At $20/hour for a new F-250 rental, Home Depot has better options available. If people wanted to haul lumber, they probably wouldn't show up with a trailer attached, they would buy a truck with a 8 foot box.

I _think_ you mean they wouldn't attach a trailer to their Camray? I was confused initially by your post because a trailer behind a pickup I find is a great combination. You can load stuff much more easily on the trailer but the pickup bed is there for any overflow. But I think you mean 10' box, no?

You go rent an F-250 from Home Depot and let me know how that goes.

It's the smoothest car rental experience I've ever had. I checked the nearby Home Depots and one had a truck. I was in and out with the keys in 10 minutes. Drove to pick up a couch, delivered it, and brought the truck back. Parked it in the parking lot and walked in with the keys. It was about $30 and painless.

What do you think is so bad about the process?

1) There are three Home Depots near me. None of them offer diesels for rent

2) The $20 is for the first 75 minutes. I guess I'm wrong, but I couldn't imagine a use-case where you're only going to need the truck for 75 minutes.

3) Use restrictions. Home Depot greatly restricts what you can use the truck for, including no towing.

4) Availability. At the three HD's near me, good luck getting any rental truck let a lone a diesel (mentioned above). They're always checked out, sometimes weeks in advance.

> The $20 is for the first 75 minutes. I guess I'm wrong, but I couldn't imagine a use-case where you're only going to need the truck for 75 minutes.

The idea is that you drive the truck home, unload it, then drive the truck back to the store and return it. If you live less than 30 minutes away from the Home Depot then it is completely reasonable amount of time.

Example: 30 mins driving home + 15 mins unloading + 30 mins driving back = 75 minute rental.

It seems very practical to me. Most people live less than 30 mins from a Home Depot. In fact Home Depot has an internal goal that they want 95% of Americans to live 15 mins or less from a Home Depot store. So if you fall into 95% of Americans, then you can rent a truck for 75 mins, spend 15 mins each way driving and have 45 minutes to unload or mess around before returning the car.

Home Depot really rents the trucks with the idea that you drive to the store in your car, buy something at the store, use the truck to take it home, drive back to return the truck, and then drive your car home.

That extra trip there and back cost an hour out of your day, though, and usually during prime hours.

You must have missed the fine print that said it was only to haul lumber from that Home Depot to your house.

As long as nothing goes wrong they don't care, but if something does go wrong the lawyers will jump on that.

Have you had a bad experience doing so? I rent probably three or four times a month and I have never had a problem. Obviously YMMV but personally I can get work done for less than an oil change, let alone paying for the truck itself.

Oh great. Then you return your rental and come back home and realize you need to buy more of some heavy large item. Fantastic.

A truck costs tens of thousands of dollars. Even assuming half the cost would otherwise be put towards an alternative vehicle, you'd still need to move stuff uniquely suited to a truck literally hundreds of times to make it worthwhile.

You can get a truck, in CA, for less then $10K (including initial repairs). Why does everything need to be new?

The truck I got about 9 months ago has already paid for itself by saving me from having to hire people to do things that I could have done myself if only I had a truck.

Renting is fine once in a while, but if you're hauling base rock or lumber every few weekends, I cannot imaging having to deal with rentals every time. It doesn't make sense, and would be such an enormous waste of time.

> if you're hauling base rock or lumber every few weekends

Yes, exactly. If you've actually got a use for it, great! The comment I was replying to was suggesting that realizing you need to get one more bulky item would happen frequently enough to make up the difference for someone who would otherwise rent, which is ridiculous.

Even used, the marginal cost of a truck in maintenance and higher gas bills really adds up. Comparing a used F-150 to a used Prius, mile-per-mile, the truck is going to be more than twice as expensive.

Yes, it does all depend. I guess where I'm coming from is people have skewed ideas of the thresholds that define "need" here, and often say "why do you even need a truck??" in an almost shaming way, and ignore your reasons when you list them off (you're not doing that here, but in general I'm sensing an ideological stigma against trucks).

> Even used, the marginal cost of a truck in maintenance and higher gas bills really adds up. Comparing a used F-150 to a used Prius, mile-per-mile, the truck is going to be more than twice as expensive.

Again, depends! For me, the cost of a truck in maintenance and gas is much cheaper than a Prius, because the Prius can't do most of the things I'd want a truck for to begin with. Gas included: I don't take the truck on long road trips. But I'm lucky and have a honda and a truck. If you only have budget for once vehicle, then yes, weigh the pros and cons much more carefully. If you have a used car and a used truck though, you can pay about as much as you'd pay new for either of them (less, even), and have much more utility.

Lastly, I'd wager that an F150 from the 90s is going to be a lot cheaper to maintain than a Prius in the long run due to the Prius' overall complexity. I wouldn't make that same bet on any truck built after 2005, though.

> A truck costs tens of thousands of dollars.

Only if you insist on buying new, you'll pay a lot. My pickup is about as big as it gets (4 door, 8ft bed, diesel dually) and it didn't cost tens of thousands since I bought an older one.

Diesels don't depreciate that much, so I'll probably get most of it back whenever I sell.

I'm not sure why you'd assume if I can afford and am willing to buy a $50k truck that I wouldn't buy a $50k car or SUV. So now renting is in addition to that, and it's not as convenient.

Like a boat?

Sure. That's a reasonable use case. Needing to get lumber home from Home Depot isn't, for most people, because of low frequency.

Meh. I'd argue more people need to tow their boat than haul lumber, but I live in Florida where that's visually true.

I think people are taking my comment to read "don't get a truck" when it was really just responding to the suggestion that "return your rental and come back home and realize you need to buy more of some heavy large item" would be such a common occurrence that ownership makes more sense than renting even without some other use.

Large items are pretty easy to predict. You aren't going to buy a bathroom vanity, then rent a truck to take it home and then realize you needed two vanities.

If you are buying wood you can measure the size of the wall. Estimate the studs you need based on 16" gaps. Buy that much plus a few extras.

The constant trips back and forth to home depot is generally smaller items that you forget. You need a special socket size, you need a different type of nail, etc.

I've happily carried plenty of lumber and even full sheets of plywood/drywall with my Civic. It fits 10' lengths inside, and sheets on the roof. What it lacks is capacity, and convenience for sheet stock. Recently I've gotten into towing trailers (on a light SUV), which seems like a great capability for the times that I need to transport more at once. If you're transporting large things frequently, I get the utility of a truck. But most truck owners aren't hauling anywhere near that much.

FWIW after reading the other thread specifically about home backup power, I was thinking this new F-150 sounds interesting. But then reading this whole product page and coming to "automatic software updates" I remembered why new vehicles are non-starters for me. I'd rather keep dealing with gasoline than resigning myself to surveillance culture.

Don't know why you're getting downvoted. I feel the exact same way. OTA updates for my vehicle gives me the shivers. Why not build the fucking thing right the first time? Why does every machine need to be a supercomputer? At what point does it spend more energy thinking then it does getting me from A to B when I push down on a pedal?

I do really think the idea of an electric truck seems cool, and the F150 looks capable, but I'd rather not have yet another connected device. Give me dumb toasters, dumb refrigerators, dumb laundry machines, dumb vehicles. I'm tired of this "smart" bullshit. It doesn't need to be smart because I can tell it exactly what I want.

You can fit a surprising amount of 8' lumber in a small car. Full sheets of plywood or drywall on the other hand is another story.

Pick-ups are also useful for larger furniture and machinery, but don't discount thr carrying capacity of a car just because it's a car.

IMO sheet goods are easier to haul on car roofs than they are in a truck bed that's too short. A truck bed they can fit flat in is easiest but not the default these days.

The vast majority of suburban pickup truck owners haven’t ever either.

Really? I find it hard to imagine that anyone who owns a freestanding home hasn't wanted to carry some sort of large item home from Home Depot. It's not some unusual "salt of the earth" kind of situation. I only have a tiny Chevy Sonic, and have often thought how handy it would be to have a truck for carrying home soil, mulch, random wood things, a new lawnmower, heck even a large TV, etc, and have had to rent or borrow one occasionally.

As someone upthread pointed out, Home Depot will rent you an F-250 (or another model with a slightly larger bed) for $20/hr. I buy a fair amount of "too big to fit in my car" stuff from Home Depot (mostly lumber), but I'd have to be doing it multiple times a week for it to be cheaper to actually own the truck.

It's actually really nice, because if you buy your goods before you rent the truck, the person that shows you to the truck will usually help you load your stuff into it. That can be a godsend if you're trying to manipulate big sheets of plywood or something heavy. I also like that they clearly treat them as work vehicles; when they inspected it before I took off, they were only interested in fairly significant damage to the body. The truck I got already had scrapes on the body, and they really only noted the large and/or deep ones.

This runs contrary to my experience as a suburban pickup truck owner with many neighbors that also own pickups.

It is weird, like if you own a house, having a truck is perfect. I bought a tacoma 1 year ago and have used it countless times. Getting mulch, buying lumber for shelving projects, moving couches, chairs etc. Literally the perfect vehicle for me. Also it is very versatile. You can get hard tops, soft tops etc. Great for camping etc. Having a separate trailer (and storing it somewhere) or always having to rent a truck or whatever just sounds like a hassle.

I think what people miss is that once you have a truck, all sorts of things happen that you wouldn't have bothered if you didn't have the truck, because the hassle is removed.