The thing is, looking around at these monstrosities - the people driving them are almost never hauling anything. For the most part, they are just carrying the dumbass driver. And they are about 25% of the vehicles on the road.

And here in america nothing is free

As a Swede, I think the reason this baffles you has a lot to do with the fact that the U.K. is comparatively tiny, with 67 mil inhabitants on 244 sqkm. Sweden for example has 10.5mil inhabitants on 450 sqkm.

What happens is that densely populated areas will have access to these services, perhaps not for free, but they're at least there. Less sparsely populated areas have less service coverage, and so you get more car dependant. Here in Sweden at least we have a decent public transport network so even in my old village of 600 people you could make do without a car, you just couldn't be particularly spontaneous about things.

The U.S. is very much structured around owning cars. Massive roads, poor pedestrian/cycling infrastructure, and a general lack of public transit. I visited Massachusetts back in 2019 and got a completely different perspective on things. Until then I didn't understand why my friend just didn't bike everywhere, but having been there it's easy to see that it's not viable. Even the cul-de-sac they lived on wasn't very pedestrian friendly.

That's not to say that the U.S. could have more sensible sizes on their cars, they definitely could. I think the sizes of cars growing has to do with manufacturers wanting increased profit. We're seeing an increase in the average car size here in Europe as well, with a lot of the more compact cars being taken off the market.

You listed all new item purchase things, where delivery is just part of the price you paid for it in the first place.

What do you do when you're not purchasing something, i.e hauling shit you already own from your old place to your new place when moving?

American here looking to buy a truck that's not absurdly oversized and over priced. I need it to haul hay and bring garbage to the dump. I save a couple hundred a year for bringing my own garbage instead of doing trash pick up, and hay deliveries cost way more than they used to.
Plus my rural area requires driving everywhere and the winters are pretty bad so a 4 wheel drive vehicle is good to have for going to work or emergencies.
I'm looking into those tiny Japanese kei trucks as a potential alternative if I can't find something that's reasonable though.

Oh my fellow European, affordable delivery just ain't a thing in America, always shocked me just how expensive daily life there is. But even then you're absolutely right, 99% of everything Americans "haul" would easily fit inside a regular family car or even a smaller car like a Renault Clio. And for the 1%, why not just borrow/get a small trailer or rent a small van?

Also just a side note, I was shocked when I visited my American buddies and legit NOTHING fit inside those huge ass vehicle. We bought like 8 bags of groceries for a week trip and 2 of those bags were on my lap IN THE FRONT SEAT!!! I mean you're not putting anything in the trunk, shit'll break, and the back seats have barely any space, it's ridiculous.

Particularly in rural America, that's not an option. When dealing with used stuff, well one person or the other is going to need a truck to haul it. If you take a boat regularly to water or a camper regularly to outdoors, you need something that can tow.

I rarely need to haul, but I do need to tow a lot, so I have an SUV that can tow and rent a trailer on the odd occasion I have to haul stuff. The SUV is from a European manufacturer if that's comforting.

But these pickups have laughably tall heights that is just a detriment to utility and a safety hazard. Ironically brought on by efficiency standards that gave a pass to larger vehicles, so when the car company can either try to engineer more efficiency or just make them bigger, they chose 'just make em bigger'. The truck buying market doesn't help, with a lot of people getting giddy at the thought of playing "I drive a big rig" with their personal vehicle.

It's not free; it's included in the price. Those are entirely different things.

As for why someone would want to haul things themselves, well, there are a lot of things that you can not reasonably expect delivery on, or paying another person to haul would be unreasonably expensive for. Does that necessarily make up for the cost of a truck? Probably not by itself, in most cases.