Perhaps you’ve noticed a sudden rash of articles in the Atlantic and elsewhere, bemoaning the massive risk posed by pickup trucks to pedestrians. Many of these articles are either written by self-appointed transportation journalist Angie Schmitt or rely heavily on her book Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America. While Schmitt has a peculiar fascination with trucks of all kinds, she saves her greatest vitriol for the Ford F-250. “My 4-year-old son,” Schmitt wrote in Bloomberg, “barely cleared the bumper on a lifted F-250 we came across in a parking lot last summer.”
In this case, “lifted” means that the suspension was modified for additional height. This has been done with every sort of vehicle, including Corvettes and old Rolls-Royces, so Schmitt’s complaint is tantamount to saying, “My 4-year-old son was unable to reach the knees of a circus performer who was wearing stilts.”
Why are Schmitt and her friends taking photos of children in front of modified trucks? To drive home a particular point: “Vehicles of this scale saddle their drivers with huge front and rear blind zones that make them perilous to operate in crowded areas.” In one sense, she is absolutely correct: The combination of a high seating position and a long, tall hood does reduce one’s ability to see what is directly in front of said vehicle, which is why modern school buses usually feature a “Betsy Bar” to keep their drivers from running down children who loiter in front of them.
In the vehicle market of 2022, however, long-and-tall hoods are the rule, not the exception. Many of the worst offenders are $100,000-plus SUVs from Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Lamborghini, and other high-end manufacturers. Furthermore, the three-quarter-ton-payload Ford F-250 is vastly outsold both by its slightly smaller, half-ton F-150 sibling and other similar pickups from Chevrolet, Toyota, Chrysler, and Nissan. Go for a walk in Manhattan or Chicago and you’ll see high-buck SUVs everywhere you look. Expand that walk out to the suburbs and you’ll see plenty of half-tons trundling down side streets. In neither of these pedestrian-centric environments will you see a significant number of F-250s.
Here’s one you will see: the Land Rover Defender, a trendy urban SUV, which is 77.7 inches tall, close enough to a pickup as to make no difference to the proverbial 4-year-old child. And unlike the F-250, it is all over cities from coast to coast. Its sibling, the 73.6-inch tall Range Rover, is a popular “black car” in Manhattan. All of these vehicles are massively taller than, say, a new Honda Civic, which can barely clear the 55-inch mark. So how did the relatively unassuming Ford become the face of pedestrian danger, in the writing of Schmitt and others?
It might be as simple as a difference of one-tenth of an inch in Ford’s published specs for the “Super Duty” line of pickups. The F-250 is a less robust pickup than its one-ton F-350 sibling, but due to a slight difference in the standard equipment tires, Ford lists its height at 81.3 inches, while the F-350 is 81.2. It’s possible Schmitt simply flipped through the spec book and chose the tallest truck.
Or perhaps it’s something a bit more sinister. The F-250 might not be common in Manhattan — during a recent trip to the city, your author saw hundreds of glossy-black SUVs but not a single one weighing three-quarters of a ton — yet it is positively omnipresent in the fevered imaginations of coastal writers who equate these fairly inoffensive trucks with climate denial, gun violence, “Make America Great Again” hats, and possibly a worrisome fondness for Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. In the Christian Science Monitor, political scientist Marc Hetherington is quoted explaining a recent “return to the political culture of the 1800s” involving expert commentary about how “the flag-waving Trump performative political movement has come to include armed people in trucks.” Another “expert” from the same article asks, “Is it innocuous to have a flotilla that looks like a battle army? Is it innocent to have these souped-up trucks as loud as trains [rolling into Portland]?”
What is behind the anti-F-250 commentary is not a factual argument. It is aesthetic and cultural prejudice, dressed up as intellection and expertise. Quoting a cartoonist of whom she approves in her Bloomberg article, Schmitt tells us that “the way these trucks look speaks to a ‘rejection of communication, reciprocity, and legal accountability.’” Heady stuff for a vehicle you’ll most often see pulling a horse trailer or parked on a construction site.
The media’s concern regarding the F-250 is serious enough that Consumer Reports, in covering a fatality caused in New Jersey by the driver of a much smaller Jeep Gladiator pickup, can’t help but inject it: “On some heavy-duty trucks, such as the Ford F-250, the front edge of the hood is now 55 inches or more off the ground.” Given the wealth of data available to Consumer Reports, one has to wonder why it didn’t come up with an actual pedestrian-death incident involving an F-250. Among people with less rigorous methodologies for determining what they post on the internet, the gap between perception and reality is even greater. Searching Twitter with the phrase “F-250 racist” returns astounding results, perhaps the least self-aware of which is: “The American flag looks racist all by itself but a bald white man wearing an American flag bandana on his head driving a Ford F-250 with an American flag blowing out the back is quadruple racist.”
By contrast, that Range Rover or Lamborghini Urus you see in midtown Manhattan probably represents far more of a danger to pedestrians than the F-250 — at least the National Transportation Safety Board thinks so, according to a recent survey. But it’s being driven by the right sort of person, someone who votes the right way and says all the right things on social media. At the worst, it’s Michael Douglas from Wall Street, not the terrifying caricatures of rural people from Deliverance.
It should be noted that the three-quarter-ton F-250 has existed in more or less its present form for decades now. As someone who sold Ford trucks in the 1990s, I can assure you that they were no more pedestrian-friendly back then. In fact, the height gap between the bestselling car and the bestselling truck was greater in 1995 than it is now, largely because crossovers have replaced traditional sedans as the family vehicle of choice. And while pedestrian fatalities have increased, it’s not big pickup trucks causing that increase. It’s SUVs.
Viewed in this light, it is obvious that the F-250, like the similarly alphanumeric and rural AR-15 rifle, is less of a statistical threat to city dwellers and more of an emotional one. These mysterious and frightening machines seem to be totems of “The Other Side,” nightmare manifestations of a separate America that can build things, fix things, tow things, and shoot, fish, or hunt without the assistance of reassuringly trained professionals. It’s not the F-250 that Schmitt and her fellow travelers hate. It’s the men and women behind the wheel of the F-250 — people whom they primarily encounter through the offensive stereotypes of mass media and therefore don’t really know at all.
I can’t help but wonder if recent media pickup truck hysteria isn’t perhaps a product of another perception gap: the difference in City Mouse and Country Mouse attitudes toward COVID-19. Today’s urban inmates, much like the Muscovites of 1980, can’t help but notice that the folks on the other side of the curtain are having a lot more fun, owning a lot more things, and occupying a lot more space. Imagine making half a million dollars in New York or Chicago and being effectively locked in one’s tiny apartment at random and unpredictable intervals, knowing that a journeyman electrician in Iowa is making his commute in something called a “King Ranch” or “Denali” or “Laramie Longhorn” despite earning one-fifth as much — and without wearing so much as a single N95 mask!
A quick survey of Twitter shows plenty of city folk openly hoping for the unpleasant demise of rural “deniers,” the precise nature of said “denial” notwithstanding. Much of the invective contains reference to country music, inappropriate familiarity with one’s immediate family, and, of course, the pickup truck. There’s also constant chatter about not “feeling safe” in the vicinity of trucks — one Minneapolis writer said that “the Ram design feels less aggressive than that of the Ford F-150. But when I encounter these two different trucks on the street as a pedestrian, I know which one makes me feel less safe, and it’s the Ford.”
Any observer of modern media knows that rhetoric about “not feeling safe” in America is a direct indicator that something is going to be done about, or to, the people or objects who are responsible for this unsafe feeling. And so it is with this anti-F-250 rhetoric. A recent piece from Passage, “It’s time to ban the sale of pickup trucks,” lays it out for everyone to see: “Reducing further climate destruction and harm from needlessly fatal road accidents is more important than corporate or consumer freedom. It’s time to ban sales of pickup trucks for non-work purposes, for all of our sakes.”
Should such a thing come to pass, there will be a nice symmetry to it, albeit a depressing one: Banning a machine that is never seen in cities for the emotional comfort of city dwellers is as authentically “American” in 2022 as the oft-celebrated notion of the truck-driving cowboy or Wichita lineman was 50 years ago. It won’t happen at all once, of course. It will be a slow drip, one “dangerous” vehicle type at a time, done the way that the federal government takes power but never relinquishes it: by tenths of an inch.
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver, and he has been the “Avoidable Contact” columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines.
