That said, an foolish coworker of mine decided that this was a great vehicle for commuting 50 miles round trip each day. Only 68K list! A bargain at 62K!
Oof. That's an awful lot of miles a year for a big truck as a personal vehicle - and that's work miles only, so it'll probably end up with 15k-20k/yr on it. I've put... uh, about 3k miles/yr on my truck in the 3.5 years or so I've had it, and that includes 3500 miles of cross country trip to pick up some family furniture (and visit family), plus a few 1000 mile round trips while we were moving (any time we were visiting family where we were moving, we took a load of boxes and stuff out - we moved ourselves this last move, so moving stuff ahead of time was useful). And I didn't spend nearly that much on my truck...
Folks ought to price what it costs to repair those diesel engines when something breaks.
Eh, the guys buying $100k trucks don't care. It's under warranty for a lot of the time they own it, and they're generally unlikely to keep it past 100-150k miles - not much goes wrong by that time.
When it gets resold a time or two and actually needs injectors and such, the aftermarket is likely to have the details worked out. And, it's generally rare to need a full set unless they're just really high mileage (300k+). Usually it's an electrical issue and you can get a rebuilt unit. A set of 8 for my truck runs $1100-$1400, unless I want to go with high performance exotica (which I don't - I'll probably bump up a step and get a chip when I replace them, but that's hopefully many, many years off).
And, an awful lot of guys who own older trucks (myself included) do their own work. Partly because it's stupid-expensive to let someone else do it, partly because most of us don't trust other people to wrench on our vehicles.
But, yes, a big truck is more expensive to maintain than a small car. Doesn't bother me, and doesn't bother the people I know with other large trucks (our "10k" lb church trailer is exclusively hauled by 7.3 Powerstrokes at the moment) because we use them as trucks, and don't drive them around as a car. Mostly - I've noted either in this thread or elsewhere that I will take my truck to town if my wife has the car and the weather is particularly nasty.
Wonder how many here wouldn't know a bro-dozer from a piperliner's rig, since they often look similar. Wonder how many would even imagine that the pipeliner uses that oversized flashy pickup to generate $2-300K a year in billable hours?
If it's got stacks in the bed, it's a BroDozer? :D