Sam Bartelt, opinions editor

You know what consistently ruins my mood every single day? Seeing a lifted truck with illegal underbody lighting. Like, I can smell the body odor covered up with cheap AXE body spray from here. Trucks like these are the bane of my existence. These road-princesses take up so much space and blind you with the power of the sun for LEDs, and ultimately for no purpose.

There is absolutely zero purpose to these vehicles. You can yell and scream about how it has utility, but when you don’t use the utility vehicle for utility, you’re wasting your breath and your money. These disgusting abominations don’t serve a purpose other than “look how loud my engine is,” or “look how big I am,” or “I can totally tow things.” That truck has never seen a day’s work in its life. It’s never been off-road, it’s never hauled anything besides groceries, it’s never towed anything, and its only purpose to you is to look pretty on the road. Ergo, that’s a road-princess.

These trucks do nothing but clog up the roadways. If you’ve ever taken a biology or anatomy class, you may have heard the comparison that the circulatory system is a lot like the road system. The roads and highways are like veins and arteries, traffic flow is like blood flow, and vehicles are like blood cells. That analogy can also work in reverse; the circulatory system is like our roadways, and these trucks are big as hell and impede traffic flow. So in many ways, these trucks are like blood clots. 

Some of these trucks are so large, and the front end is so big, that they have worse front-end visibility than an actual tank… for war. And because of that, the fatality rate for pedestrians killed by trucks is increasing every single year, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. While the fatality rate from regular passenger cars is actually decreasing, that could be due in part to the fact that the market for regular passenger cars is decreasing. Most likely because in a world full of behemoth-sized trucks and SUVs, people don’t really feel safe in regular cars anymore. Every year, the base size of the trucks and SUVs coming out keeps getting bigger and bigger, to the point where some of them don’t fit in people’s garages anymore, and some roadways are too small for them. And it gets even worse when these trucks and SUVs get lifted. Now, they can’t see hardly anything in front of them, and a full-sized car could be completely out of view of the trucks.

If you need a good hauling or towing truck that isn’t egregiously large and in the way like an actual blood clot, there are tons of options. For example, basically any truck before 2018, like the 2017 Ford F-150. It has good towing ability and good front-end visibility. If you want something more modern, the 2025 Rivian R1T is an electric truck with roughly the same specs as the 2017 Ford F-150. There are plenty of trucks that have fantastic abilities and utility for whatever you need them to do, whether it’s for off-roading, towing or hauling, without sacrificing your visibility and pedestrian safety.

The whole purpose of trucks was originally to be used for utility, not for aesthetics. While you’re allowed to have aesthetics in your utility, it gets to the point where you are prioritizing fashion or function. Coming from someone who has had slurs yelled at them from these kinds of trucks just for wearing something for fashion purposes. It just seems both moronic and ironic to me.