Let’s get this out of the way right off the top: needing a truck is not a requirement for owning a truck. We are PRO CAR here at The Autopian, and the “car” refers to anything you can get in and drive. If you want to get the biggest, toughest, off-roadiest 4X4 that money can buy, dump beaucoup bucks into it to make it even bigger, even tougher, even off-roadier, and then just drive it to the office, that’s fine. Whatever makes you happy.
“Wildest load transported in a car? Who needs a car?” Jason snapped this hero on a visit to India.
THAT SAID, there’s a whole lot of truck-stuff you can do without actually having a truck, especially if you’re creative and/or desperate when faced with a not-optional need to move a thing (or many things) from A to B. Move an entire apartment in a Taurus wagon? Done it. Two kayaks in a hatchback? You bet. So much mulch my RAV4 was on the bump stops and I couldn’t close the hatch and I got pulled over but the cop was cool about it because I only live like a mile from Home Depot? That was last weekend.
You tell us …
What’s The Wildest Thing You’ve Transported In A Regular Car?
To the comments!
Lots of ten foot long pipes, two by fours, and any thing else that’s ten foot long but not too girthy in a 2010 Toyota Prius. It’s almost like someone at Toyota specified that they were going after the independent plumber market with the Prius.
In reference to the picture from Jason and to prove thay I’m a proper Dutch person: We biked with 5 people on 1 bike. One sitting on the steer, one standing on the pedals, one sitting on the actual seat and 2 on the luggage rack.
We were around 12 to 15 years old, iirc, so still a bit small otherwise 2 on a luggage rack would have been very hard.
A 50gal water heater standing up in the back of a Geo Tracker. Same Tracker carried a load of granite cobblestones of unknown weight, but the front wheels barely stayed on the ground.
18 crates of beer in a ’92 vw golf. That was pretty much the amount it could hold in regards to volume but at the very limit of pay load.
Not sure what a crate of beer is but did you think of a keg?
I moved from Portland to LA in a 2003 Mini Cooper. It was crammed completely full with the backseats removed. I had a roofrack with a full set of track tires on the top. It bottomed out over everything. The exhaust fell off twice.
I carried a bunch of lumber in my Miata by unzipping the back window and using the passenger seat like a truck bed
New dishwasher in my Soul. Lowes listed the box dimensions on their website so I knew it would just fit. They ask if I have a truck or van or large SUV. I say no problem and pull up. Sales guy was convinced it wouldn’t fit. I slid it in there and closed the hatch while it looked sorta amazed.
I tried moving as much of my apartment as possible in the Lancer when I moved into my current place. Like, why pay movers for the small stuff in a cross-town move? Each car-load was packed to the top, though, which was pretty hilarious. I cleared out the storage unit for my race car in a similar fashion: if I was headed back from Harris Hill, I loaded up a car-load of whatever would fit on the way home.
People underestimate how much crap a 2010 Lancer can hold. I think my record for length was a Billy bookshelf from Ikea, still in the box, which just fit between the two front seats.
Few ideas off the top of my head:
Was moving back home after college. My mom and sister came down south to help me pack, and my mom brought her van. “This will be easy”, I thought, “I only have a one-bedroom apartment’s worth of stuff, and we have a van to transport it in.”
I was a fool.
My mom also brought her dog.
With the van halfway full, she declared that any more stuff loaded in the van would be “crowding the dog too much”, so the rest of it needed to go in my car. I drive a 1990 Ford Thunderbird, and I love her very much- but she’s a 2-door with a non-folding rear seat. The trunk was already full. I had to cram the back seat with everything that was left, including all my clothes, a bunch of pots and pans, and an entire (non-folding) desk.
Also my sister was riding with me.
And we were driving from Sarnia to Ottawa (~720 km).
It was so heavily loaded, the front of the car was sitting a good couple inches higher than the back. I kept expecting to hear my back tires rubbing. Somehow made it back in one piece *and* in one tank, which surprised the hell out of me.
In/On a Saturn Vue by trip:
20 stone pavers, gas plate compactor, wheel borrow, 4 bags of concrete, and my two sons in a Satun Vue.
30 bags of mulch plus 6 flats of flowers.
3 30″ solid core doors, 10 8ft 2x4s
3 12ft long 4x6s, plus about 100lbs of rebar
If you include mini van in “normal car” I have a whole other list.
I do also borrow a truck when needed, but the above list did not hit the truck threshold.
12′ 2x4s from the floorboard, through the rollbar, and out the back of my Miata. (with a flag of course!)
A BMW M70 on a pallet, just fits inside the luggage section of a e53 X5.
When I was in high school my mom drove a Chevy Beauville passenger van. One day I get a call from my best friend’s sister saying she needed some help, her school’s entire pom pom squad was at her house and had no way to get to the school for the big game. “MOM! I NEED TO BORROW THE VAN!”
There were maybe a dozen girls crammed into what was probably a 7 passenger vehicle, and I got a kiss on the cheek from each as they hopped out.
An L-head six from a 1937 Plymouth is not, of itself, all that unreasonable to carry inside a car. The car, however, was a 1969 SAAB Sonett V4, a vehicle not exactly known for its roominess, and I was transporting the engine from the southern Oregon coast to Seattle. I admit I did have to remove the passenger seat to make this work. The folks at the machine shop were impressed, perhaps even favorably impressed.
After the machine work I took the engine back to Oregon in the Sonett, too, both so I could install it in the Plymouth and so I could retrieve my passenger seat. I came back later via Greyhound to get the Plymouth.
I towed my 400hp V8 twin tunnel hull muscle boat with my Audi wagon for years:
https://i.imgur.com/DGlSRBx.jpeg
Worked great, only bitch was a tiny displacement turbo engine has no low end torque, and combined with a manual transmission = pulling it out was a delicate dance of clutch,e brake, and regular braking and gas all at once.
Was always hilarious to me seeing all the F-teen-thousands towing a dinky little 16′ aluminum boat with a 60hp outboard; I’m sure they justified owning a truck because “They gotta tow things” but never realized a honda civic could likely tow their little boats.
I used to see a guy towing a larger Lund fishing boat with a Chevy Malibu. Everyone else had same or smaller boats and huge trucks. It was always fun to watch.
I tow my small fishing boat with an outboard with my wife’s base model Forester. Only reason I don’t tow it with my Soul is that hers had a hitch on it when we bought it so I saved the couple hundred on buying an extra hitch.
A queen mattress with a 2004 Corolla. we put it on the roof and 4 dudes (including the driver) had their arms out the window holding on to the thing. This was January in Kentucky. That was a cold freaking trip.
I once managed to move a mattress in the back of a 2009 VW GTI, folded it up like a taco and had someone follow me since it stuck out the back.
In my current 2014 Sportwagen, I’ve hauled hundreds of pounds of (bagged) dirt and mulch, eight foot boards (fold the passenger seat flat and they fit with the hatch closed), bales of straw, a disassembled futon complete with mattress, and on one occasion close to 500lbs of brick. Eight foot ladders also fit easily, and the wheelbarrow I borrow from my fiancees mom from time to time fits no problem at all.
Nothing too crazy, but it certainly proves that if you only have about a fifth of an acre of land, you probably don’t need a full size truck. And thanks to some old sheets, the interior has stayed clean and undamaged. Not to mention how easy it is to get heavy things in and out of it. Thanks to the fact that it’s lowered, you don’t have to heft things up high at all. I would hate to have to lift 10 bags of mulch high enough to get into some modern pickups.
From my personal experience:
Is there any other type of goose besides Angry? I swear Canadians are so nice because they conduct arcane rituals to seal their negative emotions into those flying poop factories before sending them south.
Two come to mind.
1. Used to regularly haul chicken feed in the back of my ‘68 Dodge Dart. This was around 2013 or so, and if I packed the bags right, I could fit 400lbs with the truck still closing.
2. Chrysler /6 in an ‘03 Honda Odyssey. Got the engine for free for a turbo build I was contemplating, and didn’t have a crew cab truck at the time to haul friends and engine together. It worked, got a little coolant in the carpet but no big deal.
#3. I have also accidently tied things down only to discover I could no longer close the door. I have also tied things down only to discover I had tied the door shut and could no longer allow entrance to my back seat passengers who were with me.
My uncle was stationed in Hawaii as a corpsman back in the 90s. He had gotten rid of his old Volvo wagon and bought a 1994 Mitsubishi Eclipse. He was headed off base and a couple of Marines asked for a ride, they’d pay. He said sure. They climbed in. A couple more also asked for a ride. He said sure. They climbed in. One more asked for a ride. He said sure. Guy climbs in. You’ve now got six men in a hatchback with no air conditioner, no tint blocking the sun, no power steering (so no delicate movements), a manual, only 92 horsepower, and only two real seats. The back seats are these bizarre little buckets (I should know, I inherited this car). My uncle is a lanky 6’6″ and the other five guys are all Marines who are not usually a petite bunch. They’ve got their personal gear including a skateboard. My uncle said he had one guy up front with the seat pushed up, three across the rear “seat”, and two curled up under the glass hatchback like they were lizards in a terrarium. A heck of a funny image to try to conjure up.
…And they all are still friends to this very day! 😉
I don’t see a way to add pictures, otherwise I’d put one of the old 2 door XJ with an 8 foot cabinet and small bookshelf on the roof rack, a large bench and other junk strapped to the bike rack in back, and the all of the interior but the driver’s seat taken out to fit everything from a table saw and band saw to some granite slabs and a bunch of other project wood, rock, etc inside. That was about the only time the 30 mph speed limit on Cottonwood pass over the continental divide has seemed reasonable. Most of the rest of the move from the storage unit I did in the Bolt, stuffing the inside full and strapping small furniture to the bike rack.
Another fun one was back in college, helping move the campus climbing wall to a new rec center. There were some ~ 10 foot x 50 foot foam pads to move, so we draped them over the same XJ, folded them up in front and back in thirds just enough so I could see out the windshield. My friend sat on top of the whole pile to hold it in place while I drove 10 mph across campus with flashers on, probably confusing and annoying everyone on the way. Finished with a bit of offroading through the construction site to the front door of the new center, and getting yelled at by the construction foreman for getting mud and dirt all over the front walkway that they were finishing up.
Harbor Freight Engine Hoist in a LeBaron convertible. It was in pieces, but all had to go in the back seat and the top had to stay down.
I also had four people two snowboards and all of their luggage.
The wildest thing?
A box full of baby opossums.
Mamma got squashed but she had six little ones with her that remained unsquashed.
Being a person that likes animals unsquashed, I couldn’t just leave them there (she was definitely not playing possum).
I gathered em up in a box and put them in the back seat.
Randomly, my friend that was with me knew a lady who knew a lady that ran a rescue.
Half an hour later we met up in a parking lot and handed them off to this stranger.
Before we left, as if to prove her good intentions, she pulled a tiny baby opossum
from her bosom to show us. Its eyes weren’t even open yet, it was so young.
Just keeping it warm in her bra I guess.
She thanked us for saving them, promised she’d take care of them and asked us not to tell any authorities about her “rescue”.
That was the wildest thing.
“Don’t worry! Here, these little darlings will receive the breast of care.”
There you are.
Shame can be a powerful motivator for change my friend.
But did you need to go so hard at it?
I was holding back.
And, as you can see, it didn’t really work did it.
Here we are.
Let’s go walk the dogs.
Can we maybe go out on the kayak tomorrow morning, before work?
If we stay off the internet…sure.
Kayak kayak kayak!
Kayak kayak kayak!
Kayak kayak…
Kayak!
Man, if we can actually pull this off and escape the internet…
I know right?!
So much more free time that actually matters.
I’ll miss this place though. Great writers, fun articles.
Yeah. They have really stuck to their guns as far as their original mission statement is concerned.
The peanut gallery here is probably the best you’ll ever find yourself in.
True. I will miss some of the commenters.
Should we say goodbye?
Let them all know it’s a “it’s not you it’s me” scenario?
I think we just did.
Now what?
I dunno… make pasta caprese for dinner.
Maybe dust off the ol Fender Jazz Bass? You know you want to…
Good call. I bet we could be playing Muse “Hysteria” perfectly again in a few weeks if we simply ignore this shit. (great shit BTW).
Here we go!
And that’s how you lose a tail ladies, gentlemen and non-binaries.
Where were you a few minutes ago?
You got weirdly obsessive about having a moment of privacy then stared blankly at your smartphone for about 47 seconds…
Are you posting comments again?
Yes. I can’t help myself.
It was an article celebrating comments!
What was I supposed to do?
Not chomping down on any old baited fishhook dropped in the lake would be a good start.