Too high modern American pickup truck beds — and the statement that makes about silly fashions

© 2017 Peter Free

 

09 July 2017

 

 

Off on a Clutter Rat tangent

 

Part three of my recent Clutter Rats musings begins with a comment about the disutility of modern American pickup trucks, whose too-high load beds interfere with the original purpose that pickups were invented to solve. (That original purpose was not towing huge trailers and large toys, which even today, proportionately few pickup truck buyers do on a regular basis.)

 

I suspect that this "get in the way of work" design approach reflects the lack of "reality relevance" of the preponderance of modern American culture — where appearance, rather than purpose and successful outcome, is the goal.

 

 

American pickup truck fashion defies common work sense

 

The load beds on modern American pickup trucks are way too high for those of us who have to work all day loading heavy objects in and out of them.

 

For the last 9 days, for example, I've been loading a Clutter Rat's voluminously useless estate into a modern American pickup. And I've been unable to avoid comparing its nonsensically high bed height to the much more utilitarian 1960s-1970s predecessors that we used on the farm where I lived. I could toss 110-pound hay bales (and other heavy items) into those noticeably lower trucks without thinking that the vehicles themselves had been obtusely designed.

 

This week, my 6-3 work companion struggled like I did. Body height (him) and strength (me) were not the problems. Foolishly high bed heights were.

 

Even hopping in and out of these 21st Century trucks is an exercise in unnecessary physical challenge. Reportedly so, even for agile hunting dogs.

 

 

What imbeciles thought raising pickup beds into the clouds was a functionally good idea?

 

And why do the people who use them for real work continue to buy these impediments to getting anything heavy actually done?

 

Curious, I scanned the Internet looking for perspectives on the "too high a loading bed" problem. Not surprisingly, most of the opinions (almost universally denying the issue) came from the scrotum-proud set. You know, the people who climb into their pickups to tower over the Common Folk so as to enhance their self-questioned manhood.

 

A handful of people who actually use pickup trucks to move heavy things tended to agree with me that pickup beds are too high and that there are no persuasively good engineering reasons for this. Functionally speaking, the 1969 GMC from my past would have easily bettered its modern equivalents in what we could load, move and unload within a timed interval.

 

 

Customer base brain-fog

 

A surprisingly substantial portion of Internet opinions about bed height addressed the height of the truck side-walls, rather than the vehicles' bed heights.

 

These people were too clueless to recognize that side-wall height (and its effect on contained bed volume) has nothing at all to do with load-lifting elevation's negative effect on output.

 

With a consumer public like that, it is no wonder that those of us who actually do the heavy lifting are outvoted in the market. If one does not frequently load mass-intensive items into a pickup, how is one going to recognize that having to lift every darn thing higher than necessary is tiringly inefficient?

 

 

My point is that fashion too frequently destroys brain

 

Fads and looks, rather than utility, seems to dictate what passes for "intelligence" in American culture.

 

And men, enfeebled by their evident lack of usefulness in our an increasingly dweebish age, seem to be seeking out ways to make visual statements of masculinity that do not require actually earning it.

 

(I think that I can almost guarantee that women, having to load pickups all day, would demand that their lift heights be lowered to sensible levels.)

 

 

The moral? — Those of us who still do heavy work have been drowned out by the Pretenders

 

From my perspective, pickups have lost work utility compared to what they used to be. Vans and trailers, with their noticeably lower beds, are more usefully designed for most work purposes.

 

Vans and trailers, I suppose, have been somewhat immune to the Stupidity Quotient in that virtually no one buys them to make macho statements about self-worth. Most of both are still work platforms designed for people that have to load them on a daily basis without motorized assistance.

 

Living in Germany recently, I noticed that almost all businesses, including construction companies, use a combination of vans and trailers. The American pickup is noticeably missing, presumably (in part) because it has become so time-consumingly inefficient for most load moving purposes.