I would trade in my model y for a compact electric truck of similar spec and price if it existed. I live in a city and don't haul stuff most of the time, but every time I need to carry trash or dirt, make home depot runs, or move furniture I wish I had a truck.
> […] but every time I need to carry trash or dirt, make home depot runs, or move furniture I wish I had a truck.
If you actually read the article, you'll see that—going by usable length—pickup trucks are generally no longer thing-haulers but people-haulers, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of their form factor.
If you want general hauling space/volume, your best best seems to be a (mini)van.
No, I don't need volume. I want to haul things that I do not want inside of the cabin (trash, dirt, gravel, wild game, dirty camping equipment, muddy boots, etc.)
My uncle is in construction and relatively outdoorsy: he used a (mini)van to haul all of those things. Drop a tarp or two and move on.
I've helped friends haul some of those things as well since they knew my dad had a minivan (Caravan, later Sienna), and would ask if I could (in my late-teens, early-20s) help them out.
But the bed used to be where the people went too. Then they made that illegal. When I was a kid it was pretty common to just sit in the bed, now you have to have a cab big enough for everyone to keep from getting a ticket.
I'm pointing out it's a ridiculous nostalgia to think back about the days when the truck wasn't a people hauler. It was. They just made the bed an illegal place to put the people.
Making the cab longer isn't to ruin people's nostalgia. It's to deal with the legal requirements for transporting passengers. You're illustrating my point. We shouldn't be outraged when you make something illegal and the vehicle is adapted to deal with that.
Why would we be upset about fewer people getting dead, shouldn't we be happy about bigger cabs if that's the case?
> It's to deal with the legal requirements for transporting passengers.
In 1982 the top selling vehicle in the US was the Ford Escort. In 2022 it was the Ford F-150.
People were hauled in the Escort just fine (and probably more comfortably in the rain and winter). The F-150 wasn't adapted to better haul people because changes to safety laws: it was adapted do help profit margins.
