Sure and honestly there are obviously reasons for a large pickup especially because the market is dumb as hell but also…
The high hood is murderous and pointless from a utility perspective, which is fundamentally contradictory to the concept of the vehicle as a utility focused vehicle.
The crash ratings for the back seats in many older pickups are not safe for kids, there is a reason SUVs have a longer passenger compartment size…
These vehicles put everyone in danger around them, including the passengers because even with the miracles of modern brake technology they can’t stop fast on slippery conditions and they cannot swerve at high speed without going out of control or rolling over leaving your only option to smash into thing and hope you kill it more than it kills you… my point is even when these vehicles have a function they still involve an individual placing everyone around them in danger through their use.
Compare an american pickup hood to the hood of this utility van, the hood of this van still has to go up very quickly to eventually reach the roof line but even still you can see it was thoughtfully designed to maximize visibility while also making the most likely pedestrian collision one where the person is hit lowdown and falls onto the hood rather than under the vehicle.
This one is better, of course the “problem” is that it doesn’t look like a RAM because… it was designed purposefully to be a BAD battering ram???
Even still that hood shape still doesn’t gurantee a pedestrian strike couldn’t happen higher up on the head or upper chest. This is the entire reason for the sedan like pronounced nose in the first place right??!?
All pickup truck designers did was look at that and think “yeah but that looks lame, we need to raise the hood more” until they made another vertical wall that the driver now can’t see over… it is so dumb it makes my head hurt.
This article about blindspots is a good visual example of the problem in that they are both expressions of the same fundamental geometric stupidity of american pickup truck hoods, the same reason the make it easy to run over kids by accident makes them more likely to kill them on contact in an accident that might otherwise have been totally survivable. It is pretty hard to lethally impact someone in their lower body, it is frighteningly easy to lethally impact someone in the head or their upper chest.
Sure and honestly there are obviously reasons for a large pickup especially because the market is dumb as hell but also…
The high hood is murderous and pointless from a utility perspective, which is fundamentally contradictory to the concept of the vehicle as a utility focused vehicle.
The crash ratings for the back seats in many older pickups are not safe for kids, there is a reason SUVs have a longer passenger compartment size…
These vehicles put everyone in danger around them, including the passengers because even with the miracles of modern brake technology they can’t stop fast on slippery conditions and they cannot swerve at high speed without going out of control or rolling over leaving your only option to smash into thing and hope you kill it more than it kills you… my point is even when these vehicles have a function they still involve an individual placing everyone around them in danger through their use.
Compare an american pickup hood to the hood of this utility van, the hood of this van still has to go up very quickly to eventually reach the roof line but even still you can see it was thoughtfully designed to maximize visibility while also making the most likely pedestrian collision one where the person is hit lowdown and falls onto the hood rather than under the vehicle.
This one is better, of course the “problem” is that it doesn’t look like a RAM because… it was designed purposefully to be a BAD battering ram???
Even still that hood shape still doesn’t gurantee a pedestrian strike couldn’t happen higher up on the head or upper chest. This is the entire reason for the sedan like pronounced nose in the first place right??!?
All pickup truck designers did was look at that and think “yeah but that looks lame, we need to raise the hood more” until they made another vertical wall that the driver now can’t see over… it is so dumb it makes my head hurt.
https://alexandriainjuryattorney.com/blog/pick-up-truck-blind-spots/
This article about blindspots is a good visual example of the problem in that they are both expressions of the same fundamental geometric stupidity of american pickup truck hoods, the same reason the make it easy to run over kids by accident makes them more likely to kill them on contact in an accident that might otherwise have been totally survivable. It is pretty hard to lethally impact someone in their lower body, it is frighteningly easy to lethally impact someone in the head or their upper chest.
vans don’t do quite as well at going over trenches, and don’t look like they have places to put straps/chains to drag things with