Americana from the Perspective of a Truck

Cars and folklore

When people use the word "truck" in North America, one should assume it's slang and not the literal meaning. In fact, they don't refer to just any large commercial rig or an 18-wheeler, but specifically to a pickup truck. These are bulky, powerful 4-wheel drive vehicles with an open bed in the back, often used for hauling cargo or towing trailers. They are both functional and a bit of a status symbol (Carrie's is a 2006 Dodge Ram 1500).

Pickup trucks are one of the ultimate symbols of Americana, up there with apple pie, late-night diners, the yellow school bus, Little League baseball, the front porch, fire hydrants, drive-ins, corn mazes, and road trips on yellow-lined deserted roads. "I got my first truck when I was three / Drove a hundred thousand miles on my knees," sang country legend Joe Diffie in his glorious mullet in 'Pickup Man', the undisputed truck anthem. But there are dozens of country songs dedicated to the pickup folklore (see playlist below) and even this actual gem by Kings of Leon. But I am digressing.

In 2023, the Ford F-Series was the most popular pickup truck in the United States, with over 750,000 units sold. It maintained its position as the best-selling truck in the country for over 40 consecutive years. A ballpark figure is that over 16 million are on American roads at any given time. Looking at it with European eyes, it's an unnecessarily gigantic car. It weighs between 1.8 to 2.6 tons (4,069 and 5,697 lbs), depending on the configuration and model year. In fact, it's on the lighter side of the spectrum for the market segment. The Chevrolet Silverado came in second place with over 500,000 units sold in 2023, with a weight ranging between 2.20 and 3.47 tons (4,400 to 6,947 lbs), depending on the configuration and model year, and up to 3.85 tons (7,700 lbs) for the Silverado 3500, which is sold with optional steps to help passengers climb in.

Who drives them?

Trucks are particularly popular in rural areas and smaller towns across the United States, although you may see some on the streets of New York City as well. You can't really imagine the owners dealing with alternate-side parking twice a week, but instead, that they come from Queens and Long Island, or from Staten Island, and venture into the city for work. And just because they really have to.

If you judge from the tone of the average pickup truck ad, you would say that the appeal is in large part what the truck can do for hard-working people: haul 16 tons of cargo like it's feathers or mount a powerful crane on the cargo bed or carry bulky, dusty construction tools like hardwood floor sanders and wacker plates. But if you listen to Alexander Edwards, the president of Strategic Vision, a research-based consultancy firm that specializes in understanding human behavior and decision-making patterns, and which every year conducts a psychographic survey of thousands of car owners, then a more nuanced picture emerges. It turns out that trucks are not actually for work, but more for play.

The majority of truck owners, 87%, are male, and their loyalty is near absolute: 80% will choose another truck when purchasing a new vehicle. Why? And what do they do with them? Well, nothing really. They commute to and from work, like most other garden-variety car owners. With very few exceptions: 75% of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less. Nearly 70% of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35% of truck owners use their truck for hauling — putting something in the bed — once a year or less.

In Edward's words:

When asked for attributes that are important to them, truck owners oversample in ones like: the ability to outperform others, to look good while driving, to present a tough image, to have their car act as extension of their personality, and to stand out in a crowd.

The elephant in the room

To characterize the truck owners even further, we have to go back in time to an era when profiling users couldn't be done simply by running machine-learning modeling on their digital consumption habits or social media history. Instead, this is a game of "tell me what car you drive, and I will tell you whom you voted for president for."

Karl Rove, the architect of President George W. Bush's election in 2000 and of his reelection four years later, had pioneered a system of "metrics" to identify the Republican vote based on gathering statistics on voters and using them to organize the get-out-the-vote operations.

Frontline and The Washington Post collaborated on a feature about the role Rove had in shaping politics in the United States at the turn of the century. In an interview Matthew Dowd, the head of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, mentions cars to explain how the 'metrics' worked in practical terms: "We did a fairly sophisticated analysis of what magazines people read, or what kind of cars they own, or where they live, a combination of what issues they're interested in."

What does Karl Rove have to do with trucks? Plenty, in fact. According to an (old) informal poll again conducted by Strategic Vision for U.S. News & World Report, truck owners are five times more likely to be Republicans than Democrats.

More recently, ahead of the 2020 election, Forbes Wheels shared a new Strategic Vision survey based on 46,000 responses by cars owners in the United States. The research "split the industry into 23 vehicle segments, more than 250 car models and 11 political affiliations". These include Republican and Democratic, then Independent and smaller groups like Libertarian but also groups not directly associated with a party like Conservative and Liberal. With a part of the consumers that don't recognize in any particular group. "The single greatest Republican-Democrat disparity is the heavy duty pickup truck segment, where Republicans buy eight pickups to one for each Democratic buyer".

In pollsters' jargon, truck owners are part of the "white men without college degrees." Traditionally, this portion of the electorate, white men, that is, tends to vote for Republican candidates with varying percentages. It ranged from 52% to 56% in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, then plummeted to 32% in 1992 when Bill Clinton was first elected and inched up to 38% in 1996 when he was re-elected. The Republicans had a share of 50% to 51% of white men in 2000 and 2004 with George W. Bush until Barack Obama dented it back down to 45% in 2008. In 2012, with Mitt Romney, it jumped back up to 57% and reached its highest point yet with Donald Trump in 2016 at 62%. It was still at its second-highest level in 2020, at 59%, when Trump lost the presidency to Joseph Biden.

Tank size matters

In exchange for their awesomeness and impressive heft, pickup trucks cost more than other cars — north of $60,000, which is usually double what an SUV or a sedan will cost. But car owners have all sorts of creative ways to finance or loan vehicles they can't afford in the U.S., so let's focus on the fixed costs for maintenance instead.

For the F-150, the most popular model in the F-Series, the average fuel tank size is 87 liters (23 gallons). The Silverado 1500, Chevrolet's entry-level model, has a slightly larger tank at 91 liters (24 gallons). The large volume is necessary because these trucks use a lot of fuel.

The average fuel consumption is, respectively, 7 kml (16.5 miles per gallon) in traffic and 9.6 kml (22.5 mpg) on highways for the Ford, and 7.4 kml (17.5 mpg) in traffic and 9.6 kml (22.5 mpg) on highways for the Chevy. The bulkier Chevy model, the 3500, averages 6 kml (14 mpg) in traffic and 7.9 kml (18.5 mpg) on highways. This level of consumption is in line, or slightly worse in fact, than the Ferrari Roma (6.80 kml or 16 mpg in the city and 9.35 kml or 22 mpg on highways), or the hybrid Ferrari SF90 Stradale (7.23 kml or 16 mpg in the city and 9.35 kml or 22 mpg on highways). Need another angle? Filling up the tank in Europe with a Chevrolet Silverado 3500, assuming a price of 1.7 euros per liter, would cost 231.6 euros.

For a common mortal comparison, the best-selling non-electric car in Europe in 2023 was the Dacia Sandero. The weight ranges from 1 to 1.2 tons (2,401 to 2,639 lbs), depending on the specific configuration and trim level. The fuel tank has a capacity of 50 liters (13.2 gallons). The fuel consumption in traffic conditions is around 16 kml (37.55 mpg) in traffic and 19.7 kml (46.4 mpg) on highways. I am going out on a limb here in choosing it as a placeholder for the typical European car. I have been gone from Europe for over 20 years, and I had never heard of the Sandero before. And I was also mighty surprised to find out that the best-selling car in Europe overall in 2023 was an electric one, the Tesla Model Y! Not a car person, sorry.

Gas prices

In June of 2022, the average retail price for gasoline peaked in the United States at $5.032 per gallon, based on data by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The spike was attributed by the consensus of economists to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ripples of the economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Gas prices had been stable during the 1990s, hovering around 1 dollar per gallon. They climbed in the first decade of the new century to 3 dollars per gallon, pushed by the increase in Chinese demand and by the fact that Saudi Arabia was slow to increase production. The prices peaked in 2012 at 3.63 dollars per gallon, with 2011 and 2013 at 3.53 dollars per gallon and 3.44 in 2014, before falling back to the level of 8 years prior.

According to an analysis on Forbes "the reason for the crash in gasoline prices was that Saudi Arabia decided to engage in a price war with the U.S. to win back market share that had been lost to the U.S. shale oil boom".

If one were to look at the behavior of retail gas prices from a political perspective, one would get the following chart. One that requires context.

In fact, if presidents and their policies can influence supply and demand in the long-term, they can do very little to impact gas prices in the short-term. And this is in stark contrast with the perception of the public and how spikes affect their popularity.

For instance, Bush Jr., who was a very pro-oil president, had to deal with record gas prices for the eight years he was at the White House.

Gas prices fell during the last two years of Trump's presidency as a consequence of the pandemic and hit the lowest level since 2004 in 2020 and then spiked to their highest level on record under Biden's watch.

In 2024, although gas prices have been cheaper, they are still one dollar per gallon more expensive than in Trump's last year in office.

Road rage

It should come as no surprise that the working-class owners of a group of vehicles that use as much fuel as, or more than, a small Ferrari might be enraged if gas prices reach a record high.

To see exactly why, let's compare the cost of a full tank in 2020 (the last stretch of the Trump presidency) to what it is now. The price per gallon, always according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration was 2.272 dollars in August 2020, and it was 3.507 dollars per gallon in August 2024. It's relevant to remember that the price had spiked to over 5 dollars per gallon in June 2022 and hovered above 4.5 dollars per gallon for most of that year.

To determine the difference in full tank costs for the Ford F-Series, Chevrolet Silverado, and Dacia Sandero, we have to consider the different volumes of the fuel tanks.

• Ford F-150
• Cost in August 2020: 23 gallons × $2.272/gallon = $52.256
• Cost in August 2024: 23 gallons × $3.507/gallon = $80.661
• Chevrolet Silverado 3500
• Cost in August 2020: 36 gallons × $2.272/gallon = $81.792
• Cost in August 2024: 36 gallons × $3.507/gallon = $126.252
• Dacia Sandero
• Cost in August 2020: 13.2 gallons × $2.272/gallon = $29.9904
• Cost in August 2024: 13.2 gallons × $3.507/gallon = $46.2924

See below a table with the cost of gas from 1993 to 2024.

So the average Ford truck owner pays $28.41 more for a full tank now than at the end of the Trump presidency. The owner of the spiffiest of the Chevy models pays $44.46 more, and the hypothetical Dacia owner (the Romanian compact is, alas, not sold in the United States) would pay $16.30 more.

This is only a partial picture, of course, because, on average, rural Americans drive more miles annually than those who live in cities. Let's assume an average of 15,000 to 20,000 miles per year, and let's match it with the consumption of each car, averaging 17,500 miles per year.

A person driving a Ford F-Series or Chevrolet Silverado would typically need to fill up their fuel tank about 42 to 45 times per year, or roughly 3.5 to 3.7 times per month. A person driving a Dacia Sandero would fill up approximately 36 times per year, or about 3 times per month. The bottom line is that, even if the gas prices have gone down significantly, a F-150 owner in 2024 will spend 1163.93 dollars more on gas than they did four years ago. A Chevy Silverado 3500 owner will spend between 1390.31 dollars more than the year Trump left the White House. As for the hypothetical Dacia owner, they would spend 533.85 dollars more. This hypothetical extra cost for the Dacia is actually very close to that for a Toyota Camry, the most popular car in the United States for the gas models (+$634.29) and roughly half of that of the hybrid model (+$443.9).

The final multipliers to consider are that the median household income in rural America is roughly 15-20% lower than in cities, especially on the two coasts, and that the cost of gasoline can be higher in inland areas compared to coastal areas, with extra transportation costs usually blamed.

Blame the car ahead

So yes, road rage does not apply on all car owners equally 👆👆👆, and those months in the spring and summer of 2022 when to fill up the tank of a monster truck, one had to pay between 160 and 182 dollars are hard to forget.

My father-in-law, who lives near Twin Falls, Idaho, is the proud owner of a flaming red Silverado and a staunch Democrat in a county that Trump carried with 73.14% of the vote in 2020, with Biden getting 24.15%. A retired botanist and college professor, he does not fully represent the target demographic of the 'white man', but he definitely shared the rage at the pump over the course of the past 4 years.

I live in Brooklyn, New York, and I rarely use my 2017 Volkswagen Jetta to drop off and pick up the kids at school and for weekly grocery runs, and on average, I refill the tank once a month. The cost went from 33.12 dollars in 2020 to 50.85 dollars in 2024, with an annual increase of $227.41 over the four years. Life is full of hurdles. I am way more upset for price spike of eggs and broccoli!

A large number of Americans will cast their votes in November not thinking about the future but about the cost of a full tank in the past four years. And if you wander — and you should — what may happen next, trucks may hold a key.