Comment by michaelt
25 days ago
> 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.