Cheap trucks often get a bad name. It seems that the idea is that if you have to spend any money on maintenance you should just get rid of it. They don’t often get good mileage. They are big, often loud and seldom very pretty. Here’s why old pickups should be valued, not scorned.
My 1980 Plymouth Arrow Pickup gets 25 miles per gallon. My 1976 Chevy C-10 gets 15 miles per gallon. Comparable new trucks are much more powerful, but not much better on the mileage. New trucks cannot be justified based on fuel mileage. You have to find other justification.
What about comparing an old Chevy pickup with a new hybrid SUV. No comparison again. Check out towing ability with a little hybrid. Look at what it can haul. An old truck is a different beast that excels at what it does.
An old vehicle, car or truck, sitting there is a store of value and energy. All the energy, human and fossil, that went into building that vehicle is stored right there ready to work. Trash the truck and you lose all of what it took to make it and get it in a form that is useful. Sure, you can recycle the basic materials. Throw it away and what gets lost for good is all the energy and work that went into putting it into it’s useful form. That cannot be reclaimed in any way at all. Scrap a truck and you lose a lot.
Old truck cost little to keep going. Much of what it takes to keep them going is just in place and cheap to maintain. The infrastructure is there and paid for it seems. Get the cutting edge technology and the maintenance and environmental issures may be bigger than you expect. Some costs may be getting hidden. Take batteries. Is the current battery replacement cost the same as what it will be in the future? Maybe manufactureres subsidize battery costs to sell cars and trucks? Do batteries really help somehow with environmental costs? Could it be that some cars being sold now will have very short lives and be totally unaffordable for the people who now use old vehicles? Maybe so.
Used parts and the people to install them are the way to keep old trucks working. Some protection for the beds like roll-on bed liner or a drop in bed liner is yet another of the ways to keep older trucks on the road. Many vehicles hit the scrap heap not because they are worn out or obsolete. It’s simply because parts are high priced and the skills to deal with that particular model are rare. But if you drive old Detroit iron, at least for no, that is not a problem.
Some trucks are just tools. Not all are fashion statements or art objects. Lots of trucks still go because they make sense. Will that be true for what are now new trucks when they are no longer new? Maybe, but maybe not.
Cheap trucks represent a lot of energy and work that’s already been spent. If an older truck gets thrown away much of what it took to make it is thrown away for good. Maintaining a truck rather than throwing it away is the prudent thing to do in so many ways.