Comic Strips

A little of this. A lot more of, truck manufacturers are now either uninterested or incapable of making vehicles that exist inside of legal emissions restrictions, so they blow up the wheelbase to class it up to SUV class. The bigger the vehicle the less restrictive emissions laws are.

https://newrepublic.com/article/180263/epa-tailpipe-emissions-loophole

Part of the whole multipurpose craze is also just that few people can afford to own multiple vehicles anymore. My dad owns a little hatchback for a daily driver and a fuckoff big pickup for when hauling needs to be done but he can only do that because he knows enough about vehicles to buy and fix cheap old piles of crap and keep them going. The average person doesn't know how to do that so they need to buy newer vehicles and those vehicles are heniously expensive now so buying one daily driver is enough of a struggle let alone buying a seperate work vehicle. If they need to both take the kids to soccer practice and haul things then I can see how someone might think a suburbitank is a good idea.

But like you said, there are also a lot of people who own these massive trucks but don't need them. If the paint on the truck is unblemished or there isn't a spot of dirt on it then that driver can go fuck themselves because clearly the only utility that vehicle is serving is as an ego prosthetic. Real working vehicles get beat up. Seeing a clean spotless truck is like seeing a mechanic without a spot of dirt on them; they both clearly aren't working.