All SUV's *are* Trucks but All Trucks are *not* SUV's
Have read this "survey" thread from the beginning. Verrrry interesting. Suggests additional bizarre questions about the nature of identity and the art of naming things though, such as:
If I were to take two wheels off my Explorer, and still manage to drive it while somehow balancing on the remaining wheels ... could I then call my Explorer a BICYCLE?
And if I did so, would my neighbors then call me a LUNATIC???
Probably.
For the record, I vote TRUCK.
My '95 Explorer is registered in Virginia as a "Sport Utility".
However, when I first titled my '82 Bronco in Virginia sometime in the late '90's (having bought it from someone in another State where people apparently didn't seem to care about such niceties as body style labeling), the woman behind the counter at the DMV handed me a registration that said "pickup truck" (which it obviously wasn't, but of course she had never actually seen a Bronco herself, or had she seen one, she had no idea what it was).
I insisted that the Bronco was not a 'Pickup Truck' and if I were ever stopped by the police, I would probably get arrested because any police officer would immediately know that a Ford Bronco was NOT a 'Pickup Truck'. I suggested that she just call it an 'SUV' but the DMV lady didn't seem to have any concept of what that is. We established that it was NOT a car OR a pickup truck ... however she still didn't know what to call it, and was bureaucratically insistent that it had to be called
something.
[Sometimes I have serious doubts about governments that hire third-worlders for jobs where they have to deal with an English-speaking public.]
So I finally told the DMV lady "just call it a 'Bronco' then" ... and that is exactly what she did.
And in the entire history of the grand and glorious Commonwealth of Virginia, my Bronco and I possessed what was probably the only Vehicle Registration that ever stated:
"Body Style: Bronco"
The DMV folks did correct that faux pas a few years later, entirely on their own, and certainly with no prompting from me.
Suddenly one year, they just started calling my Bronco an "SUV" ... maybe by then they had finally figured out what that was.
When I bought my Explorer (again from another State), I was looking forward to another wacky and scintillating DMV argument when I registered the new title. But no, they just labeled my Explorer as "Sport Utility" and there was no controversy at all there. Trés disappointing!
