KidCrusher 350s Are Very Legal and Very Cool
They said my pickup would be "small". It weighed 5,000 pounds
It’s unoriginal to point out that applying the phrase “mature content” to pornographic or erotic productions makes adulthood seem rather more appealing than it is. Maturity means responsibility, and responsibility means, rather often, self-denial, not indulgence. A movie that’s really about “mature content” would instead be about taxes, laundry, troubled relationships with parents—Everything Everywhere All At Once, but without the multiverse or googly eyes.
This newsletter is about mature themes, but the unsexy kind. In particular, it’s about the mature content that ensued when I rented a pickup truck.
I am not a pickup truck person. I was raised in a pickup truck part of the world. Until a few years ago, I would look up the prices of Ford F-150s, both to tempt myself and to remind myself that I could not afford one. (The entry model starts at about $36,000 and you can top $70,000 really fast—especially when you’re daydreaming.)
Those daydreams ebbed and finally ceased a few years ago. Partly, this as because of my own changing tastes and predispositions; partly, it’s because the trucks are bigger and angrier than they used to be. Even in 2012 or so, I could imagine myself letting my imaginary dog into the truck and then … I don’t know, doing manly stuff, like driving cattle, or at least driving to a coffee shop to type an article manfully. The pickup truck as gender-affirming vehicle, I suppose.1
What used to be a working truck and then a stereotyped working truck has now become a ‘roided behemoth. As has been widely noted, contemporary U.S. pickup trucks are far bigger than they need to be for cargo-carrying purposes. And as has also been widely noted, the trucks are so big—and, in particular, so tall—they have blind zones in the front. That means drivers can’t see short people, or children, well in front of them. And so the trucks are killing kids. A lot.
Not for nothing does Bluesky legend Faine Greenwood call the automobiles “KidCrusher 350s”—a way of making them as unappealing as fur coats are now.
To be sure, as Jessie Singer, author of the revelatory There Are No Accidents, would likely say, trucks don’t kill people—but it’s also not the drivers who kill people. It’s the system that allows these trucks to be sold that’s killing people. A lot. Most of you are Americans, and that means that most of you live in a country where more pedestrians are being killed by cars than ever before.
Cars killing people is a solvable problem. Many other countries have made progress toward solving it. The United States has not.
My experience behind the wheel of one of these machines explains why. As I mentioned earlier, this past weekend I found myself in a mature situation: needing to move a lot more stuff than would fit in my nearly-antique Prius. (At 19 years old and 214,000 miles, this car has almost driven a half Apollo—238,900 miles to the Moon.) This is exactly the situation that one encounters in hypothetical justifications for buying a pickup, and it is also the situation best dealt with by just renting a truck the one day out of (literally) 800 in which it takes place.
I rented what was described, online, as a small pickup truck. Friends, it was a 2023 Chevy Silverado, weighing (depending on trim) 4,410 to 5,500 pounds.
This was, in at least some senses of the term, the largest vehicle I’ve driven. I have driven larger vehicles by gross weight, but not more powerful ones, and not, actually, taller ones. And a 20-foot U-Haul truck just isn’t going to, uh, accidentally get away from you the way this beast could.
This was a powerful truck. It didn’t purr, like sportscars are supposed to; it didn’t growl, either. It just kind of resonated. I have to admit: I see the appeal. Comfortable, roomy, tall enough that I could see into the next county. (No cupholders in this one, though, probably because it was a working truck.)
It was also huge. The rearview camera wasn’t a safety figure—it was the only way I could navigate going into and out of the long driveway I needed to use, because the roomy interior required an exterior that felt like twice the size of my Prius and I just don’t have a good sense about how to move a body that big. (Isn’t it funny how we extend our sense of our own body’s dimensions to incorporate our cars’ dimensions, and how being in a new automobile feels like being in a new body?)
And it was tall. I had something like the worst-case non-scenario happen. A mom with two little kids was trying and failing to control them both simultaneously as they crossed the sidewalk while I was waiting to turn into the driveway. No, you absolutely cannot see kids under, generously, six feet tall in this monstrosity. I just froze and waited. You can imagine running this scenario over and over again in the multiverse and having it turn out worse a lot more often in the Silverado than the Prius.
My experience and qualifications as a driver, and whatever remains of my formal education as a driver, just don’t qualify me to operate this kind of vehicle. I’m not sure that anyone’s does. Bigger trucks have more visibility and operate in areas where there’s fewer kids—and they require different licenses anyway.
The dimensions of these trucks, of the KidCrushers, have crept up and up until they’re just fundamentally not vehicles for the roads and environments we actually have. They’re not even suited for America’s vast car-centric infrastructure, as anyone who’s tried to park next to one knows—they’re just too damn big for lanes, for parking spots, for driveways, for anything except publicity photos in national parks, where they’re in a world with no other cars or safety concerns.
The KidCrushers are very legal, in the sense that anyone with money and a driver’s license can buy them, and very cool, in the sense that they tap into your lizard brain and make you feel different and special and powerful. It’s a toxic combination.
That’s not really a joke. And it’s not sex-affirming, either, since an Aston Martin DB5 would also be gender affirming—just a different sort of gender performance than a ‘Murcan pickup truck.