this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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4WD usually refers to a vehicle more like a Subaru Forester than a Ram, at least in my dialect of English. And while I'm at it, we don't use the word "truck" here to refer to anything other than actual trucks. What Americans often call a truck would usually be called a "ute", though that's a relatively imprecise use of the term compared to the more traditional ute I linked above.
And, to be clear, I'm pretty anti-Forester, too, because most people rarely if ever use them in a way that actually needs that vehicle. But they're definitely less obnoxious than yank tanks.
The point here isn't that there is literally zero possible use case for them. It's that the use case is so vanishingly small that bringing it up as a defence to criticism of those vehicles is just annoying and comes across as (even if you did not intend it this way) an attempt to derail the conversation in bad faith.
Oh... I think in my part of the world, most people picture a pickup truck when they think of a 4WD vehicle, although other vehicles like a Forester or Jeep would also be included.
I guess for me, I know enough non-city people who have vehicle needs that very regularly involve hauling, towing, driving off-road (or on barely-a-road surfaces), etc. that it doesn't seem weird or wasteful to me that they own a truck, even though yes they also use them to pick up groceries. There's great benefit in the versatility, which other vehicles don't easily match, and I don't think the number of people who need that versatility is vanishingly small.
In the city though, yeah... Almost nobody needs a truck in the city.
I should probably also add that I'm from a country with an especially low rural population. I'm from the state with the highest proportion of rural population, and we have 50% in our capital city alone.
That makes sense. Different populations have different needs! Maybe in your part of the world, things are set up so that even the rural folk can meet their truck needs some other way... I think that's totally possible for much of the world, even if it's not practical for, say, most of Saskatchewan.