The case against American truck bloat

A pointless design trend has turned trucks into dangerous pedestrian killers

A pickup truck.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

When I was growing up in rural Colorado, my family had a classic work truck: a 1980 F-150 with the famous 300 cubic inch inline six-cylinder engine. It was often my task to fetch a load of sand for mixing concrete, or landscaping soil, or lumber for some project. It was a great truck, with only one problem — the oil pressure relief valve was a little sticky, so if you started it up cold and let it idle, the oil filter would sometimes explode. You had to give it some throttle immediately to shake loose the valve, after which it would be fine. It was just one of those little quirks that you adapt to with a hard-used piece of equipment.

That sort of truck is hard to come by in the consumer market these days. Trucks have gotten bigger, taller, gotten larger blind spots, and become much more powerful, luxurious, and expensive. Almost nobody even makes small pickups anymore, like the 1986 Toyota Hilux that I drove in college. The Toyota Tacoma, which used to be in that segment, is now almost as big as my old F-150.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.