Another factor is safety. I don't share this point of view, but I have seen others purposely choose large, heavy vehicles for family members so they stand a better chance surviving a bad collision.

If you've ever sat in traffic driving a small car surrounded by large vehicles it definitely starts to sink in that you are at a distinct disadvantage if anything goes wrong. So this trend is also at least partially about this weird arms race of wanting to feel safer in the presence of ever larger vehicles.

You're at a safety advantage in a smaller vehicle more often than not. If you're in an accident going fast enough for the size of your vehicle to matter, you stand a very high chance of getting severely fucked up no matter what you're driving. You need to not be in the accident in the first place, and driving a large vehicle with worse handling, longer stopping distances, and a tendency to roll over does not help.

Your average person is not mechanically inclined enough to assess the safety of vehicles, usually to the detriment of the safety of everybody else on the road. Another example of this is people's perception that they're safer with AWD in snowy conditions when all it's doing is getting the vehicle moving faster and giving the driver the confidence to push it way beyond its ability to brake in those conditions.

> If you're in an accident going fast enough for the size of your vehicle to matter, you stand a very high chance of getting severely fucked up no matter what you're driving.

The most dangerous, a head on collision, will always be safer for the heavier vehicle. It's simple physics.

Rollovers are also extremely bad, and vehicles like the Tahoe have a ~25% rollover risk as assessed by the NHTSA. It's simple physics!

More than anything, you need to just not be in the accident in the first place. Buying a vehicle with dogshit braking and handling characteristics so you can "win" in a crash you could have just avoided is dumb, especially when you consider that you carry that increased rollover tendency every single second you're driving that vehicle.

> Buying a vehicle with dogshit braking and handling characteristics so you can "win" in a crash you could have just avoided is dumb,

Not really sure how you can avoid someone drifting over the line at you...

By doing everything you can to not get in a head-on. Ditch it, land it in a yard, etc. Just about the only thing I wouldn't do is dump it in a flooded ag ditch, but that's a situation most people don't find themselves in. If you're in a city where you have literally nowhere to go, nobody is going fast enough to the point where the size differential between the vehicles is going to matter unless you're in something exceptionally small.

There are multiple times where I've had to drive on the shoulder to avoid people out of their lane and they would have been a hell of a lot scarier than they were if I had to do it in an SUV/truck. I've been in multiple fairly severe vehicle accidents and I can tell you from first-hand experience that you're not appreciably safer in an SUV.

I’ve only ever seen “safety” used as a justification for a decision already made, besides some people who like to “sit higher”.

It’s not missing the point. It’s making the point.

Sprinter vans are more practical than modern pickups. You can fit a few sheets of drywall into it, lock up your stuff, and keep everything out of the elements. If you have a windowless van, you have everything out of sight, as well.

Huge lifted trucks are just flashy iPhones in another form--jewelry and signals of wealth to others.

Not even necessarily ego or whatever. Some people just like trucks, and a car's "reputation" is part of the purchase decision for many buyers. It's why men don't buy Beetles or Priuses as often as women and women don't buy trucks as often as men for instance. Many people express themselves with their car.

Not me.

I bought a F250 diesel to tow my 13,000 lb rv. Smaller vehicles can't do that.

A 13,000lb RV is doing a similar job to a 6lb tent, 1lb sleeping mat, 3lb sleeping bag, and 2lb stove.

There are obviously some good reasons to buy a huge RV instead of using a tent, but the RV itself is an expensive and heavy status symbol.

Do you live in a tent? Would you make the same comparison about your house?

We live in our RV for 3-6 months a year, in weather from -10 in Colorado blizzards and 120 degree California summers. In rain snow and sleet. I work remotely from it.

A tent is not a home. An RV It is for many of us.

Before you throw more stones, it's far more eco friendly and lower carbon Footprint to own an rv and travel and stay in it in various places than to own several properties and fly between them.

> it's far more eco friendly and lower carbon Footprint to own an rv and travel and stay in it in various places than to own several properties and fly between them.

It's considered worse to drive (vs fly) unless you have more than 2 people-- and that's for a normal car. With a truck+trailer the break-even point would need more passengers.

https://terrapass.com/blog/carbon-footprint-of-driving-vs-fl...

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-climate-...

The info you posted doesn't include the property and accommodations, it's only the travel, which of course is higher, the savings overall is in the stay, so you have to compare it to flying AND accommodations, not just flying.

https://www.trianglerv.com/blog/post/how-an-rving-vacation-a...

Tiny homes and RVs have about 7% of the energy Footprint of traditional dwellings: https://beginrv.com/tiny-house-vs-rv/

So if you add all that up, its more eco friendly, affordable, and what we've chosen to do.

That's per passager mile, right?

For the comparison parent post is making - leisure travel - I think there's a big difference in that flying enables much larger distances, thus much more emissions.

You can easily fly 1000 miles each way for a weekend trip. Not as easily with a car, the travel tends to be much shorter.

And also doesn't take into account economy of scale, a family of 4 has 4x the emissions in the plane example, same as 1 person in the car example. So if you do the math as a family of 4 it really changes things.

Owning multiple properties and flying between them is something rich people do that wastes an astronomical amount of resources, and the fact that it wastes more than towing 13,000lbs of RV around doesn't make either of them any better.

Or any worse - you apparently didn't notice, but I wrote that there are good reasons to own an RV, and want to reiterate that. Probably in your heart of hearts you know whether your ownership is justified, and I don't need to tell you.

thank you for your last sentence.

TONs of non-rich people also have 2 properties and go between them. You can buy a cabin or vacation property in the rural US for a surprisingly affordable amount. I know many folks who are certainly not rich, but do spend time in various locations.

Think traveling nurses, seasonal employees, etc. Also look up the term "snow bird"

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. I live in Dallas and this is 100% true.

What’s fun is when you notice that the biggest, flashiest trucks are all concentrated in the fanciest suburbs. Once you get out in the country, off the main roads like where I’m from, suddenly (1) pickup trucks make up a lower percentage of the traffic, and (2) they are generally* smaller, more utilitarian and more beat up.

* except for the occasional F350 dually pulling an actual horse trailer

See a lot of "handy men" actually prefer old minivans as a "work truck".

Probably because nobody is missing the point. They understand that huge vehicles are largely bought as a status symbol and they're mocking those people for buying an unnecessarily enormous hunk of metal.

There's nothing more utilitarian than an extended-cab truck if you're a "divorced dad". You're hauling kids, furniture, trash, tools, etc. And if you need to move cross country guess what...You can tow a trailer. And I'd argue "ego lifting" is buying a 15k carbon fiber bike and riding in a traffic snarling peleton with your euro bike buddies...Everybody's guilty of some form of ego.