Ries
Diamond
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2004
- Location
- Edison Washington USA
There is one of the "joke" sized yankee pickups local ..a Ford 450....all sorts of quality stuff like fake plas- chrome wheel nuts ,pickup bed made of a bit of moulded plastic.....the giant thing takes up four parking spaces ...the old (80yr?) owner cant back the giant joke ,even with the help of a crew of 60 year old groupie chicks.....last time I saw it he was stuck in the mall parking lot ,and had to call the towies to get it out .......Not all yank tanks,tho.....there is also a Benz mobile home Ive seen stuck in a parking area....Must be 30 ft long .....reckon next time it gets left home and the Tesla taken shopping.
The Australian government makes no bones about the fact that their laws are written to do everything possible to discourage importing vehicles. There are pages of rules, and taxes, fees, and tariffs. There is a quarantine inspection, where if they decide the car is not clean enough, they refuse to let it in. It costs thousands of Aus Dollars to get a used car in, and it must be on the Registry of Approved vehicles. If you bought a pickup for 10,000 Au$, they would charge you GST on 14,300 Au$
Hence, not many beater F150s.
Contrast that with slinging one off of a Dhow in a Red Sea town which barely has a pier, and driving it off into the bush. A quick few bills to the port master, and voila.
An F450 has a 6000lb payload- its a bit bigger, and, here, they are often equipped with big flatbeds. Not exactly a typical yankee pickup, the vast majority of which, these days, are 4 doors with 6' beds.
I am in South America these days, and the streets are full of old full size pickups, with big boxes on the back, or flatbeds, used as midsize delivery vehicles.