It is disgusting because people want trucks with super high hoods because they look like cowboy belt buckles and it’s masculine… but the reason cars haven’t been built to look like that in the past is because it is a pathologically murderous way to design a vehicle that will inevitably get in accidents with other cars and pedestrians at some point. I can’t walk around wielding a giant machete in broad daylight and have people treat me like that is acceptable behavior, why do we treat driving around a vehicle optimized to hurt other people in accidents as acceptable behavior? Especially when the reason is “idk, it looks cool, especially once I lift it”.

I think the design of pickups really pretty precisely tracks the retreat of conservatism from pretending to honor basic social contracts in favor of outright embracing violence against The Other whoever that might be defined as. Giant pickups are just a physical manifestation of marketing department’s best guess at what the interior psyche of conservative masculinity desires, and that desire has clearly gravitated more and more towards embracing violence and lack of caring for the consequences of ones actions on others and that is a scary thought.