We're continuing investigation to the performance issues, you can follow and react here: https://lemmy.world/c/friendicaworld

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So many Europeans are telling me that they've been seeing a lot of the "huge" Ford Ranger trucks appearing in their cities.

Wait until they find out that the Ford Ranger is a small Ford pickup truck, and most of them are significantly larger. 😬

carsized.com/en/cars/compare/f…

Ford Ranger 2022-present vs. Ford F-350 2016-2019

Ford Ranger Pick-up 2022-present vs. Ford F-350 Pick-up Crew Cab 2016-2019. Compare car dimensions (length, width and height) vs. street perspective.
Carsized.com
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

And here's an American Ford F-350 next to the most popular car in Europe (Dacia Sandero).

There's a reason why we need to do everything we can to prevent people from driving these stupid American trucks in Europe.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to random thoughts

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Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

@hittitezombie
Dacia Sandero is classed as a supermini / B segment, but in Europe there is one smaller size (the city car / A-segment), and superminis have grown in size in just last 10 years (for instance a VW Polo Typ AW isn't *that* much smaller than my Mk7 Golf)

I suspect its only fuel costs (on top of those of the vehicle itself) that keep the F-350 a rare sight on European roads (the only ones I could find in the UK were clearly imported as they are left hand drive). I am seeing more and more Rangers, mostly in the outer suburbs and semi-rural areas (they would be too unwieldy for the town)

@random thoughts

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Woodstock

@vfrmedia @Glogran @Mab_813 @hittitezombie
Just going to drop this here in case it catches anybody's eye for interesting reading:

tyreextinguishers.com/how-to-d…

Those of us who have read Malm's book lareviewofbooks.org/article/sa… may have instantly had a similar thought about potential responses/actions available to the us to respond with once these things start to make landfall in Europe.

I would like to think that lawmakers, MEPs, etc... would keep that day from coming. But seeing how fast they have folded and showed willingness to sell us out to American Big Tech and Private Equity by agreeing to the rolling back the consumer protections, gdpr, AI safety, etc... we enjoy and rely on, I imagine this will go the same way in the rolling back of regulations, laws, and norms and placing the burden on us to deal with the fallout.

Sabotage Can Be Done Softly: On Andreas Malm’s “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” | Los Angeles Review of Books

Scott W. Stern reviews "How to Blow Up a Pipeline," the new book from Andreas Malm.
Los Angeles Review of Books
@Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK @Mab_813 @random thoughts @Scott

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Derick Rethans

@Mab_813 @vfrmedia @hittitezombie (Inner) London is way too full of these wankpantzers. I'm a tall person but can't look over them to cross roads. They make everything so unsafe.

At least I think I heard rumours that some cities and boroughs are making them pay much more for parking permits.

@Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK @Mab_813 @random thoughts
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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Hakan Bayındır

@Mab_813 @vfrmedia @hittitezombie

I want to offer a different perspective: As cars get bigger, trunk space is getting smaller. I drive a 2001 Ford Focus. To get the same trunk space, I need to get a Peugeot 3008 or Skoda Superb now, and I need space for more than two cabin luggage.

I'm not interested in pickup trucks and large SUVs, but when I need to replace my car, I'd have to get something bigger to get the same space.

This is not an easy problem to solve.

@Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK @Mab_813 @random thoughts
in reply to Mab_813

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Twobiscuits🚴‍♂️

@Mab_813 @vfrmedia @hittitezombie I'm a driving school instructor & teach people to parallel park. On our school parking area we have the regulation parking space for the driving test, which is 8 m long. We impress on our learners that they're almost never going to find an 8-m parking space out on the road. A lot of the parking spaces on the street are diagonal; there you have to be between the lines & neither overhang the sidewalk nor stick out into the road. They're just about big enough for our Skoda Roomster …
@Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK @Mab_813 @random thoughts
in reply to Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷

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Petra van Cronenburg

@Tooden @eriksandblom @menos @hobbynutte69 Someone in the town has a RAM. He is the biggest nazi, climate change denier, and misogynist in the region. Perhaps he gets some love from his car because everybody hates him.
@Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷 @Matt @Hobbynutte69 @Erik Sandblom 🌻
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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PedestrianError

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. When you build your communities around cars and then supersize the cars, you don't just get traffic jams, pollution, and dead pedestrians, you get a populace so filled with road rage and ignorance that they elect fascists who will bankrupt them because they're scared of their kid reading a book about gay people who walk and ride the subway.

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CIMB4

and people who drive pickup trucks in my city are just as terrible human beings as you would think... i don't know why pickup trucks need to be so much more noisier than normal cars or maybe all of them just 'tune' their 'sound'.. bikes don't ever have right of way in their opinion, even when you're also in a car chances are they'll just take your rght of way.. oh and not to mention how they'll just drive partially on the sidewalk when the road is too narrow :blobcatangery:
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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Dan Sugalski

The most super-insane thing about this (well, one of the many) is that 99+% of the time the F-350 and the Dacia Sandero have the *same* actually-used carrying capacity. The number of people who would actually ever use the extra capacity in the truck is, to a first approximation, zero. (And the vast majority of them would need to rent a truck once or twice. Probably in their entire lifetime)

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Dan Sugalski

@Mab_813 The best car (and possibly financial!) advice I ever got was from someone at a rental car place -- they told me to buy the least amount of car possible to cover daily driving needs and just rent a van/truck/whatever for those two times a year I needed more.

I ended up buying a Honda Fit rather than a minivan because of that. Probably saved ~$5k/year in running costs (cars are expensive) over the decade the Fit lasted. And I needed a truck twice in that 10 years.

@Mab_813
in reply to Tommi

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bleeptrack

@tommi absolutely! It's a City EL - an all electric one seater. Mine is from 1993, had a 20 year slumber in a garage and I upgraded it last year from lead acid batteries to modern LiFePo4 ones 😀 I have the "modded" version that drives 65-70kmh max.

vis.social/@bleeptrack/1156394…

bleeptrack

2025-11-30 16:04:02

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The car in question: a City El!
#solarpunk #CityEL
@Tommi

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bleeptrack

@tommi there are also some videos:

When I got it: youtu.be/divOHGn2AhI

Finally got the road permit back: youtu.be/fY5SX1spYRM

A recent repair: youtu.be/qkxx986vYkc

😀

This Rusty Old Relay Was Killing My Electric Car

Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
bleeptrack (YouTube)
@Tommi
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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Jean-Francois Mezei

F350 ? You've been out of North America for too long. The F650 is the new black ! It's your beloved dream ride when you reach 1 million subscibers 😉 See how well it parks !
(big advantage: you can use the "deliveries only" parking spots downtown whereas small cars can't !)

See it in action in Toronto:

youtube.com/watch?v=3D0nxi-Tkz…

Ford F650 Super Truck Review // What Fresh Hell Is This

Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
Throttle House (YouTube)
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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Jon Sullivan

But, what if you want to drive all over river beds, with nesting birds, and carry crates of beer!? Perplexingly, that’s a real thing in New Zealand, called “Crate Day”, and it’s something you couldn’t do in an average European car.

rnz.co.nz/news/ldr/580632/crat…

Crate Day revellers warned to watch for nesting birds

Environment Canterbury rangers, other agencies and volunteers will be out in force on Saturday to protect nesting birds on Crate Day.
RNZ News (RNZ)
in reply to Jon Sullivan

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Raglan Niall

How do cultures get started and how can they be changed? Its just crazy.
Not answering my question but an idea for slowing it: Can those things (vehicles & drivers & contents) be checked for legality? We in NZ love beauracracy on our vehicles-non standard stuff needs an LVVTA inspection and plate. You know, sort of like cops do to people turning up to Tangi? Or is there some mysterious reason these guys get a pass?!
@notjustbikes
@Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

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Jon Sullivan

@Niall Yes. I’m a bit baffled by why in this case the best authorities can do is just “help educate river users”. I expect our road and vehicle laws were written without imagining these big drive-anywhere tanks in mind. Instead, I read this week how the focus of the current government is updating the NZ traffic laws to let electric scooters legally use cycle ways (which they’re all doing anyway).
@Raglan Niall
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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Eobard Toyotathon

To be fair, not *everyone* in the US drives these things, not even close to a majority. They are, however, far more popular than they should be. They’ve essentially replaced luxury cars in the public consciousness, which is so antithetical to the purpose of either a truck or a luxury car that it’s completely insane . 1/
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Eobard Toyotathon

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

DFX4509B (Joshua Mason)

in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

hometown - Link to source

Tom Scheinfeldt

I don't disagree with the overall sentiment, but it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. Very few people actually drive an F-350. They're mainly used for heavy construction. Here's a side by side comparison of the what is actually the most popular passenger car in the US (the Toyota RAV4) with the Sandero. Not a huge difference.
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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Trouble

serious q: is there any info on blind spots in these oversized vehicles? E.g. which ones can hide this car in its blind spot? How can you even get maps/pics like carsized?
I figure the easiest way to capture visibility is to park in a dark area with a white background gridded floor, and put a light where the driver head is, capture pic from overhead. Essentially ray tracing, but in the real world, since 3d models of vehicles are even harder to get.
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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rood

honestly, this gets me in purely power to weight ratio and efficiency. Why do I need extra tonnes to drag myself around?

And if I'm towing actual weight, I'm probably going to hire a more efficient vs effective vehicle anyway. A diesel van likely comes out in front. Utilitarian need isn't even erring towards this vehicle!

"Wank tanks" isn't far wrong.

in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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Dario Zanette

I live not-so-far from the Aviano Air Base so, sometimes, I can see some Really True American Car trought the street of my city.
Everytime they scare me. I wonder how the hell they could like to drive such monster but most of all everytime they SCARE ME to be killed or seriously injured.

(and the one in the picture, as you said, isn't even the biggest)

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to bk

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Samuel Smith

@knutson_brain that's part of a solution, but the real problem is that we don't have much of a choice in America.
I needed a truck and the smallest one I could get was a Toyota Tacoma. My old neighbor has an older Tacoma that's about half the size of mine!
We need more choices in America but the corporations offer what they want to sell over what we want to buy. There's also a concerted campaign to program us into thinking bigger cars are safer.

Look; both vehicles here are the same model, same bed size and carry the same number of people.

@bk
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

DFX4509B (Joshua Mason)

Unknown parent

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Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

@breizh @Mab_813 @hittitezombie
even now they are not 100% illegal to buy in UK or EU - but may require modifications to pass inspection, known as Individual Vehicle Approval, so some "enthusiasts" with enough money still import them into Europe (I found two used F350s for sale in the UK and 5 in the Netherlands (so even the lack of space in that country doesn't deter some people)
@Breizh @Mab_813 @random thoughts
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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sortius

what drives me nuts is I see these Suburban Shermans driving around my inner city suburb, taking up room, struggling with the lanes and thin streets.

Meanwhile a cheap Fuso or whatever over-cab truck will immensely smaller, and much more useful for actual city building/handman/etc work. I see a few of them getting around, as replacements for these useless utes

in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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Barry Cook 🇨🇦

- and the Ford Maverick is smaller than the Ranger. Bizarrely, they are all going 'crew-cab' (4 door) - only exacerbating the fact you usually see them with only one person in them - and with an absolute pristine cargo bed.
And they’re all massive compared the range of 1970s pickup trucks from Toyota and Datsun that were everywhere and somehow managed to do the job they were intended for.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
Unknown parent

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Klaus Frank

@benny
Well the weight only matters for deciding which C-license you need (the 3.5, 7, or 12(?)).

I'd say anything where you sit that high up should require a C-license just so that you have had to show that you can deal with it. Also it should have the same requirements for assistant technology too...

@benny
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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Rob van Kan🔻

Make clear to anyone considering such a car that they will simply not be tolerated.
It takes four people and perhaps some traffic pole for leverage to roll these things on their side, I estimate. Make posters warning the people of this and other ways to incapacitate these things.
The EU can deregulate all they want. We rule the streets, not them.
in reply to Rob van Kan🔻

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Coen Wesselman

@edgeofeurope my daughter and I always loudly agree that it's actually a really ugly car. Sometimes the people inside the car, or stepping out of the car can hear us. One parent at school drives one so we practice almost on a daily basis.

But we should treat these cars equally, and ban them from city centers and crowded places together with all other cars.

@Rob van Kan🔻
in reply to Rob van Kan🔻

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Coen Wesselman

@edgeofeurope
I try to do my part by making the unattractive to anyone who listens. A hard campaign would be great, but it might also just pull the edgy crowd towards getting one.

My comment is about not making separate policies for this specific type of car, but instead treat all cars the same and limit their access to certain areas.

Most of the EU population does live in urban areas, which has some level of a center or public space. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European…

European countries by percentage of urban population - Wikipedia

Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)
@Rob van Kan🔻
in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

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Petra van Cronenburg

@vfrmedia In my region in France, cities do everything to get all cars out and bicycles in. They invested a lot of money and wouldn't bulldoze the town for that. People in the mountains often have (European) pickups but don't find parking places in the center.
It's also much a question of life style.

@breizh @Mab_813 @hittitezombie @notjustbikes

@Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱 @Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK @Breizh @Mab_813 @random thoughts
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Andreas K

Actually, the European Ford Ranger, in it's biggest version is rather on the small end of a F150.

And I would say it's not showing up suddenly, it has been always part of the Ford commercial vehicle round up for a long time.
(it's the only pickup among a couple of different vans offered)

It's a necessity. A real US truck literally does not fit typical EU parking spaces.

A neighbour who has an imported Dodge RAM litzerally cannot fit the hood on his assigned space. 🙅

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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Yimby Earth

I keep saying:
Ban them outright. Go harsher than what we already do in Europe.
Define required lines of sight from shortest & tallest allowed driver of unmodded vehicle, such that all drivers can see a preschooler standing along any point of the front of the vehicle. And no kill zones ("blind spots"), have mirrors and larger windows so the driver can see.
And require all motor vehicles to have fronts shaped to protects pedestrians if hit.
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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Arjan Bos

even the Germans are now making jokes about the size of new cars.

New star sign “much too big wagon” identified next to “big wagon” der-postillon.com/2025/12/ster…

Neues Sternbild: "Viel zu großer Wagen" neben Großem Wagen entdeckt

Brüssel (dpo) - Jeder kennt den Kleinen Wagen und den Großen Wagen. Astronomen haben nun noch einen dritten, erheblich größeren Wagen am Nachthimmel e
Der Postillon
in reply to Not Just Bikes 🇳🇱

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Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐

One of the things that Europeans may not understand is that US federal tax policy incentivizes the use of light trucks with a GWVR above a certain weight as "commercial vehicles", so these heavy-duty Class 2 trucks are often tax write-offs for small business owners, and that's why they drive them.

kbb.com/car-advice/section-179…

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
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