It’s Genetic

I’ve researched why people drive the brand of pickup they do, and I’ve reached the conclusion it’s genetic. If both your father and your mother drove Fords, you will too.  

This is called “being homozygous” for the Ford gene. If both parents drove a Chevy or a GMC, so will you. If one parent drove a Chevy and the other a Ford, you probably drive a Ram.  

Having two parents with different truck genes means you are “heterozygous” or “trans,” which has nothing to do with the transmission. If somehow you drive a Toyota pickup, yet both parents were homozygous for the Chevy gene, this is called a “mutation” or “mutant.” No offense. 

I’ve loved trucks all my life. My old man was a long haul trucker, and he never owned anything but a Kenworth, or KW as they’re known in the trade. If I were a trucker, I’d drive a KW, too, because that’s what I learned to drive in. But, I have to admit, I’ve seen a lot of Peterbilts and Mack trucks that made my heart go pitter-patter. 

I also love fire trucks because both my grandpa and my great-grandpa were fire chiefs for decades on our volunteer fire department. I went with grandpa once to a trade show where he was looking to buy a new fire truck for our town.  

We looked at Peterbilts, Macks, Sutphens and Seagraves, but it was the American LaFrance grandpa and I settled on. It had nothing to do with France. LaFrance was the last name of the founder. 

I still collect fire truck ephemera, and one of my unattained goals in life was to either have a six-horse hitch of Clydesdales pulling a Concord stage or an old fire truck I could drive in local parades and blare the siren. Both, no doubt, would stampede the Paso Fino riding group and terrorize the piccolo players in the band. 

Today’s pickups are fabulous, but my all-time favorite is the 1952 Chevy, preferably blue with baby moon hubcaps. It’s a step-side truck, which made it easier to get in and out of the bed.  

This is a big deal for old geezers like me who need either a ladder or a forklift to get in the bed of today’s trucks. I don’t understand why it took so long for truck manufacturers to come up with a tailgate someone could use like a stepstool, but I think they’ll be very popular with truck buyers. 

When women were polled on which make of truck made men look more sexy, 16 percent said Ford, while 13 percent said Chevy. Although I admit to not knowing much about how women think, I would have thought they’d prefer an old Dodge Power Wagon or a 1925 model TT International, which was made by the International Harvester Corporation.  

Although, I can see why a woman wouldn’t want their man driving a truck made by a farm equipment manufacturer. As for what truck women look sexier driving, there’s nothing quite as sexy as a female behind the horn of a Ram. 

I enjoy reading a column called “Mr. Truck,” which is written by an expert on the subject and he recently wrote the future in trucks is a hybrid, although Mr. Truck never struck me as a “save the earth” type of guy. I’m not sure a hybrid is the image most men want to convey.  

I’m also curious if the Tesla truck is going to be very popular because it looks more like a minivan that’s been in a crash or an isosceles triangle on training wheels. Will this really appeal to cowboys, roustabouts, roughnecks or city slickers who drive four-wheel drive trucks that never leave the pavement? And how about the demographic who drive a diesel so they can “fuel up” at the truck stop, or tough guys who have studs on their rims but not in their tires, or old guys like me who have a roll of toilet paper on their dash you can see through a cracked windshield?  

Right now it’s just not genetically possible for there to be Tesla or hybrid-truck drivers, but with all the mutating of genes I see these days, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of mutants on the road in the future.