Vans and minivans do everything trucks and SUVs do, and they do it better. Every time. No exception. SUVs and crossovers are just worse minivans for people who think they’re too cool to drive a minivan.
And those outside of North America largely need not apply. I wish we could just have a robust public transit system here, but apparently, public transit is antithetical to muh freedum or something. Or so they tell me.
And that’s not even getting into the point the post makes, which is that these monstrosities are getting bigger and more dangerous to pedestrians, yet our governments do nothing to stop it.
I would love to buy a kei car but the USA won’t import them. I want a Nissan Sakura - an EV that costs $15,000 new. Nope. The USA has all these rules in place to prevent competition. They say it’s about fuel efficiency or safety, but many foreign cars are more fuel efficient than USA cars, and this is an EV - so it’s vastly more fuel efficient! As for safety, we allow motorcycles, golf carts, and farm tractors on our roads but not kei cars?
It’s not about fuel efficiency or safety. It’s about protectionism. USA auto manufacturers have rigged our market to ensure we have to pay $30,000 or more to buy a new car. They don’t want $10,000 kei cars being sold here because they know they can’t compete.
They’re legal in colorado but with a lot of protectionist add-ons, like the newest model you can import is 25 years old, and you can’t get on the highway with one.
They’re legal in Texas now. I think in November they’ll be 100% legal and soon be able to buy them from a dealer. Since last year you could import them.
I just got back from Europe and I’m so fucking sick of how stupid North America is when it comes to transports. I just want to break all those stupidly big trucks and cars that all over my city. Seriously fuck you, driving a fucking tank in the middle of 1.5 millions shouldn’t be a right just because some idiots want to do it.
Interesting note: the reason so many vehicles are black, white or silver/gray is that dealers have found those are the colors customers looking for other colors will settle for if they get a good deal, so dealers stock a lot more of those 3 colors.
Are crossovers that bad? They seem mostly to be sedans with better storage and a little worse gas mileage. The latter of which minivans definitely dont win on.
That just sounds like a worse station wagon. Which, being the owner of a Subaru Outback station wagon, I can confirm.
Worse station wagon is exactly what a crossover is
Its all capitalism. In germany, people also buy larger and larger suvs and just a couple minutes ago i saw a petition for the EU to limit car soze growth. Its infinitely braindead. You dont need a car the size of a small house. Streets are not your property. I would limit individual cars to the smallest size possible. Driving a car isnt just bad for the environment, it is also a logistical nightmare. Therefore, the benefit of the many trumps the benefit of the few.
The distances are a problem in the US for good public transport.
So are: Lawyers, NIMBYs, classism, racism, anti-tax, automotive lobbyists, peer pressure, and even environmentalists.
NIMBY is an unfortunate term that lazily discounts completely valid arguments against bad things that happen to be in someone’s “backyard” - as if people being personally affected changes the facts of the situation.
“Bad things”
Like public transportation? Which is what we’re discussing. Not sewage treatment plants.
I’m not arguing whatever issue is being argued here, in fact I didn’t even know what it was. I’m talking about the term NIMBY and saying exactly (and only) what I said.
Oh, so you’re ignoring the entire conversation to make an ignorant quip obviously based on the fact you don’t know what NIMBYs are… and then you carry on to admit you don’t know what a NIMBY is…
Damn, ignorance must be your friend if you chum up with it so readily.
Let me clue you in: NIMBYs complain about ANY change that they do not personally want. As the person you conveniently ignored already pointed out, NIMBYs say no to things that are good for society, NOT for valid reasons, but because they’re selfish pricks who don’t care about making society better.
What about moving a mattress? Can’t fit that in a minivan, and that comes up all the damn time.
There are valid complaints in here, but most of it is nonsense. Trucks and SUVs are the only choice? What do you even mean by that? It’s way easier to get a regular car.
I live in Texas. I only know one person with a truck, and it’s used constantly. There’s something in the flatbed that wouldn’t fit in a van at least once or twice a month, I’d say.
I’ve moved many a mattress in my parent’s minivan. With the seats folded down or removed and a bit of an angle and/or squishing in a bit you can usually fit a queen, maybe even a king depending on the mattress and van. Box springs are harder, but often still doable, and in a pinch can be easily strapped to a roof rack.
They also have a '93 ranger with the 7ft bed, still chose to use the van for mattresses as often as not, to need to strap anything down or cover them if there’s rain in the forecast.
I did a road trip with my wife a few years back and borrowed their Sedona, took out the back seats, threw a “queen” sized air mattress (I’m pretty sure it was a little undersized from a real mattress, but still pretty close) and the mattress was a little squished on the sides but otherwise fit pretty comfortably in the back, we slept in the van for about a week moving between different campsites.
Know what mattresses don’t fit comfortably in? The 5.5ft beds a lot of pickup trucks have these days.
Fair enough. But short beds notwithstanding, removing seats or using a roof rack hardly qualify as “doing everything trucks do and doing it better”.
I’d still rather use the truck. The original post is silly.
I mean, it probably takes about as long for me to remove the seats from the van as it does for me to find a broom and sweep out the truck bed to make sure my mattress doesn’t get dirty because I’ve been using my truck as a truck, so six of one, half dozen of the other.
And truck bed or roof rack I’m anal about securing my loads, so I’m gonna spend a few minutes fucking with ratchet straps either way, box springs are light so unless you’re really short it’s pretty trivial to get them on a roof rack.
Plus you get the benefit of being able to carry more passengers when you need to. Haven’t found a pickup yet that will seat 7 or 8 people.
You can fit at least a twin, probably a full size inside most minivans (I did have to take one out of a grand caravan recently), and a queen or king would go on the roof fine if you spec one with crossbars. Most minivans also have reasonable towing capacity, so renting a U-Haul utility or cargo trailer is less than the difference in one monthly payment between a van and a bigger truck or SUV. I’ve put thousands of miles on my 2nd gen highlander hybrid just towing either my utility trailer (5x8) or a U-Haul cargo (4x6, 5x8, and 6x12), moved twice, helped friends and family move, done dump runs etc… I’ve only rented a moving truck once, for my first move, and that was only due to limited time for a full apartment move.
The Highlander is an SUV and is thus unsafe to pedestrians and worse than a minivan according to this post.
I’m curious how many folks in the US basically go broke from truck payments and interest rates. I do pretty well working in tech and I still gasp whenever I look at truck prices here. They’re a massive fucking ripoff—even small trucks like the Ranger and Tacoma. I probably walk past folks on the daily that are paying 4-digits every month for a stupid status symbol, while they get paid like shit.
We’re pop up headlights a danger? I always wondered why they went away as a style choice
Dangerous, overcomplicated, prone to failure and expensive. The auto industry didn’t fight to save them because customers didn’t really seem to care that much about them.
Does pop-up headlights mean the old kind that mechanically raise when turned on? I was fully unaware of safety concerns and govt regs against them and just assumed they were too costly and overly complex for manufacturers to keep doing. And I still see them in some sporty models.
The argument is not that some people need trucks.
It is that huge trucks and suvs shouldn’t be the way they are nowadays. They can tow just as much if the hood is redesigned so it has better visibility than an M1 tank, because it’s currently worse. They’re stupid and oversized in the wrong ways.
If you need a real truck, you probably should get a flat front Isuzu FTR or something more functional than a sidewalk princess designed to kill pedestrians.
They changed the rules in my country. You can buy a truck but I’ll be taxed like a personal car instead of light catch, unless you have a business and it’s a company car. That seriously curbed the eagerness to buy one.
While I don’t entirely agree with the sentiment of your post. I will sure add my two cents:
I travel for work and have learned the Chrysler Pacifica minivan rental cars are unbeatable machines for loading equipment and driving long distances. The seats fold right down into the floor and I can load it to the ceiling with my Pelican cases. The larger crossover SUVs are just sedans that somebody attached a bike pump to and inflated the metal between the inside and outside of the vehicle. There ain’t shit for space anymore. Also the Pacifica is comfy af.
Also also, you don’t have to lift your heavy shit 4 feet off the ground… Big bonus.
Yeah! Minivans are the best for hauling people or stuff.
Honestly I don’t mind trucks or SUVs specifically but vechiles are getting way too big on average, I mean the F150 is North America’s best selling vechile since forever. It’s a problem of misaligned incentives.
There’s an exception carved out for large vechiles in the EPA guidelines that hold them to less stringent emissions standards which incentivizes building larger vehicles link
Large cars are also incentivized by our crash safety rating system which only takes into account the mortality rate of those inside the car as apposed to average related fatalities. This means it will prioritize safety of those in the vechile, which has led to our average fatalities increasing. link.
As an unintended side effect this also damages roads much faster because vechile weight per axel determines the magnitude of the damage a vechile does to the road. link. anecdotally this makes me concerned for the additional weight that electric cars add.
Also as vechiles get increase in weight the amount of microplastics put into the air as a by product of tire wear increase. link
As cars increase in size (and therefore weight) the downsides are exponential.
I’m an American in the rural South East. I can count on one hand the amount of people I’ve seen, met, or are my in laws who NEED a truck. I do not have enough body parts to count the amount of trucks that are used by compensating good ol’ boys and girls. The amount of shitty drivers in SUVd who have the mindset of “if I’m in an accident I’ll be ok, so.i don’t have to worry about driving like there are other people on the road” is down right astounding.
Most days I don’t need a truck. Most days I don’t want a truck.
But that’s what I’ve got and I can’t exactly just buy a new vehicle, or simply change jobs to one I can cycle to.
I’m a minority though, for most people it’s compensation for insecurity or attempted status symbol. Around here we call them “pavement princesses” because they never touch dirt and likely couldn’t navigate a back yard with its current driver.
And I’m not trying to imply that there is no reason to need a truck or no reason to need an SUV. There are jobs that require it, there are things that you can do or be employed by that would require needing extra towing capacity, that would require needing extra abilities to hold heavier weights. Those things do exist. But again I can count on one hand the amount of people I know or have met or am related to now who NEED those things. I’ve actually had to watch as several of my in-laws who worked for companies that they claimed they couldn’t do their job unless they had a lifted jacked up truck which had an extreme extended cab and bed be transferred to electric vans and it did not impact their job. They were still able to get everywhere they needed to go with all of the things that they had in tow and the mover vans worked just fine. And I’ve actually known several people who got fired from those jobs because the electric vans had tattler programs and it told them that they were driving in dangerous manners putting both the company’s assets at risk and risking liability.
And I’m not trying to imply that there is no reason to need a truck or no reason to need an SUV.
I didn’t mean to imply that’s what you were saying.
There are exceptions, but yeah 99% of trucks and SUVs on the road simply don’t need to be there.
I’d love electric van, honestly. Most of the stuff I use my truck for doesn’t need the open space up top or the ability to drop a load from above/the side, and the few times I have needed that I could have spent an hour hand loading things. Plus I’d prefer the extra security of having an enclosed cargo space. Vans are better than trucks in all but a small set of circumstances
Yep, only things my truck has been specifically good for have been dump runs to one particular facility (big pit with low wall) and hauling loads of gravel/soil. A van or a trailer could accomplish much the same, but the truck was cheap and I don’t have anywhere to keep a trailer so it’s a good second vehicle.
Sorry I know that in text it can seem like I’m responding directly to you but I was more meaning in the broad sense. That I understand that there are situations where you do need a pickup truck or a heavy duty truck, things of that nature.
Not even close to true. We have a small car (integra) and a giant truck (F250). We use the F250 to tow boats and a camper. Most people look at the tow limit and don’t realize the limiting factor is the payload. We had to trade in our F150 for the F250 because the F150 only had 1500 lbs payload. The camper (6000lbs dry, 7500 lbs max) had a dry tongue weight of 850 lbs and a loaded payload closer to 1000 lbs. Leaving about 500 lbs for people, dogs, and cargo. Doesn’t work. F250 has 3300 lbs payload. Find me a van with 3300 payload and no, don’t look in the manual. Those are all the theoretical max payload. Look at the door sticker. F150 manual says something like 2200 lbs, but door sticker says 1500 lbs. And yes, the F250 is no fun to drive in a city or take shopping. Thats what the Integra is for.
F150 manual says something like 2200 lbs,
That’s for the f-150 each trim and modification lowers it. Want the v8 instead of v6, less payload. Entertainment and speakers, less payload. Captains chairs, less payload.
The manual tells you all of this as well.
Sure, but that doesn’t give you an actual payload number. The only ways I’ve seen to get an actual number is the door sticker or the manufacturer tow calculator. You can get the VIN off of a dealer page and enter it like https://www.ford.com/support/towing-calculator with VIN 1FTFW5LD5SFB04598 and check out the 1340 lbs payload on that F150.
Well that’s because a single item can change the end payload, they can’t tell you the specifics because of the massive variances in personal customizations.
You’re asking them to give you an exact number that doesn’t exist until it’s built and ready for delivery.
I added running boards at the dealership when I bought mine, guess what, less payload and that’s NOT in the sticker. Sound proofing? Less payload. Bed protector, less payload. They just can’t tell you mate.
