There are more vehicles in the US than the F150 right? in Australia this would be seen as an absurdly over the top vehicle for almost all contractors and construction workers.

Some amount of this issue must be marketing and propaganda making people buy massively over spec vehicles than their actual needs require. Most of these workers could get by with basically any car but get marketed and peer pressured in to spending $50,000 on the biggest one.

Yes, but there are no ~17k pickups in the US, which would be the inflation adjusted price of the F-100. The cheapest truck is the Maverick which starts at 28k.

> $50,000 on the biggest one

You can easily run into trucks in the $120,000-$150,000 range in the car lots now.