I like my big gasser, F-350 SuperDuty work-trim truck. Maybe not the gas milage it gets, or it’s ugly front grill, but for my adventure minded self and the rough roads I drive, it’s really a great truck for my needs spent up in woods.
There are many who say I’d be better off had I not gotten a SuperDuty but something smaller, more fuel efficent like an F-150, Ranger, or Maverick. But I didn’t want a little fuel sipping truck that stalled at every traffic light and had an overly complex auto-stop-start system, complicated cylinder deactivation or a millions things to go wrong.
Indeed, had I gone for a smaller truck for about the same amount of money, I could have gotten a bunch of luxury features like leather seats, adaptive cruise control, vanity mirrors, automatic heating and cooling, heated seats or a million different things. But I wanted vinyl floors that are easy to clean, the simplicity of a work truck.
And the thing is a work truck today is not a 3-on-tree simple thing with no features. My SuperDuty has things like cruise control, emergency stop braking, electronic parking break, hill descent control, auto dimming headlights. The 4×4 may not be automatic, but there’s a button that allows you to enable 4×4 mode, the locking rear differential. Or shift manually through the gears. And while the touch screen is not ginormous, it does Android Auto and apps like Waze and VLC for tunes and streaming.
Still I have questions in my mind. $59,750 out the door, the cost of fuel – roughly 13.5 to 14 mpg, the cost of maintance and insuring a new truck. Yet, the OTD cost was less then 6% of my net worth at the time, with stock market gains mostly washing out the cost of the truck. I certainly didn’t take a note, so there was no interest cost involved. Yet, was I stealing from my future? Those days without a truck last winter after I retired Big Red, certainly were quite economical with no insurance to pay or gas tank to fill.
Truth is while I live in a city and over the winter didn’t need a truck, I enjoy my weekends and weeks spent in the wilderness. Maybe I could have gotten a cheaper, smaller truck, but there is something about an HD truck – how it drives on the rough roads, how it handles on the highway. There is a reason why a lot of men eventually step up to HD trucks – and it’s not just for pulling heavy loads. HD trucks have a lot more power, they handle rough roads much better then standard trucks. You get better ground clearance and 4×4 capacity without having to install a lift kit.
And ultimately the cost will mostly disappear over time with inflation. In a few years of everything getting more expensive and stock market growing, the money spent will seem so trivial. The thing is I need to enjoy life and do things in the next 14 years prior to my retirement and building the off-grid cabin, and for that I needed I truck. And I think the SuperDuty fills that role well.
