this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Wait, no one has a legitimate use case for a truck? Like transporting building materials and tools? Large furniture and appliances? People who live along an unpaved mountain road, or work somewhere similarly remote, like forestry? Towing fifth-wheel trailers? When it snows here, I'm stuck at home until someone with a truck comes by to plow... They have large dedicated snowplows for the highways and stuff, but for out-of-the-way residential streets, the city contracts private pickup truck owners with their own plows. I'm glad they're around.
Like don't get me wrong-- The majority of truck owners pretty much never do these things, and it's an extremely wasteful vanity display for them. That's bad. Most people who buy Cybertrucks will not be doing truck stuff with them. That's bad too.
But I think some people have a good reason to own a truck.
We're talking about less than 1% here. And yes, most of even your examples do not require a pickup truck, or even your own hauler. Just look at other countries. People transporting tools? They have little vans or nowadays even cargo bikes. This whole pickup truck thing is very much an US fetish.
Almost all use cases for yank tanks and monster utes would be better served by some other vehicle. Large furniture and appliances? A van. Unpaved mountain road (sure...let's just pretend that that's actually a significant enough market to be worth derailing the conversation to talk about)? A 4WD. Transporting building materials and tools? Either a real truck or a more traditional ute. Or even a bakfiets if they're just doing minor home repairs.
Are there use cases where yank tanks are truly the best option? Yeah probably. But they are so vanishingly small that they're never worth talking about.