I decide if you need to have a step on your bumper because the truck is too high to get anything in and out of it. Lowering my truck made it way easier to load and unload.
I used to fairly often carry 2x4x8 and 4x4x8 in a Toyota Matrix (Corolla wagon) with the hatch closed. Couldn't do a full-width sheet of plywood, though.
Yes, with room to spare. I assume the grandparent was referring to a stud, i.e. the nominal "2x4" that is 1.5x3.5inches in cross section and 8 feet long :-) Sadly I cannot fit 4x8 sheet goods though I haven't tried very hard. I can definitely fit them if I ask nicely for a lengthwise cut, so I end up with 2' wide 8' strips. Those I can fit and close the hatch.
Ford had a terrible but well packaging rear suspension design in those cars. It was designed to not have strut towers so he gets the full width which is probably around 4ft.
No way does the length check out though. I haul lumber in a similar size car and 8ft is basically trunk to dash so there's no way he's hauling an 8ft by 4ft sheet without it conflicting with the driver's seat if not torso.
Individual boards should fit in just about anything though.
A Maverick is hardly a working truck. It's got the same towing capacity of an older Kia Sportage. It's got front wheel drive (or awd). It's a car with a bed, not a truck.
I don't get this attitude. Everyone criticizes auto companies for not making a small truck anymore, and then Ford comes out with the Maverick and then you say it doesn't have enough towing capacity. It can tow 4000 lbs. That covers a whole lot of use cases. It also has a payload capacity of 1500 lbs which is quite respectable for a small truck. As for FWD vs. RWD, who cares? How does that affect your ability to move things around?
Really the only thing I think you can ding it for is the small bed. It used to be that trucks this size would have a regular cab or an extended cab with the two tiny side facing seats, and they would have a longer bed. With the tailgate down you can still move sheet goods with a Maverick though.
I get your point, but those tow numbers are notoriously optimistic. Most people I bet would not be comfortable towing 4000 lbs with a Maverick, and it would struggle on grades or in heat. You can even feel that kind of weight with a full-size truck. Above 5000 lbs in most places you need independent trailer brakes.
The real issue that limits the Maverick for a wider audience is the rear is too small to comfortably fit kids, especially in car seats. Adding 4 in of leg room to the rear and making the whole truck 4 in longer would've made in a great homeowner family option without sacrificing much agility.
Most people don't need to tow 4000 lbs period. If I had a Maverick and needed to tow 4000 lbs I would absolutely do it though. I've towed more than that in an older Tacoma that's not that different from the Maverick. Would I do it at 75mph? Probably not. Would I be towing 4000 lbs going 65 up an 8% grade in the heat at high altitude in Arizona? Again probably not, but the idea that a small truck needs to be able to do everything is just against the concept of a small truck. If you must have the ability to do that, get something bigger.
I agree that the Maverick's bed is small and the back seat is small. IMO they would have been better off making a regular cab or an "access cab" thing with two doors and fold-down seats, and used the extra length to add to the bed. Those are great if you're single or don't have kids, and you just need to carry passengers very occasionally. If you're regularly hauling kids around you definitely want the next step up. A lot of tradesmen essentially never even use the passenger seat though, and the back seat is just lost bed space unless you're using it for locked storage.
People want smaller, not weaker, trucks. The 1985 Ford ranger compact truck could tow over 3000 lbs base, and over 5000 with upgrades.
The Maverick only tows 2000 base, the 4000 is an upgrade package and only for trailers with their own brakes.
RWD is pretty functionally important for a vehicle to maintain control while towing significant weight, as all the weight sits on the back of the frame, and that's where you want the engine power to go.
The Maverick is not a working truck, which was my original point. In terms of what matters, it is worse in every way than a 40 year old design.
You need to have AWD for the Maverick to have the 4000 lbs rating. It's going to be sending power to the rear wheels when you're towing.
You can't really compare the tow ratings with a 1985 Ranger. Back then the ratings were not standardized and were generally inflated for marketing purposes. Today tow ratings are standardized by SAE J2807. The Maverick has way more power than the old Ranger and weighs about 600 lbs more, plus it has trailer sway control. You're going to have a much easier time towing 4000 lbs in the Maverick than the Ranger.
Edit: The Maverick also has 300 lbs more payload capacity than the 1984 Ranger. The fact is, not everyone needs a giant heavy truck. I see loads of tradesmen driving Mavericks.
The '22 ranger tows up to 7500, payload 1500. Sure, bed is only 5-6 feet, but is 4x4, and interior feels good, and is about as bougie as the big F gets. Had it down to 12L/100km, a full tank gave me a 700km range at that point. Fits my family of 5 when it needs to. I would buy one again e-z.
Grabbed it in '25 with factory warranty still on it for about the price of a new maverick.
Several times a year at a minimum, and not always with good notice.
Towing weight is also a good proxy for frame strength. I do some light forestry work moving and bucking logs, freeing stuck cars, plowing snow in addition to towing trailers and equipment.
I didn't really trust it for some of the logs I was moving, as the trailer hitch was added on after and the frame isn't really designed for shocks like what I was putting it through. On top of that, hauling messy stuff in the back was a pain with having to lay down tarp and hoping it caught everything and didn't rip.
Plus, you can't really put a winch or snow plow on a Sportage.
Good article, but “Java deprecated their Date way back in 1997” is not exactly true. They deprecated a lot of methods and constructors in JDK1.1 when Calendar was introduced, but the class itself was never deprecated and it was the preferred way to represent a point in time until the “modern” approach was provided in java.time in JDK8 (c2014)
(I can't find the 1.1 docs, but they were the same)
It's one of my favourite examples of how languages pretty much always get date and time hopelessly wrong initially. Java now has one of the best temporal APIs.
Yeah, it effectively became a typed wrapper of a long epoch millis value. Generally treated as immutable by convention in my experience, although of course it technically wasn't as the setters were never removed.
It was hopelessly wrong initially, and got even worse when they added the horrible sql Date/Timestamp/etc classes.
With java.time though, it is the gold standard as far as I've seen.
In this case the candidate they voted for was a convicted criminal and pathological liar.
Dishonesty is the through line of Trump’s entire life. There was no reasonable expectation his second term would bring anything else. Anyone expressing buyer’s remorse at this point is impossibly naive.
Registration fees are likely the same or close but when you factor in gas taxes (the original comparison here), the Ford is definitely paying more both based on fuel type and mpg.
Not sure where you are but in Indiana, gas tax for unleaded is 36c while diesel is 62c so on a per-gallon basis, that's an additional +72% in taxes. Back of the envelope: Civic at 30mpg pays 1.2c/mile vs SuperDuty at 15mpg pays 4.13c/mile so the multiple is closer to 3.4 vs 2
So yes - assuming registration fees are comparable and mileage is comparable - the SuperDuty should pay more.
The lightest SuperDuty has a gas engine. Diesel SuperDuty fuel economy is a bit better, but the vehicle also weighs more and is likely to be carrying/pulling more. But regardless of whether the multiple is 2 or 3.4 or somewhere in between, it is a small fraction of the added road wear.
By the fourth power law, an unloaded diesel Superduty creates ~22x the road wear of a honda civic. Loaded can be 100x more.
The Slate is utilitarian, but remains to be seen if it actually ships. https://www.slate.auto/en
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