I always see replies like this in conversations about vehicles in the US and it baffles me a little. Yes, of course there are appropriate situations in which someone might own a Hummer. But are we really trying to claim that even 10% of Hummers out there today are used in those situations? They’re very obvious status symbols.
If their owners wanted to actually go off road, they'd have bought something else. They really have no purpose other than to mark you as a person with more money than sense.
This definitely does not mean what you think it means. Owning a large car for work doesn’t mean it’s utilized as such. I know people who own trucks and large SUVs for work - but it’s “just in case” not because they need additional space on a daily or even weekly basis.
There are about 60m trucks on the road in the US [0]
There are 6m construction/mining workers, 6m installation workers, and 4m building maintenance workers. [1]
Using that definition, at most, 25% of trucks are used for work.
If you want to be extremely generous, there are also 13m transportation drivers (being very generous because that 60m does not include big rigs) and 8m factory workers (again, unlikely to use trucks for work).
Using that frankly incorrect definition, you still get only 62% of trucks being used for work.
So no, under NO circumstances are the "vast majority" of trucks in the US used for work.
But how many of those contruction/mining workers need to drive a truck?
My brother works in road construction - he drives a 15,000 lb maintenance truck owned by his company. But he doesn't drive it home, it stays on the job site (which varies between 15 and 150 miles from home). He owns a truck, but like many suburban trucks, it's in pristine condition and he mostly only uses it to pull a trailer, he drives a Honda Civic to get to the job site.
So you must not be familiar with NAICS codes. They are a mutually exclusive completely exhaustive categorization of jobs, as defined by the US government.
Here's the other ones:
11-0000 Management Occupations
13-0000 Business and Financial Operations Occupations
15-0000 Computer and Mathematical Occupations
17-0000 Architecture and Engineering Occupations
19-0000 Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations
21-0000 Community and Social Service Occupations
23-0000 Legal Occupations
25-0000 Educational Instruction and Library Occupations
27-0000 Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media
Occupations
29-0000 Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations
31-0000 Healthcare Support Occupations
33-0000 Protective Service Occupations
35-0000 Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations
37-0000 Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance Occupations
39-0000 Personal Care and Service Occupations
41-0000 Sales and Related Occupations
43-0000 Office and Administrative Support Occupations
45-0000 Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations
47-0000 Construction and Extraction Occupations
49-0000 Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations
51-0000 Production Occupations
53-0000 Transportation and Material Moving Occupations
Sure, maybe the 500k farming, fishing, and Forestry workers should be added to the list, but I'm curious as to what else you think should be.
EDIT: HN is banning me so this doesn't turn into a flamewar, but I'll leave you with this:
I am trying not to personally attack you, but I think you're kind of dipping into ad hominen attacks because you regret making statement that is not supported by data.
If you want to know why I think they shouldn't be included (and why I think you're really over your skis here), it's because the reality of farm work in the US is as follows:
1) The majority of the <1m US farm workers do the following job [0] [1]:
Manually plant, cultivate, and harvest vegetables, fruits, nuts, horticultural specialties, and field crops. Use hand tools, such as shovels, trowels, hoes, tampers, pruning hooks, shears, and knives.
It is not clear to me that this requires a truck (especially not one for each worker).
2) The average wage of farmworkers is $15/hour [1] and the average cost of a used F-150 in the US is $40k ($30k pre-pandemic) [2], so it's not immediately clear to me that this group of people own a large number of pick-ups.
Ultimately though, for someone to work at a large tech company, make their identity publicly available and to be so aggressive on a forum like this seems like a weird risk to take. If you want to delete all of this stuff and just move on, I'm ok with that.
The fact that you don't even think of 'farmers' when you think of truck user makes it clear you've got a warped suburban idea of what people use trucks for.
Farmers are a rounding error in the claim "the vast majority of trucks are used for work".
[EDIT] I think, assuming you're posting all this in good faith, it may be a result of expanding a local perspective to the entire country. Some parts of the country definitely do have way fewer non-work trucks driving around, as a proportion of total cars. One might conclude that this is the norm over enough of the country that "the vast majority" of trucks are work trucks. It very much is not.
A Suzuki Jimny would probably be more effective for 99% of Hummer owners that actually use it off-road, and in turn that is probably a very small minority of the total.
There's probably some amount of a valid point there, but making it about a Hummer, specifically, undermines it, since they suck at most of the things one might think they'd be good at.
Incidentally, I saw tons of Hummers on the road around here in the '00s. Now... I thought they'd stopped making them. All those "I want a huge car because... I want a huge car" buyers must be getting expensive trucks or other kinds of big SUVs these days.
I’ve been in places with rougher terrain than virtually anything in the US.
You’ll see people in areas like that driving a beat up truck barely large enough to fit 2 people or a tiny scooter that’s hauling a half ton of cargo.
Nobody is getting their hummer dirty or risking a scratch. And anybody going to a job site is going to prefer an actual truck over an oversized vehicle for bored suburban couples.
