Traded in...

Bet you did ok on it! these cars are still in high demand, still waiting to see another one on the road? glad you got what you like!!!

 

Man, I'd never leave the house if I worried about the stuff you guys do.

If you believe you're going to get in an accident, you most likely will.

 

Vehicles with "truck frames" are FAR safer in accidents than passenger vehicles. I don't know where you get most of your information, but you need to seriously reconsider your sources.

 

I still can't understand why city folk buy trucks. Incredibly overpriced IMO. And unattractive.

If you're a tradesman, understood. But beyond that... an SUV makes FAR more sense to me. And they are much more attractive IMO.

 

Same in my Triumph Spitfire

 

i'd venture that more trucks are owned by people who don't use them as trucks than people who do.
men (and some women) have a natural affinity for them, i'm not sure why.
just walking around our suburban neighborhoods, it's amazing how many driveways have a pickup.
they usually have a few suv's and sometimes a sports car.

 

I believe that the attraction to trucks is largely promoted by the sales people at the car companies. I'm not sure where they benefit from selling trucks to people who never dirty the bed, but there must be something that they get out of the transaction.

Their sales pitch is quite clever. They sell the truck as "one car that can do everything" while ignoring the things that it can't do.

What can't an F150 4x4 do? It seems that there's a lot of places where they fail. For instance they don't park well in most parking lots. They don't bring groceries home from the store in a rain storm. They often fill the driveway built for a suburban house. They don't always fit in an urban parking structure. With the terrible gas mileage they need a very big gas tank. I was appalled last month when I saw a man at the gas pump as he added more than $90 worth of gas into his pickup. No idea what truck owners do when they exceed $100. Does it roll over like an odometer or do they have to pay it off and start over?

Don't get me wrong. I had an F150 for more than 10 years, and I used it a lot. When I bought my Prius my use of the truck fell to almost nothing. I still picked up mulch for the garden. Brought home the Christmas tree. Dropped off the Christmas tree at the dump. Drove the truck to the smog check station so that I could renew the registration. I figured that between the gas, license and insurance I was spending a horrific amount per mile. Add the occasional tire replacement (rubber breaks down with age) and I actually paid more than $1 for each mile that I traveled.

I'll stick with a sedan for daily use and rent or borrow trucks as needed.

 

It was a scientific study, as opposed to someone's gut feeling. It was perhaps this Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory study, but there are probably other scientific studies with similar conclusions.

So, the bottom line is that the wife was wrong.

An analysis of traffic deaths by vehicle type and model

Abstract

This study compares the risk of death in traffic accidents, depending on type of vehicle and vehicle model. Here, risk is driver deaths per year per million vehicle sales, for model years 1995–1999. Two risks are evaluated: the risk to the driver of the vehicle model in question in all types of crashes and the risk to the drivers of other vehicles involved in crashes with the model in question. The sum of those risks is the combined risk. Our main results are that sport utility vehicles (SUVs) are not necessarily safer for their drivers than cars; on average they are as risky as the average midsize or large car, and no safer than many of the most popular compact and subcompact models. Minivans and import luxury cars have the safest records. If combined risk is considered, most cars are safer than the average SUV, while pickup trucks are much less safe than all other types. Characteristics of the drivers of certain vehicle types probably have a strong effect on safety. For example, sports cars as driven are extremely risky for their drivers, who tend to be young males, and minivans are extremely safe for their drivers, very few of whom are young males. However, there is no evidence that driver age and sex distributions increase the risk of the average SUV compared to the risk of the average midsize car or a safe smaller car model.

 

Which Is Safer in an Accident, Trucks or Cars?.

"According to the IIHS, there’s only a 20 per cent difference in the fatality rates of cars and trucks. Cars still do come in at a higher 60 per cent, but trucks aren’t that far behind, taking in 40 per cent of fatalities.

According to research by the University of Buffalo, every additional 1,000 pounds of weight on a vehicle reduces the risk of injury in a crash by 19 per cent. With that being said, although pickup trucks are safer in some instances like head-on collisions, there are other factors that can make them dangerous in certain types of accidents."

 

Please point us to the actual IIHS report, not to some "automotive training centre's" rendition of it that leaves out most of the crucial details, such as differences in types of accidents, and occupant vs non-occupant rates.

I remember reading the report Gokhan referenced back when it was first released. Here is one of its relevant charts. One thing that then jumped out at me was that the Honda Civic just as safe for its driver as a Ford Explorer, but twice as safe for the driver of the other vehicles it tangled with. Some other SUVs were a bit better for their own driver, but worse for the other drivers. All pickups scored worse, some far worse, on both measures.

 

As I said, larger vehicles are typically safer in multivehicle accidents involving smaller vehicles, but they are typically less safe in single-vehicle accidents. For example, when you're driving a pickup truck, if you lose control for some reason and hit a pole, it's like a head-on collision with another pickup truck, which could be devastating for the occupants. SUVs and pickup trucks are also more susceptible to rollovers.

 

Car companies sell things that sell the most - not the stuff that takes forever to get it off the lot. Still, believe what you want.

It's called higher margins.

Speak for yourself.

There's this thing - it's called a "SHELL". There's this other thing, it's called a roll out tonneau cover. Never mind that the Lion's share of pickups now have back seats.

That's not too bad. We could easily put $100 into the Range Rover tank ¼ century ago - back when the dollar was much much less deflated. Besides,
if people are really worried about pickup truck mileage as much as you seem to be, in just a few more months Dodge is releasing a 150 Mi range - DC fast charging plug-in Ramcharger that works out to about 50 MPGe - can tow 14,000 .... even has plenty of room in the back seats that you can stow your groceries without even needing a shell or a tonneau cover. But call me when a smallish sedan can tow a 35 ft double axle 5th wheel travel trailer.

i .... i .... i ... i ... starting to sound like a mariachi.

Maybe if there's a chance to escape silly cone Valley you can find Millions of people in many other areas driving through big potholes, or on slick ice, or deep snow, or steep inclines, or mud & sand. Perhaps that way it won't be necessary to be judging everybody that doesn't meet the specific needs of .... i .... i ... i ... i. It's a much healthier life not worrying about what everybody else is driving.
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Note that I added an interesting chart to my earlier post, from the report you linked.

Back when that report was written, larger vehicles were 'safer' in multi-vehicle crashes in part because most of the vehicles they tangled with, were smaller and lighter. But when they tangled with another vehicle of their own size and weight, they didn't fare as well, not even as well as smaller vehicles tangling with their own, because pickups and SUVs were then still exempt from most passenger car crash safety requirements, which hadn't yet been changed to reflect the shift in consumer sales.

 

And they've only gotten bigger, and heavier, which may or may not make them more dangerous to other drivers, even they are technically safer for the driver in the car.

A 95-99 study would really need to be done again, 25 years later, thanks to not only the increasingly growing size of many of these cars, but also the advancements in safety tech to boot.

Then again, the crux of this whole conversation is 18 wheelers vs not 18 wheelers. And I think, logically, a small compact car being slammed by one of those is gonna have a worse time than a big F250. But lets be honest - almost nothing will survive a major collision with an 18 wheeler.

In a lot of ways, if the car is small enough, it might even pass right under a truck that doesn't see them in the blindspot without a trailer skirt like in the movies if we REALLY want to start splitting hairs

 

If an F150 pickup gets into a collision with a Honda Civic, the end result will be the Honda Civic fitting easily into the bed of the truck next to the groceries with the truck having little more than a mangled front bumper. I've actually witnessed this.

"78% of injury accidents involve multiple cars. Every additional 1,000 pounds of weight on a vehicle reduces the risk of injury in a crash by 19%."

F150 = 4,400 lbs.
Civic = 3,000 lbs.

 

$$$. Pickup truck profit margins are much higher than passenger car margins.

This was even more true back in the second-half 1990s when pickup trucks and SUVs were exempt from most passenger car safety and fuel efficiency regulations.

 

That's what happened when customers defined "safety" as 'killing the other guy without killing yourself'. A paraphrase of an actual SUV owner interviewed in a 1990s Seattle Times article about the then-increasing popularity of SUVs.

I added some markers to that chart posted back at #50, to illustrate the problem:

 

That's a great chart. Would love to see it updated through 2023 with Tesla's & Hyundai/Kia's various models included.
Supposedly rollovers are big contributors to high sitting vehicles .... but with the Advent of skateboard plug-in battery locations, that should really up their game.
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There have been major changes since. Pickups were all given rear-axle (single channel) ABS shortly after that era, before it was rolled out to most passenger cars (as 4-channel), considerably reducing their single-vehicle crashes. That and some other changes significantly reduced their rollover rates. SUVs and pickups also lost a considerable portion of their safety exemptions and have had to comply with most of the more stringent car rules. So today's chart should look much different, and both death rate axes should be scaled smaller now.

Do beware that at least one less-old chart out there, showing SUVs as safer than cars, was made at a time when virtually all new pickups/SUVs had ABS, but around half of passenger cars didn't yet have it, so was not really apples-to-apples.

Back in the 1990s, as stricter passenger car safety requirements were bearing fruit, the rate at which everyone survived severe car-car crashes was climbing rapidly. But still being exempt from those regulations, pickup-pickup and SUV-SUV crashes were not showing similar improvements, but remained nearly as deadly as ever. And the larger vehicles had much higher single-vehicle death rates too.

But those weren't the crashes most consumers were watching. Instead, they were watching the truck/SUV-vs-car crashes where the truck rode over the top the cars' crash safety features to more directly kill car occupants. They assumed this meant the larger vehicles were 'safer', in spite of the above chart showing the opposite. Lots more equivalent car-car crashes were becoming non-fatal, but 'killing the other guy without killing yourself' had become the consumer standard of 'safety'.

 

You are absolutely right. I do stay out of Texas and South Dakota