It has become all too common to see gigantic pickup trucks and SUVs, often with front ends that make it impossible for the driver to see even an adult pedestrian, and whose designs are meant to intimidate everyone around them.
Truck sizes have inflated astoundingly in two decades, and anecdata says that it's mostly not the needs of utility users/buyers that have driven the changes: it's manufacturer marketing, because the markup on these babies is much larger than it is on sedans, and selling masculinity to insecure suburban men works really well.
Anyway. My reason for writing this is because I saw one such jerkmobile over the weekend: a Ford F350 Tremor:
Yes, the Ford Motor Company officially named one of its vehicles Tremor.
Even the reviews that purport to admire this thing (like this one) make it sound absurd. My favorite part of that web page is that while churning out photo after photo showing repetitive angles and aspects of the Tremor, the writer or editor couldn't be bothered to come up with actual captions for each photo. So they started repeating the same thing over and over: "2021 Ford F-350 Super Duty Tremor is a whole lot of truck."
They did manage to write a caption for this photo: "It definitely has an in-your-face design." That it does, reviewer, that it does.
I try to imagine what products meant for someone like me would be called, if they were marketed as baldly. Would I find them appealing enough to buy, or would I be insulted by the pandering?
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