It’s not entirely organic though. “Light trucks” get a tax deduction for business owners and slip through a lot of regulatory cracks regarding fuel economy standards. From there, marketing actually has a bigger hand in shaping consumer demand than people give it credit for. They sell these cars to sell a certain lifestyle aesthetic of manliness.

If the production incentives were different, there’s no reason we can’t imagine they’d have tried to code rugged manliness as a rugged 4x4 like was popular in the 90s or an absurd muscle car like was popular in the 70s instead.