In a survey released by Ford today, the company said it found that thirty-eight per cent of surveyed U.S. truck owners would stop having sex before giving up their truck for a year. That might seem low or high to you, depending on how important fucking is to you personally.
The same survey said that 82 per cent of respondents would make the same trade for streaming services, 79 per cent for booze, 71 per cent for coffee, 47 per cent for using a phone, and 44 per cent for eating meat.
And the Detroit Free Press pulled out these other snippets from the survey:
Most folks have heard that you may not need to own a truck but you do need to know someone who does.
Data suggests knowing a truck owner is, in fact, essential:
- 94% of truck owners have used their truck to help others.
- 75% of truck owners have used their truck to help friends or family move items.
- 62% have jump-started another car with their truck.
- 22% have driven someone in need to safety with their truck.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you can jump-start your car with almost any other car. More to the point, this survey — one of Ford’s attempts to drum up interest in the fourteenth generation F-150, which will be revealed globally on Thursday — does a good job of highlighting the very specific kind of truck culture that exists here.
Because for all the stats about how much pickup truck owners love their trucks, including some who will choose them over regularly having a literal orgasm, the most jarring stat from the survey is this:
The number of Americans actively interested in purchasing an electric truck is presumably much lower than the number of truck owners who are simply excited by the idea of one but I could be wrong. And while Ford thinks this is because an electric pickup doesn’t exist yet, that seems optimistic, given that in this country the very idea of what pickups are is tied to internal-combustion engines.
I mean, look at more of Ford’s numbers:
Just over a third of Americans would switch under certain conditions, implying that around two-thirds of people aren’t interested in switching for any reason. All of which suggests to me that Ford’s electric F-150 is a product that, like the Harley-Davidson LiveWire, not a lot of people are asking for. And we haven’t even talked about how much towing will reduce range.