer doesn't have a proper forklift, just those clip on forks that hook on the bucket loader in front of his tractor. Then I'm imagining hauling the single fruit bin over a mountain pass in the subaru. And it's a good look. I'm sold. Screw pickups I need a compact SUV!
We're freeing farmers from the tyranny of loading their produce up on a suitably large vehicle and hauling it to market; no, in our movement, we are sending down into the countryside millions of suburban yuppies in Subarus to fetch produce from individual farmers
Oh, you know what I just realized?
CAN'T SPELL SUBURBAN WITHOUT SUBARU
Lol compulsory agricultural transport for suburbanites. There's no I in Subaru.
I regret not buying one, instead going for a fuel efficient hatchback, for three reasons:
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It handles offroading and snow better. I spend a lot of time in the mountains with dirt roads. In my car there are times I'm inching through pothole fields and can potentially easily become stuck. If it's muddy I'm screwed. With a truck I'd have better clearance and purpose-built tyres. Snow banks wouldn't be a literal death sentence.
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It has utility when homesteading. I'm a horti- and fungiculturist. The cargo capacity of my car both in terms of weight and volume is much lower than a pickup even though my car is the utilitarian option for cars. Two bales of alfalfa, two or three bags of oats, I can't transport a beam of lumber or a fencing panel or a pipe. I can only haul a tiny trailer.
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You can put a pop-up camper on the back and it's a cheaper version of a van. It's probably like a $10k difference with similar fuel efficiency and more utility.
Ban them in cities, send suburbanites with them to big man jail in Siberia. Anti-truck aktion also alienates a large chunk of the rural area where roads aren't maintained and you need to carry shit and there isn't much to do beyond outdoors things on bad roads.
I mean, there's pickups (which have some legitimate uses imo) and P I C K U P S.
There shouldn't be the babydick pickups like avalanches, but the super modest ones would also be impractical for the demographics I'm talking about. If I'm an hour or two outside of a city and have to stick to the daily routine, I want to make as few supply runs as possible. If I'm transporting livestock the trailers to do so humanely are pretty bulky and I'm not sure a small truck would manage that much better than my car could. The alternative to a bulkier pickup truck in that instance would be a cargo truck and that's worse by any metric we'd gauge pickups by.
I guess my problem with them really comes from having specialty use-cases like off-roading and hauling heavy loads rolled into a general-use high-speed long distance vehicle. And it's aggravated by not having the infrastructure to disentangle these functions into more specialised, more efficient vehicles... Like tractors, vans and trucks in Europe
In any case, I really don't care much what cars ppl are buying, it's not policing individual consumption choices, but building a better world that must be the goal.
Highways seem to necessitate that for me. The nearest interstate is 75mph, the rural roads connecting to it range from 50-65mph. That's the only way you're efficiently getting to a farmer's market or a livestock auction or a distributor. We'd be selling more vehicles with the ecological toll of producing/shipping them or removing less control over production from small farmers. People with the operational scale to ship semis full of product won't be impacted but the van won't arrive safely and the tractor won't arrive efficiently and owning an XYZ combination of vehicles costs more than an X or XY combination. Someone has to eat the costs of the truck ban and it would need to be matched by the populations calling for it funding roads in the regions impacted by it. When the starting position of that camp is significantly disrupting businesses they don't understand and look down on, I don't see them following up the truck ban with a socially positive solution to the problems it creates. It's city liberals pushing a $25k van switchover tax on people radicalised against city liberals.
They all have legitimate uses, it's just that the proportion of trucks on the road that are being rightly used has been steadily decreasing.
No ban them. 99%> don't need them and the downsides of al these pickups (pollution, traffic congestion, safety) outweigh your reasons. Also it is not like there are only 2 types of car hatchback/pickup, maybe next time get a station wagon.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Online leftists, I am once again asking you to get out of the city.
Just because dudes in the country feel like they need a huge truck doesn't mean that they actually do. I'm guessing there's far more F250s with heated cupholders and blacked-out rims on the road than ones schlepping ATVs around. If you're spending $50k on what's essentially a minivan with a flatbed, you're more concerned with the signifiers of masculinity than a vehicle with utility.
There are absolutely a lot of good reasons for people working in rural areas to want a pickup. These people who need these are also probably not the people driving brand new F250s, and are either using smaller, cheaper vehicles like the hilux or the ranger or substantially depreciated used models.
Yes, there are people driving huge luxury vehicles disguised as manly tools to their office job even in the rural areas, but being that you've obviously never been to these areas, how exactly are you in a position to know that, ackshwally, they're all posers and don't need it?
Where did I say that they're all posers? Like I said elsewhere, 4/5 vehicles sold in this Canada are SUV or pickups. The vast majority of those aren't cheaper, practical models, they're lifestyle trucks. I'm not saying nobody actually needs a pickup, I'm saying most people don't - or at the least don't need a gigantic vehicle with weapons-grade emissions when 95% of their driving is spent on the highway.
Actually just baffled at the leap from "Some people need pickups" to "All trucks are good, actually, you out of touch lib"
Where did I say that they’re all posers?
You've jumped into a thread in which someone was advocating a total ban, that's the source of confusion. I don't think anyone here disagrees that a great many truck owners could suffice with a smaller, lighter vehicle.
And to add on to this, there ARE in fact people who need large trucks to, for example, transport large agricultural equipment. F-250s and shit have a purpose. Just because YOU (generally; not you, Vostok) haven't seen one used correctly doesn't prove otherwise.
Just because dudes in the country feel like they need a huge truck doesn’t mean that they actually do.
So would you say they're capturing the aesthetic of the material base of their environment? Like the successful farmers they're trying to emulate who are successful because they use those trucks for their designed purpose? The vehicle has utility in the same way a gun has utility. Banning the vehicle because chuds culturally identify with it is as stupid as banning guns because of the same association. It economically undermines the people who ensure you ate this morning. It undermines the working class most impacted by increases in food prices because farm operations are suddenly less efficient. It sends the reactionary elements of the countryside into a rabid frenzy, a legitimate one and one that's blatantly urban liberals jerking themselves off over consumer emissions while concentrating wealth and turning those same rural areas into the hinterlands. Which specific metric are you solving by erasing a specific class of truck, or even pickup trucks in general, for which the benefit outweighs the obvious social and material consequences? And before you answer, the people you'll inflame also live next to the infrastructure sustaining you and they can legally buy explosives.
Love the implication that somebody getting told their dick truck is destroying the planet unnecessarily means I deserve to get shot, thanks
I don't think you deserve to be shot. I think the obvious consequence of fucking with a population that hates you, that either directly or vicariously lives through the thing you're taking away, is them reacting like you'd expect them to. They don't need my encouragement to shoot anyone, only the barest justification to do so. You're attacking their private property, and if anything in a way that's a step up from dun takin' mah guns because it's the livelihood of them or someone they're directly connected to. I'm a Leninist and you're saying I shouldn't be able to efficiently grow mushrooms, unless you want me to upgrade to a worse truck by any material metric you haven't supplied, when those mushrooms are both my survival and the basis for my political project. You're saying I shouldn't be able to rehab animals unless you want to give me the keys to your car the next time I work with an aggressive ostrich or a shit-caked sheep or a horse. Those are things that at the very least make me apathetic to what the chuds will obviously do when your Nancy Pelosi-ass idea to solve climate change or toxic masculinity becomes policy.
This is unironically the 30-50 feral hogs argument but for a car, my dude. Nobody's saying you can't drive your mushrooms around. But pretending that you need a luxury lifestyle vehicle to do so isn't revolutionary.
The sale of new ICE vehicles will be banned in most of the western world by 2035. That's policy that people are going to have to accept, and even that is going to be too late to meaningfully impact climate collapse. People will go down kicking and screaming about their precious coal roller, I'm sure. In the meantime, defending this literal death drive of inefficient, impractical vehicles as lifestyle choice is absurd.
There are a handful of truck models I'd call luxury lifestyle vehicles. If your qualifier is just big truck, is your proletarian lifestyle alternative going to be multiple trips with a smaller truck or the same number of trips for the required volume with a larger and less efficient truck? Those cargo trucks will still need to exist to carry the food to your urban grocery that entirely depends on the efficient operation of people carrying heavy loads in their big trucks. 30-50 feral hogs makes sense in the context of Texan fields overrun by feral hogs. Where you're wrong is that you're privileged enough to not have to deal with work environments that all have 30-50 feral hogs running around. When those hogs are the most basic level of the entire logistics system and the bulk of this country's landscape, that argument means something real to a much larger number of people. It's not Texas farmers who need to shoot hogs, it's every farmer everywhere and everyone who identifies with farmers like Appalachians identify with coal miners. Give me something better than an AR-15 to kill hogs with or accept that you don't have to kill hogs because other people do for you, people you're alienating to your detriment.
muh rugged self-reliance manufactured in mexico and fueled by petrochemicals shipped literally halfway around the world
Someone else is advocating mass murder of F-150 drivers here, it's the fucking internet and irony-poisoned Hexbear.net in particular, please spare us all this faux indignation.
Never mind the fact that that user was making a point about country people's capacity for terrorism broadly, not about whether you in particular deserve to die.
That's pretty much exactly how it'd play out. If a roadsign says something people around here don't like they shoot it with military-grade weapons. When big ole dang ole antifers broke some windows in a city 50 miles away, everyone around me casually switched to terrorism plans they're fully capable of doing. This area directly supplies power and water to the entire urban corridor who'd push for a truck ban. The arterial roads and railways go through it and dozens of areas like it before connecting cities. Even if it wasn't my own material base and that of the only other socialist I know of in this area, Y'all Qaeda isn't going to be helped or hindered by us.
edit: And this is a Bernie state people like us move to in order to escape the dangerous states.
i grew up in the country and rural exceptionalism makes me want barf two times and die. get over yourself, honey. your grandpa got by just fine with a truck practically half the size in every metric
Correct, and he kept the thing running for fucking thirty years to boot.
I don't know what you think you're arguing with me about.
There are tractors being used today that are double the weight of anything commercially available 50 years ago, and having them allows more efficient farming practices. A gas powered tractor in the 1950s (which most were) might be less than 12 feet across, things have changed drastically since then. If there aren’t large pickups available for farm trucks, semis will need to be used to transport them.
factory farming is hella sustainable and not destructive at all and furthermore most pickups sold are used on small family farms
If your point of view was defensible, you wouldn’t need to mischaracterize every view that contradicts it. What is gained from transparently lying to yourself?
Have you ever driven on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere? You don't know what you are talking about.
There are uses for pick-up trucks, and without hyperbole, you would not be able to get produce at your local farmers market without them.
Not to mention that there are families who rely on hunting for food. Good luck carrying a fucking moose on top of your station wagon.
Yeah but my car is the modern version of a station wagon. As infrastructure decays and climate change creates more weather extremes, the problems facing that 1% which grows your food will expand. That's not advocating for wider truck usage, only showing that there's a perfectly reasonable argument for owning one.
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In an ideal world, if you absolutely have to have private transportation, I’m afraid it’s going to have to be a communist version of the Subaru Baja
:frothingfash:
I would've dropped my truck for a ute if we had any in this country.
One of these 7k ton pieces of shit is like the size of my room. I couldn't even imagine driving this thing around, hell I wouldn't want to with all those blind spots, I'm going to accidentally kill someone.
Become a cop so that those blind spots cease to be your problem.
https://chi.streetsblog.org/2021/07/15/off-duty-cop-who-reportedly-ran-stop-sign-killing-boy-on-bike-has-not-been-cited/
Correction for that URL: he did in fact receive a citation. Justice!
I think it might do some good to restrict trucks to stripper models - no leather , just vinyl/fabric, crank windows and reasonably comfortable seats. People just don't buy those nowadays.
I learnt how to drive in a 89 gmc sierra. Same specs you just listed, but with a busted a/c and a tape deck. We need more trucks like that.
Dude, what I wouldn't give for an old Toyota Hilux with all the letters in the back painted over except the "yo". Takes me back.
Mismatched hood, pine air freshner dangling from the mirror, overflowing ash tray, a rust patch on the rear left fender. Manufacturers should have a "grandpas truck" model.
Must have both bench seats and a manual transmission, making the middle totally uncomfortable but people still sit there when needed
Its a cab and a half, but theres no swing door and the seats are impossible to get over. Also gotta have a box of shells under the drivers seat.
