Hacker News Reader

Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

Vans are a lot better for both transporting people (more spacious compared to SUVs) and goods (easier loading and protected from the weather compared to pickups), plus of course having vastly better visibility. It always seems odd how trucks and SUVs are seen as status symbols in the US whereas in, say, Hong Kong, it is the MPV that is the status symbol. I suppose certain tax and emissions regulations in favor of trucks also contribute to their popularity.

View on HN

Vans tend to have pretty good visibility, but not compared to a single cab truck.

Loading into a van can be easier or harder depending on the goods. Larger items are easier into a truck, IMHO, since you don't have to rearrange or remove the seating, and don't have to negotiate door openings, and sometimes it's useful to get help over the sides of the bed. Lower typical height of van floors can be helpful though. Pickup beds tend to have more and better tiedown points, too.

I have a pickup and a van, and a c-max, and I would most likely give up the c-max first; especially if either or both the van and the pickup had reasonable fuel efficiency.

> Larger items are easier into a truck, IMHO, since you don't have to rearrange or remove the seating

Think less minivan and more Mercedes-Benz Sprinter. You load them more like a moving truck: giant doors in the rear, big empty space to put stuff in.

AFAIK, exactly this - something about how trucks and SUVs are classified differently and so have different emission standards, which results in other effects that are then appealing to consumers.

Plus, of course, marketing.

Minivans are light trucks for fleet purposes, so they can also get bigger engines and what not, if that's what people are looking for.

Can't even buy the MPV in the US anymore...

Vans are not better for goods as a universal rule, they are better for certain classes of goods. I do not want a yard of manure/dirt/gravel dumped in my van, but thats a common use of a pickup in my neck of the woods. Like extremely common.

> Hong Kong

Hot take: The Americas just aren't developed to the level of Eurasia, and we should stop pretending like they are.

I think this is an incentives game, Americans have much more land and money to pay for expensive development (like suburbs) that just do not make financial sense in the EU or Asia in general, as they either lack land or it would be too expensive to pay for the infrastructure needed to make it all work.

I also haven't met an American that has been to a high quality of life and walkable city in the EU and didn't come back with a changed perspective on what life could be like. Once you visit places like London, Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam and the like and stay there for a while you rethink the suburban life.

I'm in the burbs because having small kids in big US cities is super shitty and expensive but as soon as they get older the goal is to find a nice city to move to. Either here or in Europe.

> I also haven't met an American that has been to a high quality of life and walkable city in the EU and didn't come back with a changed perspective on what life could be like. Once you visit places like London, Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam and the like and stay there for a while you rethink the suburban life.

Then you haven’t met enough people. Lots of Americans, like me, visit those cities, enjoy our visit, and come back happy to live in suburbia with our big homes and yards. Those cities are great to visit, but I wouldn’t want to try to raise a family there.

Suburbia is expensive in some ways, but suburbs are often built as a less expensive place to live or at least less expensive for a given size. Of course, it's often hard to find a studio apartment in the suburbs and it's hard to find a single story detached home in the city, so it's comparing different kinds of apples; they're comparable but not fungible.

I had a very nice visit to Paris and London for business many years ago. And I tried to get my boss to transfer me to the Paris office. But I moved from the suburbs to a ruralish community where I can live on a 9 acre wooded lot where I know my neighbors but rarely hear them.

They’re only less expensive on paper because the rest of the county, state and federal government are footing the bill for infrastructure, gas for all the driving and everything else. If we were paying the actual price of suburbia people would likely be moving closer to the cities.

> it's hard to find a single story detached home in the city

Newsflash, this just in: Kids can actually grow up living in an apartment in a multi-story building. Researchers have found that single-family single-story detached housing is not required.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com