You are right. Still the american truck is hugely oversized, even for 5 persons and cargo. But, for the sake of the argument, imagine standing on the highway. Have a gander at the cars around you. How many people per car do you see? Exactly, 90% of the time there is exactly one person in a car. What makes the american truck an extreme waste of space an ressources, beside being a health hazard to everyone outside of the car.

Cars should get smaller, not bigger.

You're mostly right. The main problem is that manufacturers chose to ignore the spirit of the US CAFE fuel economy regulations, and instead build everything bigger and bigger. That's why quarter-ton trucks grew to the size of the F150 in the year 2000 when they were quite a bit smaller before.

It's not the fault of the regulation. It is the fault of the manufacturers and to an equal extent, of consumers for preferring gigantic vehicles.

And let's not let GM off the hook for the 1990s Suburban, which began to, quite literally, dominate the roads. Those fuckers were the original huge grocery getter, and they had truly awful turning radius and blind spots. You just couldn't drive them safely or courteously if you tried. So of course everyone wanted more powerful and bigger vehicles to compete.

The extended cab version of the right truck would still tick all the boxes.

Off-road and towing capacity are probably the main feature you give up with that sort of design. Whether or not most people need that is a separate story.

Thanks for pointing our the real incentives which are always some bullshit about more money and less regulations - basically the reason capitalism sucks at innovation - it doesn't care about whats important and in some cases actively hates it

This is why Pedestrian crash avoidance mitigation (PCAM) needs to be standard required by law, and will be on Californian shortly, and with California goes the world.

I love that there's casually an Abrams in the middle there.

This pic is fantastic but I wish there were more examples from actual alternatives to what people claim they need the pickups for e.g. vans like Trafics, Kangoos/Berlingos, Mercedes Sprinter/Vito etc etc. There is at least a sprinter there in version pickup, which has a very good result as I'm sure the other ones would as well, because these things tend to have the windshield all the way at the front of the vehicle so you have great visibility for the front 180°, the back 180° depends on the configuration you have which range from completely closed/opaque cargo space to fully furnished 5/7 seaters with windows.

Good pic. Question : I'm new to Lemmy. How come it's almost impossible to resize a pic without the pic closing on me? Is there a trick to this?

At first, I was going to criticize the collision speed of the example study, but found ( ok, I say found, I mean I googled for 15 seconds ) that the average American collision is occurring at less than 40mph, so good to go there.

Second, I was going to comment on the relative safety of being in the Kei truck and being struck by the 2500HD... but that just goes back to the 'participating in the arms race', so feels... stupid.

So, overall: Thanks for providing this. It directly answers the primary concern of 'what if I hit something tho'. There are some other angles I could nitpick on maybe, but they all feel like a kind of 'consolation prize' to the argument.

I was going to buy one of the kei trucks when I had to replace my truck in 2022. I ended up with a base used F150 for 12k, because it was cheaper than any kei truck I could find.

Ours are utes. Either road versions or 4×4 versions. American trucks sell here but they're seen as a joke in both capability and practicality, so it's assumed the owner is very insecure about something or not very intelligent. As a result, they're very rare.

They try to act and look tough but they have some of the most fragile egos.