When I was school-age, I was friends with a kid who was into hockey along with his brother for most of their growing years. They were on competitive teams and it was a major part of their lives. Their parents had two SUVs which were used multiple times weekly to haul all the gear around.

That’s the only time I’ve known of someone making practical use of these obscenely large and wasteful oil burners. A smaller station wagon would’ve fit everything though, if you could buy them any more. Roads in the US are congested now with large sedans, those crossover things, and enormous pickup trucks with pristine beds. Cars in the US seem to have trended toward larger sizes in recent decades, smaller station wagons and things like the old Honda Civic or Geo Metro no longer exist (in my opinion the modern Civic is fucking huge and hideous compared to its namesake), and trying to find what was once called a compact/subcompact is impossible these days.

I used it to haul bandmates and gear around up untolil the band dissolved at the start of the pandemic.

I also helped friends move and generally enabled as many people around me to be carless as possible.

It was a used hybrid- I tried my best to be non-wasteful.

How do you define utility? I know that many people in my city (in Russia, for reference) are buying larger cars (such as SUVs/crossovers) to get to the summer houses (dachas). Others do it to be able to drive in winter. Mind you, winters in my specific area aren’t that harsh, but the snow plowing is lacking - main roads might be clean, but good luck getting to them through knee high snow.

No idea why some buy pickups though. Those seem excessive in the city. Utility can be achieved with a van, for example the Gazelle

I had a teacher when I was in highschool that actually put his SUV to good use. Had lots of hobbies that it was pretty handy for transporting his equipment: kayaking, mountain biking, etc. In some cases he probably could have managed it on a smaller vehicle, but not everything. Made sense for him just to have one vehicle that covered all his use-cases.

He was the only person in that camp I ever met though.