I loved my 1987 Toyota 4x4 pickup with all its mods. My wife used to say that I'd get rid of her before I got rid of it (wife's still here; I sold the truck long ago).
But no way in hell would I want to be a real accident in one. That's why they're no longer sold in the US. Amazing off-roader, cheap and extremely reliable.
But they're stuck in 1980's crash survivability while the rest of the world moved on.
They're selling side by sides today in the <3500 dry wt. category which can be road registered. If used primarily for agriculture, they're even tax exempt from registration in some states. The 80's toyota pickup is better than a side by side and weighs less than 3500, arguably safer, and offers better utility for agriculture. There are plenty of Toyota manufacturing facilities in the US, which would avoid the chicken tax on import. It's not impossible or unreasonable for light weight toyota turbo diesels with hydraulic systems, an aluminum frame, and manual locking hubs to materialize.
That's the dirty secret, is that a lot of the side-by-sides kind of suck in relation to an old Tacoma, S10, Mahindra Roxor or a Kei truck, and cost an arm and a leg. It's amazing to me that Polaris sells as many as they do, given what they cost and their capabilities.
This is new? Farmers have been using Belarus tractors for decades. As far back as 1998, I remember a friend in SK whose father had one on his wheat farm.
I was just happy I could start mowing again. But since it is a Craftsman they have a ton of accessories available on the used market for very cheap so I might pick up a plow for like $100 to see how it does for next winter.
This kind of thing is not new. In 1998 I worked for a large corporation (I think they were an F100 at the time) that built machines with a feature that could only be enabled if the customer paid an extra fee and had a field technician come out to "install" it.
Unknown to the customer was that all machines were identical. The technician's "installation procedure" was to enter the Service Mode password, select the feature enable option, and exit Service Mode then run a test to make sure it worked.
This is pretty common in commercial/industrial manufacturing. The exception cost to omit certain hardware subsystems when building a product is often higher than the cost of the hardware itself, so it makes more sense to build everything identically and enable/disable features in software.
I was seriously thinking about looking into finding a surplus FMTV until I realized just how loud and uncomfortable they probably are. Sure, that can be fixed, but I have enough projects.
Never used 2-10V but I learned about 0-10V when someone approached me to design a device to input 0-10V position signal and output two phase-shifted sinusoids to retrofit to a controller that only took resolver inputs. We shipped a couple dozen of them to repair broken machine tools. Fun project, but not going to get rich from it!
I'm guessing that the 2-10V is to detect line break conditions?
It is utility, just not the utility you're thinking of. Try spending all day, every day in a basic, rough riding pickup truck, then compare it to spending all day in a "luxobarge" that can still tow a 7,000lb trailer.
To the people I know who drive trucks like that, they're basically mobile offices.
Yep. The internet loves to bash truck owners as all being the same one guy who buys a truck to drive 1.3 miles to the office every day, but the audience of truck buyers is huge and diverse. Acting like nobody who buys a truck actually uses it or thinking that contractors couldn’t possibly appreciate (or deserve?) a nice interior for what is basically their mobile office is pretty out of touch.
> thinking that contractors couldn’t possibly appreciate (or deserve?) a nice interior for what is basically their mobile office is pretty out of touch
I'm not familiar with the USA. What do contractors over there do in terms of clean/dirty clothes? Do they change into clean boots and trousers before getting into the truck? Or are they all in roles where they don't get their hands dirty?
In my country, vehicles marketed to tradesmen and agricultural workers usually aim for a hard-wearing, easy-to-clean interior that's fairly spartan.
The trades are wide and varied. A lot of tradespeople will show up to the job in an old 250,000 mile Honda if they’re just doing dirty work and going home.
The farm and woodworking people I know have nicer trucks, but they’re not afraid to get them dirty. Put some rubber floor mats down and the floor is easy to clean. Leather seats are actually easier to clean than cloth seats. The steering wheel wipes clean.
Every square inch of my truck’s interior is covered in a layer of fine dust every time we go off roading because the windows have to be down. I can clean it all relatively quickly because everything is accessible and the interior is smaller and boxier than my car.
LOL. I know you're serious, but that's just funny.
Using my wife's fairly recent (2024 model year) pickup truck as an example, every horizontal surface is covered in papers, clipboards, horse tack and medications (she trains horses and operates a horse rescue). The floors and kick panels are probably muddy at this time of year, but I'm so used to it that I don't notice. The surfaces that aren't covered by papers or something else have a nice thick layer of dust (the truck spends a lot of time on gravel roads).
It might actually be vacuumed out a few times a year, but that's far from a priority. Generally, the cleanup only happens if one of us has to wear "nice" clothes to go somewhere.
But bear in mind that the areas that your body touches tend to clean themselves simply because you're moving around. So, the floors, dashboard, etc., might be muddy or dusty but the seats will generally be clean.
The basic "spartan" trucks tend to be for uses where you don't have to travel very far. If you're driving a hundred miles or so on an average day, you'll want to be as comfortable as possible or it gets old really fast.
>he internet loves to bash truck owners as all being the same one guy who buys a truck to drive 1.3 miles to the office every day
Because the only truck owners the people who bash trucks see are their neighbor across the street who is that guy.
The demographically comparable guy who commutes in 80mi one way from his "country estate" in his Audi isn't on the internet bashing truck owners because the guy he lives across from uses his truck.
Also, acting like the whole of the working class are basic burger shop cashiers who struggle to buy anything while simultaneously being idiots who buy 80k trucks just to "virtue signal"... This thread is totally incoherent. Most of the jobs people have are better than that, and most of the trucks people drive are cheaper than that, but the two extremes are mixed to create the most outlandish narrative.
But no way in hell would I want to be a real accident in one. That's why they're no longer sold in the US. Amazing off-roader, cheap and extremely reliable.
But they're stuck in 1980's crash survivability while the rest of the world moved on.
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