My brother rented a truck from Home Depot this week. $30 + gas, zero hassle. Far better option for most city dwellers than owning their own truck, IMO.
Yeah, I own a Honda Fit, and buying a sub-$20k subcompact car for daily use and being willing to do short-term rentals of something when I need to (very rarely, the Fit has a lot of cargo space for its size) has been an excellent trade-off. Particularly since in daily life having decent gas mileage and being able to park in any available spot is far more useful...
The main drawback of owning it, honestly, is that there's always the worry that someone in a behemoth pickup will collide with me, and I'd come off the worse from that.
I'm sure there are people out there who actually need the capacity of a pickup truck... but I don't think that most of the people who own one actually do. Certainly not the people you see driving them in town with an empty bed.
Honda fits are like a bag of holding, I've moved 500lb machine tools in one.
I wouldn't mind the flexibility of having a pickup truck shaped object because I never use the rear seats and always have them folded down for moving around other stuff, but nobody makes tiny pickups like they did in the 80s/90s. I also can't be alone in thinking this because I've seen an explosion in 80s Japanese micro trucks around town recently after some people documented the import process online.
I at one point had a guy with pickup (without a rack) trying to load lumber and remarked at how much easier of a time I was having loading the same lumber into the fit. It was pretty funny and I was surprised at his candor given my usual truck owner interactions.
Yeah! It being at or below waist level makes a huge difference. I usually get at least one skeptical look when I pull up to the local lumber yard with it. I'm always the only non-truck or van there.
My favorite personal anecdote was when I drove ~90 minutes to a friend's house in January so we could use his '98 Tahoe to pick up a king sized bed from Ikea. But we couldn't actually close the back doors with all of the boxes in there. It was quite chilly. When we got back to his house, I said "you know what, let's at least try to fit this in my (2007) Honda Fit. If it works, I'm warm, you don't have to waste 180 minutes on a round trip (with the first half freezing), and I save a bunch in gas." He thought I was crazy and it would never work. But wouldn't you know, with the passenger seat folded back we could get everything in with the hatch closed. I was able to drive the bed straight home and save my friend a lot of hassle!
They're not going to see you driving it at night because they're not going to see anything at all with you blinding them from half a block away with completely hostile stadium intensity headlightd mounted at eye level.
I never understood this, don't the presumably mature adult engineers and product managers who design lighting systems at places like Ford and Chevy not have children of their own, some of which being infants have to sit in rear-facing seats and get their retinas seared by these aggressively attention-seeking manhood cosplay accessories?
One of the few things the Cybertruck gets right is that the headlights are low down between the bumper and the frunk. The light bar at the hood line is decorative.
I can rent cars and vans from the supermarket 200m from me - the problem is the faff of waiting for a member of staff, the pre inspection, the post inspection, the cleaning, refuelling, the scanning of my drivers license, the payment of the deposit and fee - if it was as simple as turning up with my phone, scanning something and driving off I wouldn’t need a personal car and I doubt many would either.
An argument against this is that you will “own nothing”, but I sometimes feel like these tools I’ve acquired are more of a burden than they should be. Yes it’s convenient to have a table saw when I need it, but… I use it very occasionally, and I know well in advance when I’ll be using it.
It would be really nice to own a cleaner, more spacious home rather than a bunch of tools, most days.
The counterpoint there is that it's plain inefficient if everyone had to own everything. It's great that there's the option for the ones who want it I suppose, but as you've pointed out, from my perspective it's really just hoarding to have all these "justincases" hiding in the attic.
The Lowes and HD near me always have their trucks either in maintenance or rented out. It's always a mistake to rely on their availability here. Rebuilding my deck and making raised beds was basically an exercise in begging friends for their trucks
We've both always just did the "stick it out the trunk with a flag" or "tie it to our roof rack" thing when getting stuff from HD. But his experience was so good that we decided we'd be better off renting a truck in the future. Hopefully our future experience isn't like yours. Renting on a weekday in January is probably easier than a weekend in the summer.
You know they'll deliver. Plus, you can rent a moving van from U-Haul. There's no reason to spend Big Money on a truck you'll be using every now and then.
The delivery solution reminds me of the why-dropbox question. Delivery is fine* if you know exactly the amount you need or are fine with paying for extra materials. There were a few times I needed an extra piece or just needed something else.
And yea, I can still just wait for another piece of wood to be delivered - or I could just ask someone who has a truck to help me.
*Also Home Depot / Lowes lumber is garbage tier. I don't trust them to just send me whatever 2x6s I select online. If you don't go to the store and actually inspect the wood, you're just gonna get curved pieces.
