Is this communism? Is that what I’m doing here? I mean it sounds sort of like communism, advocating for collective ownership of a resource, but I implore all of you who may find this concept distasteful to just hear me out. The concept is really simple: Every neighborhood – made up of, say, 8-12 residences or so – should communally own a pickup truck.
I’m not suggesting that people should or shouldn’t just own trucks privately, because, sure, why not, drive what you like. But I think that there is a significant overall quality of life improvement to be had when a group of people in a small community like a neighborhood have shared access to a pickup truck.
I feel like I’ve had this thought before; it popped into my head most recently when I got my old F-150 going again so I could help my neighbors bring a ton of gravel and slate to their house. They mentioned that they don’t really need a truck, except for about three or so times a year when they very much do.
I think this is extremely common for people all over the place; they don’t need pickup trucks very often, but there are times when only a pickup truck will do. The thing about a pickup truck is it is an ability multiplier, and a truck is often a key component of being able to accomplish things that otherwise have nothing to do with trucks. Like, say, getting a lathe to your workshop to build things, or a pottery kiln or a lot of wood for a project. You may only need that truck for, say, an afternoon, but that single afternoon of truck use can transform your ability to create and build and do things for months or years.
Maybe you have a small boat, or, like me, a shitty canoe. They are useless unless you have a truck to get them to the water. Maybe a tree falls in your yard, and you need to clear out all the debris. Maybe your kid is going off to college. Maybe you’re throwing a party or a surprise Bar Mitzvah and you need to haul a bunch of folding tables and chairs. Maybe you told a date some elaborate lie about how you live that truck life, baby, and you need to keep the deception going?
Hell, maybe your car is in the shop for a week, and you just need a way to get two and from work? You don’t need a truck for that, but it’ll work!
There’s nothing but uses and reasons for a truck.
But these don’t happen every day. If you have a truck that’s not your daily driver, chances are that truck spends a lot of time sitting. So why not share it?
Just picture this: a group of households in your neighborhood – I’m guessing maybe a dozen at the high end, but who knows, more or less could likely work – get together to buy a used workhorse-type pickup truck. I think buying a used workhorse truck makes more sense than anything new, because this truck is for work. It has no need to be actually nice or pretty or even particularly comfortable, because it’s not for that. If you want a nice truck, buy yourself a nice truck. This is a communal truck.
Every household would pay a share of the initial cost, and there would be some sort of vote to find the “home base” for the truck. This home base would be the house of the person who would usually agree to store the truck, have it registered in their name (most states allow for some sort of group registration – here’s an example from the New York DOT), and would be responsible for making sure insurance and inspections and other legalities are up to date. In return, this person would be exempt from the fractional payments of insurance and maybe would get some sort of compensation for storing the vehicle.
You’re all adults, you’ll figure that out. If a neighborhood has an HOA, this is a perfect opportunity to actually have an HOA do something useful, for once, and the HOA could be the entity that registers/stores the truck.
Since we live in a modern age of computing machines that talk to one another, setting up something like a communal Google Calendar for scheduling the truck should be pretty easy; that’s part of why this may be the best time in history to communally own a truck. All the tools to manage truck scheduling are free and available on everyone’s phone!
Maybe keys could be stored in some sort of lock box in an outdoor location? Or on the truck itself?
I know people can rent trucks from Home Depot or U-Haul or whatever, but let’s be honest – it’s a pain in the ass, and it almost always costs more than you thought it would. It’s not the same as having access to a simple calendar to sign up for use of a truck walking distance from your house.
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I got a Home Depot Transit 350 HD, ask me anything ???????????? pic.twitter.com/Wv8bz0A1eY
— The Autopian (@the_autopian) September 23, 2023
[Ed Note: I would love to skip the HD visit and just grab the communal truck keys – Pete]
Truck co-owners would need to agree to some basic, obvious rules, like fill the truck up with gas when you’re done with it, clean it if you get it filthy, if something breaks from what you did, fix it, that kind of thing.
Regular maintenance and larger repairs would be communally paid for, of course, and hopefully wouldn’t be that terrible, since everything would be split about ten ways or so. Or, even better, members of the community fix the truck themselves (if the skills and/or will to try are there) together, which can help people learn how to work on cars, as well as a way for people to get to know one another.
Are there risks? Sure! Lots of them, probably! Someone could be a dick and stop paying their share (easy to fix, they’re out of the group), someone could get in a wreck, it could get used in a crime of some sort, all of these are possible but I think the worst possibilities are pretty unlikely. I believe the benefits of communal truck ownership outweigh these risks. These people are your neighbors, after all! If you’re that worried about them doing terrible shit, you have bigger problems, I think.
Why isn’t this more of a thing? I’m sure there are places where this does exist, and where it’s working well. I bet there are also stories from people who have tried this and it was a disaster. Again, I still think this is a net positive.
In fact, it should be something people look for when buying a house – a Zillow listing should have a section that mentions something like OPTION FOR COMMUNAL TRUCK OWNERSHIP, and it’s a nice perk if that’s checked.
See, this is the scale where communal things could actually work: small groups, a clear, common benefit, saves money for the people involved, builds community camaraderie – I just don’t see a downside here.
Trucks should be shared, and the best place to do so is right where you live. If this is communism, then I’ll be Karl Fucking Marx, tooling around in my battered but beautiful old F-150.
Is this a really good idea in the US? The only place where the population collectively agrees that doing things for the public good is dog-shit and underneath them?
What are the chances the “People’s Truck” isn’t turned into a vector for abuse or destroyed by someone within 5 years “because fuck you”?
I like the idea but it does require a solid level of demand.
I tried something like this in my neighborhood of 25 homes. I have a Harbor Freight trailer that folds and takes up very little space in my garage so storage is not an issue. I get all sorts of seasonal use out of it and I let it be known that it’s readily available to any neighbors who need it, and I’ll even pull it if their cars aren’t equipped.
I have been taken up on that offer exactly twice in 9 years, and one of those was in support of the HOA in a boundary dispute with a neighboring company. The thing is that in my neighborhood, I’m the only one who DIYs the sort of project that requires this hauling capacity. All my neighbors, if they do anything at all, will hire contractors to do the landscaping/remodeling/whatever. It’s just not in the “culture” of the neighborhood to do that sort of work.
I’m a little disappointed it’s gone that way because I feel that working together on large projects is a great way to get to know the neighbors and develop friendships. To be fair, I’ve never asked any of them to assist when I have a yard of dirt to unload either so I guess I can’t expect that any of them would take that first step either.
I’m more of a people’s van kind of guy.
Jokes aside, as much as I want to like the idea, and as much as most of my neighbors are perfectly fine people, the co-owned truck seems like a great way to send neighborly relationships down a dark, dark path.
For the most part we keep to ourselves (small city neighborhood with a mix of single family and multi family homes) though we’re friendly enough. I don’t think co-owning a vehicle would enhance the experience much. Also, have we considered that basically half the US population already appears to own a truck?
I agree that when you bring money into it like this it will put strains on weak relationships. Better to own it outright and just let people know you’re available to help if needed.
If there’s a schedule, someone will abuse it. You’re going to try to book it and find that someone (probably the same someone) has booked it for every Saturday in the spring. Assuming you work normal-ish hours, this means you just don’t get use of the thing.
My wife used to have a co-worker who would request every Friday off over the summer (and the following Tuesday as well on any long weekend). She’d do it months in advance. This made it damn near impossible for anyone else in the department to take a long weekend on a whim, and even difficult to schedule a week off for vacation.
The woman’s life outside of the office was kind of a mess. I honestly think she did it as a power move so she felt she had some level of control over anyone. These are people I do not want to have to deal with when I need a load of mulch.
Just get your own truck!
Uhaul is easier and cheaper. I just checked my records and I did 5 trailer rentals and 3 truck rentals in the last year. My total cost was $330. I know I would spend more than that on buying, insuring and maintaining a share of some old junker truck. If you do the process online in advance you walk in the door and they hand you a key. They also have an app where you don’t even need to speak to a human to pick up or drop off.
Cause it’s 35 minutes ’round trip just for me to get to the depot and back. That doesn’t include time at the depot.
While I find it convenient when I need a utility trailer or auto transport, that would drive me nuts just to get access to a truck.
That’s about how long it takes me. Not a problem at all for me the few times a year I need a truck or trailer.
Congrats on that not being a problem for you. A lot of us are operating with limited windows of time. I typically lose 2+ hours to the rental retrieval and return process, which can kill the possibility of getting the job done.
That sounds relatively convenient.
When everything is at least 20 minutes away, adding the pickup/drop-off commute time kills the time available in a day.
Last time I rented a utility trailer, I had to rent it for 2 days just to do my scrap & dump runs. Ran out of time between when work finishes and when I have to get my kid off the bus & make supper.
Now, if my community had a truck just up the street where I could reserve a day and go pick it up? It’d all be done in one aft.
The last place I lived, it took me three hours to run to the depot for some screws for a project one Saturday. It was a ~15 mile round trip and I was only in the store for 10 minutes. The traffic there was misery. That was when I decided to move.
The only downside to where I live is that everything requires a car for access. Traffic is good, it’s just physical distance.
But since we’re rural, it’s in our best interest to just have one of our dailies be a truck. I’m currently shopping the Frontier pretty hard as it’s adequate, has a 6ft bed, and gets about the same mpg as my V6 Sorento.
We do a bastardized version of this. We own an organic farm right next to a few other organic farms, and sharing is caring. Granted, my wife is the farmer, so outside of owning half of it, I don’t do much on the farm. On the farms, it would be weird if you didn’t let someone burrow your shit, under condition they put some red dye in it and if it breaks under their watch they cover it. We even have a central location in between all the farms to park everything. And no one lives within a half mile of the lot, all the keys are in each vehicle. Probably about 12ish trucks, couple tractors and a handle-full of box trucks. Want to use something, just text the person. For example, we have two Cummins 12vs, we really only need one. So our spare is the main pass around truck. Also doubles as the neighborhoods plow truck. Haven’t actually seen this truck in months. No idea where it is, wife probably does, it’s just kinda whatever. Our tractor too, we use like three times a year. So, if you need a tractor ours is probably free. We don’t own a box truck, but the people that do let us use theirs so often we have no need to buy one. Really for small scale agriculture this is the only way to operate. No one brings in enough moola to cover full self sufficiency. It works pretty well, because everyone involved needs and wants it to work pretty well.
Neat! What do you grow? Have you considered or looked into agri-voltaics at all or is it too early?
If you really need it only three times a year, can’t you simply rent one? I mean sure, your community idea might work in some places, and it obviously kind of does already, but in many places, I’d imagine just going for a rented one is going to be easier.
I have rented a pickup every single time I needed one. Or rather, I would rent one if I ever needed one. I did rent a little truck (not a pickup) when moving together with my then-girlfriend in 1993. I have not needed a truck since then. (You can have big-arse TVs and home appliances delivered …)
I feel like it might work in communities where routine cooperation between neighbors can be a matter of life or death. We have pockets out in California, not even far from major metros (I’m talking less than an hour’s drive from LA or SF), where neighbors have to rely on each other in case of fire, mudslides, heavy rains, or earthquakes, which are real and common issues. Areas outside of Santa Cruz, or in the canyons outside of Malibu, for example. Anecdotally I’ve heard stories of successful cooperation, but part of that is self-selection: people who choose to live there are more likely to be cooperative and considerate of community resources.
In a typical urban or suburban environment? Fat chance.
Agree. Maybe the HOAs of America could outlaw the personal possession of trucks an offer an HOA-owned one for rent instead?
Nah. There is only so much bullshit people are going to take from their HOA, and something actually sensible is one step too far.
I’m in a motorsports club that includes about a 150th share of a big old Transit van.
A couple of time a year I’ll fill it with sofas or mountain bikes and do a trip you can’t do in a tiny coupe (or in a pickup, not if you want 5 grands worth of MTBs to still be in it in the morning)
The van started off battered, but doesn’t seem to get worse, and it’s always clean and full of fuel.
Some members never use it, some book it a year in advance to tow their race car.
I love owning a tiny share of a van. It helps that everyone else who owns it is in to motorsport, so it tends to get competently driven by people who know how to fix stuff.
There is a difference between a neighborhood and a community.
It’s a great idea but…….heres my experience
I bought a towable manlift capable of going up 48 feet,everyone wants to use it and I used to loan it out.
No more, its come back with the gas tank on the Honda engine empty and batteries flat with new scratches on it. They borrow it for free and can’t spend five bucks to fill it with non oxy gas or plug it in so the automatic charger can recharge the six golf cart batteries .
I can’t accept any money for loaning it out due to insurance and to a person everyone said if you need help with something give a couple week notice and they will be happy to help.
I always need help with something and to a person they are always busy when I need a hand. Nope , no more loaning it out,learned my lesson.Perhaps the Autopian community would be different but after reading the comments section my guess is we might be better but there’s still that ten percent asshole ratio that would ruin it for everyone.
I think you may be looking for Communitarianism.Communitarianism gets Comunisim’s misaddressed mail all the time. Communitarianism has long commiserated with the Conservationists when the Conservationists get confused with the Conservatives. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are pretty bewildered by whatever the fuck they are being confused with.
It’s not Marx–this isn’t about workers owning the means of production or even state ownership of productive assets, which is really socialism. What you’re describing is good old fashioned hyper local scale anarchism, which is really about autonomy and decisionmaking at scales small enough that all are considered and involved in the process. So, anarchy trucks for all! Or for some. For those that want it. That’s a good bumper sticker, right?
Conquest of the Truck
The trouble with Anarchism is you inevitably end up with some Libertarians sneaking in and fucking everything up. But some of my best friends are Libertarians, they are great fun at parties, and the same for my monarchist and communist friends. I get to tease them all about using the socialist roads to get to the party.
See also Marx vs Engels
They already have this. Home Depot or U-Haul will rent you a truck. It’s $20 for 75 minutes for a truck at Home Depot.
Torch absolutely brings this up in the article, but this is the correct take for most people. There’s some faffing about with dropping your car off and picking up the truck, making sure the tank is topped off, etc. but it’s just so easy to rent a truck for the 2-3 times a year I need to haul mulch or bring a large appliance home.
And if you need a full day (or days) just rent a truck from a rental company. I’ve rented a truck on a few occasions. It’s easy and there is always one available and you can beat the hell out of those things and just return it when you’re done.
Rental trucks are the most capable trucks.
There’s a shared car in my buildings parking lot. Every day it’s returned with new dents, scratches and general damage, constantly parked in the wrong spot blocking someone else. It’s quite entertaining watching people park by just crashing into the concrete wall, then backing up a few inches. Bad enough to share the road with these people, even worse if I had to share a car with them.
Totally could work but very dependent on what kind of folks are in your ‘hood.
I will buy a lottery ticket here and there when it’s like up to $500 million or whatever, and daydream about forcing all my friends to move into an awesome private type court? street block where we don’t have to work, but hang out and live life and screw off.
Torch’s idea is brilliant…. I’d pick a 2002-2006, 6.0 2500 single cab, long bed 2wd GMT800. Will take abuse and scratches etc all good – reliable.
Everyone else already has a daily family hauler 1500 crew with the tall super short bed so not too useful. Good idea Torch
My only concern would be – have you ever had a vehicle at work that was sort of open for anyone to take, where you could just sign out the key as needed? I have, and it was always a shit hole when I got into it, gas needle on E, even though they had to pass the fuel pumps to get back to the parking spot, fast food wrappers everywhere, garbage on the dash, and everything weirdly sticky. And that was sharing with a smallish pool of people who all owned their paychecks to the same organization
Oh yeah. At one of my old companies years ago there was a Nissan Versa and Honda Fit available for employees to sign out to run work-related errands. Both cars were abused to hell. One sales guy apparently even flipped the Honda Fit over. Not sure how he got away with that.
I’m curious how anyone would flip a a Fit. Like, logistically and physically. Flipping an Urus or a Z, sure, but a Fit?
I have no idea either.
Maybe they got shorted on their check, flipped out by having a fit, then went driving and flipped a Fit since they were having a fit? Ha ha (Good question though, it’s not like it’s a Bronco II)
We sort of did this with an old enclosed trailer. Split the cost three ways, then I got one look at the tires and replaced all three (two + spare) because we used it first, to move to a new house 50+ miles away, and I didn’t want to carry all my belongings on a blowout waiting to happen. One of the originals was a studded snow tire, all of them were severely weather checked, and one was so old it didn’t even have a date code.
It is insured separately, but the beauty of it is while in transit the insurance coverage comes from whatever vehicle it’s hooked to.
Of course the only reason this works is because all three of us already have vehicles that are capable of towing 3,500 pounds.
So, not a solution for everybody, but highly recommended if it can work for you.
In my local farming community, though less so these days, equipment borrowing and sharing is a fairly normal thing. We all understand that every one of us farmers have been in a pinch with broken equipment, and probably will be again at some point. That’s not communism, that’s just how communities operate. Or should operate. Stuff isn’t communally owned, but everybody helps when you need a piece of equipment.
Several years back I was just starting out and was very equipment-poor. I routinely had to borrow my next door neighbor’s equipment when my worn-out machines inevitably failed. I hated it, but equipment was freely given and as a rule I always made sure to do some sort of preventative maintenance or repair to make sure the machine was in better shape than when I picked it up.
Now that I’m finally in a better machinery spot, it’s my turn to be the lender and I’m happy to do so. My wife’s best friend routinely uses my K2500, my one landlord sometimes uses my big loader to move brush, my other landlord frequently borrows tools, etc. Point is, I don’t believe in community ownership of a truck, for example, but I absolutely have seen the benefits of helping out your community, whatever that looks like.
You reap what you sow, both metaphorically and literally.
That’s the way to do it, leaving the item better than when you got it. Farmers are awesome! Love it.
That’s how it was when I was growing up on our farm. My grandfather painted a lot of the equipment turquoise, and it was understood that it was borrowable. It worked pretty well until one of my cousins married a guy that would steal anything he could. I mean you really only need a road grader about once a year just after mud season. Lots of coops which are a more formalized version of the same thing.
Funny, you just described civilization, and it’s so tragic how modern convenience and a post-scarcity society have made it disappear.
No, thanks. I’m not relying on Bob from Baltimore to fix a flat. That dude can’t even keep his sweatpants clean.
I’ll keep my stuff unto myself, unless I decide differently. Fuck Bob and the horse he rode in on.
I wouldn’t trust myself not to hack it up with a Sawzall to fit 35s.
Nope. You want to borrow me and my truck, we’ll talk. But you’re not driving it.
If something requires a truck then that’s something I generally don’t wanna do. Like getting a new fridge. I’m paying Lowes the $100 to deliver, install, and haul away the old one. I bought several yards of granite rocks for the front yard and paid like $75 to have their dump truck deliver it. I just don’t have the time for that stuff anymore. Money well spent.
On the other side of the coin, I hauled the fridge in a Honda Fit. I could shut the hatch on the new one, and let it stand overnight before plugging in (over the recommended 3 hour minimum) after transporting it horizontally, but it was a glorified minifridge since I went according to need rather than replace like with like.
The old one stuck out the back but that’s what rope and orange flags are for.
I’m always amazed what will fit in a Fit.
I once hauled a Toyota 4AGE four cylinder engine and transmission in the back of my WRX hatchback. That thing made a surprisingly good truck, I even slept in the back of it a couple times.
My niece has a “it’s bigger on the inside” tardis sticker on her Fit.
You can fit a ten-foot-long pipe or 2×4 in a Prius with the hatch shut. I suspect that it was on a check list of design requirements, It’s a fun trick at Home Depot (how I hate that store) when the 4 door short bed trucks of ludicrous size seem to have a problem with that.
This brings back memories of winning a bet (and some McDonald’s hash browns) because of my Fit. I told my friend that we might have to trim 6″ off a 10′ stick of conduit and my friend told me 2 ft. Nope. 6″ did the trick. My Honda Fit was so freaking epic at fitting everything and anything in the back.
I have a truck. But I’m often not IN the truck when I need to get things. So my Saabaru has done a lot of truck duties. repeatedly I’ve carried full sets of tires, up to 33s in that thing. I can only fit 3 of those inside, so its three in and one on the roof rack. But it still got the job done! Carried transmissions and a million other car parts in the back of that thing.
In fairness, it is called a Fit, not a Wontfit.
Many times, you don’t even need to pay. Our local lumber yard delivers for anything over $1000, which you can hit pretty quickly in 2024. Lots of appliance and furniture places have free delivery.
I’ve learned that people can’t be trusted not to bust the clip off an ink pen that you generously shared during a meeting; I can imagine how a communal truck arrangement would work out. Hell, some people don’t even respect their own vehicles, and we all know how rental cars are treated.
(._. )
Reminds me of this conversation in class.
*Lowered voice*
“Oi, Mick, have you got a spare pen?”
“Yes.”
“Can I borrow it?”
“No, I’m using it.”
On the other hand, I’ve had enough customers track me down at work (grocery store and I’m all over the building) to return a pen that I now tell them when I hand it over to just drop it off at the checkout, it’s the store’s pen anyway.
On the other other hand, it’s always the store’s pen, I don’t carry one that’s special to me in any way at work let alone lend it out.
Only in Autopia, where the trucks are strong, the cars are good looking and the fuel economy is above average will this idea work. In the real world, ruled by treacherous, rapacious, unscrupulous, mendacious plunderers, the idea will fail.
“It’s lewd, lascivious, salacious, outrageous.”