I blame Billy Bob Thornton. In Landman, the highly-acclaimed Paramount series which paints a naturalistic picture of the oil industry in the heart of Texas, Thornton plays the lead character, a roughneck operator turned millionaire business chief.
He is rugged and shrewd and charismatic and funny, he has a beautiful wife and home, the use of a private jet and money to burn. Leave aside the ethics of the oil industry: there isn’t a man I know who wouldn’t, on some level, want to be Tommy Norris, the character played by Thornton.
And he drives everywhere, across a barren Texas landscape whose only points of interest are the oil-extracting pumpjacks, in a beaten-up, beige pick-up truck. It’s the perfect vehicle for him: durable, practical and, yes, evocative of the working life of Middle America.
Is it too much to suggest that the huge success of Landman – almost 15 million viewers watched the series 2 finale within 48 hours of its release – is, in part at least, responsible for the huge rise in the popularity of pick-up trucks in the UK? Maybe it is, but if you want to drive around feeling that you’re Tommy Norris, there’s no simpler way than to get yourself one.
According to figures from the Department of Transport, there are now almost 600,000 pick-up trucks on the roads of Britain, a figure that has almost doubled in the past decade. Many of these are used for pleasure not purpose, and have changed the character of our streets. They are oversized, overbearing and over here. So forget about looking as cool as Tommy Norris: this is an American import that is as damaging for our environment as the arrival of McDonald’s on our shores was for the healthy eating habits of the nation.
“This boom in US-style pickup trucks is lifestyle over practicality in exchange for parking mayhem and dangerous roads,” said Oliver Lord, the UK head of Clean Cities, a pan-European environmental campaign group. “City leaders must act to discourage these menacing vehicles from our streets.”
Meanwhile, What Car magazine, the authoritative source for advice on buying your new motor, says that a pick-up is “ideal for being used and abused in so many settings” and “comfortable seats, decent technology, a car-like driving experience and smart looks means they’re often used as a family car as well as a work vehicle”.
In addition, said What Car, there is a financial benefit to the owning of a pick-up. Even used for private purposes, certain models bought prior to April 2025 can often accrue the tax advantages of commercial vehicles, which means lower benefit-in-kind rates and, in some cases, the opportunity to offset running expenses.
For those vehicles, this adds up to a counterintuitive subsidy for heavier, more polluting cars. As well as being in contrast to other major European countries, this undermines both a sense of fairness to other road-users and our environmental objectives.
This is not a blast against American cultural colonialism, but more a plea for central government to take notice of a fundamental and, by most measures, damaging change in the nature of our urban landscape. Britain’s town and cities were not designed for the likes of the Ford Ranger, the UK’s best-selling pick-up truck, which is 5.3 metres long and weighs more than two tonnes.
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These vehicles are not suited to narrow streets; they force other cars into narrower lanes, block sight lines at junctions, spill on to pavements and, with a bonnet height of more than a metre, pose a particular threat to young children: an average six-year old cannot be seen from the driver’s seat. Surely, ownership of a pick-up truck for anything other than a utilitarian purpose should be penalised – rather than encouraged – by the tax system.
Meanwhile, in its own promotion of the Ranger, Ford says that buying one “is how to make a statement”. (I’m not sure what that statement would be, however.) Words used to describe its newest model include “muscular”, “robust”, “powerful” and “fearless”, which gives you some idea of the people they are trying to attract: those who see themselves as Billy Bob Thornton in Landman.
It would do us all a favour if someone were to tell them that these vehicles are for the open roads of Texas, not for the crowded streets of Teddington.
