Disingenuous as heck. I've literally never seen a modern non-commercial regular cab, standard bed F-150. Far more likely the people in question are driving massive SuperCrew cabs. And those SuperCrews start at $43,000 which means more like $50,000 for a realistic spec.
Regular Cab/6.5-Foot Bed: Length – 209.1 inches / Wheelbase – 122.8 inches
Regular Cab/8.0-Foot Bed: Length – 227.7 inches / Wheelbase – 141.5 inches
SuperCab/6.5-Foot Bed: Length – 231.7 inches / Wheelbase – 145.4 inches
SuperCab/8.0-Foot Bed: Length – 250.3 inches / Wheelbase – 164.1 inches
SuperCrew/5.5-Foot Bed: Length – 231.7 inches / Wheelbase – 145.4 inches
SuperCrew/6.5-Foot Bed: Length – 243.5 inches / Wheelbase – 157.2 inches
Nope, as you can see above bed may be shrinking, cab growing and growing.
These start at about $44,000. I was responding to the parent's claim that you can have a normal sedan or a pickup for "$15,000", so consumers choose the larger car sort of by default.
In reality, they pay a lot more for pickups because they want pickups, not because of some lopsided pricing incentives.
That’s more a function of crew cabs and using a pickup as a family vehicle. The bed has to shorten as the cab lengthens, else the truck gets unmanageablely long.
Which could also reasonably be called a pretty big car.
A lot of people like bigger vehicles. For ages, big cars drove poorly, absolutely guzzled gas, and lacked features. Over the past 20 years, auto makers basically solved all of these issues.
A lot of big vehicles drive much better for what most people do - straight driving on highway. Fuel economy is “good enough”. Large trucks and SUVs have great feature sets. On top of all of that, large vehicles seat more, hold more, and generally still fit in most parking spaces and garages.
People just want big cars
It comes down to: "I want to drive big, loud, smelly, dangerous car free of any consequences for fraction of the cost". We don't tolerate such desires in other areas but cars somehow get free pass still.
It's really not that black and white. There's a line between the government deciding the optimal allocation of all resources and you retaining some degree of personal freedom. Techies in the SF Bay Area are very quick to draw that line in a way that affects other people's lifestyles, but doesn't affect their own. Guess what - pickup drivers in Texas have critical opinions about your consumer choices too.
If you think the math for cars is uniquely bad, I think that's a reasonable position, although I suspect it's pretty myopic. The externalities of cheap consumer goods from China, or of a clothes dryer or an AC unit, are pretty terrible too.
The math aside, there is a huge risk to this sort of hyper-rational accounting. It's probably not cost-effective for the society to medically prolong the lives of people over the age of 50. There are many squishy, hard-to-parametrize overriding considerations for policy decisions, and if we accept it for our lifestyles, we should probably at least try to understand what they are for other lifestyles too.
Do you also have a problem with commercial trucks or just the people that chose personal trucks because they don't agree with your ideology?
They still guzzle insane amounts of gas and generally drive poorly. That hasn't changed in decades. They may handle better than they did in the past, but they still handle poorly. Similarly they may get better gas milage, but not by much, and not in comparison to other vehicles.
For non-Americans: While literally writing truck bed lengths being 8 inches (8") and 5.5 inches (5.5"), the text means 8 feet (8', 2.44m) and 5.5 feet (5.5', 1.68m). Americans don't always remember which of the " and ' is which, so they use these interchangeably (and according to the movie This is Spinal Tap, so do the English).
Yeah…
* https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/honda-civic-2021-se...
The F-150 is +1216mm (48") longer, +228mm wider, +546mm taller than a Civic.
> It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
What is the front-end height of all of these vehicles?
> Pedestrian deaths in the US have risen in recent years. Concurrently, US vehicles have increased in size, which may pose a safety risk for pedestrians. In particular, the increased height of vehicle front-ends may present a danger for pedestrians in a crash, as the point of vehicle contact is more likely to occur at the pedestrian’s chest or head. I merge US crash data with a public data set on vehicle dimensions to test for the impact of vehicle height on the likelihood that a struck pedestrian dies. After controlling for crash characteristics, I estimate a 10 cm increase in the vehicle’s front-end height is associated with a 22% increase in fatality risk. I estimate that a cap on front-end vehicle heights of 1.25 m would reduce annual US pedestrian deaths by 509.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221201222...
I think the emission standards are dumb, but this narrative around customer choice is really getting distorted in weird ways. The bottom line is that people in the US want to drive pickups. Maybe for good reasons, maybe for bad reasons, but they go out of their way to do this. And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
Yes, a newspaper can always post a photo of a lifted 2024 RAM 3500 next to a 1975 Chevy C10 pickup to get some internet outrage points, but if you post an apples-to-apples comparison, the changes aren't really all that dramatic.