We were talking about this at work a few days ago… I **loved **when we were allowed to ride around in the back of my best friend’s dad’s pickup truck when I was a kid. You don’t see people in the back of pickups anymore, but I think more than the laws have changed since I’m about 90% sure it was against the law already when I was a kid. I guess it’s considered too dangerous now.
You can talk about being in a capped pickup truck in this thread if you want to but for polling purposes, let’s exclude that given that’s at least marginally less dangerous.
Yup, my uncle had a pickup with a couch in the back, and us kids used to ride in it. Even then I knew it was horribly dangerous, especially sitting on the couch so our centers of gravity were probably higher than the sides, but I couldn’t show fear in front of my cousins.
Hitching a ride into town from the hiking trails, I’ve rode in the back of a pickup truck several times, including climbing ontop of cargo way above the deck and hanging on. Great times.
I’ve also ridden under a tonneau cover that was a serious pain in the ass to get done back up. Since it wouldn’t have helped in an accident is was basically the same thing except for being completely blind. Nothing quite like riding in a cocoon crammed in shoulder to shoulder with several other people.
I used to own a Falcon Ranchero, and I used to let other people drive it so I could ride in the back. I bought it for $200 right after I got back from military training, and rebuilt part of the engine, and pretty much the whole electric system. Sold it after my son was born, so I owned it for about 15 years. For most of that time, I owned another car as well. There were times it didn’t run because I was looking for a part for it, and the last five years I owned it, I was less enthusiastic about part-hunting, so it sat more and more. But I put lots of miles on it for a while.
When we lived in Queens, my neighbors’ grandfather had a pick-up. Sometimes he would take a bunch of us to the drive-in (which at this point was only open on weekends, but it chugged along until about 1985, when people wanted to experience the better sound you could get in indoor theaters). Watching a drive-in movie from the back of a pick-up was pretty cool.
I haven’t, but I have a friend who did (or probably used to and probably did on a regular basis) when he was college aged. He got bounced out (may have involved alcohol, I don’t remember) and broke both his wrists. He had casts on both his arms for a good chunk of the year.
