The article talks about using the Kei truck as a replacement for a UTV/Side-by-Side, not for a daily truck. These /r/fuckcars people have never done real work in their lives and are just larping. 1100 pound tow capacity couldn't even tow most empty trailers.
iPhones somehow manage to be a status symbol even with 50% of the US population owning one
You folks need to get it out of your heads that one size fits all and everyone needs to have the same values and make the same choices as you. Everything has risks and trade offs.
Awesome, but that's not about the car, it's about working from home.
> Taking up more space is not an issue for people who don’t live in big cities.
But it is for those who do. And still for a lot of people outside big cities.
> Trucks are not more inherently dangerous than any other vehicle just because of their size. If that were the case let’s outlaw semis, delivery trucks and anything larger than a VW Golf (a car I had & loved in my youth.)
It's not just the size, also other factors about the design, but there's a reason why commercial driving licenses exist. They should probably be required for all trucks.
> You folks need to get it out of your heads that one size fits all and everyone needs to have the same values and make the same choices as you.
It doesn't have to fit all, but it does have to fit the environment, or at least take it into consideration.
In your opinion
> It doesn't have to fit all, but it does have to fit the environment, or at least take it into consideration.
What does that even mean? It's a completely arbitrary non-specific statement. Look - if people don't want large vehicles, trucks or otherwise, they'll stop buying them and manufacturers will stop making them. It's entirely your right to dislike the state of things, but I don't believe it's anyone's job or authority to force people to buy a Fiat 500 (a perfectly fine car for many) when they prefer an F-150.
Maybe you should look around a bit through the rest of the discussion here, but lots of people are pointing out that those F-150s exist because they don't have to meet the same requirements as the Fiat 500, which is ridiculous. Especially since they do require the same license. They don't have to meet the same requirements as passenger cars because by some rules, they don't count as passenger cars, but as trucks. But you can drive with with a regular license, and they're used as regular passenger cars. This discrepancy is causing problems with lots of people driving trucks far bigger than what they need.
Also, apparently, US fuel efficiency rules seem to encourage larger cars, which are less fuel efficient. Clearly a broken system.
In your opinion.
> Also, apparently, US fuel efficiency rules seem to encourage larger cars, which are less fuel efficient.
I'm not sure where you get that idea from. We're generally less sensitive to fuel economy because gasoline in the US is cheap - because it's not taxed to the hilt (I'd be happy to pay higher taxes for universal healthcare, but that's another hot topic).
> This discrepancy is causing problems with lots of people driving trucks far bigger than what they need.
Again, "need" is subjective.
You're in the EU and you have your own mindset that's very different from the vast majority of American's mindset (I would know, my parents are EU immigrants.) Nothing wrong with difference of opinions...but you're not going to change people's minds here with these arguments.
From this very discussion. Read what some other people here write.
The sky isn't falling and pickup trucks aren't that big of a problem from an emissions standpoint (my F-150 gets 19mpg, within 1mpg of my wife's minivan and my neighbor's Toyota Highlander. Passenger car/truck transportation accounts for 7% of the world's emissions. People are acting like buying EVs and small cars is going to make a damn bit of difference.
Literally don't know one person that drives a truck "for vanity" and I gotta know at least a few hundred truck owners.
I drive a F350. It will tow a mountain. I pull a fifth wheel with it. People are often surprised to hear that it gets 20 miles per gallon when it's not towing anything.
While I love the truck, I miss my old Tacoma. The Tacoma was a smoother ride and far more practical for urban navigation. But Tacomas have a bout a fifth or even less as much tow capacity as an F350.
Big trucks aren't causing social ills for anyone except people that have nothing better to do but complain about other people enjoying their own lives.
"These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35202168
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Just one of many reports from the past 20 years documenting the correlation between vehicle size and deaths/injuries to those on the receiving end. You'll find similar conclusions from IIHS, NHTSA, etc.
This is not the win you think it is.
That's a massive failure, in other developed countries, motor vehicle deaths have drastically declined in 40 years.
As I get older I’ve grown less tolerant of people trying to tell other people how they should live. Feel free to live your own life as you see fit as long as you’re not directly hurting other folks.
The transmission overheats after 3-4 hours going uphill with no load. They made it too heavy for the powertrain!
It’s also depressingly easy to trigger the overload light on the dashboard by doing things like buying bricks at Home Depot.
Seriously, WTF? Do we need a 2500 class to replace our old pre-fuel-injection GMC 1500? It had better fuel economy and was also lower to the ground. It could even handle mountain freeways!
(The newer GMC was even worse than the Ram, FWIW.)
I’d definitely look into one of these little japanese trucks if I could get a new one and have it serviced. Bonus points if it is an EV.
The subreddit is specifically named 'fuck cars'. How exactly are they being dishonest? This is more like r/vegan showing how a vegan meal is better than a steak meal along some dimension, say, environmental impact.
> I live in an urban area close enough to the forest, lakes, and pastures to see all of these uses frequently.
In fact I would say that you are the one being somewhat dishonest by (implicitly) claiming both the benefits of being able to use it as a utilitarian workhorse, and in an urban area. If the trucks have the majority of their utility as contracting, construction, or towing, they should require being licensed as a commercial driver, and potentially be banned from being operated on city roads due to the danger they pose to smaller vehicles and pedestrians.
Think of the argument from that subreddit (and me) this way -- if you are driving a huge farm tractor, you cannot also bring said tractor into the city center. Not all heavy machinery needs to be allowed everywhere. Obviously you might not agree, but I think the argument is fundamentally honest.
They're comparing on a single dimension and laughing at F-150 owners.
> This is more like r/vegan showing how a vegan meal is better than a steak meal along some dimension, say, environmental impact.
Not when evaluating a purchasing decision, overall utility, or customer demographics and needs. I'm showing that morally opposed parties inject themselves and their biases orthogonally.
> In fact I would say that you are the one being somewhat dishonest by (implicitly) claiming both the benefits of being able to use it as a utilitarian workhorse, and in an urban area.
Have you ever been to a city that's half an hour to the woods? Or perhaps somewhere it's typical to find people owning acres of their own land right next to a major metropolitan? Not everything is SF or NYC.
If you want to tax an externality, do so. Many state gas taxes tax vehicle weight via the proxy of gas mileage. Right now it's the heavy EVs doing the damage that are slipping through the taxation cracks.
> they should require being licensed as a commercial driver
Okay, now we're getting into yucking other people's yums.
If you want to regulate that negative externality, we should go all the way. Tax and regulate everything.
Let's start with sex. It spreads disease and causes all sorts of relationship drama. Kids can be a nightmare. Think about all the lost productivity! Who's paying for that? (I'm joking, of course!)
> potentially be banned from being operated on city roads due to the danger they pose to smaller vehicles and pedestrians
You can vote for that in your own district, and maybe that's correct, but other places and populations will feel differently about how they live their own lives.
> if you are driving a huge farm tractor, you cannot also bring said tractor into the city center. Not all heavy machinery needs to be allowed everywhere.
On the spectrum of farm tractor to kei car, the F-150 is tightly clustered in the middle with the rest of the "street legal" vehicles.
* The real farm families would have a pickup for pulling a horse trailer, moving mulch/manure/hay bales/equipment, but also have a regular sedan for, like, driving places.
* The suburban families would have a pickup or SUV as a daily driver.
A quick Google search seems to back my impresssion:
"According to Edwards’ data, 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less."
As you say, taxing the externality is reasonable (and currently imperfect, in a few dimensions). One reason to look especially hard at SUVs and light trucks is that they have externalities in a number of dimensions (road wear, emissions, accident safety for other cars) and seem to have very limited utility (most people who buy them aren't really using them for their supposed purpose).
Lots of folks haul their own boats. Renting at a marina is expensive.
Most people doing real work with trucks are hauling heavy duty construction trailers, or otherwise, but even if you wanted to move furniture you'd quickly exceed 1300 pounds.
Even a tiny 4'x 8' U-Haul is 850 pounds empty: https://www.uhaul.com/Trailers/4x8-Cargo-Trailer-Rental/UV/
https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...
So we're clear: because surveys are incredibly difficult to do in a scientific way and there's a dozen ways to ask a question that can skew results, there's a hundred ways a journalist can misinterpret the results of that question, and there's a thousand ways you could incorrectly slice the demographics such that your survey skews completely out of sync with the target subject.
We want to know what large truck owners are doing with their trucks. We don't care about small truck owners not towing things because small trucks aren't considered to be excessive and truck beds are useful things on their own.
Show me the data. Not the spin.
Most truck owners I know use their truck as a truck quite often. But that’s more rural; maybe everyone in a city commutes in an F150 for absolutely no reason at all.
I'm sure semis are empty after they've dropped off a load at a destination and there is no commensurate return load back to where they came from. But given that semis are very expensive to move down the road, both from a human resource cost and an energy cost, I suspect the market is far better at optimizing that than you or I or any central operator could do.
Everyone I know that owns F150s use their truck beds or use their hitch to tow. I'm not sure what the big controversy is, except there seems to be a class of urbanites that are convinced they know other people's own needs better than they do. "They don't need a truck," says the Brooklyn blogger, who then proceeds to snark about a foreign micro truck that's normally used to skirt through the narrow streets and alleyways of Tokyo. The blogger has prob never owned acreage, cut lumber, smoked a brisket on-location, or hauled a load, but they know for sure that these silly Americans don't need a truck that's any bigger than a Prius.
I'm pretty sure most people who own these oversized pickup trucks never use that towing capacity. Maybe some do, and if they were the only ones using them, nobody would have a problem with it.
Subaru Sambar (kei truck) towing capacity: 1,300 lbs
Ford F-150 towing capacity: 5,000 to 11,300 lbs
Ford F-250 Shelby edition towing capacity: 24,200 pounds
And that's just one additional dimension where these vehicles significantly differ.
These vehicles are utilitarian workhorses great for contracting, construction, farming (eg. hauling livestock), towing (eg. other cars, trailers, mobile BBQ, etc.), boating, leisure [1], etc.
I live in an urban area close enough to the forest, lakes, and pastures to see all of these uses frequently.
The electric version will power job sites, camp sites, and help with disaster recovery. It's going to sell like hot cakes.
[1] https://www.f150forum.com/f34/how-pull-jeep-out-mud-130086/#...