this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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I guess in other climates it's different, but over here people get vans for that. Can I interest you in the concept of "what if your pickup truck had a roof and also wasn't grotesquely oversized?"
Although, I'm looking at this year's Renault Trafic and that front is actually starting to get concerning, tbh.
I have a minivan currently and they're so practical for the average American. Hauling stuff? Put the seats down, and your "bed" is longer than almost any pickup's, plus it's protected from the elements. Hauling people? Seats go up, and it will fit seven people. Even though you sit high up the grill is angled downward, meaning better visibility AND in a crash will throw the victim over the car rather than under (way better likelihood for survival). They also tend to get decent mileage compared to trucks. Hell they even make for a great camping vehicle: no tent needed, just throw a sleeping pad in the back with the seats down and call it a night. It's such a shame that they were branded as soccer mom vehicles, because a lot of folks buying trucks for their "practicality" would be better served with a minivan.
However! They are not good for: carrying loose gravel/soil/mulch/manure, transporting livestock, traveling on 4WD roads and other rough terrain, hauling a trailer, or moving stuff that's tall but cannot be tipped on its side. The carrying/hauling capacity is really low, the ground clearance minimal, and the carpet-like interior gets dirty really easily. These are not tasks that the average customer is going to undertake often, and I've creatively worked around many of these limitations in the past for one-off instances, but it's definitely not an everyday-use farm vehicle.
I don't think that the branding is the problem with minivans. IMO they really do look pathetic (sorry!) and that's not something an ad campaign could have overcome. This is the same problem station wagons and modern day don't-call-it-a-station-wagons have: they're very practical but that can't make up for the way they look.
That's the entire problem: people treating vehicles like fashion accessories instead of as tools. I really don't understand the sentiment as I think all motor vehicles are eyesores. Sure some are better looking than others, but at the end of the day they're something to be hidden away in a garage or tucked behind a building; they don't enhance their surroundings like a decorative statue or ornamental shrubbery. I know car enthusiasts are going to disagree, but most car owners are not enthusiasts, they just need decent transportation. So why are we all forced to treat motor vehicles like designer purses?
I wouldn't call myself an enthusiast, but I still like the way my car looks and I usually enjoy driving it. To me, it's like a house - the primary purpose of a house is to provide shelter from the elements and even a very basic house can do that, but going beyond that and having a good-looking, cozy house is very important.
I wonder if minivans have a reputation as women's cars not because women particularly like minivans but because on average women are less interested in cars than men are and therefore tend to buy the most practical ones, which often happen to be minivans. It seems sad to me, a little like being unable to taste food and therefore deciding what to eat based solely on nutritional value.
A work van is not a minivan.
Refer to the video I posted above. The first comment mentioning those things seemed a bit confusing at first, but I'm starting to think maybe Americans don't have a notion of what a work van looks like? That's... a thing I learned today.
I know what a work van is, but I only have minimal experience with them so instead I critiqued my extensive experience with minivans vs pickups. A work van could address some, but not all, of the issues I outlined. The bigger issue is that it's still a MUCH larger vehicle than I want or need. I'd rather a small pickup and a detachable trailer for when I've especially large jobs to handle. I'd even consider importing a kei truck if they were A) road legal and B) available in automatic.
Ah, gotcha. I was confused because whenever the point of pickups comes up people keep bringing up having to use them for work, and in my mind that's what vans are for. I've been taken to school in a van before, but that's not the point of them.
I think over here people would instead get a hatchback and a van if they had to do both things. That'd probably cost the same amount of money and be more practical. And you'd have two cars by the end of it.
Oh, and there definitely are work vans sized like minivans. That's the entire point of the Kangoo, as far as I can tell. It's basically a minivan you can choose to get with or without seats.
EDIT: Oh, hey, apparently you CAN buy a Kangoo with a closed cabin, too. I said earlier that you couldn't.
Aren't work vans built on the same frames as pickups? Only a minivan is going to be significantly smaller than a truck.
Maybe in the US? The Trafic gets rebadged a lot, but I don't know if it matches up with any current pickups. It's certainly not small, but it's not a gas guzzler, it's low slung and it uses sensible tyres. It certainly doesn't look like you're overcompensating for something, even if its road footprint is large.
And that's not even the smallest one they make (but it is the smallest with a separate cabin, I think).
I think that's more true as time goes on, though. That's what my comment about the concerning front of modern vans was about earlier. Still, if you compare the Ford Transit to the F150 you clearly don't see a pickup with a roof.
Plenty of agricultural stuff you don't want to share a roof with. And you want a hard bed that you can hose off.
The Trafic in particular has a separated cabin and the floor of that thing is pretty much one layer of sheet metal between the wheels. You're good on both counts.
It does smell... eh... agricultural inside one of those after a while, of course. It's kinda nostalgic for me at this point.
For the really nasty stuff people here just get a trolley to hook up to a jeep or a tractor and a bit of patience. Or, you know, sealed containers. Trust me, people do haul a lot of smelly stuff and I haven't seen anybody who owns an open bed pickup truck in my life. I know more people who moved stuff around with oxen than with pickup trucks. It works.
Wouldn't be able to pick up chem in it, and you're welcome to throw a dead, half-eaten calf in your van, but I'd rather throw it in my truck bed and hose the contents of the intestines out later.
Like I said, for the really nasty, loose stuff people would just throw an open bed trolley in the back of a different vehicle and do it that way.
I don't know what you carry, but I'm pretty sure you can do both of those things in a van if you have to. At most you may want to put a tarp underneath first. And you can hose it later. Again, I don't think Americans are picturing what the back of a work van looks like or how it gets used. If you fully open the back and side doors at once you actually get direct access to more of the floor than you do in a pickup bed.
Ya, I don't get why people get bogged down with the van thing. It's some hollier than thou stuff. And I love my van.
The problem with modern pickups is that they are too huge and used too often as commuter vehicles. And a v8 van would have the same issues. The pickup design is still better suited for a lot of things.
It's not holier than thou, I literally have never seen a pickup truck in my life outside of the times I've been in North America for work. I'm just trying to explain why.
But then I just read the words "A v8 van", so I don't think that I'm gonna bridge this particular cultural divide here.
Well, then you probably are just unaware that small pickups used to be incredibly common, and a lot of people still have them, which is why your arguments sound pedantic.
Similarly, there are both large and small vans. So, it does sound pretentious to act like a covered bed is so superior to an open bed. It's just preference at that point.
I mean, I responded to somebody being annoyed by only having pickup options for farm work. I merely proposed the alternative.
But it's more than just preference, considering the OP was concerned about the lack of alternatives and I have never seen a person living in a rural area who owns a US-style pickup. There's clearly a regional divide here, and from what I'm hearing from both sides none of us seem to be particularly aware of why. Beyond "American like big truck" or whatever.
We are talking about open beds and why they are useful. The size of trucks in the modern market is a separate issue. I agree there.
Are we talking about that? Because what seems to happen up there is that the OP said they "want to purchase a ToddlerKiller4000. Short of inventing a time machine and traveling back to an era of car-sized rather than tank-sized pickups, my options are pretty slim"
And I suggested a van instead and apparently hit the secret trap card of culture clash for today, which I wasn't expecting at all. I thought we'd just joke around about how Americans like their work vehicles to look huge and rugged and maybe feel all superior for a bit about sensible white vans. I didn't think that the concept of a truck bed having a roof would be the great Atlantic rift.
In this particular thread, yes, people just explained that they didn't want manure and compressed gas cylinders in their van or whatever. I didn't think Europeans were actually going to feel all superior. But here we are.
Oh, man, it's an endless loop.
Again, you can absolutely carry those things in a van, but if you don't want to do that you can just hitch a bed to something else. There are billions of people in territories where pickup trucks are not commonplace, I promise you we move those things around just fine.
It's not even a superiority thing, the presumably American OP said he didn't want a pickup but thought he didn't have alternatives, I mentioned vans.
It's not like anybody outside the... pickupsphere? ever felt superior about driving around in a van. I promise you there isn't a bunch of people buying Kangoos and Ford Transits as a status symbol.
I sometimes don't know how to not appear to be feeling superior when talking to Americans. If driving around on a rickety cheap van with holes on the floor now counts as a show of arrogance against people driving cars that need ladders to climb inside I don't know what level of humility is adequate here. Should I just praise baseball or something? Embrace pounds and ounces? I have a measuring tape that lists inches, if that helps.
I have a van, and I use a trailer for stuff I don't want in my van. You just sound like a jerk. That's all. Gday.
So you... agree with me? I'm extra confused now, but hey, suit yourself. Congratulations on your sensible vehicle choice, I guess.
Ya, I said I have a van in my very first comment. But that's my choice for my purposes. I'm not trying to tripple down on "why don't people select my preferred vehicle shape!?"
The guy. I was responding to. Explicitly said. He didn't want a huge pickup truck.
My "arrogance" here comes down to responding to "what other options do I have?" with "here's an option".
Man, I know I'm not the most charismatic guy on the Internet, but holy crap.
Haha. Alight bruv, naw, you were out here on some other evangelical tip. Talking bout "have you heard about our lord and savior, van?". Writing essays and posting videos like mfers never heard of a transit before. Get off it already, people know vans exist. Lol.
I don't know how many ways I can rephrase "the guy literally said he didn't have any options beyond pickup trucks".
I wonder if I can link a thread to itself here.
I don't know how many ways I can tell you that doesn't justify all the things you said to other people.
And I'm thinking, all things being equal, putting a metal roof over my cargo area would just add weight anyway. I guess it's not built for towing like my 1-ton is, so maybe that's a weight savings, but it's also not built for towing which would make it unusable for most farmwork.
We have tractors for that.
What I'm starting to realize is that despite Americans seemingly being car-first in so many facets the entire narrative around the humongous cars seems to be to have a one-size-fits-all car that is supposed to do everything. Wanna carry manure? Pickup truck. Wanna carry kids to school? Pickup truck. Seemingly want to drag a plow? Pickup truck.
A person with what we'd call a "farm", or at least a person in a rural area who has animals and plants vegetables in a field (I also think the concept of "farm" is different) would instead have different, cheaper vehicles for all of those. A small tractor head, or a big tractor if you have a lot of land and it's worth the money, then a van, then a small car, then Jeep or a Range Rover if you need to go offroad and tow a lot.
Do Americans in rural areas just have a different pickup for each person working there instead? That seems insane.
I was honestly not thinking this conversation would reveal one of the biggest challenges to visualize the logic of a different culture I've had this week.
Oh, we have tractors, all right. I could take a picture for you out in our equipment yard that would have 60 tons of tractors in it. I think the scale of this all might be where the disconnect comes from.
When I say, "pick up chem" I'm talking maybe a couple of 1000L totes that would be forked on the back, and that's just a makeup order because I was short on foliar fert during spraying, the main part of the order came on a semi-trailer. They aren't going in a van, even something like a Sprinter, which I'd be surprised if it's any more fuel efficient than a pickup. When I pull a trailer, it's a 30' flatdeck gooseneck, perhaps with a 7630 tractor chained to it or a 25' horse trailer with 16 steers on it. I'm going to drive those to an auction market 150 km away, and while I'm gone, the other people on the farm need to do similar things, so yes, we all have trucks because picking and choosing which vehicle you take to hope that it's the right size when you get out in a field to do something, and realize you needed to grab a pickup is silly. We don't spend money (and the imbued energy implied) on 4 sizes/types of vehicles that might just barely do the job that particular time.
We usually get 8-10 Europeans staying with us over the summer on workstay programs and even the rural ones have no concept of how farming is done in Canada and the US, and come away with a completely different view of farming life here. I'd say you would be surprised and might come away with a different opinion than what you've experienced yourself.
I know you're contemptuous of us and how we do things, but perhaps it's the same thing you'd find yourself doing if you dealt with the same challenges.
They don't care. You can say that you make a living using a vehicle that works for you, for good reason, and that you prefer it to alternatives. And their answer will be "No, you don't." Their head is that far up their own ass. So much so that you are now involved in industrial exploitation, apparently. Top hat and monocle, too, I'm sure.
I actually fully agree that scale is a big part of the disconnect here. Even where I'm from, people in rural areas from the north and south are talking about wildly different scales when they talk about "farming". Hell, for my standards, the scope you describe doesn't count as "farming" at all, it's a full-on industrial exploitation. May as well call an Ikea factory an "atelier".
This isn't news to me, in that I've been around all those places enough to understand the difference between their respective scales, but I've crucially not actively done work in the others. I have no idea of the kind of use cases that would justify a fleet of pickup trucks rather than specialized vehicles. I know that no size of exploitation chooses to go that way locally, nationally or eeven continentally, so there are definintely alternatives. I don't know that I'd say I'm "contemptuous", though. More "amusedly snarky", perhaps.
Also worth noting that the post I was originally responding to was specifically bemoaning that they couldn't find smaller pickup truck options, so I doubt they were worrying about that type of haul.
Sure but you could do that with a regular-sized truck too.
This particular thread started with op saying they wanted a small truck. A lot of people out here are fighting ghosts with strong car shape superiority complexes.