I still recall the day, many years ago, that my youngest daughter asked me, "Why would somebody buy a pickup truck?" A nice-looking Ford F-150 had just passed by. I thought for a moment and then said, "I don't know, I guess they have things to pick up."
That's pretty much my feeling about pickup trucks. They are the ultimate purpose-driven vehicles. I've always lived in the city and I don't regularly need to pick things up, so I've never owned one. I imagine the country as a place where people are constantly picking up and dropping off large objects (refrigerators, stoves, piles of wood). They need pickup trucks.
Of course, that's old-fashioned thinking. Pickups are costly status symbols for rural and urban drivers alike. Mercedes just unveiled the X-Class luxury pickup, which will be available this fall in Europe. It's not just a pretty ride. The X-Class will be able to haul 1.1 metric tons or tow up to 3.5 metric tons. A 2017 Ram Laramie Longhorn with leather seats and chrome billet-port grille starts at around $63,000 and the 2017 Nissan Titan Crew Cab 4x4, which boasts a 5.6-litre V-8 and seven-speed automatic transmission, starts at $45,150.
This trend is reflected in sales. In the first financial quarter of 2017, Canadian auto makers saw the sales of passenger sedans and minivans drop. There was, however, an increase in the sale of pickups; one out of every five new vehicles sold was a truck. Ford's F-Series was tops, grabbing 36 per cent of Canadian pickup sales.
Personally, I don't have positive associations with pickup trucks. They are often driven by people I call to do work at my house who act like I'm an idiot for not knowing how to do the very thing I've called them to do. I'm always perplexed by this attitude. They should be celebrating my ineptitude. If I knew how to do the kind of things that require pickup trucks then I would not need to call them. They wouldn't be getting paid to do these things – ergo, they wouldn't be able to buy pickup trucks.
Likewise, pickup-truck commercials leave me cold. They normally show guys putting in a hard day's work on a mountain or a remote work site, driving through mud, hooking massive metal chains to things and hauling them. Or they're towing lesser vehicles that are stuck in mud and, at the end of these commercials, the mud-splattered pickup truck owners are always smiling. Why? They're living a nightmare.
Yet who am I to disparage them? I drive a minivan, which is far worse than driving a pickup. Far, far worse. Commercials for minivans show happy families driving around doing fun stuff. If commercials for minivans were honest they'd show a guy awake at 3 a.m., rise from bed, walk to the window, draw back the curtain, and see his darkened sepulcher of a minivan in the driveway glaring up at him. Then the words, "Because you chose this life" would appear on screen.
Minivans are the sort of vehicles people buy when they think they might occasionally need to pick something up. This is flawed thinking. Nothing you want to pick up ever fits (the only things you can always load into a minivan are your broken hopes and dreams). I can count the number of times my minivan has actually been useful picking up a large object on the "fingers of a one-eyed lathe worker" (as my grandfather used to say). Inevitably, I end up having to get someone with a pickup truck to do it.
Then again, perhaps I'm misunderstanding the word "pickup." A 2014 survey of 2,000 drivers conducted by Insure.com found that women were most attracted to men who drove pickup trucks (not sports cars). A guy in a pickup is a hot commodity. Where did my minivan rank? According to Insure.com, women were more attracted to men who drove UPS trucks. Only postal trucks were less appealing. It crossed genders. While men found women in sports cars most attractive, they found female pickup drivers more alluring than those in minivans and hybrids.
I guess American country singer Kip Moore is right: There's "somethin' 'bout a truck."
Truck, yeah.
Shopping for a new car? Check out the new Globe Drive Build and Price Tool to see the latest discounts, rebates and rates on new cars, trucks and SUVs. Click here to get your price.
Andrew Clark