Hot take: pick-up trucks should be illegal as daily drivers. You should need either a commercial license or permit. Vast majority of truck drivers don't need them regularly as a truck or to tow; they're just status symbols and make driving more dangerous for everyone else. Not to mention the inefficiency.
There's an easier solution. A vehicle weight tax that actual laborers are exempted from. Weight is what damages the roads, so a weight tax would accomplish practical and ideological goals.
This sounds like the CAFE debacle all over again....
You could do that, but in southern states they’d just make it too easy to get the permit. See Oklahoma’s “commercial vehicle” loophole where everyone has their car zoned commercial to get a tax write off. Also electric pickup trucks are a thing.
That and there are plenty of people who need a truck regularly enough to justify owning one vs renting one, but don't use it comercially. The "permitting" for this would have so much gray area, it wouldn't be worth it. Additionally, if you told all those people they couldn't have a truck, they'd just go get an SUV and you wouldn't really accomplish anything.
So...good luck with that. In the meantime they continue to sell like hotcakes.
How else am I supposed to get my lumber from Home Depot every other week?
Is that for your job? You're in the extreme minority if you need 6'+ lumber twice a month. Also renting a $30 uhaul pickup for that will 100% be cheaper than buying and maintaining a pickup truck. $720/yr. You're just looking for reasons to drive a truck daily for the aesthetics.
Bonus points for living on a 5 million dollar "rural" property 1:30 from the city center where they work.
Just call them what they are for so many, emotional support vehicles.
I don't care what anyone says, it's just a fact that the vast majority of people who use these huge trucks as daily drivers do not actually need to. Obviously there are exceptions, but they are relatively uncommon.
I use my mid-sized pickup as a daily driver, but that's because I used to need it and my work situation recently changed. My plan is to get a little commuter car as soon as I can and use that as my daily driver and keep the truck for when I actually need it. The gas savings will pay for it, and again, I don't even drive a full-sized pickup.
If you want to buy a second smaller car that's fine, but just don't do it because you think it'll help the environment, because it'll actually have the opposite effect. Producing a car takes a huge amount of energy and creates a huge amount of carbon pollution and other waste. The amount of gas (and thus pollution) you'd save by using a new small car will never come close to making up for the pollution that was created in the production of that car.
The most environmentally helpful choice is for people to keep using their current car for as long as they can, no matter how much gas it guzzles or oil it leaks.
With that said, life is of course much more complicated than that, so it shouldn't be the only factor you consider in deciding whether or not to buy a new car.
EDIT
To the couple of people who downvoted this, I'm not just making stuff up, this is information I heard from scientific sources. Here's citations:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-used-cars-are-more-ecofriendly/
Agreed. That said, it's not my intention to buy a "new" small car. Why would it be when what I want is something that's fuel-efficient and cheap?
A "new" car never even occurred to me.
Also always drives 130 on the highway and accelerates as aggressively as possible. Then they post on Facebook complaining about the new carbon tax.
But if I ask for help it's a "handout".
For a split second I thought they posted a picture of a Lightning and I was gonna laugh.
