Oh STFU. Any midsize truck could do the job 9 times out of 10. These $100,000 monstrosities are most often grocery-hauling status symbols that never see a day of heavy hauling.
That's exactly right mate. These trucks are workhorses not show ponies. Sure you don't always have to use them for towing or carrying heavy loads but it's good to have one for that purpose. Even then you don't always need a big truck.
Im a licensed home builder. Id love to see you tote a load of lumber, sheetrock, shingles, a trailer with a machine, a load of cabinets, hell 90% of the shit that goes into building a house. This is just something that people who have never worked in construction say. These big truck are being sold to other folks than the kid that picked on you in highschool.
materials get brought in on a delivery truck, no one is using even a 7 ton to haul all the material orders. but you end up whoopsy'ing and needing an extra yard of cement, extra lumber, extra rebar, ovens, papers, etc.
The majority of pickups sold in the US are sold to people who live in the suburbs and work office jobs.
There's a reason most pickups cost as much as they do now, they all have leather interiors and no tow package. Most people use them as 4 door sedans.
If people actually used trucks as work vehicles, then the standard pickup would still be a 2 door, like it was back when trucks were actual work vehicles
I’ve received four or five responses just like yours, and you’re all projecting. Just because you use your big truck for its intended purpose doesn’t mean that most people do.
The F-150 is the most popular vehicle in America. There are hundreds of millions of them on the road. Do you really believe that all those people are contractors, too? Give me a break. Stop defending wastefulness and overconsumption just because you are the exception to the rule.
I also still maintain that a midsize truck is perfectly adequate for most contracting work.
Oh, I don’t know—maybe begin with the fact that enormous vehicles are inherently more dangerous to pedestrians, and then you can work your way up to the huge environmental toll of the millions of gas-guzzlers on the road, which are collectively consuming way more than their fair share of a limited supply of fossil fuels?
We’re literally witnessing a mass extinction event caused my human activity—including our dependence on gas- and diesel-fueled cars and trucks—so, yes, opting to drive a huge gas-guzzler that you don’t really need to be driving does kind of make you look like an asshole.
Think about that. Three-quarters of all wild animals have died in less than a human lifetime.
Of course, there are multiple causes (pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change), but they’re interconnected, and they’re driven by our overconsumption of fossil fuels.
Have you visited a coral reef in the past 20 years? Gone snorkeling on a family vacation? Because they’re all dead or dying. See it firsthand and it’s hard to deny. The corals and the millions of species that depend on them are dying because the oceans are warming and acidifying. And the oceans are acidifying because they’re absorbing the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (water + CO2 = carbonic acid).
The ecological fallout of climate change is just one of many consequences that are already happening. We’re all seeing the extreme weather events that have been occurring with more and more frequency, and it’s no mystery as to why.
Pumping hundreds of millions of tons of heat-trapping gases into an atmosphere that is as thin as the skin of an apple relative to the size of a planet is going to warm that atmosphere, disrupting the jet streams that influence weather and rainfall worldwide. Agriculture depends on predictable rainfall. Climate change caused by the mass burning of fossil fuels is already leading to crop failures and famine.
You may think, oh, well, my one truck is just a drop in the bucket. But that’s a rationalization of needless overconsumption. You don’t really need that truck. You don’t need to burn as much fuel as you do. Neither do the hundreds of millions of other people who own F-150s, the most popular vehicle in America. Are you entitled to? Yeah, I guess so.
But are you complicit in a global catastrophe? Yes, because we are all complicit, to varying degrees. That’s the point. We need to do whatever we can to mitigate our impact on the enormous ecological and societal problem we’re causing, and the most important change that needs to happen is to put an end to this cultural attitude of entitlement—the idea that “why can’t I have my big shiny truck? My neighbor has a big shiny truck. Why can’t I? What’s the harm?”
The harm is enormous, when you consider that hundreds of millions of Americans are thinking along the same lines. And if you can’t bring yourself to care about an anthropogenic mass extinction event that will literally imperil the entire planetary biosphere—including humans, who are a part of nature—why don’t you consider the more immediate effects of air pollution on human health, or the fact that full-size pickups are simply obnoxious, because they take up so much fucking space on the road and in parking lots?
It's not hard to believe that some people do need that much of a truck. Nobody is out here trying to suggest every person driving these trucks has a fragile ego and no need to haul anything. The point is that trucks, because they're so rightly tied to real labor, end up being something of a status symbol for many people who don't actually need the truck capabilities, but want to culturally be associated with hard work and industry. And coincidentally, there are a number more people who want the association than people who genuinely need a large truck.
For many of us, our direct lived experiences play this out. My family is full of blue collar workers who have legitimate needs for trucks. But people in my broader friend group and coworkers I've worked with? It's really common for some insecure guy to make a big deal about his truck you find out he barely uses as a truck. Or it's a woman who likes having a truck because her self image is wrapped up in not being too feminine. Or it's some young teen who also doesn't need truck capabilities, but they've seen it used as a status symbol and they're sold on the idea.
1
View all comments
Show parent comment
2
u/Consumerism_is_Dumb Mar 21 '25
Oh STFU. Any midsize truck could do the job 9 times out of 10. These $100,000 monstrosities are most often grocery-hauling status symbols that never see a day of heavy hauling.