Traffic deaths of pedestrians are up by 70% in the last 10 years and pickup trucks are largely to blame, according to a story from The Hill that we ran this week.
The number of walkers killed by “light utility trucks” rose from 732 in 2010 to 1,773 in 2021.
The reasons are obvious. Pickup trucks have long since ceased to be the single-bench-seat, utilitarian work vehicles of my youth, and morphed into monsters. It used to be rare to see a large four-door pickup. Now, it’s practically impossible to buy anything else.
To make them look brawnier, manufacturers raised suspensions and put huge grilles on the front. The hoods are so hard to see over that one congressman has proposed requiring new trucks to have forward-facing cameras and sensors to reduce “frontover” accidents, which is running over people or things you can’t see through the windshield.
There’s a better way: smaller trucks. They exist. We just can’t buy them.
Many’s the time I’ve turned on the nightly news and seen Taliban or ISIS militants tooling around in mini-trucks, mostly Toyotas, with machine guns bolted to the bed “Rat Patrol” style.
Every time I see that, I say to myself (or anyone unlucky enough to be in earshot) “There, that’s the truck I want” — minus the machine gun, which I’d only need if I were driving Kris Kobach in a parade.
But we can’t get those trucks here because of two reasons: profits and politics.
Profits, because car manufacturers make way more per unit selling jumbo trucks. And politics because of an antiquated trade policy levying a 25% tariff on imported light trucks, in retaliation for a European tariff on U.S. chicken.
Mini-trucks — mostly Toyotas, but also Ford Couriers and Chevy Luvs — were once ubiquitous on the streets and freeways of southern California, where I lived from the late 1970s to the late 1990s.
The first vehicle my wife and I ever bought together was a 1989 Chevy S-10 pickup, and we’d probably still have it if we hadn’t been blessed with twins and needed space for two car seats.
It was a simple, nimble, reliable and comfortable two-person truck. From the time we got it, my wife used it regularly to bring home furniture to replace the mismatched mishmash I had brought into our marriage. I once transported enough salvaged solid oak hardwood flooring to redo our entire kitchen.
The S-10’s curb weight was 2,700 pounds. It wasn’t the smallest truck on the road then, but today it would look like a mackerel swimming with a pod of killer whales.
The Ford F-150, America’s most popular automobile according to Car and Driver, weighs in between 4,000 and 5,700 pounds, depending on options. The real heavyweights are 8,000 pounds and up. Their high-rise suspensions and oversize tires could get you through the Baja 500, but are way more than overkill for the annual trip to Lowe’s to buy mulch.
According to an Axios study, shopping and errands are the No. 1 use of pickups, with 87% of owners reporting they do that frequently. Second was pleasure driving, 70%, and third, commuting, 42%.
Only 28% said they frequently use their trucks for personal hauling, and towing was a piddling 7%.
That same study showed that in 1985, mini-trucks were slightly more than a quarter of all pickups sold. By 2010, that had dropped to zero, and full-size trucks had over 90% of the market.
That’s tapered off slightly with mid-size trucks picking up more market share, but the smallest pickup you can buy today, the Ford Maverick, is still a needlessly beefy 3,500 pounds — 800 more than my trusty S-10.
So if you want to try to make a dent in traffic fatalities, gasoline usage and global warming, call or write your congressperson and ask them to repeal the Chicken Tax.
That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. U.S. trade negotiators made a deal in 2011 to allow Korean light-truck imports by 2021, but President Donald Trump, a big fan of trade wars, pushed that back to 2041.
Ditching the Chicken Tax might break the big-truck stranglehold on the market. If smaller import trucks sell, as I suspect they would, our domestic manufacturers might be led to retool and compete.
And then, when it comes to buying a pickup truck, we might once again be as free as the Taliban.
