Pickup trucks in Europe

As you all know, pickup trucks are not very popular in Europe, for a variety
of reasons.

You might, thus, amuse yourselves by reading this review written by a
journalist in the UK Sunday Times (the leading quality Sunday paper here)
after he bought a Ford Ranger. FYI Brian Appleyard is not normally a
motoring writer.

Ok, it's not a Chrysler (but he does mention having seen Dodge Rams and
comments on their environmental friendliness) but it might still be a fun
read.
http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,12389-1450581_1,00.html

The reference to Ken Livingstone is to London's mayor (who does not have a
car!), who has introduced the rather controversial congestion charge in
central London and which is to be increased and have its scope widened.

DAS


Pick it up there: a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do
Bryan Appleyard broke through the class barrier and made a lot
of new friends by buying a pick-up truck. Now he's a happy Good Ol' Boy





A match made in heaven: Appleyard with his Ford
Range XLT (DWAYNE SENIOR)

The great thing about the middle classes is their gullibility.
You can sell most things to the working class, but after a while they always
turn shrewd. You can sell nothing to the upper class because they always buy
the same things from the same people. But the middle classes walk around
with the word "sucker" emblazoned on their foreheads in letters of fire.
This is why, when they get to country places and the remote
possibility that they may hit a muddy road enters their head, they can
easily be persuaded to spend vast sums of money on jaw-droppingly ugly 4x4s
like the Porsche Cayenne or the BMW X5. Then, of course, having spent the
money, they're too scared to go off-road for fear of scratching or denting
their gleaming uber-chariots.

Everybody, from Ken "Foxy-Woxy" Livingstone upwards, has pointed
out that people don't need big four-wheel-drive machines. However, some -
like, for example, me - do. I periodically have to transport big things
between London and Norfolk, and in Norfolk I drive down muddy marshland
roads and (increasingly frequently thanks to global warming) through deep
water.



I would be insane to try to do these things in an X5 or a
Cayenne. They're not big enough for the "big things" and every
bramble-scratch or rock-dent would be taking hundreds of pounds off their
value. The solution is obvious, but you need to be very socially secure. So
brace yourself, because here it is: get a truck. I did and I'm a better man
for it.

"I couldn't do that," said a friend when I told him of my plans.
"I'd look like a painter and decorator."

I have no problem with looking like a painter and decorator. But
the British class-thing is a problem. In America the middle classes think
nothing of having a pick-up truck - and they do have some gorgeous trucks.
The most beautiful motoring spectacle I have ever seen was at the
Indianapolis 500. I don't mean the race itself, which makes Formula One look
interesting, but beforehand during preparations for the race. Overnight rain
was removed from the track by six bright-red Dodge Rams thundering round the
circuit in diagonal formation with gigantic hairdryers on their backs.

Americans have so many trucks that they are startled by our
"trucklessness". Some newly arrived US tourists recently spotted mine parked
in the street and cried: "Look, our first truck!" Over here we go all prissy
at the prospect that our vehicle might make people think we are in, ugh,
some trade. And so we buy dumb-ass mink-lined 4x4s instead of pick-ups.
Admittedly they're not as environmentally insensitive as some would have you
believe - empty bendy buses are much worse - they are just pointlessly
extravagant celebrations of an unnecessary function they are extremely badly
designed to fulfil.

But let me tell you about my truck . . . because I love it. I
love it more than my wife's Porsche Boxster S and I love it more than the
Jaguar XKR or the TVR Griffith - both super-desirable cars I have driven in
the past. Here's a test: when you park your car do you look back at it with
satisfaction? I did with the Jag and the TVR, I don't with the Porsche, but
with the truck I just stop dead and stare gratefully at the overpowering
rightness of the thing.

It's a Ford Ranger XLT in blue and silver with an aluminium
checker plate Mountain Top cover over the back, on which a gay friend says
he wants to dance as I drive along the M11. I thought of getting the
special-edition Thunder version, but that has pointless leather seats and,
very embarrassingly, Thunder written on the side.

The Ranger has five seats, air-conditioning and excellent
off-road capability. It's easier to drive than most cars and it's a lot
quieter than the Porsche. It's not fast, but I've "done speed" in it, and
it's
fun but not really worth it because, on any given journey, you only get
there about 5% faster.

My truck doesn't have sports-car driving dynamics but it has a
kind of authoritative languor about it, just kind of suavely rolling along.


On some country roads it even acquires an amusing boat-like
pitching motion. Of course it carries almost anything you can think of: I've
had about a ton of damp wood in the back. Oddly, its performance seems
unaffected by whether it's loaded, and naturally I don't wash it. And you
know what it cost? With the £800 Mountain Top it was just under £18,000. A
joke.

It has an amiable but slightly weak 2.5 litre diesel engine so
it doesn't compare with American trucks, which are bigger - much bigger.
Unlike certain other contributors to these pages I do, however, have
environmental pangs, and the Ranger delivers lots of miles to the gallon
whereas the Dodge Ram and all its butch cousins blast continuous strips out
of the ozone layer.

The Ranger does at least look as though it's beefy, with its
heavyweight chrome front and excitingly weird tubes around the sides, called
"style bars". Not that, I am happy to say, any designer appears to have been
within a hundred miles of the thing. It's just chucked together with a few
truck "signifiers". But it's handsomely proportioned and, inside, you do
have that American feeling of sitting in moving space rather than the
European feeling of being wedged in a machine.



But here's the really big thing: people love me in the truck almost as much
as they loathe me in the Porsche. All my class hangups have gone, I am one
with the people. Lorry drivers flash me to signal I am past them. People
smile as they let me in. Other truckers nod and grimace knowingly in traffic
jams. At service stations - even when I get out of the truck wearing a suit
and tie - I am silently included in the stoical brotherhood of those who
drive for a living.
I once parked outside a hardware shop where I bought a screw or something
and the bloke actually said: "Nice truck." I glowed. As Daphne says in
Frasier: "You can't buy memories like that."

Now obviously you'll want to buy a truck at once. So here's some serious
consumer thinking. Trucks cost more to insure than cars, primarily because a
lot of them get nicked. It's the price of being as one with the people. The
Ranger is a cheaper buy because the market leaders are Mitsubishi, Toyota
and Nissan, and Ford is obliged to discount.



In fact Mitsubishi is so dominant in this market that the salesman couldn't
believe it when I decided against their L200 and bought the Ford. He rang me
up, incredulous. But I prefer the redneck looks of the Ford to the weird
retro of the L200 and I saved about £4,000.

All the trucks have much the same level of performance and carrying
capacity. The special editions, such as the Mitsubishi Animal and Warrior,
tend to be expensive and look and sound embarrassing, although I know this
SAS bloke who drives around in a Warrior and makes it look cool. Well, he
would.

Against all that, the commercial vehicle side of Ford has self-esteem
issues. I had to buy my truck from a guy in a Portakabin way off the main
lot and, though Ford and the rest are very keen to sell trucks to the middle
classes, the salesman seemed baffled as to my motives.

And he did manage to lose my Ranger at one point - it simply vanished from
his computer screen, finally turning up on the dockside in Southampton. The
upside of this was that it gave me the opportunity to call Ford and say: "I
suppose a truck's out of the question?" Now, well . . . life is good. I roll
up and down the Norfolk route chewing gum, raising eyebrows with the other
truckers as yet another X5 weaves stupidly across the tarmac, and deploying
ruthless lane-savvy to pass Lamborghinis. Or I lapse into a dream, fancying
myself on a dirt road in Dixie and, like the Good Ol' Boy I have become in
my heart, I allow tears to streak my face as Emmylou Harris croons and moans
her way through Daniel Lanois's baptismal prayer The Maker.

It is, as they say, a no-brainer. Get a truck.


For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
---

 

That was good for a chuckle. Very different set of social
"sensibilities" on opposite sides of the pond, I guess. The thought of
being insulted by being mistaken for a painter or decorator would never
occur to me.

Quite a few facts wrong too- for one thing auto emissions are associated
with "greenhouse" gasses, and NOT with ozone depletion
(chloroflourocarbons are the ozone-depleters). For another, attributing
increased wetlands to "global warming" is pseudo-scientific folly. And
it never mentions that the Ranger is, in fact, a COMPACT pickup truck
and not a standard pickup.


But a good read nonetheless.

 

d> Subject: Re: Pickup trucks in Europe

That is what was really curious to me as well. Does English society
look down upon her labourers? Here, earning an "honest living" by
"working with your hands" is revered somewhat as the more desirable
alternative to being an office-dweller. Reading this gives me the sense
that you in the U.K. are perhaps more "urbanized" than we in the
'states.

I don't own a pickup truck -- a minivan suits my hauling needs nicely,
and the handling dynamics of even the most modern pickup are put to
shame by the lowliest of economy cars. That said, every opportunity
I've had to drive one -- and I've probably logged about 50,000 miles in
pickups over my driving life -- has been enjoyable in its own right.
There's a lot to be said for having two or three hundred pound
feet of torque in reserve under one's right foot. And the driving
dynamics, primitive as they are, come with their own rewards. You'll
have no greater fun behind the wheel of a vehicle, IMO, than
deliberately breaking the tail end of a pickup loose in spirited city
driving. Not that there aren't other types of fun to be had...of
course.

--Geoff

 

I think we ARE more urbanised in the UK, but that may be only an impression.
IIRC about 3% of the population lives in an agricultural environment.

As regards some of Brian Appleyard's comments I think he had his tongue
firmly in his cheek, but do refer to older snobbishness.

An interesting thing I read a long time ago was a statistic from about 100
years ago, which to me signalled the rise of the USA as the dominant
economic power and the decline of Britain. Remember that about a hundred
years ago the UK was at the height of its global might.
A study (in the eighties?) had looked at the patterns of employment in the
UK and US at the turn of the century. The conclusion was that in the US
most employees (i.e. workers on a wage) were in industrial jobs whereas in
the UK most were in domestic service, i.e. working as other people's
servants.

This was a time when being in 'trade' or business was looked down upon by
the aristocracy, and science and engineering was still not accorded the full
social recognition it deserved -- notwithstanding some truly great British
engineers such as I K Brunel, who in the 19th century designed and/or built
just about every grand bridge or railway station etc still standing today.

It is a vast subject and here is not the place to expand on it, nor am I a
great expert.

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling

 

Geoff wrote:

That's exactly why I drive older American cars with v8s And they
handle better than trucks too (especially with modern shocks and
polygraphite suspension bushings ;-)

 

Most definitely, on the whole.

Urbanized? Even the country gentry are generally a snobbish lot, from
my experience. The working class are down to earth, and generally an
earthy bunch. But they know their place and their station in life.
Those who attempt to rise above it STILL have a rocky ride.

 

It certainly hasn't occured to me either, but then in the states, being
working class isn't anything to be ashamed of. Europeans have in several
centuries accused prominent Americans of being proud of the lowest possible
birth they lay claim to. Which is true, I'm sure. Our feudal system was
different from the European model.

I've always wondered how you get anything done in Europe without any
pickups. My experience has been that they're beyond unpopular, they're
absent. Completely. I can't figure out how you'd move something like a
refrigerator, or a half-ton of rocks, or a lawnmower, or all that other
stuff we have to use pickups to move in the states.

To bolster my case, if you've ever noticed the "world's worst drivers" stuff
they show on TV, anytime they pull somebody over for hauling a sofa on top
of a Ford Escort, or 8' long lumber balanced sidewise on a moped, those
people are ALWAYS British.

 

See below

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
---

DAS: Even in Britain people are proud to point to the lowliness of their
origins ("my father was a coalminer.."), perhaps because they are
embarrassed how far they have come..

I don't think the US ever had a feudal system. I am not sure that the
residents of the time knew what that was. And the Europeans arrived way
after that period.

DAS: We don't move rocks and get our household stuff delivered.

DAS: Not according to some of the photos circulating on the net..

 

I grew up on a farm in England, and my father often had a van or pickup
truck that was simply a variant of a regular passenger car. The same
kind of "commercial" variants of passenger cars were to be found in
Australia (although the cars were typically somewhat larger).

Do such pickup trucks and vans no longer exist in UK?

Perce

 

In Britain they were referred to as "vanettes" and in Aussie, they are
"Utes"

 

Yes, thanks for jogging my memory about "utes." I haven't lived in
Australia for 19 years (last of all in Brisbane) and haven't visited in
the last 17. So does Oz still produce utes, or have they been displaced
by US-style "pickup trucks"?

I don't recall hearing the term "vanette" in UK, but that might have
come in after I left more than 40 years ago.

Perce

 

I can only imagine from your description that they were similar to what
in the U.S. were Chevy El Caminos and Ford Rancheros.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
adddress with the letter 'x')

 

Still widely available in Australia. Known as "utes" (short for
"utility"). The Chrysler Valiant Wayfarer ute was very popular from 1965
through 1981; the Ford Falcon ute is a brisk seller today. Go to
ford.com.au and see for yourself.

 

The term was in common use in the colonies - my experience was
Zambia(formerly Northern Rhodesia) in the seventies. The
littleDaihatsu, Datsun, Peugot, and Austin/Morris "pickup" and
"utility" type vehicles with an open uncovered box were "vannettes" -
anything bigger was a "lorry".

IIRC the term vannette was also sometimes applied to the "taxsaver"
station wagon type vehicles with closed in rear windows and no rear
seats.

Station wagons were also referrred to as "breaks"

 

Still are, in France, if I am not mistaken. Never in Britain.

DAS
--
For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
---

[...]

[...]

 

I remember from my youth in UK the term "shooting brake" (note the
different spelling), and a Google search for that term brings up links
to Aston Martin, Bentley, Daimler and Saturn on the first page alone.

A couple of the linked sites claim that "shooting brake" is the British
term for a station wagon.

Perce

 

This shows is it dangerous to use 'extreme' words like "never"...

I withdraw it and replace it with "Not in Britain in recent times" ...

DAS

 

Stop the bullshit - the Brits aren't *that* stupid.

 

Most Americans don't move rocks, lawnmowers, refigerators, etc......


People will tell you all kinds of BS to try to convince you they need
a pickup or an SUV, but they really just want a truck.

The beds of most pickups are used to hold empty beer cans.