About half of the people where I live drive these huge pickup trucks, and I've never seen one hauling anything.
America has a love affair with pickup trucks. In 2022, the top three best-selling vehicles in America were pickup trucks, and among them, the Ford F-series reigns supreme. The Ford F-150 has been the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. for more than 40 years, and for that reason, it’s a useful proxy for pickups overall.
It's worth noting that the success of the F-series isn't due to the overall popularity of pickups. Pickups have only recently become ~20% of the market. They've never been the largest market segment.
Instead, for several reasons pickup sales have been concentrated into comparatively few models for decades.
First, we've had a 25% protectionist tarrif on foreign-built pickups since the 60s. The excuse for passing it was as retaliation in a trade war with France and Germany over frozen US factory farmed chicken, so it's called the chicken tax. So there's a number of foreign cars and SUVs on the market, but very few foreign pickups.
Second, companies like Ford and Chevy focus their pickup sales into fewer models than SUV/car makers tend to. Ford buckets all of the F150, F250, F350, etc. sales into the "F-series". The F-series includes 2 door and 4 door trucks, long bed, regular bed and short bed trucks, regular trucks and their luxury trucks, etc. The lions share of trucks they sell are F-series.
Pickups have been getting steadily larger and less practical, sure, and the F150 is a great poster child for the trend. But the fact that pickups are consistently best-selling models has much more to do with industry shenanigans than any real American "love affair" with them.
We need to ban these vehicles
And this is why I had to put a new motor in my work truck this last winter. It was cheaper to buy a new motor for a 25yo truck then buy even a used 10yo truck. As someone who needs a work truck I hate the mall trucks just as much as the rest of you.
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags: