Fat Cowboy Trucks
The most hated vehicles on the road
Note: This is a rewrite of an article originally published on my website on April 18, 2022.
In 2015 Mercedes Benz announced that they were going to produce a pickup truck and one of their high level executives made a point to say that it wasn’t going to be a “fat cowboy truck.” This was a smart move by Mercedes because that statement gave the press something interesting to say about the rebadged Nissan pickup that they had no intention of selling to Americans.
Every once in a while I think about this statement. Love of fat cowboy trucks is one thing that sets Americans apart from the rest of the world and Europeans and city folk love to poke fun at American trucks. I do have to admit that they have a point, fat cowboy trucks are often not very fun to drive, an absolute pain to park, lacking in useful storage, hard to get in and out of, not that great in the snow and, now that they are growing taller every year, harder to use as a pickup truck. However, the American blood in me can’t help but want a fat cowboy truck.
A car’s purpose is to get a person from point A to point B. Everybody knows this and cars fulfill that purpose quite well but people use trucks to do this as well. Fat cowboy truck critics will see this and say that you don’t need a giant truck to get yourself from point A to point B and they’re not wrong, they just misunderstand the purpose of a truck. Trucks are not for taking a person from point A to point B, they are for taking things from point A to point B.
Compare ads for trucks to ads for cars. Truck ads show off a truck’s payload, towing capacity, ruggedness and sometimes even their ability to provide electricity to power tools. Car ads don’t have that, they’ll tell you what kind of fuel economy they have then show a bunch of video of the car driving around pretty places or happy people sitting in a comfortable interior. Trucks are marketed to people who need to use them to do work, while cars are marketed as the simple point A to B machines that they are.
But does a person who doesn’t use their truck for truck things very often really need a truck? City folk say no, but why?
The first point they’ll probably make is simply that they don’t do truck things that often. They’re right that the average person isn’t moving a couch or towing a trailer every day. They might argue that anything a person buys that would require a truck to move could simply be delivered to their house. In most cases delivery is the most convenient option but it is not always an option. What if you are buying a washing machine from a friend instead of a store? Or buying a table from a thrift shop instead of one that only sells furniture? What if your fridge just went out and waiting a week for a new one to be delivered isn’t an option? In these cases you’d have to provide your own truck.
“Why not rent a truck when things like that come up?” they might ask. This is a good alternative for situations like that but it requires us to assume that rental companies will always have a truck available to rent. Rental companies don’t have an unlimited supply of trucks and if most of the people who currently own trucks didn’t then the demand for trucks from rental companies would skyrocket, especially on the weekends when people most often use their trucks for truck stuff. You’d have to reserve a truck weeks in advance which means there wouldn’t be one available to you when an emergency that requires a truck arises.
Vans are another truck owning alternative thing that truck haters might bring up when talking about this and sure you can fit the same sort of things in a van that you can fit in the bed of a truck maybe even more. But beds aren’t the only things that make trucks useful. Trucks are built to tow and modern cargo vans are not.
“But you can hook a trailer to any car,” they might respond. Technically yes, you can hook a trailer up to any car but that’s not a very good idea. Regular cars are not designed to tow heavy loads, I know people who have destroyed transmissions by towing things that their car wasn’t designed to handle. Sure you can put a light load behind an average car and it should handle it alright but then you also have to remember that most people don’t have experience towing a trailer and it isn’t as easy as people may think. Trailers reduce visibility, increase a car’s turning radius, and generally slow you down. Whenever I see a regular car towing a trailer I make sure to get far away from them because I don’t trust the driver to know what they are doing, plus there is a good chance they can’t see what’s behind them. I’d much rather be on the road next to a truck with a couch in the bed than a Prius hauling a couch on a trailer. I don’t feel safe around people hauling trailers who don’t know what they’re doing.
Speaking of safety that’s another complaint that the anti-truck people have. Larger and heavier vehicles obviously hit things much harder than smaller lighter vehicles, that is simple physics that can’t be avoided. Driving is a dangerous activity and drivers have to assume the responsibility of operating a vehicle safely no matter the size of their vehicle. This is why people are required to get driver’s licenses, why speed limits exist, and why police sit on the side of busy highways and streets.
Something that is much less often talked about is pedestrian safety. You don’t need a license to walk on a sidewalk so many people are never taught how to avoid the dangers of being a pedestrian. In high school I’d often hear people say dumb things like “pedestrians have the right of way” and while a driver has the responsibility to avoid hitting pedestrians, pedestrians also have the responsibility to avoid being in a car’s path when they have no reason to be. If a pedestrian is waiting at a corner for a traffic light to let them they should stand as far away from the street as possible, ideally behind the pole that holds the traffic light. This should be common sense and yet it is not because I frequently see people standing in the street as they wait to cross in a place where a careless driver could easily sweep them away. They should be just as aware of their surroundings as the people driving by them.
Road safety is everybody’s responsibility. Nobody buys a truck or gets on the road with the intention of running over a child or something like that. Drivers, cyclists and pedestrians should all work together to avoid tragedy. You should not view other people on the road as your enemy, you should respect them and give them the space they need to travel safely and you will find that most people will treat you with that same respect as well. Walking the earth antagonizing the people around you is not a healthy way for us to live.
Speaking of things people love to antagonize, trucks produce more CO2 emissions than the average car. Some people care more about that fact than others but I won’t get into that debate here. Instead I’ll point out the simple fact trucks are tools designed to transport large and heavy things and it is, again, simple physics that this requires a lot of energy. At the moment fossil fuels are the most efficient and practical source of that energy, this may change in the future but we cannot let our hatred of the energy’s source blind us from the fact that the energy has to be expended. We cannot avoid our need to move large and heavy things so we cannot avoid our need to use trucks.
This brings us back to the beginning of our discussion, trucks are designed to move things from point A to B. People who chose to use it to take themselves from point A to B anticipate the need to take things from point A to B and likely can’t afford to have a second vehicle and chose not to live somewhere where public transit it an option.
Ultimately the whole truck vs no truck debate is not a debate between right and wrong it is instead a debate between different lifestyles and that is generally the style of debate which we should avoid. Personally I think the idea of a community being reliant on public transit is incredibly dystopian. But I recognize that billions of people across the globe live perfectly happy like this so I’m not going to go out of my way to tell them that their way of life is wrong. I’ll take my shoes off when entering an Asian household for the same reason.
Fat cowboy trucks have become a modern symbol of American freedom and independence, much like the American flag. To insult trucks is to insult the independent American way of life.