Hey, German here. What the f*** are Americans doing at the other side of the Atlantic? Some of you already know this monstrosity. I did’nt. This is a Ford F650 Truck and when I stepped out of my Youtube Bubble I realized, it was marketed as the “biggest, baddest Truck on the road” for the everyday American. Are you guys serious?! Is the end goal really to drive a Monster Truck to McDs to get a McFlurry? Americas bloodiest wars have been fought in the middle east to secure oil, bombing nations to rubble. And all, for this bullshit? The excess, waste and decadence is mind boggling to me and people on Reddit seriously justifying this by “you know dude I’m 6,4ft. I don’t fit in any other vehicle” makes me go up the wall.
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The F650 is a commercial vehicle. You can’t buy one from Ford without a commercial account with them. You need a CDL to drive it. They’re uncommon to see, and when you do, they’re invariably used to do actual work.
No, they’re not used just to drive to McDonald’s.
You don’t need a CDL to drive these. Doug Demuro has even reviewed one.
Slight correction on my part. It’s very easy to set one up to put it technically over the GVWR limit where you need a CDL. Ford makes it so it can be setup just below the limit.
You better.
A vehicle that size is essentially a 5.5 tons truck in Europe, which is the type of vehicle used for moving cargo or modify into a special purpose vehicles. It is not a recreational vehicle.
Thank you! I’m tired of people complaining “hur dur’ big truck bad”, without any other logical input.
I do get it. The market around the F150 (and similar trucks at other manufactures) is ridiculous. There’s luxury trim levels in there that offer two tone leather, which does not seem like the sort of thing anyone who works with their truck would want.
It’s just that once you jump up to the F250 or above, you’re mostly dealing with people who actually use their truck for truck things.
Exactly! I’m in complete agreement! We’ve been wanting the F250 for our fencing company because it seems modest for our tools. Unless someone is constantly moving aroung commercial grade material on a smaller scale the F620 helps, but not very practical for majority of society. Hopefully pushing luxury trucks is just a fad and the next best thing will be more useful for everyone.
This is a really braindead and disingenuous take. The F650 is a commercial vehicle. Attempting to pretend that “Americans” drive these is moronic, because the number of private citizens who drive one of these as a personal vehicle is probably in the triple digits in a country with a population of 332,000,000.
I know it’s fasionable to farm for upvotes these days by blaring AMERICANS BIG TRUCKS BAD. But no one is “driving these to McD’s to get a McFlurry.” Very, very few people own one of these just to be “decadent.”
You may as well get on your high horse about Americans driving big rigs all the time while you’re at it. Because they totally do!!! (It’s true!) Ones who are truck drivers, you know, delivering the goods you rely on every day.
On the very outside edge of the graph, there are probably a few outliers who own one of these to tow something enormous: A big horse trailer or a box trailer with their airplane in it or something. I have never seen one of these on the road that wasn’t an actual commercial vehicle like a tow truck or similar.
The problem with obviously ridiculous whinging like this is that it dilutes the actual useful message, which is that America’s transportation infrastructure is fucked up, and our reliance on fossil fuels (not just trucks) is Too Damn High.
People prefer to jerk themselves off instead of having genuine and difficult discussion. Actual improvements require compromise and accepting your position doesn’t work as an absolute. And who wants to do that when you can just demonize the other side instead to feel good about yourself?
People prefer to jerk themselves off instead of having genuine and difficult discussion.
While this is true, what is the point of having genuine and difficult discussion on Lemmy / Reddit / social media (especially about societal issues) anyway?
Are lawmakers going to look through Lemmy threads to get legislative ideas? Probably not, right?
Fair enough, but it’s still possible to discuss something without devolving into an ideologically pure circlejerk. I’d like to say it doesn’t matter, but this is how we ended up with so much fake news in the US. Bubbles can be really bad when they start to change your perception of reality.
I’d like to say it doesn’t matter, but this is how we ended up with so much fake news in the US.
We ended up with a lot of fake news in the US for a lot of reasons, but I don’t think Fuck Cars is likely to turn into a launchpad for the country’s first left-wing authoritarian.
In other words, I think people are getting all jazzercized up about something that’s essentially meaningless. But that’s life too I guess. 🤷
EDIT: This country is very strange. People do nothing about right-wingers going on shooting sprees, but someone posting a slightly annoying image about how big trucks have gotten and everyone forms a line to decry it for “balance” reasons.
Oh I completely agree this is fairly inconsequential, but it’s the sort of thing we should practice regularly anyway. The consolidation of an ideology is the first step in the death of the ideology.
To be clear, it’s not as if think the kind of dipshit who wants an F650 pickup truck (or any kind of “mall crawler” in general) constitutes any kind of legitimate “other side” to be demonized in the first place. “Having genuine and difficult discussion” is for situations in which multiple valid points of view exist, but people trying to defend these monstrosities are just plain wrong in the same way that a moron trying to argue 2+2=5 is wrong, and that’s the end of it.
It’s so beyond-the-pale absurd it’s not even worth circle-jerking over, and I’m sick and tired of this community’s attention being wasted on it.
Personally I’m ok with fuck cars being mainly a place for people to express their frustrations with how things are - I think that serves an important role.
I would also like to see places for more nuanced discussions about urbanism for those who are interested. I used to go to r/NotJustBikes for that, but haven’t seen any similar communities emerge on Lemmy.
The problem comes when it’s an echo chamber. I can get on board with reducing car dependence, that America is oversaturated with SUVs and trucks that are unnecessarily large, and that bike infrastructure should be improved. FuckCars, however, then devolves into purity cycles where perfectly reasonable things are hated. This is especially true for people who have no experience at all with how people use their trucks for work. That then spills over into all other communities in the vicinity, and then you get dumb flamewars as people call out their bullshit rather than swallowing it whole.
Well said. Circlejerks just create an echo chamber where people become more and more radical.
Expressing frustration is fine. The thing I really have a problem with is how misplaced it is in this case. Even if every big pickup truck (and big SUV; why not?) somehow magically transformed into a compact sedan tomorrow, we’d still have the same shitty car-dependency problem we have now. We’d still have the same number of cars demanding the same wide roads and huge parking lots, destroying walkability, making our cities insolvent, fucking up our health*, etc. Nothing would’ve actually improved in any meaningful way what-so-fucking-ever!
The arrogance of space of all cars is the thing we need to be frustrated about, and the inherent pretense of these anti-truck posts – that of redirecting criticism of all cars to one particular type of car – is at best a useless unintentional distraction, or at worst, deliberate disinformation designed to sap attention from efforts towards things like road diets and parking reform.
TL;DR: If you’re bitching about specifically big trucks, you’re not bitching about cars in general – and we should be bitching about cars in general!
(* That one’s a trifecta, BTW: lung disease from pollution, obesity from being sedentary, and poor mental health from road rage and loss of “third places” due to Euclidean zoning!)
“These monstrosities” will exist in anything short of a significantly de-growthed society. OP’s picture is not typical of an F650. They are usually converted to flat bed towing, refrigerated box trucks, utility cranes, ambulances, and dump trailers. If you don’t believe me, well, here’s a listing of used ones. Notice how many have anything like the original bed.
In Europe, Volvo and Mercedes make trucks just like it for the same kind of market. All Ford did here was take the cab of an F250 and put it on a beefier frame and drive train.
These are work vehicles, bought by people who do work. Unless you’re suggesting an immediate de-growth to the point that we no longer haul anything heavier than a cubic meter of gravel in a single trip, they will be necessary.
These are work vehicles, bought by people who do work.
The amount of pavement princesses out there says otherwise.
If we were talking about the F150 and trucks like it, sure. The F250 and up are a completely different matter. They don’t share much except the name similarity.
OP was aimed at the completely wrong target.
The F150 is still a dual cab monstrosity. It’s foot print is still close to the OPs pic.
Sure. So post about that, not trucks people actually need to get work done.
“These monstrosities” will exist in anything short of a significantly de-growthed society. OP’s picture is not typical of an F650. They are usually converted to flat bed towing, refrigerated box trucks, utility cranes, ambulances, and dump trailers. If you don’t believe me, well, here’s a listing of used ones. Notice how many have anything like the original bed.
I wrote “F650 pickup truck.” I also, pointedly, did not write “F650 chassis-cab commercial vehicle” or anything similar. I generally choose my words pretty carefully when writing these comments.
Maybe you should make sure you read what a person actually wrote before falling over yourself to post a dishonest strawman argument.
Communicating poorly and then acting smug when you’re misunderstood is not cleverness. Since these barely even exist as pickup trucks, who’s making the strawman, here?
Communicating poorly and then acting smug when you’re misunderstood is not cleverness.
Well, at least you admit that you misunderstood instead of doubling-down on the claim that I was talking about commercial vehicles. That’s, frankly, better than I would’ve expected had we been discussing this back on Reddit, so thank you.
Since these barely even exist as pickup trucks, who’s making the strawman, here?
The person who posted the thread, of course. That’s part of [or at least adjacent to] what I was complaining about to begin with!
Like you’re doing, right now?
No.
What an incredibly detailed, logical counterargument. This has completely changed my mind
Because all the ways to improve things I see are crap ideas that boil down to
- Let’s make driving harder not mass transit easier
- Traffic circles!
- Tax on poor people who have to be work at a certain time
- More zoning laws can fix the problems zoning laws created, zoning laws that themselves were created to fix other older zoning laws, that were created to keep minorities away
- Force upper middle class people to move to areas with poverty, get upset that middle class people moved to those areas. Also get upset when they don’t move
When all the ideas are crap you might as well crackwise since the world is burning
Force upper middle class people to move to areas with poverty, get upset that middle class people moved to those areas
That one is hilarious to me…they DID move to areas of poverty over the last 30 years. Now those places are so fucking expensive the poor people had to move.
Stay where you: you should move to where the jobs are!
Move to where the jobs are: gentrification!
Move away from where the jobs are: white flight!
No action or inaction is moral. Leaving people with the choice of not caring at all or caring but unable to do anything about it since existence itself is wrong.
Welp, this is awkward. I support most of those (disregarding the uncharitable way you spun the descriptions, anyway). I’m interested to hear why you think they’re “crap.”
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“Let’s make driving harder not mass transit easier” – The problem with doing it the other way around is that the act of accommodating cars makes transit non-viable, both by (a) sucking up funding in an (ultimately futile) effort to build our way out of congestion by widening roads, and (b) physically forcing trip origins and destinations further apart by shoehorning parking lots in between them, lowering density and therefore the maximum potential transit ridership along a given route. People are going to use the transportation mode they think is best for them (quickest, cheapest, etc.), and to continue bending over backwards accommodating cars is to put a thumb (if not your entire body weight) on that scale.
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“Traffic circles!” – meh, I’m not going to argue this one 'cause I agree they’re overrated. They often perform better than traffic lights in terms of their level of service (LOS) moving cars, but they take up lots more space and aren’t necessarily great for cyclists and pedestrians. Besides LOS often isn’t the right thing to measure to begin with.
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“Tax on poor people who have to be work at a certain time” – By this you mean anything that increases the costs of driving, I assume? The problem with that kind of thinking is that it uses a current symptom of the problem as an excuse not to solve the problem. In other words, increasing the costs of driving wouldn’t be a problem for poor commuters if, in so doing, we also solved their need to drive to commute.
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“More zoning laws can fix the problems zoning laws created” – I, for one, argue for straight-up repealing things like minimum parking requirements and restrictions on density. That sort of idea often gets [mis]represented as “abolishing single-family zoning,” but in reality it’s not about prohibiting property owners from building single-family houses; it’s about ending the mandate to build single-family houses and giving them the freedom to build higher-density things instead if they want. Frankly, this common criticism is usually just flat-out backwards.
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“Force upper middle class people to move to areas with poverty” – I have almost no idea what you’re talking about here. However, I suspect that, like the previous bullet point, it’s another backwards argument confusing an option for a mandate.
“Tax on poor people who have to be work at a certain time” – By this you mean anything that increases the costs of driving, I assume? The problem with that kind of thinking is that it uses a current symptom of the problem as an excuse not to solve the problem. In other words, increasing the costs of driving wouldn’t be a problem for poor commuters if, in so doing, we also solved their need to drive to commute.
In that case every proposed solution needs to solve the need to drive for a commute on Day 1 of implementation. If you don’t want to disproportionately hurt poor people and the working class, that is.
That’s the issue. It is like saying we could get rid of fire departments if we installed fire suppression systems in every home, then we get rid of fire departments.
We need to make mass transit better, once that happens people will stop driving as much by choice.
Exactly. Fixing the underlying issues to a problem takes time to propagate. It’s only about 2 years after a president takes office that their policies have affected the national economy and such.
Great analogy by the way. We need the fire department until those systems are installed. In this case, it probably means avoiding congestion taxes and the like until there’s viable public transit for commuting. Otherwise we’re just squeezing the working class.
This is why technologies to reduce emissions on cars and electrify them are so important. We need to minimize their impact since they’re going to stick around.
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What happens in practice is it is easier to make roads shit then it is to make buses good. So the town makes it shit and everyone stops going there. It is better to put up with the existing bad solution and make a better replacement instead of breaking what you have even more so and hope some Messiah figure will fix it. Go check out what happened when Buffalo NY built its rail. That is a perfect example and the entire downtown died.
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Glad you agree. They aren’t safe and rarely a good option. Forcing cars to make sharp turns and pedestrians to walk longer distances in the road to cross.
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Congestion taxes. They don’t impact somewhat wealth-off people like me since we can adjust our schedule. They punish poor people who can’t. It isn’t even regressive, it is reverse-progressive.
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My city has a rule that satellite dishes can’t be street visible. When I see urban cough…planners…cough willing to admit that rules like that should not be a thing I will be inclined to take you guys seriously about density.
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Gentrification and white flight. I suspect you knew damn well what I was referring to but enjoy backwards arguments
Go check out what happened when Buffalo NY built its rail. That is a perfect example and the entire downtown died.
I think you’re scapegoating the rail and the real problem was that declining rust belt cities just suck.
See also: https://www.buffalorising.com/2007/10/what-really-killed-downtown-retail/
Glad you agree. They aren’t safe and rarely a good option. Forcing cars to make sharp turns and pedestrians to walk longer distances in the road to cross.
No, everything you wrote is wrong: roundabouts are relatively safe because they minimize path conflicts, forcing cars to make sharp turns (and thereby slow down) is a good thing, and although pedestrians walk longer distances around the edge of the roundabout, the crosswalks themselves are generally shorter and thus safer.
The reasons I think roundabouts are overrated have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with lack of space-efficiency and how the good performance for cars comes at the expense of other street users’ convenience (e.g. making pedestrians walk farther).
Congestion taxes. They don’t impact somewhat wealth-off people like me since we can adjust our schedule. They punish poor people who can’t. It isn’t even regressive, it is reverse-progressive.
Oh, that’s what you were talking about? Never mind then; I agree with you on that point.
Discouraging people from driving in downtowns needs to be accomplished by physically choking the traffic off with road diets and traffic calming etc. “Lexus lanes” not only create unjust privilege, they also fail at reducing capacity since they’re just shifting the usage from one cohort of drivers to another.
Gentrification and white flight. I suspect you knew damn well what I was referring to but enjoy backwards arguments
No, I really didn’t. What confused me was your use of the word “force.” Nobody’s forcing upper middle class people to do a damn thing. If they’re moving to impoverished areas and gentrifying them, it’s because they saw an opportunity they liked and took it. Conversely, if they’re engaging in white flight, they’re being “forced” by nothing but their own bigotry (which obviously doesn’t count).
The upper middle class people have all the power in the situations you’re talking about. Painting them as somehow the victims of their own choices is laughable.
Wow again wrong about everything. Laughable
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The real problem was people not able to get to a place for a decade. Not having customers for ten years tends to be a bad thing.
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Still wrong. You do not want cars to randomly turn. It makes them flip over. This isn’t a hard concept.
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Oh libertarian definition of force
Still wrong. You do not want cars to randomly turn. It makes them flip over. This isn’t a hard concept.
“Cars can’t possibly negotiate roundabouts because slowing down so they don’t flip over is too much to ask of drivers” 🙄
The amount of car-brained shit like this getting upvoted around here is too damn high! WTF is wrong with you people?
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The year is 2068. Everyone takes the bus to work. Their own personal bus.
Chuck a fiberglass walk-in bed cover on the back of that thing and you have a 12-seater bus!
Funny thing is, a Toyota Hiace bus has 17 seats, spacious interior, and is way smaller compared to this oversized thing
The real pro move is to convert either a double-decker bus for personal use or a bi-articulated bus.
Ok, see to put thin in context a little bit, this truck is not for, nor is it even marketed towards regular people. This is a modular truck, so this is going to be converted into ambulances, tow trucks, bucket trucks, etc. This one does have a bed on it, but they had to get one from like an F-350 and modify it to get it to fit. And while you can buy this truck, it’s not really a thing on roads here.
Just to add to this, and affirm that it’s not intended to be a “go to McDonald’s” truck, here is the actual product page for this model where it is marketed as a commercial vehicle.
No truck is intended to be a “go to McDonalds” truck. Yet, here we are.
This isn’t true any more, look at any modern consumer pickup truck e.g. Ford F150. The bed is ludicrously small and high, it’s got a fast, low torque petrol engine and transmission, the cabin is large and comfortable. It’s designed to be a normal car and that’s what it’s used for.
Btw… German car companies built those monstrosities…
The Unimog U500 was more or less just a marketing gag, but the G63 was a real thing…
What’s supposed to be the deal with the Unimog? It’s an off-road capable military/commercial vehicle that is used pretty much exclusively for those kinds of things. I don’t know the guy in the video, but calling the version that he had “luxurious” was patently absurd: Things like climate control can be legally required if you want to tell your employees to work in these vehicles in extreme weathers (and: Germany can get quite hot as well) and didn’t match at all what he was showing. Also: Because it has an additional cabin to transport more people it is a family-version? WTF? The primary use-case for that is if you need to transport several employees to somewhere. Which is not at all an absurd thing if you are talking farmers/military/fire-brigade/construction/…
To be fair the G wagon is a ridiculous vehicle, truck bed or not
OP you just got pwned! n00b!! I can’t believe the 6x6 is in GTA V and I’ve never driven it!!
Can confirm. We have 2 Dodge Ram 550s for our ambulances. And the photo clearly has F-550 on the sides.
It also needs a CDL to drive it.
By all means, criticize things like the Lariat or King Ranch trims of the F150. Those add luxury features that clearly have no work purpose. The F250 on up, though, is mostly for people who get shit done.
You do not need a CDL. I don’t know where you’re getting that info
An F650 has a GVWR of 26-29k lbs. A CDL is required for any vehicle over 26k
The GVWR varies, as it’s a modular truck, but the lowest is 25,600 according to Ford. Yes it can be higher and need a CDL, but that’s due to accessories.
Edit: That’s for the 2023 model. Previous model years, such as the 2022 have a GVWR of 22,000 - 26,000
Factory gvw doesn’t matter. What does matter is whether or not it has air brakes, the actual weight of the vehicle including what you are hauling, and the weight range you have insured it for. Your average F350 is legally capable of towing a combined weight of over 25000 lbs also, but you don’t need a CDL till you exceed 25000.
Requirements for the CDL vary by state. Don’t know what yours says, but in my own state of Wisconsin, it’s any one of:
- 26,000lbs GVWR (typically; there’s some details around how the weight is calculated)
- Carries hazmat stuff
- Designed to carry 16 or more people
Air brakes don’t enter into it, at least not here.
If you intend to operate a commercial vehicle with air brakes, you do have to take an air brake skills test in Wisconsin.
You don’t need a CDL if it’s 26,000lbs or lower. That’s the point I’m making. Just driving it, unloaded, without any heavy accessories like a dump bed or a rollback, a CDL is not required. So yes, someone could buy one of these and use it as their mall-crawler without a CDL. That may not be the intended use of the vehicle but it’s possible.
Well played, you answered the German with logic
This is custom made by a shop. Ford sells the front end and cab, and a small shop builds the rest.
It’s prohibitively expensive to the point of being a non issue. U need to calm down bro.
I have seen one nearly as ridiculous as this one, on the road in Cullman, AL.
They’re out there.
Here’s a little food for thought…
As big and stupid as the F#50s are, the square footage they use up is limited, and generally no bigger than a 3-row SUV.
You know the gas mileage that every super car gets? Ferraris, Lamborghinis, McLarens… All in the neighborhood of 7-10MPG.
These monstrosities are around 12-15, they are all more efficient than your average supercar, and not bigger than your suburban soccer-family-mobile.
Not defending stupid, just putting stupid into perspective.
Ferrari SF90 Stradale has 51 MPG in hybrid mode and 18 MPG in petrol only mode. SUV from Lamborghini, Urus, has 20 MPG. The fuck did your get your imaginary numbers out of? Your ass?
Ah yes, using a hybrid high-efficiency supercar to shit on an everyman’s pickup. Totally reasonable.
Look at pre-hybrid if you care about comparing apples to apples. Hybrid f250 has 25mg. You’ve never driven one long enough to refill a tank, the way mpg numbers are measured is much closer to how you’d drive a big truck day to day to your kids daycare and soccer practice than how you drive a two seater.
Do you just search the internet for vague American shit to get mad about? Been all over this country and I’ve never seen one of these outside commercial use.
I’ve never seen a “Ford F650” either. I live in California and most vehicles are small and nimble, including a lot of Teslas lately. Ten years ago a lot of Priuses.
Hell - my next-door neighbors have horses in their backyards and so do three houses directly across the street, and I’ve never seen one of these. Everyone has 150s or 250s.
You probably have-at construction sites or something, with giant beds meant for towing huge digging equipment, and so never noticed them at all.
I saw one once on T Pains Cribs episode
You almost certainly have seen a F650, you just probably didn’t recognize it because Ford only sells them incomplete (without the bed) and they are highly customized to fit their purpose. Commonly they are dump trucks, bucket trucks, heavy wreckers (tow trucks for transports), box trucks, etc. Here’s some good pictures of what they can be used for.
I’ve seen maybe three of them, and one was at the Chicago Auto Show.
Most people in the market for a truck like this go for the dedicated commercial manufacturers, like Mack or International.
I usually see the F-450/550/650 tow trucks and the sort. I’ve also seen some fire departments with them for some specialty type vehicles.
Yeah 99% of the time these are sold as cab and chassis then used as ambulances or RVs
Having lived in Iowa, I have definitely seen these in non-commercial use.
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Usually they aren’t done up as passenger vehicles like this. I’ve seen them done up as box trucks, power line repair, tow trucks, construction site dump trucks, stuff like that. I also think the 450s and 550s are used for ambulances and things.
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I used to drive an F650
In the military
For my job
It was a truck to refuel aircraft.
People don’t drive these on the roads, but our trucks are too big.
I work in the US auto industry. I’m not happy about this shit either.
Also, F650 is a rare vehicle so it really isn’t a good one to be mad about. F150’s and F250’s are everywhere though
Most people in Europe shake their heads an F150… Even as a work car it’s terrible
Professional trucks here are the ford custom transit
Give me a Mitsubishi L200 any time over an American made truck.
In my eyes it’s just as bad as any other pickup. It’s not even a real pickup. It’s a wannabe pickup
I’d love a ranger but they are a still a bit big. Fwiw I live in the woods so it would be a work truck.
I work at a large company with a lot of trucks and truck people. Never seen one.
American here. I’ve never seen this truck before. 🤷
This isn’t really something you see on US roads, unless you replace the bed with a flatbed or box. No normal person owns one of these as a pickup truck.
Yeah I live right in the middle of farm country and the only time I’ve ever seen this truck is like you said, with a flatbed.
I’ve seen some ridiculous trucks in my area, but you can always find most of them on a farm being used for actual work.
I saw one of these attempting to back into a parking spot at home depot a few weeks ago. I’m 6’1, the guy that got out was much shorter than me.
Oh, well, you saw one so evidently all americans drive one.
Well, at least one…
the biggest baddest truck
They certainly know their target audience: 6 year olds
Except it isn’t marketed that way at all. It’s a commercial truck that needs a CDL.
It doesn’t need a cdl
The GVWR is 26-29k lbs. A CDL is required for any vehicle over 26k.
Damnnmn.
These are novelty vehicles for the ultra wealthy. “Normal” pickups are already comically large and ripe for mockery, no need to hyperbolize
This is a work truck for commercial use. The bed in this image is an aftermarket mod done by someone with more money than sense. OP is just outrage baiting.
This is a work truck for commercial use, that is an overengineered abomination.
That cannot support large equipment, has no PTO, cannot safely carry a cherry picker, will not pull a low-loader 5th wheel trailer with a full load, run a flat-bed with a winch for towing cars, or carry 7 CY of wet soil in a dumper.
Commercial operations buy things based on their needs. There’s a reason why the small truck you’ve posted is almost non-existent in the US.
There’s a reason why the small truck you’ve posted is almost non-existent in the US.
Yes, it’s called overcompensating. You think other countries don’t do infrastructure and heavy machinery?
Can confirm, the United States has lost it’s mind. And yes, you have it down. The US goes abroad to secure resources for capitalist industry and has been promoting upsell and excess for some time now. Verhoeven’s satirical advertising blurbs in Robocop (1987) were right on the mark.
Making us stupid and wanting to spend our money on $200 K-Pop bobble heads is exactly the world our corporations strive for, and the means to regulate them by a public-serving government was gutted in the 1980s by the Reagan administration. George W. Bush and Donald Trump (and the minimal pushback during the Clinton and Obama eras) are the natural result.
And in the next two decades you might get to see how the US does civil war and fascism. Every election lost by a Republican is challenged for legitimacy in an effort to neuter elections and create an autocratic one-party regime. Hopefully, this kind of shenanigan should sound dangerously familiar.
You got it right in one. We are out of our fucking minds, no small part to some willful efforts to turn the people of the US into mindless obedient consumers, but an epidemic of intergenerational mental illness has also contributed to Florida-Man-like conduct and truckers re-configuring their cars to belch soot as rolling coal.
We have indeed gone insane, but remember, not all of it is internal though. Let’s not forget the influence campaigns being waged against America from various foreign nations that are trying to divide the country to cause it to be so busy fighting itself, that it effectively removes itself from the world stage, letting those nations basically do whatever they want without American interference.
The Chinese are spying to steal your technology, the Russians are doing pro bono campaign work for the most divisive candidates and the Americans are perfectly able to go off the rails without outside help
I would say perfectly willing and/or eager to go off the rails.
We don’t even have to try mate.
The problem is the backdoors to SHIELD used by the oligarchs that want to give it secret orders are ultimately going to be used by HYDRA as well. In fact, one of the failures comes from the belief that the HYDRA element infiltrating SHIELD can be detected and cleaned out as if with an antivirus scan.
We’ve seen this the way NSA turned from a communications security department to a surveillance and intelligence department (that is, from anti-surveillance to surveillance), so instead of exposing and closing exploits and vulnerabilities, they catalogued them in secret for their own use – leaving them available for other interests, including rival foreign states.
I’d like to say we have the terror scare from the 9/11/01 attacks to thank for that, but federal law enforcement in the US like FBI and NSA have secret-police tendencies, and like to use their powers to harass or neutralize enemies of the current administration, so this has been going on for some time.
A recent Behind the Bastards two-parter about How Capitalism Ate Christianity takes it as far back as the Great Depression and resentment of the New Deal. Larry Lessig notes that Boss Tweed in the 1850s was already moving to turn the US into a plutocrat-run autocracy, hence the current government as an oligarchy with small democratic features.
Hopefully, this kind of shenanigan should sound dangerously familiar.
Ah, no worries, Europe is right behind you! The UK has completely fallen off the cliff and is a full blown kleptocracy, Hungary already has an openly fascist Government, and in Germany the Nazi party is currently clocking in at 20%+ in opinion polls, which would make them the 2nd strongest party in the next election. Yay! 🥳
This size of truck isn’t common. Coal rolling is both far more egregious and common than this.
