Particularly in rural America, that’s not an option. When dealing with used stuff, well one person or the other is going to need a truck to haul it. If you take a boat regularly to water or a camper regularly to outdoors, you need something that can tow.
I rarely need to haul, but I do need to tow a lot, so I have an SUV that can tow and rent a trailer on the odd occasion I have to haul stuff. The SUV is from a European manufacturer if that’s comforting.
But these pickups have laughably tall heights that is just a detriment to utility and a safety hazard. Ironically brought on by efficiency standards that gave a pass to larger vehicles, so when the car company can either try to engineer more efficiency or just make them bigger, they chose ‘just make em bigger’. The truck buying market doesn’t help, with a lot of people getting giddy at the thought of playing “I drive a big rig” with their personal vehicle.
It turns out that over 97% of people in the US do not live in NYC. I don’t know why you think when I cited rural America I would have even possibly been trying to cover NYC…
About 20% unambiguously live in ‘rural’. That’s pretty significant and a lot of folks that get hit with this are in that 20%.
But ‘urban’ can be… not very urban. So the example led with NYC, the biggest and most dense city by a wide wide margin. I live within one of the top 50 cities and need to rent a truck on occasion. I’ll say for sake of argument roughly the top 50 cities represent areas that are so well served they shouldn’t need a truck. Only 15% of the US population lives in the top 50 cities. Only 30% live in cities larger than 100,000 people, if you want to assert that relatively smaller cities ‘should’ be better served. So 70% of people live outside of cities over 100,000…
Particularly in rural America, that’s not an option. When dealing with used stuff, well one person or the other is going to need a truck to haul it. If you take a boat regularly to water or a camper regularly to outdoors, you need something that can tow.
I rarely need to haul, but I do need to tow a lot, so I have an SUV that can tow and rent a trailer on the odd occasion I have to haul stuff. The SUV is from a European manufacturer if that’s comforting.
But these pickups have laughably tall heights that is just a detriment to utility and a safety hazard. Ironically brought on by efficiency standards that gave a pass to larger vehicles, so when the car company can either try to engineer more efficiency or just make them bigger, they chose ‘just make em bigger’. The truck buying market doesn’t help, with a lot of people getting giddy at the thought of playing “I drive a big rig” with their personal vehicle.
I didn’t know that NYC counts as a rural area, pardon me.
It turns out that over 97% of people in the US do not live in NYC. I don’t know why you think when I cited rural America I would have even possibly been trying to cover NYC…
Because 97% of Americans don’t live in rural areas.
Well, it gets trickier.
About 20% unambiguously live in ‘rural’. That’s pretty significant and a lot of folks that get hit with this are in that 20%.
But ‘urban’ can be… not very urban. So the example led with NYC, the biggest and most dense city by a wide wide margin. I live within one of the top 50 cities and need to rent a truck on occasion. I’ll say for sake of argument roughly the top 50 cities represent areas that are so well served they shouldn’t need a truck. Only 15% of the US population lives in the top 50 cities. Only 30% live in cities larger than 100,000 people, if you want to assert that relatively smaller cities ‘should’ be better served. So 70% of people live outside of cities over 100,000…