I'm not at all saying that trucks aren't useful, or that they aren't the best vehicle for a lot of people and/or tasks. I'm saying that the trend right now is for trucks that are way taller than they need to be purely because the buyer prefers that look. I had zero issues with pickup trucks 10 years ago, before they turned into a political/biological/emotional statement piece, instead of a tool.
The trend for growing truck is mostly due to EPA fleet fuel efficiency regulations. If you make a small truck, it gets classified as a car, so it counts for car fleet efficiency. That’s also why you see decline in sedans and rise in relatively small crossovers SUVs: these also count as light trucks, not cars, for fuel efficiency purposes.
It's also the "footprint" model of fuel economy for CAFE. The required MPG for a truck is based on the area of the rectangle made by the wheels. This means that for 2021, a larger F-150 is expected to get 25mpg, but something like the old Chevy S-10 would be expected to get 41.8mpg. [1]
The automakers have determined that this is not practically achievable, and so you can't buy a truck like the old S-10 or a pre-Tacoma Toyota pickup anymore.
It's more that people prioritize incentives for objective "A" and are totally surprised when it comes at some cost to "lesser" objective "B." In this case, being "environmentally friendly" vs being "safe."
I think a lot of "environmentally conscious" people don't realize that more and more of these types of environmental regulations will come at some direct cost in terms human-safety.
And also that a surprising number of politicians/activists/people are so committed to the dogma that they don't have any problem with that.
Higher, larger pickup trucks did not come about as a result of safety requirements, they came about from fuel efficiency requirements (or needing to get around them).
So net result of indirect regulations to decrease fuel consumption is increased fuel consumption, and more dangerous vehicles for everyone to contend with who is not inside as large of a vehicle.
Simply making people pay more for fuel would have incentivized them to prioritize what kind of vehicle to buy, and make it possible for smaller pickups to still exist and/or a rental market for pickups to flourish.
Believe me, the market would prefer the older, smaller, steel framed trucks than the newer aluminum ones. But they're no longer an option, new.
EPA regulation and govt overreach/ unintended consequences are what led to these design changes, not market demand.
The blue-book price for my 12 year old steel-framed truck has gone up every year since I bought it used.
>before they turned into a political/biological/emotional statement piece
The anti-truck crowd, which supported all the regulations that led to the current state of vehicle design, are the ones that made this a political/emotional issue, whether they realize it or not.
I don’t think this is really the primary reason for this at all. There’s an element of that of course, but there’s other factors as well. This is a decent short article about it. But the tl;dr is popularity of crew cabs + a gap in recent regulations that encouraged trucks to become larger https://www.insidehook.com/article/vehicles/why-pickup-truck...
>In other words, the regulations put in place to get better mileage out of vehicles also led to an increase in truck size. “There was kind of an incentive to maybe stretch the wheelbase a couple of inches and set the tires maybe an inch [farther] apart, because you get a bigger platform and slightly smaller target,” said Edmunds. “Now, the bigger vehicle would be heavier and might use more fuel, so it’s not as easy as just doing that. But certainly there was a feeling that if they did need to make it bigger to accommodate more passengers, the fuel economy target wouldn’t be onerous. They could do it.”
That statement is not very convincing that the regulations lead to bigger trucks.
