There is one driving around near where I live in Amsterdam as well.

I am quite tall, even for Dutch standards, but the hood reaches my shoulder easily. It also drives around quite a busy neighbourhood. So I expect this specific car to kill someone within the next 5 years or so.

Those tend to have no bonnets. So there are some risks and accidents still, but in general they do have better visibility.

And professional drivers.

They get paid for what they do, their "profession". Most of them are not particularly good ;)

That may be true, but on average I would expect them to be better drivers than the pick-up-in-the-inner-city crowd, whose choices are already off to a poor start before they turn the ignition key, after all, they picked the wrong vehicle for the surroundings.

There are probably less than two hundred people like that in the entire EU. Kind of a pointlessly small demographic to focus on.

Please stop polluting HN threads with nonsense. Thank you.

Don't they also need special driver licences, which can have more stringent rules?

Yes, but that is mostly "one time you get it" and then some courses every now and then. You do have more stringent medical rules at every renewal.

That doesn't just seem selfish, it is selfish. And if it was a renovation crew or so carrying tools I would say they at least have some use for it (though a VW transporter would be just as effective, if not more so).

A Mercedes Vito, despite being nearly 1m shorter and normal car width, has 4-5x the carry capacity and a 3x longer bed than the RAM. These cars are just for show, you can probably find a Kei truck with similar capacity.

> These cars are just for show

I love vans more than any vehicle, but they're garbage at offroad compared to trucks (even 4motion, etc can't compare). Most people don't use them for that, but in villa constructions sometimes you really want a pickup to get to the site. They're also better than vans in snow. Edge cases but they exist and they're not so obscure that I haven't experienced them.

Indeed, there are probably a few applications where it makes sense – though I suspect a classic, normal-sized Hilux/Frontier/Ranger would excel at that with none of the downsides.

That said, 95% of construction work in europe does not involve any off-road driving at all, and definitely not around the Amsterdam/Utrecht area.

If all off-road vehicles that had never gone off-road evaporated the world would instantly be a better place.

A RAM 1500 can haul 1.3x the weight and tow 4.7x the weight of a Vito. And a RAM can go off-road.

They are, ultimately, made for different workloads.