As Abbie Hoffman once indicated in one of his late 1960's or early 1970's books, when a driver picked a hitchhiker up in the 1960's and 1970's (decades before the 21st-century "gig economy' era of cellphones, smartphones, Uber and Lyft, etc.), one reason might be that the driver just wished to acquire a temporary companion for part of his or her drive to converse with, in order to reduce the boredom of a long drive alone. And having acquired a lot of experience in speaking with a lot of different types of people spontaneously in the USA about their personal lives as a New Left activist/organizer in the 1960's, I found it fairly easy in the 1970's to get a good conversation started and kept going with most any driver who might pick me up when I was hitchhiking on the road in the 1970's.
In the 1970's, if you were still in your 20's and looked like a long-haired freak or hippy, whether bearded or not bearded, a white man hitching alone could still hook-up with highway drivers who would not be reluctant--and who were often eager--to stop and invite him to "hop in." If the driver who offered you a ride in the 1970's was also a freak or hippy in his 20's like you were, then you would often be seen as a brother or a fellow member of an underground Woodstock nation of outlaws, that the culturally straight local cops, local authorities, local establishments and "suits", who continued to dress straight and go to barbers who cut their hair shirt, were still trying to suppress around the United States.
And if the driver who offered you a ride in the 1970's wasn't a freak or hippy and looked like one of the culturally straight folks, you often sometimes felt that, in some ways, he or she saw you as a symbol of the freedom that he or she maybe once had or dreamed of having, but lacked now because of things like family economic support pressures and kid-raising or 9-to-5 job responsibilities.
Either type of drivers who picked you up on the road in the 1970's were usually personally generous and personally friendly. Although, if the driver who picked you up wasn't also a freak or hippy long-haired person, you usually had to be more cautious about what you said (especially about saying anything political or anything about religion) until you got a sense from the conversation in the car where he or she was coming from philosophically; and had determined whether he or she might be some kind of right-wing type person. But, of course, if you looked like a freak/hippy in the 1970's, most of the right-wing types who were still gung-ho about the System would generally not be willing to pick you up on the highway.
What you felt from hitching on the road in the 1970's, was that, however morally obnoxious were the businessmen, generals, politicians and super-rich white folks who ruled the USA, the vast majority of people in the United States who you met while on the road, regardless of which state you were traveling through, were still quite friendly, generous, good-natured, kind and often verbally witty and hip on a personal level in the 1970's; and many of the folks you met while on the road who picked you up in the 1970's were also still great and interesting oral storytellers when you conversed with them. You felt that the militaristic dog-eat-dog System and institutions that people who were born in the USA were supposed to accept passively and adjust to living under, while they were alive, did not really reflect the humanistic national character of most people who were born in the 20th-century in the USA or who then lived in the USA in the 1970's.
