One thing that happens when you own a truck, you get called on to help friends and family move, or pick up an oversized item. I do this a few times a year. Multiple people benefit from my truck ownership.

Oh, sure, but that’s a hefty premium to pay if you don’t need it frequently - the $20+k extra people pay for commuter trucks would pay for thousands of truck rental hours, and that’s before you factor in the higher operating costs and insurance.

Why do you say it's $20k extra? You can get a well-specced new mid-size truck for $35-40k. That's about the same as you'd pay for a mid-size SUV.

Both SUVs and trucks are heavily promoted by the manufacturers due to their higher margins - convincing Americans to pay 10-20% more margin is literally what saved Detroit around the turn of the century. The average midsize truck hit $42k and full size is over $60k, but the median buyer doesn’t need anything a sub-$30k sedan could do at more than a couple of times a year, if that - we didn’t add millions of contractors in the last couple of years and the best selling configurations are designed for luxury and image, not utility.

For sure. Just having one when you own a home is very handy. Being able to just toss long boards or pipes or large pieces of furniture in the back is great. I really only use my truck for truck related stuff (things I wouldn’t otherwise be able to use a sedan or suv for) perhaps 2-3x a month. But that’s enough to justify owning one. I think even if it was only once every 3 months it would still be justified, since it doesn’t get radically worse mileage than a sedan and I don’t otherwise drive much.

U-haul rents pickup trucks for $20 a day plus mileage, and if you want something bigger, they've got it. Your friends and family would get along just fine without your truck ownership.

That's not really the point

The numbers are interesting:

> Only 7.0% of truck buyers frequently use their trucks to tow. About 2% of people use their trucks to tow occasionally, while 63% of owners rarely or never tow.

So that's 72% not 100%.

> But at least 28% of owners frequently use their trucks for personal hauling, while 47% of owners occasionally haul. Nearly 32% of owners rarely or never haul personal items.

That accounts for 107% of truck owners.

The rest of the numbers seem to add up well enough though. Not sure if maybe I'm missing something or the author is.

These types of stats aren't much good without some measure of criticality. Even if you only rarely use the full functionality of a truck, if it's critical those times you do, it's probably worth owning. It's the same logic used to justify car ownership in areas with good public transportation; you're paying for a capability on demand, even if you're not always using it.

Also, not all trucks are good for towing. Pick-ups/utes are notorious for yielding where the cab meets the chassis, right in front of the bed, because they're designed to take a load in the bed, not at the rear of the vehicle. We don't tow with our truck for that very reason.