this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Look honestly this is pretty stupid.
The cyber truck is a super expensive, conservative coded, pavement princess car. The people buying it are probably doing so instead of getting an F350 with one of those illegal mods that lets you pipe out black smoke. It's overall a net positive for the environment.
I feel like this is less about the Cybertruck and more about Elon. I get he's hateable, but people just end up feeling lied to when you use BS logic to pretend that the (supposedly) best selling EV pickup in the US somehow needs to be targeted by climate activists. Just deface his private jet or some shit.
No. Both vehicles are absolute trash for the environment. Just because it's an EV does not mean it is suddenly environmentally friendly. The stupid stainless steel alone uses up idiotic amounts of energy to produce and in the end it is still a several ton heavy vehicle instead of some form of micro car.
And no, no one really uses this or an ICE truck in a way that would require them to have one. Even people who haul shit in the back would usually do with a more sensible roofed vehicle, but that would be less "cool".
All of those big cars can and should be a target. If we go with individual motor traffic, then we should use vehicles that are as compact and basic as possible.
Elon is also supporting right wing authoritarians who want to dismantle climate protections and promote coal, oil, and gas.
Wait, no one has a legitimate use case for a truck? Like transporting building materials and tools? Large furniture and appliances? People who live along an unpaved mountain road, or work somewhere similarly remote, like forestry? Towing fifth-wheel trailers? When it snows here, I'm stuck at home until someone with a truck comes by to plow... They have large dedicated snowplows for the highways and stuff, but for out-of-the-way residential streets, the city contracts private pickup truck owners with their own plows. I'm glad they're around.
Like don't get me wrong-- The majority of truck owners pretty much never do these things, and it's an extremely wasteful vanity display for them. That's bad. Most people who buy Cybertrucks will not be doing truck stuff with them. That's bad too.
But I think some people have a good reason to own a truck.
We're talking about less than 1% here. And yes, most of even your examples do not require a pickup truck, or even your own hauler. Just look at other countries. People transporting tools? They have little vans or nowadays even cargo bikes. This whole pickup truck thing is very much an US fetish.
Almost all use cases for yank tanks and monster utes would be better served by some other vehicle. Large furniture and appliances? A van. Unpaved mountain road (sure...let's just pretend that that's actually a significant enough market to be worth derailing the conversation to talk about)? A 4WD. Transporting building materials and tools? Either a real truck or a more traditional ute. Or even a bakfiets if they're just doing minor home repairs.
Are there use cases where yank tanks are truly the best option? Yeah probably. But they are so vanishingly small that they're never worth talking about.
I don't really understand your point. Vans have advantages for moving large stuff, but trucks do too. Trucks are the most common type of 4WD vehicle. For materials/tools, your examples are "big truck," and "small truck." Why are those acceptable, but "truck sized truck" is galling?
Oh there was also "backwards truck but bike." I unironically love that, and I wish those were more common, but that guy isn't coming 20km out of town in the snow with a new hot water tank.
The fact that trucks can do all of those things pretty well plus serve as an everyday personal vehicle means that IMO they do fit pretty well into lots of peoples' lives.
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.
Thanks for adding this. It saved me a lot of time trying to argue with you. You're clearly the type of person who is gonna believe what you want to believe.
I believe what is happening in reality. But every accusation is a confession I guess. https://www.axios.com/ford-pickup-trucks-history
That source provides evidence against. It says that around 70 percent of F-150 owners use their car for "personal hauling" on at least an occasional basis, and around 40 percent use their car for towing under the same criteria.
You specifically said "no one" uses ICE pickup trucks for their intended purpose.
Did you not read that article or did you just think that I wouldn't actually click on the link?
lmao The vast majority of people literally confess to use their trucks for shit like leisure and grocery shopping. You don't need a heavy pickup truck to "occasionally" do "personal hauling". But thanks for proving my point, because what you're doing is mental gymnastics in an effort to make excuses. It's like Cybertruck owners arguing they are off-roading with it, while they just drive over some dirt roads with a few rocks and puddles - something virtually every car can do. Unless you have to haul actually heavy gear on a daily basis through some serious terrain on an open bed, you don't need a truck. And if you fit into those criteria, you wouldn't buy a fashion truck with their tiny bed and are part of the 7% of that statistic, which is likely still more bullshit than not and the true number is closer to less than 5%.
See this is why I said it was pointless to argue.
You've 100 percent what you're gonna believe. That belief is based off your own personal hatred of pickup trucks. I wouldn't be surprised if this didn't somehow tie into a larger aspect of your identity via some weird political connection. It's like talking to a 7th grader. Pointless.
Holy mother of projection... No thanks.
Yep and the message it sends to 99% of the population that isn't deep in Elon derangement syndrome is that green movements are just more leftwing circlejerking idiots that are completely unserious about the causes they profess to fight for.
Yes I would love america to have better trains and better public transport but short of a magic wand that's not going to happen this decade, if we want to improve things then we need to live in the world we're in. Cybertruck is great for converting rich idiots who'd otherwise be ICE obsessives, they'll all be getting solar roofs too so they can brag and preaching to their budies about being secure in disasters and price spikes. Though let's be honest these protesters will likely have the opposite effect to their aims and increase Elons popularity amoung the right.
It's sad to me these people who profess to care so much about climate change or whatever always and only do aggressive, destructive and easy acts - they never put the work in to come up with creative, constructive and genuinely positive acts which help people or projects working to improve things.