Advertising works. You may think you're immune and that you buy exactly want you want... but you don't.

If you think all of those Super Bowl and World Series ads featuring steely-eyed manly men doing manly things with with their super trucks AREN'T carefully devised and targeted to specific demographics, emotions, and insecurities... then I don't think I'm the idiot here.

Automakers spend tens of millions of dollars creating advertising and marketing their vehicles, and those ads didn't happen that way by accident.

Same for the ones that show brave mothers with their child piloting an oversized SUV around attacking logs and rolling boulders, or similar ads that show them perched on distant peaks.

When the largest wide-open space the majority are ever going to see is the local Costco parking lot.

With the end result that our strouds are over populated with over sized vehicles upon which Americans spend more of their income on than any other country in the world.

Again, not an accident.

That said, trends show declining sales for larger trucks, with more and more sitting unsold on dealer lots, and a shift towards smaller, more economical versions like the Maverick. (Which being a truck, is again an upsell in price over its previous namesake.)