Insanely Large Trucks

From Bloomberg CityLab:

Since 1990, U.S. pickup trucks have added almost 1,300 pounds on average. Some of the biggest vehicles on the market now weigh almost 7,000 pounds — or about three Honda Civics. These vehicles have a voracious appetite for space, one that’s increasingly irreconcilable with the way cities (and garages, and parking lots) are built.

But a picture’s worth 1,000 words:

“The goal of modern truck grilles,” wrote Jalopnik’s Jason Torchinsky in 2018, “seems to be… about creating a massive, brutal face of rage and intimidation.”

Imagine the splat that kid would make meeting that grille. Would the driver even hear it?

Why is it that every decade, it seems, we have to introduce a massively fuel-inefficient vehicle that further entices people to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a depreciating asset? I’m thinking of the “Hummer H2” era. Have you even seen one of those lately? They were basically fad cars that damaged pocketbooks and the environment alike. For what sad reason must we repeat this financial error?

The fact that supersized pickup trucks were often deployed as political props (and weapons) during the Trump era did not escape the notice of scholars like Cara Daggett, a professor of political science at Virginia Tech. In a widely shared 2018 journal article, Daggett coined the term “petro-masculinity” to describe flamboyant expressions of fossil fuel use by men (and some women as well, but mostly men) as a reaction against social progress. To these drivers, “the affront of global warming or environmental regulations appear as insurgents on par with the dangers posed by feminists and queer movements seeking to leach energy and power from the state/traditional family,” she wrote.

Ah, so like concealed carry, buying these vehicles is wallpapering anxiety with (men’s one socially-sanctified emotion) anger, and then letting that weaponized anger loose as contempt upon the small, the big-picture minded, and the bicyclist in a performative display known as “petro-masculinity.”