Canada should ban fake trucks like the Ford F-150
REAL truckers drive a Suzuki Carry
According to Le Guide de l'auto, a Québec publication operating since 1967, four of the top ten best-selling vehicles in Canada in 2024 were pickup trucks. In sixth place, the Chevrolet Silverado. In fourth place, the Ram 1500/Super Duty, and in third place the GMC Sierra.
But right at the top? The most popular car in Canada in 2024, for the fifteenth year in a row, was the Ford F-Series, including the F-150 and it’s larger cousins. Definitively, by the number of units sold, Canada has thrown their money into bloated, gas-guzzling fake trucks.
I hate them. I despise them. The people who buy the F-150 and the Chevy Silverado have no interest in real labour. They never use their truck beds to carry anything, and they’ve never towed a single thing in their lives. It’s all about men engaging in compensation for something they lack in their pants.
We need to ban these road vermin. We need to embrace real trucks for actual work. But before I show you the replacement, let me fully explain the problem.
Something important to understand is that the category of “light” pickup trucks, including the F-150 and Ram 1500 but excluding their larger F-350 and 3500 cousins, has become much more bloated than it used to be.
According to Axios, the sixth-generation F-150, part of the larger lineup of F-Series trucks in the 1970s, dedicated 36% of the footprint to the cab, and 64% of the space to the bed. Even at this point, it was advertised for comfort over capability, with phrases like “rides like a car.”
But by the 2000s, expanded cabs with four full-size doors became standard, and suspensions lifted higher off the ground. And by the thirteenth-generation F-150, sold between 2015 and 2021, the numbers had literally flipped: 63% of the footprint is now for the cab, and only 37% goes to the truck bed.
The F-150 and competitor vehicles essentially occupy a space for “people who want an absurdly large truck but don’t carry many things.” Indeed, when you put the 1975 and 2021 F-150s side-by-side, the 2021 model’s truck bed is quite smaller. But are the people who buy F-150s even using their trucks?
The same Axios piece shows that only 28% of F-150 owners use their truck regularly for personal hauling. 41% only do so occasionally, while 32% have rarely or never done so. But even more strikingly, only 7% of F-150 owners regularly use it for towing, and only 29% tow occasionally.
That means 63% of F-150 owners essentially never use their pickup truck to tow anything. Which begs the question, why the fuck would you buy a truck over an SUV if you don’t tow anything? This is an ego vehicle, for people who want to compensate for something they don’t have, and that ego comes at a cost.
According to Consumer Reports, some trucks have a front blind spot which is eleven feet longer than a sedan, and still seven feet longer than an SUV. The latter is notable, as car manufacturers typically build trucks and SUVs on the same platform; the current Ford T3 platform is used for both the current F-150 truck and Expedition SUV.
When the hood of the vehicle is higher off the ground, the front blind spot gets bigger. It means that you are more likely to collide with a person, and it also means that when you do collide with them, you will hit them in their torso rather than their legs.
Because pickup trucks have so much more mass, the force equation also means that they now hit harder, too. It’s also more dangerous to drive a smaller car, as there’s a 12% increase in fatality risk during a collision for every 500 kilogram difference between your car and the vehicle hitting you.
Overall, “light trucks” like the F-150 have triple the chance to cause severe injury when striking a pedestrian, and a 3.4x increase in risk of death. This is why I describe them as “road vermin”. They are bloated, they are useless, and they kill people.
We can ban them, and we should ban them, because there are real trucks that do not have these problems. They are made in Japan, and they’re called kei trucks! The Suzuki Carry is a popular model, made for both the domestic Japanese market and also in Indonesia for international export.
The most recent generation of the domestic Suzuki Carry was released in 2013, and has a curb weight between 680 and 850 kilograms, much smaller than the current generation F-150 at ~1800 kilograms. And the electric F-150 model, the F-150 Lightning, clocks roughly a thousand kilograms heavier than the gas model.
The Suzuki Carry is for people who actually use their truck for work, and as a result it uses a cab-over design to greatly reduce the blind spot in front for the driver. As a result, bed capacity is actually competitive with the F-150, and many business owners in America have imported kei trucks despite the United States’ protectionist efforts to ban them.
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I love these kei trucks. Forget “light trucks”, a kei truck is actually light and efficient and easy to use for work, and much better for the environment than any variant of the F-150.
I would never propose banning the “light truck” category in Canada if there was not a real alternative. But I see no need to tolerate the fake trucks that Ram and GM and Chevy and Ford are trying to cram down our throats, when we could replace all of them on our roads.
If you do work with your vehicle, you should buy a kei truck. If you don’t haul or tow, then you shouldn’t buy a truck. And normally I wouldn’t think the government should intervene, but I’m really fucking tired of F-150s with lift kit mods driving around the suburbs, slamming into children and killing them.
In Canada, you can only import a kei truck fifteen years after it was manufactured, which means we won’t be able to use the 2013 Suzuki Carry until 2028, and only units manufactured in 2013. We’ll only get the 2014 units in 2029!
We have a safer alternative to the trucks that are dominating the road, and not only does the Canadian government refuse to take the solution, they actively restrict people from obtaining the solution. This is outrageous. It’s pathetic.
It’s time to ban fake trucks like the F-150 that can’t do real work. And it’s time to legalize kei trucks, which are better in every single way.
According to a survey of F-150 owners, it seems most of you don't do that either!
I drive a 2002 Chevy 2500 Suburban, and before that a 1991 1500 Suburban, and I deal with the wonders a north-eastern Ontario climate provides on a daily basis. From blizzards and ice storms to torrential rains and heat waves, you name it.
My SUV’s bumper is lower than almost every pickup truck out there, and the blind spots, both front and back, less than a pickup.
The cargo area is always full of tools, the trailer hitch receiver regularly greased, and often enough 10 or 12 foot long lumber is stashed into the back when the trailer is parked off site somewhere.
Yet it is dwarfed in size when a new model pickup pulls up beside me.
Through my own non-scientific parking lot observations gathered over these past few years, my conclusion is these larger pickups are favoured by oversized drivers.
The hypothesis I’ve come up with is the oversized driver/passenger finds it easier to fall out or heave up into to the cab of a pickup than try to stand up and out of or bend down and slide into the seat of a sedan.
Plus, as for winter driving, the backend of a rear wheel drive pickup is so light as to make them useless, unless they are stuffed with several hundred pounds worth of 50/50 sand/ salt mix.
Which explains why most pickups have a 4x4 drivetrain, although they too get stuck or spin out like a top if care is not taken driving them in adverse winter conditions -again because of the light backend.
So I too am befuddled as to why the pickup is as favoured as it is. Mind you, the other day while driving from one job site to the next, I quipped to my fellow traveller, it would be great to have one of those smaller Japanese style trucks to bomb around in.