You're probably right he doesn't, and consequently his post was not about what you're describing. I live in the suburbs, < 5 minutes from almost every conceivable material good, with all delivery options, and I'm frequently the lone sedan stopped at the light, surrounded by F-150s, Escalades, Land Rover's that have never left the pavement, and every other sort of towering, vanity vehicle with a single occupant. It's not uncommon to drive past large homes, with 3 and 4 SUVs/trucks out front, maybe a lone Tesla.

I have zero problems with the situation you describe, which is a household having a truck or SUV out of practical need.

Some people need smaller and fewer cars, yes. I think more nuance is useful here is all. Especially because the folks that need trucks the most are working class on average, not folks with a driveway full of Range Rovers. And, yeah, with inflation being bad lately, they can complain about gas prices. IMO anyway. They're not getting just desserts.

Mr. Range Rover Number Three can just trade in for a Tesla anyway. Our ire doesn't do much here. Maybe it's therapeutic?

Theres a big difference between access to a cheap truck for specific needs, and driving around in lifted gas guzzlers for random trips because muh neck.

I'm an European who lives in the conditions you described and I'm doing just fine with a small hatchback.

Sounds like you're not a plumber and you don't do any landscaping on the side to pay the bills.

Right now I live in an apartment built in the last 2 months with most of the apartments around me still in various stages of being built. This is in Denmark. During the 8-16 time window the road is filled with plumbers, electricians, and other construction workers. There are regularly big cranes and huge belt-driven machines rattling everything in my apartment. The only pickup truck I've seen was not used for construction work, but rather was driven by an inspector wearing a suit under the high-viz vest and hardhat.

Instead, the electricians, plumbers, etc. drive vans. They're smaller in footprint and easier to get things in and out of. Some have a covered and insulated shop inside (mostly the electricians) while others are purely for transportation. The materials and machinery that don't fit are too large be transported by a pickup too. Instead, lorries arrive with two or three pieces of machinery on a flatbed, or a single piece of machinery and a bunch of big pieces of material in a closed trailer. I can't tell where a pickup truck would ever be more useful in the construction landscape I'm seeing literally outside my window.

Again, the lower the density of life, the more pickup trucks are useful. Dense residential construction is one situation, but there are many others. I brought up plowing snow in another comment in this conversation.

That being said, I don't really care to litigate the pros and cons between work vans and work trucks. I was mostly trying to make the point that there are legitimate uses of work trucks. It's very easy for the HN crowd to be in a kind of bubble where they wouldn't understand that, so I thought I'd add some nuance to the conversation.

The serious plumbers have finally realized that vans, now more easily available in the USA, are much more appropriate for them than pickup trucks (with or without the usual work-truck mods).

At least half of the serious landscapers that I see tow a trailer with their tools, bins and stuff on it. Wouldn't matter much what was pulling it, as long as it could pull it.

That's correct, but it's a totally different argument.

I was just coming up with examples. I wasn't trying for an exhaustive list of situations where a truck is a reasonable lifestyle choice.

How big are pizzas nowadays in US? But seriously, most shops offer delivery for large items, no?

It depends. There is a spectrum of options. I was mostly saying there's a lot more nuance than folks seem to appreciate.

Station wagon and a trailer could solve most of these issues. Likely for less than a truck costs. There really is lot of alternatives or a van if you regularly need more stuff transported. I see rather few things that you actually need a truck for.

I was arguing for nuance, not arguing that everyone needs a truck. Rural folks, blue collar folks, and folks that need to build and fix things themselves get comparatively more utility from a truck. In some cases, it's a practical necessity.

Someone has to plow the neighborhood. Someone has to drive the power washer to the worksite. And so on.

And the farther you live from a city, the more likely that someone is either you or someone who trusts you enough to borrow their truck.

I get what you are saying, but I don't like the way you are conflating personal use of these vehicles with commercial use.

Some people have a good reason to own heavier vehicles for private use, but even in a rural setting, those are few and far between. There are many more good reasons to own such vehicles for a trades person or a farmer. Commercial use of those vehicles is completely justified.

Maybe it is an American thing I don't get, but there seems to be a confusion between private lives and the work people are doing? Someone does have to cart the tools and materials to the worksite, but that person should be using a work vehicle. There doesn't seem to be a need for that person to own their own truck and pay for their own gas?

The issue is perhaps that in the rural parts of the US, the boundary between these things becomes pretty fuzzy. You may need to plough the snow off your own driveway. Your job may sometimes involve the need for a truck even though it generally does not. You may be doing your own water heater replacement, and hauling that in a regular sedan is tricky (though not impossible).

I do hear what you are saying and it is important to try and maintain multiple perspectives.

Station wagon won’t pull 10,000+ lbs.

And how often does your average person need to pull 5 tons of stuff?

Some average people own cows. Others camp in fifth wheels. So it depends?

I'm in my van right now, out on some BLM land with others parked in most directions. The fifth wheelers can ONLY be hauled by a truck because of the way they are designed. Regular hitch-pulled trailers come in all sorts of sizes, and over the weekend we were parked next to two that got pulled by SUVs.

But sure, I take your point, there are legitimate, "ordinary" needs to pull a lot of weight sometimes. The question is whether the frequency of these really justifies this sort vehicle being someone's daily driver.

I know a man who retired into a fifth wheel. He doesn't move it much, but it's definitely smaller footprint housing, so more responsible than most when optimizing for environmental impact. You'd definitely want a truck if that was your lifestyle.

Fifth wheels are just a specific type of pull-along vehicle that connects to the mount in the bed of a pickup truck.

There are many pull-along vehicles ("campers", "trailers") that offer precisely the same space and features as any particular fifth wheel, but connect to a regular ball hitch instead.

At least that is how I've learned the meaning of this term.

Well, this guy has a fifth wheel, so he needs a truck to move it.

Who said my truck was my daily?

OK, so the adjacent question is about the sustainability of everyone (or a lot of people) having a 10k lb-hauling vehicle sitting around in addition to their daily driver.

Once or twice a year offsets the inability to do so.

That's not a unique issue to living in a place far from stores. Do what the rest of us do and go an rent a truck or van when you need to pick up an extra large purchase

Good idea. Prices aren't bad: (last I checked)

Home Depot rental truck prices start at $19 for the first 75 minutes, and then $5 for every 15 minutes thereafter.

So 3 hours would only be $59... assuming it's unlimited mileage.

Comparing to U-haul, which charges $1/mile, for $59, you could drive 40 miles, for the whole day.

Either way, doing this once a month costs under $1000/yr. Saving on gas, loan payments, and maybe insurance.

>assuming it's unlimited mileage

It's not. Add $.70-$1.09 per mile for mileage.

Maybe that's regional? HomeDepot.com shows this for me:

> Unlimited mileage on all vehicles

Right. So drive thirty minutes in one direction, rent a truck, drive home, pick up the lawnmower, take it to the shop (for instance), then take the truck back, then drive home. Then do it again in a week when the lawnmower is fixed.

Or have a truck.

How big is your lawnmower? Mine fits in the boot of my car.

Let's not get hung up on details. That was an example. Replace "fix lawnmower" with "pick up sheet rock" or "take broken water heater to the dump" or "buy a recliner" if you'd prefer.

Sure, but rural or not, most people don't do that sort of thing most of the time. Saying "I need a big vehicle" for the odd large load is just a smokescreen.

I don’t understand the logic of having a vehicle dedicated to a once per year at most use in your example.

I recently worked out the cost of owning a truck (including insurance, maintenance, and expected depreciation, but excluding the cost of the truck itself) versus renting from U-haul/Penske. I found that for more than 4-6 trips per year, owning is probably more economical. And that's assuming the truck is sitting in the driveway unused for the rest of the year; if your family also requires a secondary passenger vehicle, then owning a sedan and a truck almost certainly makes more sense than owning two sedans and occasionally renting a truck.

> but excluding the cost of the truck itself

Why would you exclude this on a cost analysis comparison?

When you make the purchase, you're exchanging $x for resalable equipment that's presumably worth $x. Your bank account balance goes down quite a lot, but the only decrease to your net worth is from the taxes and title transfer fees. Your net worth goes down as the vehicle depreciates. Even if you drive it to the very end of its operable life, you'll still get a bit of money from the junkyard you sell the vehicle's corpse to.

This does ignore the time that needs to be spent buying the vehicle, transferring the title, obtaining insurance, etc, which is significant. But procuring a rental truck is also time-consuming; on a typical Spring/Summer/Fall weekend where I live, you're lucky if you're able to get one at all. The local hardware stores are first-come/first-served, and can't guarantee over the phone that they'll have a rental truck available by the time you arrive.

It ignores and simplifies a lot of options for that money to be parked somewhere else instead of having a huge passive.

A truck will cost you what, US$ 50k? What are the opportunity costs of having this money parked on an ever depreciating passive? The depreciation only shows the net result of the purchase but completely disregards that you could use this money for investing somewhere else with a better return. Not only assets or financial instruments, I'm considering even quality life improvements such as home improvements, etc.

You are moving the goalposts with new issues such as availability of rentals, these might even be caused by you and everyone else buying a truck instead of renting when needed. More demand for rentals, more trucks for rentals.

It works quite well here in European cities to depend on rentals for DIY stuff, no one is buying a truck just do their own renovations or construction...

Considering just the depreciation is very simplistic, it doesn't capture all the other stresses and time-consuming processes of buying, selling, as you mentioned. I'd prefer to rent a truck once every two months instead of dealing with all the paperwork, insurance, maintenance and so on. This is wasted time.

> A truck will cost you what, US$ 50k?

I paid $600 for my first truck back in high school, drove it for a couple years, and received something in the ballpark of $100 from the scrapyard I sold it to in the end. In the current market where I live, ~$3k can get you a truck with no mechanical deficiencies and a few years of life remaining. Financially, I wouldn't advise anyone to shell out $50k for a new F-250, but some people enjoy saving money and others enjoy shiny new vehicles.

There's nothing wrong with buying $3k worth of VYM instead, and using the dividends to subsidize your rental truck costs. It's probably the better decision if you move things only 1-5 times per year, no maintenance obligations, and more free space in your driveway. If you move things more frequently than that, you enjoy the buying process, and you dislike the complexity of renting, then the calculus reverses.

Difference in lifetime-cost of vehicle should absolutely be part of calculation. It really makes no sense not to include it on all options.