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Trucks are commercial vehicles. You need them for towing, hauling and other construction related activities. License, permit and tax them as such. If you have a huge boat or RV you need to tow, get and pay for a permit. Have the taxes be based on mileage so the more they're used, the more expensive it is. We invented weigh stations to make trucks compensate for the additional strain they put on roads. Same for these trucks. That'll help prevent them from being daily drivers.
This is literally what the gas tax is for - it's something like 40 cents per gallon in NC. The worse your gas mileage, the more you pay.
Cool. Let's do another for commercial vehicles and apply it to global warming.
40 cents per gallon, aka fuck all.
Further, even if you have your boat or RV, relatively "smaller" vehicles can tow them confidently. A Santa Cruz is sized consistently with the pickup trucks of the past and can tow 5,000 lbs. There's a lot of SUVs about that same size that can tow that much or more, if you don't need a bed.
Further, the biggest reason these smaller vehicles are constrained on how much they tow is the American expedition that you can slap on your 5,000 lb trailer and drive 75 mph down the road. In Europe many cars have significantly higher towing capacities for exact same model as the American version, owing to the speed limits imposed on trailering.
The ridiculous "must look like a semi" pickup truck situation needs to pass. Those trucks have a purpose, but for it to be a likely "default" choice for a household is silly.
idk if it's an American thing, but please stop calling them trucks. Trucks are actual freight hauling industrial vehicles. This is just a family car with a bucket on the back. Call it a ute or whatever.
"pickup truck" is the term that refers to them. It's pretty unambiguous I think.
Truck is just slang for pickup truck. Ute as a term isn't really a thing in the US. Coup utilities like an El Camino or Subaru Baja feel pretty distinct from modern American pickups though. It'd be weird to put them in the same category given how different they are in both form and function.
Freight hauling industrial vehicles
Those are semis.
Ute used to refer to a 2 door vehicle with a bed based on a car chassis. Traditional utes are dying out even in Australia and New Zealand.
The American term "pickup truck" is a better term for these new vehicles built on their own oversized "light truck" chassis.