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:
Honestly this is absurd. These death machines shouldn't be legal in europe. That thing doesn't even fit in the parking space, even though the parking lot has the biggest spaces in the whole city. The ~~Golf~~ Polo is so small in comparison, it could even hide in front of the engine hood of the truck.
EDIT: It's a Polo and not a Golf, I don't know my cars, sorry for that!
You might be right about the passengers, but from a relatives point of view, only the pickup works for his line of work. I won't go into details, but it involves transporting machines from site to site and using them there. His pickup is only used for work, he has a Volvo V60 as daily driver.
I see no problem with large cars as long as there is justifications for that specific vehicle.
The F150 is the best selling vehicle in america. The vast majority of those will never pull work machinery.
We understand that some people do, but bringing it up every time we object to these massive death machines does not preclude the sheer wastefulness and carelessness that most of these vehicles are.
My neighbor has a massive truck and a huge dog. I've observed her running over the curb multiple times and more than once would've run me over if I hadn't been paying attention for both of us. Her dog weighs more than she does and it snaps at me howling every time it gets close. I've told her multiple times she possesses two lethal weapons that she clearly doesn't have control over, and she screams at me. Negligent people piss me off so bad, don't own something if you don't have the training or ability to control it. (Who wants to bet she's carrying too?)
"I see no problem with large cars as long as there is justifications for that specific vehicle."
Agreed. In 99 out of 100 cases there isn't, though.
Seriously! A van has a cover so workmen can leave their tools in it year-round, and it's lower to the ground so it's much easier to load and unload. The Mercedes Sprinter is probably the best work vehicle imo
This seems to be in a European city though
There's a reason why the tradies here mainly use vans instead of big honking trucks like these - something small and covered is much easier and more useful on small streets and is also just much safer
Also I dunno, Australia seems to run just fine on utes
We did run fine on utes, but they're getting hard to find now. You can move anything with an aluminium tray and a bit of imagination.
Now that you mention it, I can't recall seeing a car like in the picture in a city, it's always vans,
You can get smaller pick-ups with the same size bed that can easily haul the machines he needs. These giant monstrosities are just useless overkill.
Can you link a smaller one that supports 1,500lbs in the bed and 10,000lbs towing?
Ford Ranger is pretty close to that.
Also 90's F150s were way smaller than a modern one, and were rated for 8,000 pounds towing. So you don't need a monster of a truck to tow a lot, manufacturers are making them way bigger than they need to be.
It's not particularly small. The EPA has us fucked on that count.
Yeah, should be smaller for sure.
I can count to the number of urban residents who need a vehicle that meets those requirements on one hand.
Businesses that need to move stuff around for work typically use actual work vehicles that don’t have a five person cab attached to the front.
Where this photo was taken:
How many people do you think are willing to spend this much time, effort and money to do any of that, unless it's for a job?
@[email protected] literally said the relative uses their truck for work, so...
And they're from Sweden, this picture is from Germany. Ya know, a country with significantly less rural terrain. In addition, this car has no company markings and one of those covers over the bed no one needing to haul large machinery needs.
No one person needs a truck and 99% of campanies needing to haul large machinery just use a Mercedes Sprinter or similar.
I'm from the US, living in a major city, and regularly use both Pickup Trucks and Trailers, so ...
Also, congrats on saying "dude in Sweden's friend may need a truck, but really no-one needs a truck". These things don't exist because no-one needs them, and crew-cabs can allow for car-pooling, but I get it; Blindly hating that they exist at all is super important.
Would you believe they got so big because of EPA mpg requirements(also, airbags & crunch zones)? I can link you an article if so. Otherwise I'm not wasting my time.
Firstly, this comment is 3 weeks old - how did you even find it?
Secondly, approximately 99% of what a pickup is able to do can be achieved by a van, with better fuel economy, significantly better views and therefore a reduced child-killing rate and more capacity than a bed mounted way too high in the air. Nobody living in a city needs a truck. And car pooling? Yeah, I'm sure this happens all the time. How often are you participating in it?
And about the EPA requirements: I'm sure you're campaigning to have them adjusted, right? Clearly trucks don't need to be thrice as large as cars from the 60's. Also: Why should cars protect the inside more than the outside? Pedestrian impacts happen all the time due to bad drivers and large, heavy cars significantly worsen injuries. Don't they deserve protections too?
Yours was a reply to my own comment in the first place and I am regularly without good internet for a month at a time, so...
Anyways, yes, I agree that trucks should be smaller, and I donate to others who think like so, but in the meanwhile, people do have a need for trucks and cannot be blamed for buying what is available to them to purchase.
How often do I participate in car-pooling? At least daily when I'm not stringing barges together - I have a large family, my kids' friends know I'm good for a ride to group events, and I drive for Uber and Lyft ... All that said, I personally don't own a truck, but an SUV, since I've found the towing capacity(and MPG! WTF is up with that!?) of vans in my price-range to be absolutely pathetic. In trucks, when the occassion arrises, I am usually a passenger or renting.
That said, even the most rural farmers in the US now know how to import Kei Trucks, and how useful they are, so things are changing, if not quite in a "No one needs trucks" way.
I fully agree with you. These kind of vehicles can be quite practical for quite a lot of usecases!
The one in question from the picture however, seems much more like what we germans call "Stadtpanzer" (City Tank) - a utility vehicle made for transporting heavy loads in uneven terrain being used for commuting in a City, whichs is in my point of view very much not justified.
Use cases like, grabbing your Sunday shopping
I'm gobsmacked you haven't been downvoted into the dirt for that remark.