Interesting video on why these large SUVs have become the most popular new vehicle to buy, using clever marketing tricks to convince people they need the more impractical and unsafe option.
Interesting video on why these large SUVs have become the most popular new vehicle to buy, using clever marketing tricks to convince people they need the more impractical and unsafe option.
If you live in rural, isolated parts of the US and are a worker you still don’t necessarily need a truck. The people with trucks are usually land owners, ranchers, or business owners in my experience. The workers drive company trucks or they work at a diner or something that has no need for trucks at all. Or the community is dying and people are forced to move to a city, but that is a seperate issue.
As for snow, you just put chains on your tires (sometimes required by law) and only make the trek into “town” very few times during winter. Trucks or SUVs are not actually the most important part, in fact the larger vehicle can make it more difficult in narrow mountain passes. Also many residents in isolated areas are actually wealthy, especially ranch/business owners, and they are most certainly at their winter homes not dealing with snow while working people basically just drink alcohol all winter. None of the businesses I worked at were owned by legitimate residents of the area, but instead also owned property in other states like Texas or California, or in the “nearby” (like 300+ miles away) major metro areas.
Anyways I don’t think it is always true accross all rural spaces that workers specifically need large vehicles. In fact I’d say advertising, and corporate currated identities play a big role in how people choose their car- especially when it leans on outdoor lifestyle branding which is a major fixture in the US settler imagination and of US nation building. It’s not true in the isolated mountain towns I have lived in, nor in the forgetten parts of the desert. It was usually business owners that needed trucks. Poor people were crammed into shrinking small towns while the rich lived on tracts of land. I think people forget that rural often means landed and thus not always poor, not always working class.
However, ultimately I appreciate your skeptism of the narrative of the video. It is easy for yuppies to say what is good for everyone and it is much less possible for people outside of the big city to just let go of their vehicles, big or small. I ended up getting an Outback Subaru because I had to commute 50-70 miles to work from a desert valley to various mountain towns and did not feel safe in a smaller car driving so much but had no need for something bigger. Gas prices are too high for a truck to be an option and I mostly worked in restaurants.
Yeah that’s understandable. The chains on tires is a great point for snow but for dirt roads that become muddy the ground clearance is still an issue. A perfect solution to this (AFAIK as I wasn’t around when they were a company) the AMC Eagle was a sedan with 4x4 and what looks to be either 1ft or close to it of ground clearance. It’s a shame they went under, that vehicle in particular looks interesting to me due to it’s unique characteristics and expanded use value.
I understand the landed argument and this is certainly prevalent in rural America. Of course it isn’t our job to worry about the pette bourgeois I didn’t mean to confer that. I was thinking more of trailer parks whereby workers rent trailers not drive them in there and towns where workers rent around the immediate area which can take them through rough terrain due to the underdevelopment of the area. I will also say that most people who live in these areas are either pette bourgeois or working class, taking “many rich” relatively.
Agreed. Gas prices are in general very high right now, this is even worse for those with large vehicles.