Ironically, as a car enthusiast, I'd love to see something like this. I hate our current timeline where everyone drives a shitty crossover, manufacturers have stopped making cars altogether in favor of shitty crossovers and trucks, and it's more dangerous to drive my fun small sports cars, which ironically produce less emissions despite being performance-oriented vehicles. It is not efficient to drive a massive brick on wheels. It is also dangerous to other road users, and it subtlety leads to the psychology which increases road rage, on top of all of that it increases road wear and tire wear both of which lead to other forms of pollution (including microplastics).
Things are better in road environments where most drivers are in smaller vehicles. I love toodling around in a sports car in Europe. It's deeply painful in the US, especially in locales where the typical vehicle is a lifted truck that has a bumper height higher than the top of my head when in my car. There's way too many vehicles on American roadways that are literally /all/ negative from a societal perspective, and nearly all bad from a personal perspective, that people bought due to perverse incentives impacting manufacturing and pricing.
What's interesting to me is that in my experience most car enthusiasts feel the same way.
Even though I don't have a lot of interest in car culture, I'm a big fan of the Smoking Tire Podcast, and the host -- who has his own Porches, Lamborghinis, etc. -- has said multiple times that he thinks most people who drive trucks would be better off in a station wagon, and most people who drive SUVs would be better off in a sedan (edit: he actually said minivan, not sedan). (His daily driver around LA is a scooter.)
Obviously there are exceptions, but it makes sense to commute in a commuter car.
Guy with Lambo telling normies what they need. Sounds like yet another out-of-touch rich __ telling people how they should live their lives while living large himself.
I recently replaced my aging Prius with a Rav4, and the versatility improvement is so dramatic. We went from renting/borrowing trucks and vans about every month to not needing one yet. The extra few inches in every direction multiplies together to be rather significant. Plus, it has a roof rack.
I'll hang onto my sports cars, but my daily driver is forever going to be a crossover. This thing beats every hatchback, liftback, sedan, and wagon I've ever owned in every utility metric.
Small crossovers (CUVs) like the RAV4 are literally hatchbacks that are lifted. How does this beat a hatchback in any way? An equivalent volume hatchback has all of the exact same utility, and has better driving dynamics and is safer due to a lower center of gravity.
The main reason people like driving crossovers is that it raises their seating and viewing height relative to other vehicles on the road because we're in one of the dumbest arms races ever with vehicle height, where anybody who buys a sensible car loses.
I drive a crossover myself, but if you do the math, driving a cheap sedan and renting a truck when you need it is often WAY cheaper.
I remember when a neighbor bought a new washer/dryer and gave their old set away to whoever would haul it away. A couple came to get it in one of those huge late-model bro-dozer pickups. This was a ~$60K vehicle. All I could think is that there's NO WAY that couple was ever going to score enough free stuff to make up what they spent on that vehicle.
I don't know why you're aggressively attacking this guy, it sounds like agree with most of what he says.
The Rav4 is basically the kind of car most people should get instead of a lot of what's popular today. The Rav4 is a hatchback on tall suspension. What car enthusiasts want is the hatchback without the lift because tall cars don't handle as well and to top it off, are usally less efficient.
Road wear is a cubic function of weight and our roads, I think it's reasonable to ask why cars have gotten so big and who's going to pay for the increase in damage done to our roads?
better yet, the minivan!
I bought one, very reluctantly, when we were exepecting our third child. I really tried to get something else but the soccer-mom Honda was the most comfortable and performant. Now my kids are starting to drive and I get the van all to myself - it's awesome! going biking? just put it inside and don't worry about highway, weather or security for an after ride beer. Need building supplies? go camping? hauling the family on a long road trip. And I'm now into essentially "free miles" with the age and still awesome condition. My biggest fear is any accident will have the insurance company write it off and I'll get nothing towards the current generation of sub-optimal, over-priced vehicles.
My sister hit driving age when I was a senior in college. My parents took my car away from me to give to her, and so for about two months I drove my mother's old minivan.
It didn't exactly wow anyone with how cool it was, but on move-in day I had a lot more friends than I remembered from the year before (we had taken the rear bench seat out and left it at home, so I had tons of cargo space).
An honest question from someone without a car or a driving license: why exactly were you renting/borrowing these SUVs and trucks? Where does the need come from, what were you transporting?
Home Depot will rent you a Ford 250 for an 75 minutes for $19. I've done this a few times and it's a great option for the once or twice a year you actually need to haul something heavy.
I agree and I think I'm in the minority of people who are better off in a large SUV.
We have 7 in our family so need a minivan at the least. I don't think they make station wagons with 7 seats anymore. We live in a climate with long winters so we need at least one AWD/4WD vehicle so at least some of us can get out. And we tow a trailer so need the capacity. Having one vehicle that does it all is more cost-effective for us.
At this moment though, we have a 12 passenger commuter van that is horrible in the snow and can barely pull the trailer, and a compact hatchback as our all-weather vehicle. That means we can't all go somewhere in inclement weather so we're in the market for the aformentioned SUV.
Sounds like you are actually an exception that proves the rule. Unfortunately the average buyer of a crossover/SUV has at most 4 passengers in the vehicle, and most vehicle-miles driven are single-occupant. Both uses which are better served by other vehicle types that have less negative externalities.
I don't think SUVs should cease to exist, but we should stop subsidizing them with broken CAFE rules that incentivize manufacturers to make SUVs/trucks/crossovers to the exception of cars, and price them accordingly. Most Americans don't have 7 people in their family, so the most common vehicle on the road shouldn't be designed to accommodate an exceptional circumstance at many other costs to society.
And the laws are such that you can't even import the nice small cars they have in Europe.
My options for a small electric car in the US are the Chevy Volt (retiring at the end of this year) and the Nissan leaf (retiring at the end of next year?). I guess there's also the mini Cooper, but it's electric version only comes in a 2 door model that is impractical if you have children.
Pedantic point: In many cases I believe you can import them, it's just expensive and annoying to jump through the hoops. Manufacturers could even sell them, they'd just have to pay a fine/fee/whatever.
As a fan of light compact trucks, the kind they don't sell here in the U.S. anymore, my understanding is that a badly-written function in the CAFE standard calculations is one of the primary reasons I can't buy a truck that's smaller than my bedroom. The function calculates acceptable mileage based on vehicle footprint, and was nominally intended to encourage better fuel efficiency, but had the perverse effect of making trucks larger. Even then, it's legal to sell smaller trucks, but manufacturers have to pay a fine that apparently ruins the profit margin for them. And then there's the infamous chicken tax, and so on.
It's not just inconvenient, it's inconvenient enough to almost say you can't do it. I believe there is a firm lockout period of 2 years (so no 'new' cars can be imported). And then if it is not already licensed with various agencies you have to do that yourself, per-car, at a cost of (I heard) $7-15k. Not to mention the shipping, customs, etc.
And none of those small EVs are all-wheel drive, which I consider a basic requirement for any new car because I live in Colorado. Sure, I /can/ (and already do) drive a car without AWD, but if I'm buying a new car it's a hard requirement. There's no real technical reason why AWD can't be put into these smaller vehicles, it's a market-segmentation choice where anyone that wants AWD is forced to a crossover.
I hope to remain out of the market for cars for many years, but find it interesting that AWD is appearing in many hybrids now, where the main hybrid drive is the front wheels but the rears get an additional motor for on-demand AWD.
I used to be an Audi fanboy for the real mechanical quattro AWD system of my late '90s sedan. Front, rear, and center differentials, always connected. But now, for fleet efficiency, basically everyone is going to some kind of clutch-based, disconnecting AWD on demand. So at this point, I feel like these hybrid/EV style drive axles are no different and quite likely to improve costs and reliability, since drive electronics should outlast clutch packs.
AWD only helps with acceleration (and acceleration if you need to get out of a ditch). It slightly hampers most driver's ability to control the car around a slick curve. It's a nice perk, but why is it a hard requirement for you?
Did Subaru and Hyundai get rid of their AWD cars? I thought the impresario, legacy, and elantras had AWD models recently. The Taurus did too, but that was a few years ago (not sure if they even make it now).
Inded Subaru is still AWD in all the ICE product line. However, Subaru only has the SUV EV ported over from Toyota (it reviews poorly). It's sole hybrid is in the Crosstrek which essentially only exists on paper. Subaru is losing the EV/hybrid/PHEV game. It's very sad to see (as a huge Subaru fan).
Their problem is their main partner is Toyota, and Toyota basically has the stance that they want to do hybrid to maximize the benefits of a constrained lithium supply (ie better to have more hybrids on the road than a smaller number of EVs). Subaru is too small to create EVs on their own at an economically competitive scale. Until Toyota has EVs in large numbers or Subaru finds a new partner, Subaru will not have access.
Subaru doesn't offer an EV. Hyundai doesn't offer an EV version of any of its AWD vehicles, other than crossovers. There are /many/ options for AWD vehicles without it being a crossover, but none of them are EVs. The only intersection point, with the exception of Tesla, where you get both is on crossovers.
Nobody in Europe thinks any of my sports cars are large. I've driven them in Europe and they are roughly similar in size to most European cars. Some of them are even from European companies.
I really hate manufactures try to shove "small" cars down our European throats. Yes lots of people live in cities with medieval road architecture, but most of those people don't drive in the first place.
I'd wager around 70% of Europeans live in the surrounds of a big city and countryside so bigger cars would definitely sell. They started selling the Raptor here and it sells pretty good. Not sure who came up with the idea that European car needs = small econobox.
In fact there is a new chinese make that only sell SUVs and they are the #1 most sold here in Spain.
My daily vehicle is one of the only "city car" options ever sold in the US, it was originally made for the European market, and I love it. Most of my sports cars are only larger in length than the typical Euro econobox, but aren't considered particularly large. I see plenty of VW, Skoda, BMW, Mercedes, Renault, etc hatchbacks and sedans in Europe and have driven a few myself. I don't think "city car" has to be the only option in Europe, and I don't really see any evidence that there's an attempt to make it so. In some parts of Europe the fastest selling car is the Tesla Model 3. None of these are large vehicles by European standards, and definitely not by US standards.
So, why are those cars unsafe? As far as I can tell, it's only because other people drive monster cars which is the whole point of this thread. If most people were in smaller cars, then smaller cars wouldn't be unsafe.
The low mass of the frame means the restraint system puts more force on you during a collision.
Motorcycles don’t have that problem. Neither did cars back before seatbelts; a bit of shattered pre-safety glass old school windshield never hurt anyone.
That's been my frustration as well. I live in city and only drive on weekends, so I'd absolutely love a little 4 door AWD electric hatchback, but the US car market pushes people like me into hybrid crossovers like RAV4 and the CRV.
These two have been around for a few years and are on the second gen. You can get a low mileage first gen for under $25k, which means you may get an additional $4k federal tax credit. One issue to watch out for is the cover for the gear reduction unit should be replaced with a magnetic one and cleaned periodically, to avoid motor damage.
Volvo EX30 - out next year, going to be under $35k
There's also the generation of used compliance EVs like the VW eGolf and Hyundai Ioniq hatch.
All are sold as SUVs but they're really compact hatchbacks with some SUV like styling.
People often complain about crossovers being heavy. But I have a Rav4 and it's curb weight is 3615lbs. The curb weight on my Mustang is 3618 and my Supra is 3345.
So, somehow, the largest, newest vehicle in my fleet weighs the same as my 10 year old sub-compact 2+2 and barely more than a two-seater that's a foot shorter in length and like 2 feet shorter in height. And a modern Mustang is like 500-900lbs heavier than mine.
Crossovers aren't the cause of fat cars. Mustang isn't unusual in the fact that it's a heavy coupe, there are lots of examples of coupes that are somehow much heavier than crossovers. For example, a new Forester is 3528lbs but a C8 Corvette is 3647.
I had a late 1990s Audi wagon (A4) and eventually replaced it with the most comparable late 2010s Audi, which was a small crossover (Q3). Ignoring performance specs, my wagon could have compared to a late 1970s Volvo wagon I used to see all over California. The internet tells me the curb weight of the Audi wagon was 3350 lbs, the crossover is 3690 lbs, and the old Volvo would be around 2760 lbs.
When the crossover was in the shop, I was given a Mustang rental because the shop was out of normal loaner cars. I had no real experience with them, and was shocked that the Mustang felt larger and much harder to park than my crossover despite the compromised interior. So it is interesting to me that you quote such a high curb weight too.
I don't quite understand it. The "density" of cars seems to vary and yet they all have similar mass. It really does make me wonder how much it is engineering necessity versus some kind of weird regulatory mess where the engineers are targeting certain weight classes in spite of very different packaging.
As someone who owned a Mustang GT for a few years when I was younger, they weigh a lot because they have large V8s and beefy components to handle the power. They're also annoying to park because they have a much longer hood than most cars, also to fit a big V8.
Size of the wheels don’t make an SUV. In fact, wheel sizes have been constantly increasing, no matter the car. My Mazda3 has far bigger tires than the Camry from 15 years prior. It’s also detrimental to fuel economy.
I was half joking because there is no clear definition of what it is.
The name do not translate, most SUV aren't sporty nor utilitary. At least they are vehicles.
Wheel size? you said it, all are growing bigger and bigger yeat after year regardless of category.
off-road capability? nope
ground clearance? nope, a tesla model Y or that new Kia sit closer to the ground than many non SUV.
hatchback shape? nope, there are now SUV coupe, concertibles, and some will rank pickup trucks in the SUV category.
how high are the driver/passenger seated? nope again, some vans are higher.
I think what now caracterize a SUV isn't even a combination of these variables but more a tag from the brands marketing team and a general perception based on the car looking vaguely more boxy and bulbeous than other models of the same brand.
Yeah I understand that sentiment. I use the “on stilts” metaphor - a sedan or a hatchback on stilts is an SUV to me. A van is a van, those rarely go on stilts. We also have a new segment called “crossover”, which is an SUV without the S.
There’s no coherent formula for what an SUV/crossover is, but ride height is my rule of thumb. But then I ask myself “where does the Jeep Wrangler fit in?” - afaic, it’s an SUV.
I was also talking about the gas coupe. Take a minute and look at it with european eyes:
- it has comparably as large wheels as most euro SUVs
- it looks bulky and square
- it sits comparatively as high from the ground than most euros SUV.
- it is bigger and probably heavier than most euros SUV. [1]
And many manufacturers have introduced the concept of SUV coupe like Mercedes or BMW.
Given these caracteristics, it could just be called an SUV in the euro market. The only reason it is not is because it was introduced to play on the nostalgy of a pony car of the 60's.
[1] I think what of the most sold car in the SUV category in europe is the Peugeot 2008 which is just a bulkier shaped 208 with larger wheels. The 208 is considered a small/compact car. The 2008 is barely bigger and a mustang dwarfs it.
Only because of perceptions, not because of actual facts/specs.
My point here is not to debate if the Mustang is a SUV, I don't personnally consider it one. My point here is to show that there is no clear/undisputable definition of what a SUV is appart from manufacturers labelling it as one and vague perception by the public.
Because for each definition you can give you will find an example of a car labeled SUV not adhering strictly to this definition and counter examples of cars not labeled SUV adhering at least partially to some of the definition.
That the edges are blurry doesn't mean there's no definite thing.
For that edge we have the term "crossover" (for example, the Ford Edge)
Sports cars in the category of coupe explicitly lack the "U" in "SUV" - that this is referred to as vague or debatable in this thread is a bit maddening, so I will just end with, lol.
My pet peeve is limit speed by vehicle weight, equal impact for all drivers. Want to drive fast? You're welcome to crash into me with your 500kgs. Want to drive a 3000kg vehicle? Limit to 70kmh, even on the highway.
I am not an entusiast, the only thing I care about is my kids safety, hence a large SUV. When you will somehow remove drunks and low-IQ maniacs from roads, you can come and ask me to buy a smaller vehicle. Until then, please say for yourself and don’t attack my rights to safer roads
> I am not an entusiast, the only thing I care about is my kids safety, hence a large SUV. When you will somehow remove drunks and low-IQ maniacs from roads, you can come and ask me to buy a smaller vehicle. Until then, please say for yourself and don’t attack my rights to safer roads
I feel like this has to be Poe's Law in action.
Larger vehicles are actually not safer, either for the occupants or for others on the road, counter-intuitively they are less safe. So, in actuality you've just outed yourself as a selfish a-hole who chooses the most anti-social option possible without actually looking at any of the data to make an informed decision. If you actually cared about your family the about the safest vehicle you can buy is a sedan, and you'd invest the money saved in keeping good quality tires on the car, keeping up with maintenance, and taking a performance driving class.
The existence of your unnecessary behemoth lumbering down the road is an attack on my right to a safer road, as well my right to live on an Earth that doesn't require me to live in a hermetically sealed bubble with filtered water and air to get away from the excessive pollution caused by your behemoth (not the least of which is the microplastics it spews everywhere).
I absolutely did look at the data and you could, as well. The issue with NCAP and similar ratings is that their only method is to collide a vehicle with infinitely massive and rigid structure. In reality, it’s more nuanced. While a semi might not look good in the NCAP chart, it’s basically invincible in the case of actual crash involving other vehicles smaller than itself. If you’re careful enough to not go off the road or hit concrete barriers, the larger vehicle will provide more safety to the occupants.
Large SUV's are actively make the roads less safe overall though. It's a tough collective action problem.
It probably makes sense to at least remove the implicit subsidies of them though (they should never have been allowed separate emissions treatment aimed at commercial vehicles), if not something like the article suggests.
It's only an iterated prisoner's dilemma because of vehicle height and difficulty in seeing farther down the road due to all the large vehicles. But in every other aspect, the data shows nearly the opposite that this person is stating. If they actually cared about safety they'd buy a sedan.
What's interesting is that road wear is proportional to the FOURTH POWER (!!) of axle weight[1]. If it were taxed accordingly the taxes would be extremely different for personal cars versus 18-wheelers.
Looking up comparable ICE cars to a Model Y, google tells me Audi SQ5, BMW X3 M40i, and Mercedes-Benz GLC43.
Their curb weights in lbs are:
Model Y: 4,555
SQ5: 4,288
M40i: 4,392
GLC43: 4,233
So, yes, a model Y is heavier, but only by about 250 lbs. At a 4th power that could be an extra 30% damage compared to an ICE, but even the lightest SUV here is doing something like 3.5x the damage compared to a Honda Civic. So, if you think road damage is a valid concern, electric cars aren't particularly special - SUVs in general should be a bigger worry.
>even the lightest SUV here is doing something like 3.5x the damage compared to a Honda Civic
this is crazy to consider when you know that parents with three children in car seats cannot find a sedan that can hold three car seats, and wagons disappeared to be replaced by SUVs because of... EPA emissions standards.
So it could be argued that the emission standards are the cause of this extra wear, which is additionally ironic when you consider asphalt is an oil product
> parents with three children in car seats cannot find a sedan that can hold three car seats,
This is a categorically untrue myth. Lots of car seats are stupidly wide thrones, but there is no reason you have to buy those ridiculous things. Diono makes a full line of car seats which fit 3-across in any midsize car. They're even cheaper than a lot of seats from the biggest brands, starting under $200. [1]
People are buying SUVs because they want them and because we've made it attractive to do so:
* Externalize excess road wear costs onto all taxpayers due to gas tax
* Overall trends contributed to pathetic selection of good sedans
* Finally, Reasonable fears that since "everyone else" is driving 3-ton monstrosities, perhaps they won't be safe in a car 5 feet shorter than the truck that hits them.
It won't be easy to reverse any of this, since the only lever is to replace gas tax with a fair road tax like this Norway one -- the rest of them are functions of the trend. Sadly, anything that raises taxes on a majority of Americans (those who drive big SUV things) would be political suicide.
"Externalize excess road wear costs onto all taxpayers due to gas tax"
This is true for electric or hybrid, but in general, heavier ICE vehicles will have lower economy which means they buy more fuel and pay more fuel taxes. In many states trucks cost more to register too. So it's probably pretty close to proportional.
If a gas tax was replaced wholesale with a mileage tax I don't think I'd be too upset, however, how do you deal with out of state use, work vehicles that spend most of their time on job sites as opposed to roads, when and how is it assessed and collected, etc. If a mileage tax was added without repealing the gas tax, I don't think it would go over to well.
Historically gas was a reasonable proxy for road use, but that is going to be increasingly untrue. It's reasonable to see EVs as a tax dodge against road use taxation that can primarily be taken advantage of by the well-off, but in AZ it's $100-$200 a year.
Either give EVs a 1¢/mile use tax or give everyone the tax and remove the gas tax, or drop them both and become more efficient ;-).
You're half right about the seats but seats that fit three across in a normal small SUV or sedan are a small share of what's available. I also think it's worth segmenting out SUVs now that everything has become an SUV. The Corolla Cross is an "SUV" but really compact. A RAV4 is an "SUV" and one of the most popular vehicles sold in the US but it's only slightly heavier than a Camry and gets about the same fuel economy (because it's basically a tall hatchback Camry). Even the next size up (Highlander) is about the same weight as a mini van (Sienna). Weight based tax seems like a good idea to me but I don't think "SUVs" are in general really the problem.
And fair point that SUVs aren't automatically enormous, nor automatically super harmful, except in how deadly their genre-defining high stance is to pedestrians and children.
It just seems super wasteful to me the number of vehicle-miles that are driven in the suburbs by enormous and medium-sized ("Tall Hatchback Camry") SUVs with a single driver carrying a couple bags of groceries. Most of the time, most commuters and even people with up to 2 small children ought to be perfectly fine driving a 4-door compact, which is substantially more fuel-efficient and lighter than even the midsize SUVs. But the incentives don't exist to make people consider that. They figure, "Oh well, I'll spend $25 extra on gas each month but it's worth it so that I can transport lumber once a year."
> seats that fit three across in a normal small SUV or sedan are a small share of what's available.
Nobody's forcing anybody to buy the giant ones, though, so a few good choices existing is enough that "car seats" isn't a reason on its own to buy an SUV.
> wagons disappeared to be replaced by SUVs because of... EPA emissions standards
I think that's only half-true. In the US, people weren't buying many wagons when they were available. For the majority of people who don't use their SUVs off road, this seems irrational. I've heard a number of people say that the higher seating position makes them feel safer, though that feeling is not reality-based.
I think it's a tragedy of the commons situation. Driving an SUV feels safer because there are more other vehicles you can see over to keep appraised of your surroundings, but that also makes it harder for the drivers of those other vehicles.
SUVs aren't made for off-road [0], the functional ones are made for poor road conditions. Subaru has targeted that market segment quite successfully with light, low-cost cars with AWD and high ground clearance. In some parts of the US, especially the western half, an AWD with high ground clearance is often a practical requirement due to the geography and weather risks even if you never go off-road.
[0] The original "sport-utility vehicles" were built for off-road usage and had 4WD but that hasn't been true of almost anything marketed as an SUV for decades.
> In some parts of the US, especially the western half, an AWD with high ground clearance is often a practical requirement due to the geography and weather risks even if you never go off-road.
This is exactly why Subarus are massively popular in Alaska.
> I've heard a number of people say that the higher seating position makes them feel safer, though that feeling is not reality-based.
It is based in reality, albeit a kind of self fulfilling prophecy.
As more and more taller cars (large SUVs and pickup trucks) appear on the road the more dangerous it is for smaller cars. The crumple zones on a compact or sedan don't do much good when the front and rear bumpers of SUVs and trucks clear the hoods of smaller cars, effectively putting the bumper at eye level.
> * the front and rear bumpers of SUVs and trucks clear the hoods of smaller cars, effectively putting the bumper at eye level*
I expected that to be illegal, but it seems that it is not in the US. A quick look suggests that for typical unmodified SUVs the issue affects repair costs more than occupant injuries. Homebuilt monster trucks are, of course another issue.
> For the majority of people who don't use their SUVs off road, this seems irrational.
Because that's a kind of regulatory fiction, right there.
So let's cut the crap!
For the majority of the so-called SUV market the "s" in SUV is a long lost myth, and if we're being honest then it's just Utility-Vehicle (UV). But you say they sit higher off the road, perhaps that's technically correct, but actually false when compared to off-road vehicles. But we've already acknowledged SUV's are not really off road vehicles, but rather normal passenger vehicles with normal road tires, normal suspensions, and lower center's of gravity. The Model-y is really just a slightly taller/longer version of the model-3. But how much higher, well if you look at the ground clearance, then it's only ~1 inches higher off the ground. But overall the vehicle is taller, will a larger overhead canopy, and the seats are places over booster blocks to raise the eye-level higher. It's really an illusion, the Model-y is really just a sedan, that technically meets the minimum requirements to say it's an SUV. You can safely consider the modern SUV as the equivalence of old-school station-wagons.
If it waddles like a duck... quacks like a duck... you might be dealling with ducks my dude.
This is not true, at least not in Europe. Wagons/sedans didn't disappear, we drive recent BMW 5 series and there are plenty of others (Audi A6, Skoda Superb, VW Passat, Mercedes and so on and on). Its as wide as it gets and you can buy official or unofficial conversion of back seat into 3-same-seat row. You just click a conversion layer into ISOFIX from what I recall.
It doesn't magically make back row wider, so you can't fit comfortably 3 taller adults regardless of seat arrangements, but 3 child seats are easy. It then has exactly same space as usual 3-seaters like Seat Alhambra, its VW equivalent etc. but you drive much better, more powerful and also safer car (ie frontal crumple zones).
If you think about 3 solid wide seats for 3 adults, such a car wouldn't fit in regular parking spot in most EU/Switzerland and struggled on narrower roads, yeah we normally don't do that kind of stuff here since roads and parking spaces are shared among everybody.
"Wagons" are Chrysler Voyager, Renault Scenic, Citroën Picasso, Volkswagen Golf Plus, Toyota Prius+ and those have almost entirely disappeared (Golf Plus and Prius Plus aren't made anymore; Picasso will disappear this year, etc).
BMW series 5, Audi A6 etc are sedans. These are strongly declining too; SUVs make more about 40% of sales of new vehicles in Europe.
You are a bit lost and clearly no clue what you comment about, I personally have BMW 5 series wagon (F11 model to be precise). VW has Passat wagon, Skoda has Octavia/Superb wagon etc. I see them here in Europe much more often than sedans, if you go for big car you usually also want the maximum trunk space.
The Audi A6 comes in both a sedan and wagon (hatch back) variant (named "Avant"), I would assume saiya-jin was referring to the wagon variant. The only wagon variants sold in the US are the "allroad quattro" variant and the RS6 though.
Same for the 5-series, the Passat, and others mentioned. Those are available as wagons in Europe and still seem to sell well, based on what I see on the roads.
Quite a few of my whitewater paddling friends--who often have to shuttle people--prefer minivans over 3-row SUVs but, as you say, minvans have largely been replaced by SUVs which are IMO not really ideal if you regularly fill up the seats. (Even the best/biggest ones I've been in still require something of a do si do between people in the second and the third row.)
I suspect that, in the US, there's a pretty strong bias to maximizing the comfort for the first and second person rather than being able to squeeze one more passenger in.
> replaced by SUVs because of... EPA emissions standards.
That's the first time I hear this argument. I thought that SUVs replaced them because car makers found that they can justify a bigger price on a bigger, heavier vehicles. Intuitively an SUV should emit more (heavier vehicle, more wind resistance).
I know that John Deere used EPA emissions standards as a smoke screen for them of their unwilling to allow third-party repairs on their tractors. Perhaps they are using the same maneuver here?
SUVs and the like exploit a loophole in various standards like fuel efficiency requirements because they are not "cars" but "Light trucks" and therefore those standards don't apply to them; which makes them cheaper to design and build for automotive companies.
The "Light trucks" category was supposed to be used for light commercial vehicles, not personal vehicles but then the law of unintended consequences had a love-child with profit seeking corporations and their linguistic games.
Literally the only reason SUVs and trucks became popular is because the automotive manufacturers could make more money doing it that way and convinced the consumers to buy them. NotJustBikes did a good intro video on the subject.
They do have more emissions, they are however no longer classed as cars but "light trucks" which have different emission standards (much higher than cars).
I'm not sure about this, there are still many wagons out there. They don't have those classic wood panels and tacky colors, and the backwards facing rear seats are gone, but aren't these Outbacks and similarly shaped vehicles wagons?
Regarding car seats, they are just THAT much bigger these days. My family had 3 car seats in a rabbit, in the early 80s.
That's only true for triplet infants that require bassinet-style seats and even that might not be the case if you look hard enough. I had twins and a 3-year old in the back seat of an 1990 Infiniti G20. There are slim car seats specifically made for three in the back. It's tight, but it works.
I agree about wagons though. Subaru still makes them. The Lexus CT200h is pretty much a wagon. It would be nice to see more "crossovers" that took more from the sedan side, however, none of the modern ones have jump seats except (maybe ironically) the Tesla Model 3.
We've graduated to four kids which eliminates the vast majority of vehicles from our set of options. Kia, Hyundai, Toyota, and GM all make ≥6 passenger vehicles that are not-minivans, but the options are very limited and put you into the SUV category.
As much as I hate SUVs of all types, road damage is not an issue for them. The axle weight of a fully-loaded 18-wheeler is like 8 times greater than that for an SUV, meaning they are dealing 4,096 times more damage to the road.
Edit: 7klbs is also the magical number where the tax write-off goes up by ~$10k. So there is incentive to keep it above that weight. Public pays multiple times: reduced tax revenue, higher energy usage/emissions and higher road deg. Complete insanity!
True. A better consideration is the Nissan Rogue at ~3500 lbs. That's a 1000 lb. difference, which is more. But the GP didn't bother to mention the road-wear differences between, for example, the Ford Edge and Ford Escape, which also have a 1000 lb. difference between them. So it sounds disingenuous to single out EVs here.
I don't think the typical Tesla Model Y buyer is likely cross-shopping against a Rogue.
Unless they're dead-set on an EV, they're much more likely cross-shopping the Model Y ($48K base MSRP) against a luxury ($57K base, $62K base, $67K base) SUV than an economy ($27K base MSRP) SUV. If they are dead-set on an EV, they might cross-shop against the Ariya ($43K base, but also 4323 lbs).
> So, if you think road damage is a valid concern, electric cars aren't particularly special - SUVs in general should be a bigger worry.
If you look into people's buying choices I think EVs actually do make it worse quite a bit. For instance we are going to soon trade our minivan (1.7t, 3,700lb) to an ID.Buzz (2.5t, 5,000lb). And even officially that car is the replacement for the car we currently have. If you go from a VW Golf (1.3t, 2,800lb) to an ID.3 (1.9t, 4.100lb) you can see that it's not helped by picking a smaller EV.
It's not exactly fair to compare a bloated luxury model with what's fairly described as a minimalist car. Compare a BMW 330i with a an i4 and you'll get a much better idea of the battery penalty involved, it's closer to half a ton.
I do agree with you that large SUVs are the problem but EV SUVs are really worrying. Rivian's trucks are over 3 tons and the new Hummer EV is nearly 5 tons!
Not really because the difference in road wear between ICE and EV SUVs is marginal precisely because road wear is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power. The axle weight of an SUV (whether EV or ICE) is a fraction of that of an 18 wheeler. The road wear of an 18 wheeler is going to be 2 or 3 orders of magnitude greater than that of an EV or ICE SUV (both of which are in the same order of magnitude).
I think another thing to consider is that with ICE vehicles, you're doing (at least) double duty in road damage because all that fuel has to transported to the stations in another vehicle to begin with.
I think there is an high likelihood that weights will come down as batteries become more energy dense, which is probably necessary for full market penetration.
> which is probably necessary for full market penetration.
It's one possible way of getting full market penetration.
The other way is to subsidise EV's heavily until the market takes off. That's what was done here in Norway, now 80% of new cars sold are pure battery EVs [1]. The best selling model of car in Norway now is the Tesla Model Y.
Direct, operating CO2 only. In terms of embodied CO2 from manufacturing, and indirect impacts from increased demand for parking, demand for larger parking spaces, demand for charging infrastructure, and induced travel leading to sprawling urban forms, electric SUVs are a regression.
Cradle to grave analysis of most EVs puts them ahead on emissions, even including manufacturing, even with poor grid mixes of mostly coal power. Battery materials are also recyclable, so those manufacturing impacts should decrease over time on a per-vehicle basis.
Smaller, more efficient vehicles with smaller batteries are definitely better and should be incentivized.
If you want to compare them yourself, don't forget to include all of the externalities from drilling, transporting, and refining petroleum before it reaches the pump. Tailpipe vs tailpipe certainly doesn't tell the whole story.
You’re right assuming preferences don’t change but I think it is worth highlighting the research suggesting that large EVs will never break even compared to normal sized ICE vehicles. We can’t afford to allow greenwashing where someone pretends a large SUV is anything but polluting.
It doesn't really have much to do with the mining. The embodied carbon of the battery comes mostly from the fact that it has to be baked to dehydrate the materials. Carbon, because there is not enough renewable energy in the places where these batteries are made. As time goes on the carbon embodiment will decrease.
The overwhelming problem with giant electric SUVs is the opportunity cost. Given limited capacity for battery making, and considering that we are using the last bit of our emissions budget to make them, it is obviously better to make them as small as possible. Slapping a 180kWh battery pack in a Rivian is ridiculous. With the same materials you could make 500 electric bicycles.
Bicycles are not a replacement for cars in all situations, uses, or weather. You could make lighter vehicles, but that’s equally true for combustion vehicles.
you mine for battery materials once. with an ICE engine you mine for oil over and over and over again, and you burn more fossil fuels to refine it, and burn more to transport it to you, over and over and over again.
Obviously you can park an electric SUV in a parking space without a charger, just like you can park an ICE SUV in a parking space without a gasoline/diesel pump.
I know of zero parking lots/structures, however new or trendy, which feature fuel pumps.
But - at least around me - EV chargers seem to be mandated (for at least for some of the spots) when any large or image-conscious organization builds or renovates parking infrastructure. For the purpose at hand, it doesn't matter whether the mandate is legal, or just "or what will they say about us on social media???".
Mazda CX-5 looks to be smaller than Model Y, so more fair comparison would be to CX-60 which seems to be similar size, where the difference between these two is under 20 kg according to carsized. See:
I'm pro-EV and happily daily-drive one, but I think it's fair to conclude that the need for 1-hour to 8-hour+ charging means that the "space needed for parking while energy is being dispensed" is higher fleet-wide for EVs than for ICE vehicles.
We don't think of nor call it "parking" at the gas pump, but we do at a charging station. There's a reason that's the case.
Many people will have a dedicated charging space at home (taking up only epsilon extra space for the charger), but all the Tesla super-charger, Chargepoints, EVGo, ElectrifyAmerica, etc en route chargers will require more parking space per EV than the equivalent petrol station per ICE.
Fast chargers are basically only needed along highways, where they take the place of gas stations. You only need those for long-distance driving, but most driving is short-distance.
On the other hand, a lot of slow/midspeed chargers are basically just regular destination parking spots equipped with a charger. They take up zero additional space. As EVs become more and more common, we'll see an increasing number of parking spots being equipped with chargers. Because this allows EVs to charge where they are parked anyways this means you can essentially get rid of gas stations inside cities - which ends up saving space.
Right now we just happen to be in a bit of an awkward in-between phase. When the majority of cars are EVs, the ecosystem will change to fit them better.
I'm not convinced that those factors would lead to a net increase. Every day I see cars parked at gas stations for 5 minute fillups. Then they go home or to work to normal parking spaces.
EVs eliminate that middle parking spot most of the time. And, tbh, even on road trips, gas cars spend a significant amount of time stopped. They just spend less of that stopped time getting fuel.
if you drive 14,000 miles a year (US average -- twice that of EU average), you need to pull in 4,500 kWh a year.
At a 150kW charger that would be 30 hours of charging, or an average 5 minutes a day.
One charger would thus serve 200 cars in the US, 400 in the EU.
In the UK 2-in-3 cars have private parking space and thus potential for home charging. I expect the US to be a fair higher number as there's more space, but lets stay that figure.
That would make one charger serve 600 cars in the US, 1200 in the EU.
The largest chargers I've seen are half a parking space for two spaces.
Thus to serve 280 million cars you need to provide charging for 100 million, which at 600:1 car:charger ratio would be 160,000 chargers.
There are about 115,000 gas sations in the US. 2 chargers per gas station, using a total of 2.5 parking spaces, would be enough.
Thus moving to 100% EV would save massive amounts of space across the country.
In the city I live EV ownership is at 37%. Very few charge at public charging spots daily. What happens is places that lack the ability gain the ability pretty quick.
For the manufacturing part, are we including the environmental impact of oil extraction in the comparison? That isn’t part of “building” an ICE car, unlike with EV batteries, but it is still required on an ongoing basis for operation and it is the direct equivalent of the EV batteries.
I find it a little hard to believe that e.g. lithium extraction is fundamentally worse than oil extraction and processing.
Nope. Electric SUVs don't induce more demand for parking nor require larger parking spaces than ICE SUVs, and the charging infrastructure doesn't induce more emissions than equivalent ICE infrastructure, nor do they induce more travel than ICE SUVs.
The only correct bit here is that they do require more CO2 to manufacture, but this is made up for by the dramatically reduced operating emissions in the first few thousand miles or so of driving (depending on the source of the energy used to charge it). Further, the grid is getting greener all the time, so operating emissions and the manufacturing emissions are both falling quickly while the operating emissions of fossil fuels remains extremely high (literally and figuratively).
Compared to efficient cars, this crossover point is as late as 50,000km. It does not pay off as rapidly as you are implying. Something like a Kia Niro with a normal-sized battery starts with an embodied CO2 deficit of ~5t. Something absurd like a Rivian is 20t in the hole from the jump and will never be CO2-positive except when compared to something equally wasteful like an ICE Hummer.
The core problem with the modern environmental movement is the refusal to take a W when one is staring them in the face.
EVs are happening. It's a huge win for the environment and all the environmental orgs that pushed for it. Stop trying to rewrite this revolutionary change as a hidden nefarious L. You're just making yourself sad and the youth jaded.
The point of progressivism is to be seen always push progress. If you stop after a win, you're now a conservative, which for many is the worst thing possible.
W=Win, L=Loss? Why would you randomly abbreviate single 3-4 character words?
EVs are, at best, stagnation. At worst they simply go even further to hide the enormous external costs of everyone using giant, heavy wheelchairs to move around anywhere.
EVs emit about half of the co2 per mile (including manufacturing emissions) as ICE cars today, and that figure is falling rapidly as we decarbonize electricity production. In what world is a 50% reduction in emissions "stagnation"?
If it perpetuates an inefficient form of urban settlement, then it is at best a local optimization. Look at all the people in this subthread who are demanding a cradle-to-grave lifecycle analysis but are for some reason unwilling to expand the scope of that analysis to ponder the question of why the car should exist at all.
In a world with more than one single dimension. Have you considered there are other factors in addition to CO2 per mile?
A trivial example is total number of miles driven. If we end up driving twice as much then that's your CO2 gains gone right there. Considering that's exactly what's happened since 1983 does that seem unlikely?
Do EVs do anything to reverse this trend? Do they do anything for pedestrian safety? Do they do anything about the need for parking and huge roads? Do they do anything about noise and particulate pollution of tyres? Do they do anything about road rage? I could go on and on.
Focussing solely on one single metric is extremely foolish, but of course it's exactly what the car manufacturers want because they've found a solution for that one metric.
> A trivial example is total number of miles driven. If we end up driving twice as much then that's your CO2 gains gone right there. Considering that's exactly what's happened since 1983 does that seem unlikely?
Yes, it seems unlikely that we would double our number of miles driven because this is a factor of time spent driving, population, and speed. There's no indication that speed limits will increase or that people are interested in longer commutes, and population growth is stagnating.
> Do EVs do anything to reverse this trend? Do they do anything for pedestrian safety? Do they do anything about the need for parking and huge roads? Do they do anything about noise and particulate pollution of tyres? Do they do anything about road rage? I could go on and on.
Climate change is a much more significant problem than these. I can live with wide roads and parking lots; it's much harder to live with our global breadbaskets succumbing to increasingly severe droughts and the geopolitical destabilization that entails.
And there's no way we're going to pivot away from ICE cars to public transit quickly enough to meet climate goals even if there was the political will to do so (and there isn't, because lots of people get a lot of value out of cars, and even places with lots of public transit options are seeing a rise in car ownership and usage). There's just no way it's going to happen over the next century.
Moreover, there's tons we could do about pedestrian safety, tire pollution, road noise, etc without eliminating cars, but we lack the political will even to do these things so there's certainly no way we're going to abolish cars and transition to public transit / cycling lifestyles.
> Focussing solely on one single metric is extremely foolish
It's foolish to treat all metrics as equally important. You can't live without food; you can live with car noise.
> of course it's exactly what the car manufacturers want because they've found a solution for that one metric
Yeah, car manufacturers love paying Tesla so they can keep making ICE cars /s. Cars are wildly popular in the west (car adoption is increasing across the board, even among the Dutch); the auto industry doesn't need to do a psyop to convince people to drive--it's just much more convenient than the alternatives even where the alternatives are very well developed/supported.
18-wheelers already pay taxes very differently than consumer cars. I don't know how much higher they actually are. Maybe someone with knowledge can weigh in here.
In the UK a forty ton artic pays about a 1000 GBP per year for Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) plus Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) Levy. Cars pay different amounts based on emissions generally between one tenth and half what the biggest HGV pays. So the HGV is not paying anything like enough to compensate for the extra road wear.
A typical medium sized car weighs about 1 600 kg and has two axles, so an axle weight of 800 kg. The artic has six axles and weighs 41 000 kg, 6 833 kg per axle. The artic has over 5 000 times the effect on the road.
> So the HGV is not paying anything like enough to compensate for the extra road wear.
Do your road repair money not come from fuel tax on hundreds of liters of diesel per fill?
I can see this becoming an issue for EV's but that can be fixed by taxing mileage and weight. Though the mileage part is tricky as its going to be a cat and mouse game of fraud and privacy concern.
> Though the mileage part is tricky as its going to be a cat and mouse game of fraud and privacy concern.
It's not a privacy concern. The mileage is already recorded as part of the periodic safety test, annually in the UK, every two years in Norway (and the rest of EFTA I think).
> Do your road repair money not come from fuel tax on hundreds of liters of diesel per fill?
No that goes into the general treasury funds, as far as I know. It's about 0.60 GBP per litre in the UK. Typical fuel economy gives about 3 km/l so a tax of 0.20 GBP per km.
UK HGVs travel about 25 x 10^9 km per year so the income is about 5 x 10^9 GBP/year. The UK spends over 11 x 10^9 GBP per year on roads, mostly maintenance, more than double the income from diesel fuel duty.
Not just class 8 tractors, either. Everything from (approximately) class 3 up (10,000+lbs GVWR, e.g., 1- and ¾-ton pickup trucks) is taxed by weight in some states (e.g., NC and VA) and taxes at a different rate (but not directly by rate) in others (e.g., FL).
Rates for each state are available through their respective DMVs. Max-weight rated class-8 trucks (overweight is handled by by-instance permit, not registration) are 80,000lbs, and they are not cheap anywhere that I'm aware of.
Just be aware that the 4th power law is a rule of thumb that would also need the same same total contact surface and equal distribution to be useful. Eg, if you have 4 narrow tires vs 4 wide tires, vs 18 tires. I suspect that there is also some floor to the minimum weight required to do any measurable damage depending on the material and also on the natural timeliness for repair due to environmental factors like freeze thaw.
Yes, semis would have much higher taxes under that scheme. We also have to acknowledge that would be a largely regressive tax given that's they way most basic goods are transported and the cost would be passed on to consumers equally, most of which are less than wealthy.
I was just pointing out that we need to understand the rule to effectively and intelligently apply it.
Usually you want progressive taxation - where the burden falls on those with more money. Regressive taxation doesn't mean changing behavior back, but rather where the burden of the tax falls.
Realistically, this would put all the tax burden on heavy trucks and two axle buses. But not all trucks are fully loaded all the time, since some goods aren't dense enough or there might just not be enough demand. There needs to be a way to account for the actual weight of the vehicle, instead of the nominal max load, otherwise this just incentivizes reducing the nominal weight while opportunistically overloading the vehicles. It may also incentivize alternate designs such as increasing the number of axles.
It's standard procedure at most outfits to get weighed immediately after taking on a load. You have an overall weight limit on the full vehicle, but you also have individual axle weight limits, and after taking on a load under the legal limit, you may still need to "slide your tandems" to re-balance your weight.
So.. you're almost always going to stop at a "CAT scale" and get a "weight ticket." You're going to hold onto that ticket because if you do get stopped at a state checkpoint, and they show your weight differently than the scale ticket, the scale company will cover the cost of your ticket if their scale was in error.
Most companies will either make this a policy or will _very_ strongly encourage their drivers to always get a scale ticket.
I think that there is usually one open along a long route. It seems they close them to keep traffic moving. From what I can tell there are now mobile scales that they often use instead.
Roads also break down on their own, though. The large majority of roads will see very little or no semi traffic, and their upkeep is entirely for the sake of light vehicles. In the north, where freeze-thaw costs much more, the impact of trucks is much smaller.
Then mandate that vehicles over X weight can't use gasoline unless they have a special exemption. Not ideal, since the revenue still only vaguely goes towards the highway system and doesn't pay for the whole thing, but hugely improved.
The exemption thing is possibly an issue but I don't think it would price out new diesel light vehicles (and IMO, that possibility is just... unimportant) if you were careful about removing the tax on pumps that aren't accessible to heavy vehicles. I believe some states do similar things already, but most of them instead have some weird reimbursement process.
One of the biggest arguments you will hear in favor of government taxation is "Who will pay for the roads?" But very little of taxes goes to actually building and maintaining roads. We need new and innovative taxes on top of the other taxes to pay for the roads!
That's a good point, though even a truck with 80 PSI tires would do so much more damage, >27x for a unit area, multiplied by the much larger area the tires contact the ground, that it could be hundreds of times more.
But then we would actually transfer goods via rail instead of tiny amounts via trucks, and then what would happen to the cultural icon of the american trucker and his incredibly loud, unsafe at all conditions vehicle.
Rail [Edit: in the US] generally prioritizes slow freight, and has moved more in that direction over time. Precision scheduled railroading favors fewer, longer, slower trains to increase the ratio of freight to crew and maintenance costs.
It is very well optimized and efficient, but you're not going to order something with standard UPS or Fedex style shipping and see it delivered by rail. Whereas in days past the railroad covered a significant amount of mail and parcel shipping due to higher service speeds and frequencies.
I do wonder if there could be room for better logistics and an expansion of rail to cover faster (ie < 2 weeks) shipping scenarios, but this would require investing in the rail and signaling infrastructure and opening and infrastructure to competing service providers.
> It is very well optimized and efficient, but you're not going to order something with standard UPS or Fedex style shipping and see it delivered by rail.
This isn't actually true, huge amounts of small parcel ground shipping goes by rail. You're correct that it's slower, but not by a huge amount.
Costs grow enormously to shrink delivery times from around a week cross-country to only a few days, by far the best option is moving the fulfillment point closer to the destination. Amazon, Target, Walmart, Uline are some companies that do 1-2 day shipping cheaply almost anywhere by ground.
Expectations have changed too. FedEx was a pretty premium thing when it debuted. Now I'll order a new widget from Amazon because I'll get it as soon as I would have if I waited until I got around to driving to the Walmart 10 minutes away (and for the same price).
For a lot of things, consumers are like "What do you mean I won't get it for 2+ weeks?" CANCEL.
I remember buying computer parts to build my own PC around 2000, mostly shipped from California to the east coast. The parts took 2-3 weeks to get here, which I believe was similar to most ebay shipments at the time. I didn't even think to complain back then, the selection and prices were so much better than local I just considered the 2-3 weeks the minor drawback that came with them.
There also used to be these computer shows (Ken Gordon?) at local event centers where vendors would have all sorts of parts and CDs for sale. But mostly you bought your big ad-filled computer magazine and called a number. By late 90s, online ordering was coming in. Local "computer stores" (or camera stores or...) were frankly all showing their age by the late 80s or so.
Even in the 1980s, local retail stores such as computers or cameras were on the ropes. A friend of my dad's was a salesman at a local small camera store, he would talk about spending hours with a customer showing him different cameras and lenses, only to have the guy leave and save $10 ordering from a 47th Street Photo ad in a photography magazine.
And the reality was that, as information become more widely available, the local options really weren't very good. They had their limited inventory to move. I frequented various non-big city camera stores over the years and, with hindsight, they were what I had at the time but, other than as a nostalgic small town thing, I have trouble really missing them on any rational basis.
There can be value to local merchants. But it's harder to make the case for local distributors of mainstream manufactured equipment.
Yes pretty much the only such shops left where I live are the ones where the product manufacturer refuses to sell online or at Walmart -- certain brands of vacuum cleaners as an example. The local camera and computer and office supply and hardware stores (excepting big-box national retailers like Best Buy and Office Depot and Lowes) are all gone.
I think there is something to be said about how we take "free 2-day shipping" for granted these days. Transporting something across the country should cost money compared to buying something already local to you, or even better made or grown near you.
I haven't done the math myself, but I suspect we are all subsidizing interstate trucking (and perhaps air freight) compared to its actual infrastructure and emissions costs. This does lower prices of many essential goods, but also tilts things in favor of large corporations who can ship things cheaply all over the country (ie Walmart, Amazon).
Although subsidies at a country level are... complicated.
In general, I suspect that if most of us went back in time 25-30 years we'd be pretty shocked about just how much friction there was to everything. It's not a linear or absolute improvement--and some of the downsides are significant. (Cities you often wouldn't have wanted to live in back then are really expensive today.) But you also spent a lot of time and effort doing things that are essentially effortless today.
You did, but at the time it was just how things worked and it didn't seem difficult or burdensome. Certain things or services were simpler, because it was impractical for them to be more complicated or customized.
It's likely that one Amazon or UPS truck delivering 100 orders a day is better than 100 people driving to the store separately. It's hard to say though, because most people are driving to work or grocery shopping, etc. anyway and all they are really saving is one or two detours for things they don't need immediately, or wouldn't be buying at all if it weren't so convenient.
> It is very well optimized and efficient, but you're not going to order something with standard UPS or Fedex style shipping and see it delivered by rail
My package from China has arrived by rail, it took about 3 whleeks, and Aliexpress tracking showed it going through kazahstan and Russia
Yes, I should have specified in the US. In places with shared passenger and freight traffic (ie a lot of Europe and Asia), freight services can't hyper-optimize on very long, very slow, infrequent service.
This does result in usually less tonnage transported by rail, but service that is more flexible to faster shipping.
Yeah. There are already strong economic incentives to use rail for long-haul land transportation of lower value/less time-critical goods in the US. I don't know the numbers but I suspect you see relatively few goods transported coast to coast by truck in the US.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t true. Lots travels by rail, but a hell of a lot travels by truck. I ship a lot ltl (pallets)
If you want to do a quick test yourself , next time you are on a highway look at the places the trucks are from (obviously they can be registered elsewhere but it gives you an idea).
If you import to a port it usually travels by rail after (cause ports have great rail links) but if you are going business to business in the US it’s often by truck
I'd stage the train so the car was at the end not in the middle. Then you detach it via a new coupler that doesn't exist but could, and let the car coast to the swtich and move to the town.
Incredibly loud means illegally modified. Even the staccato sound of the engine brake (compression release aka jake brake) is very subdued in a properly muffled vehicle. This is how they come from factory as it is mandated. Plus the DPF+SCR cats added to the muffling ability and are sometimes all in one.
There's a list of obvious tax code changes that would immensely improve the current housing, transportation and climate situation:
- Land Value Tax
- Carbon Tax
- Space and weight tax on personal vehicles
Of course any of those mean challenging entrenched interests so are deeply unpopular. Hell, even environmentalists hate the carbon tax even though it's THE most effective climate policy.
As well as removing the obviously terrible carveouts (light duty truck carveouts to start).
An electric F-150 is about the worst personal vehicle imaginable for road wear. We need to encourage people to only use a vehicle of a size they actually need.
My understanding is that the consensus across both environmentalists and economists is that a carbon tax is the only real option. The challenge is in the implementation. Personally I don't see it happening until our AI machine overlords impose it upon an irrational species.
Carbon tax is THE solution when you have a great job and disposable income. It's easy, doesn't require you to change, and most importantly it gives the government more money to spend.
I don't believe most people appreciate the changes we (99.999%[1]) need to be committing to, indefinitely, to actually do something to reverse our impact on the planet.
Carbon tax isn't a solution. Feel free to come up to Canada and see how well it's working.
Our iceberg lettuce is up to 7$/ea except for the 10% we get from California. The other ~90% is from predominantly Ontario green houses, all of which are being hammered by the Federal carbon taxes(Provincial are already carved out).
[1] made up
On the topic of vehicle weight based taxes, I strongly agree. Family size to passenger count(sum of all family owned vehicles of all kinds) being another good one to target.
> most importantly it gives the government more money to spend.
Most popular carbon tax proposals are revenue neutral. Whatever the government collects in carbon taxes would be redistributed to everyone as a check.
You're correct that this will be painful though, especially for regular people. A lot of people believe that just because it's revenue neutral it won't be painful. Every tax causes a deadweight loss, regardless of how that money is spent. Climate change may, in fact, be a bigger deadweight loss, but the problem is that people don't perceive it as such because even if a carbon tax prevents a hurricane, nobody would ever know. Also, the benefits of the carbon tax would be distributed for everyone in the world, but the costs would be concentrated only on citizens of countries with a carbon tax.
Canada has a "revenue neutral" model. It is in quotes because it simply doesn't work as advertised. There's cost increases everywhere. Our homeless population has exploded.
Then there is interest. Money today is better than money tomorrow and certainly better than money in a year. This is especially true for the poor. Then there's what happens when you give an average poor person a check (This isn't an insult. It's perfectly understandable that a person being beat down by life would be interested in spending money on something or someone instead of food.)
Our healthcare costs also need to be considered. The solution for people to handle inflation caused partially by the carbon tax is to eat less expensive food. This means cutting out fresh fruit and veggies, meats, fish, and other nutrient dense food.
Carbon tax is solving nothing at an extraordinary cost. We still have people driving to the corner store, tossing out two full ass garbage bags every week with recycling bins mismatched and full of food crusted paper, unrecyclable materials, food itself, and much more.
Other problems exist too. Think about the average IQ in North America. It's reported in some places as 93-95. Many people simply are not capable of doing this without significant help.
Discussion of climate change on HN is quite the experience. Suggestions outside of the approved methods get downvote love. While having the view that a tax will solve anything is applauded. We will get precisely nowhere on climate change because every damn person thinks it will cost them nothing.
Nobody(ish) will do anything before they are told to either. Anything unpopular will never be brought up as a rule.
Put more simply: We're living in our mess and will do so until the mess falls over and we get stuck underneath without a soul to call for help.
--edit-- I don't use garbage collection. I don't recycle, I reduce and reuse. I don't drive.
Personally, that's why I think a Cap and Trade program is better than a Carbon tax. You're reducing the effect on lower-income people (who aren't directly exposed to increased prices caused by the tax), you incentivize innovation (so that companies don't have to buy carbon trades), and you can reduce emissions targets based on your stated goals (i.e., you can automatically reduce emissions by lowering the cap).
> Our iceberg lettuce is up to 7$/ea except for the 10% we get from California. The other ~90% is from predominantly Ontario green houses, all of which are being hammered by the Federal carbon taxes(Provincial are already carved out).
To be fair, this is the doing of the Ford government. Ontario had a cap-and-trade program under Kathleen Wynne (however bad she may be), which the Ford government scrapped for no apparent reason. By law, the federal government had to step in and implement a carbon tax, which Ford knew in advance. This increase is purely due to his government.
Why do we talk about a "carbon tax" when it ought to be a fossil fuels tax? The carbon cycle was fine until we started digging oil and gas out of the ground and burning them
Are you saying maybe fossil fuels are good
(or less bad) and cows are bad (or less good)? And we ought to tax cattle farms so that we can burn more fossil fuels? That's what it sounds like when you really look at it.
No, I am saying, tax carbon emissions regardless of source and let people make their own decision on what they want to spend on. The source of the emissions doesn't matter to how negative the externality is, so let's not put a value judgement where we don't need one.
> The source of the emissions doesn't matter to how negative the externality is
It does, though. We seem to have lost sight of the sustainability dimension of our planet. Cows can fart all day long and the carbon/methane cycles will recapture it, sustainably. In contrast, we cannot pull oil out of the ground in any sustainable way, since it was all created 100 million years ago in a one-time geological event that is unlikely to ever occur again in the history of Earth
Who are "we" in this scenario? Over the last 70 years the United States has undergone an extreme course of social engineering whereby every aspect of our lives was re-centered around the car. That could never have happened without government powers and subsidies.
It was called the "Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956"[1]. There was a time before almost every family had multiple cars and the population was 164,063,411 (not 350 million) that cars seemed like a pretty good trade off I suppose. Like many old politicians cars have likely outlived a some of their usefulness.
Ran across this Youtube Channel the other day. "Not Just Bikes"
Nah, he's just a mechanical engineer who moved to the Netherlands and started making content on how much better the infrastructure is than the shitty suburbs of Toronto and a few other places, and did a few videos basically re-hashing StrongTowns content which was started also by a civil engineer iirc. I like his channel though. There are a few other YouTubers like CityBeautiful, CityNerd, who he's done collabs with and are in the Urban Planning discipline in some capacity.
The flatness imo only lends itself particularly well to their dutch bikes, but nothing to do with whether a region has invested in their biking infrastructure. Plenty of places are flat, and plenty of those flat places are horrible car-infested hellscapes that are falling apart. There's nothing particular unique about the Netherlands.
Yep. J-walking laws were completely promoted by car manufacturers since pedestrians got in the way of drivers. Basically pushing everything that was not a car off of the roads.
This happened because cars (and roads and their vehicles in general) are unreasonably useful. They deliver emergency services vehicles. They deliver goods. They enable people to live further from where they work, so they aren't so beholden to local employers, and vice versa with employers being less beholden to local labour. Their drivers don't go on strike. Etc etc. Trains are a very useful optimisation for highly-trafficked routes, but they aren't the general case.
It happened because we built an interstate highway system between and through our cities, destroying downtowns and neighborhoods, and dismantling many functional transit systems.
If it weren't for this incredibly massive car subsidy, we'd have a much more balanced transportation system today.
I think it would've happened regardless. Cars took over the entire world. Even in places where everything is close-by it's abnormal and limiting to not have access to a car.
London is very unusual in that it has a high density mass transit system and much of it was built before cars existed. The fact that half the households still have cars after all that tells you how useful they are.
>because people should decide for themselves what they need
"Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins."
Every successful, decent civilization is a balance between limiting personal rights where they impede on the enjoyment, safety, and security of others.
And extraordinarily few people are deciding anything for themselves. The epidemic of monster pickup ownership isn't some careful evaluation, but is decades of extremely successful marketing.
I have a 20 year old 5 seater sports sedan with a 3l engine that gets ~ 32mpg on the highway.
Marketing is social engineering the US plenty; you need a bigger truck/suv so you feel high up and safe -- at least this is what the worrisome folks think.
> people should decide for themselves what they need.
People's choices affect others. Heavy vehicles wears more on tires and road surfaces, adding particles to the environment which cause thousands of deaths each year.
So insurance company shouldn't raise your premiums if you are a bad driver and crash your car every month?
There are like 10 private actors trying to socially engineer me. Among them are car drivers that act in an agressive manner when they see a bicycle on the road, they want to discourage cyclist from using the road and do it very effectively.
Insurance companies don't raise premiums in hopes of making you a safe driver, they do it because you're higher risk.
That's the difference between social engineering (policies designed to produce an outcome) and market forces (policies reacting to changing environments).
Social engineering is a layer on top of market forces that rarely works as intended because people aren't very good at predicting the behavior/reaction of markets.
People that throw drinks at cyclists while driving aren't market.
The idea that you can reduce all of society to market forces is preposterous.
If you take you argument about 'social engineering' to it's logical conclusion, it would mean that we should not stop people from starting open pit fires in parks and causing wildfires, we should mandate vaccines, chlorinate water, have food safety standards and other idiosyncratic outcomes.
Since you take a stance against social engineering, would you agree to completely defund the road transport network, given that it is acting as a massive social engineering operation in favor of cars?
No, “environmentalists” hate carbon taxes because it would force them to pay their fair share. An easy way to spot a fake environmentalist is to ask if they intend on taxing proportionally to environmental damage or income, and if those tax dollars will be spent on the environment or government services.
This is definitely true for some self-described environmentalists, but probably not the ones who actually are activists. When gas prices were high during the pandemic I mentioned how awesome this is to people who usually worry about climate change, but only a small minority shared my enthusiasm and the rest was incredulous how I could be excited about high gas prices. (I genuinely was excited)
Carbon tax will make it more expensive to do anything that consumes energy, which is every human activity.
Land value tax: you move to a cheap place, some time later its value increases and now you have to pay more tax, why?
Tax on personal vehicles: it was EPA mandates that led to the current huge truck situation in the US, so maybe remove those instead of forcing people to pay even more for worse vehicles.
A lot of human activities don't use that much energy in the grand scheme of things. Playing board games, walking around a neighborhood, going to concerts or shows at the theater, these are all things that use very little energy when compared to heavy manufacturing, transportation, and most agriculture. Since most humans will bear the costs of climate change as it begins to destroy our past investments, I think it's fairly reasonable to fix that damage based on how much carbon activities generate.
> now you have to pay more tax
I mean I buy a cheap stock and it's value goes up, why should I have to pay tax on that too!? The value of the land has gone up because it has more amenities and benefits as well. If you feel you are not benefiting from the increased investment around your land, then you should sell it so it can be put to better use.
> it was EPA mandates
Correction: it was the exemptions from EPA mandates that created the huge truck situation. The fix would be to remove the exemptions for "light trucks"
> you should sell it so it can be put to better use.
This is the key point! There is an opportunity cost for society from every piece of land we cannot use for something new. That's reflected by the value of the land. If the value to the owner is much lower than the value to someone else, we aren't using the land efficiently.
It's also unearned income. It's ideal to tax unearned income because you don't create negative incentive for desired activities. It's in essence a tax that comes at no cost to society.
Carbon tax will force people to confront the true costs of the things they do. It should be implemented with a dividend so only people who pollute more than average end up losing money.
The idea behind LVT is basically that the most morally acceptable way for the government to raise money is by owning all of society's land and renting it out at full value to citizens. There are many reasons for this, can be read here https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr... but the answer to your question is "because the land belongs to the people and you're just renting it from them, so you have to pay more as the value increases"
On the land value tax, you have to pay more tax specifically because its value increases. If you want to cash out, then sell the property for it's now much higher value. The value didn't increase because something you did personally, rather because the whole area became more popular due to you and your neighbours (or more usually, your tenants) moving in and being productive. It seems fair that this value that everybody added to your property would get distributed to everybody instead of just you, the owner.
Everyone who helped raise the value deserves a cut; that’s a good point.
That does not, however, seem to be a real justification for giving a check to a person a few towns away who does not own any property and who didn’t improve our neighborhood. What’s the justification in your model for giving him a cut?
There is an opportunity cost for society from every piece of land we cannot use for something new. That's reflected by the value of the land. If the value to the owner is much lower than the value to someone else, we aren't using the land efficiently.
It's also unearned income. It's ideal to tax unearned income because you don't create negative incentive for desired activities. It's in essence a tax that comes at no cost to society.
You are right, to some degree this would be taxing unrealized gains which IMO is generally bad. The important part though is that it's taxing a negative externality (the opportunity cost for society).
And once you cash out, you'll have to pay taxes on the profit you make. A land value tax would make live harder for the people living in their homes, as their CoL increased without them having any new income, while landlords would just increase rent accordingly (and could easily do so, as everyone would increase rent).
The solution to all such complaints about property taxes is to have very little tax for people's primary residence, and apply high taxes for all other properties they own.
This also has the effect that being a landlord is disincentivized, and property prices have a downward pressure which allows more people to become home owners.
> have very little tax for people's primary residence
Homeowners already get crazy tax breaks that our society bears the cost of. This would just be an even bigger shift to funding government services on the backs of renters rather than homeowners, as any increase in taxes that "landlords" are assessed is passed on to renters.
> you move to a cheap place, some time later its value increases and now you have to pay more tax, why?
This is already true for most implementations of property tax (at least in the US). You get reassessed and then pay tax based on the new value.
The group that has tried hardest to mitigate probably is California with prop 13, and even that can only limit property tax increases to 2% per year. When we study that we see that it can always happen just because inflation is a background force in play. And then also, look at all the wonky side effects that take place when you try to prevent this from happening.
This seems like a good idea. We have used gas taxes for a long time, but electric cars don't pay this tax. If we want to pay for roads based on how much people use them, we will need to switch to something other than gas taxes. Odometer readings could work, but it's not clear how to get honest readings. Weight isn't perfect, but it seems like a less-bad options than the others.
Many states are now adding fixed registration taxes for EVs, usually in the ballpark of $200/year. I pay this, and it costs significantly more than if I had paid gas tax on an ICE car of a similar weight for the miles I drive.
Also fun was that this remained full price during the year that my state suspended its gas tax for economic relief due to high gas prices.
Weight and mileage based taxation absolutely makes sense, since road damage increases with the 4th power of axle load. But matching those taxes to damage caused means heavy trucks will pay the vast majority of tax, since they do the vast majority of damage. This may be unpopular with Amazon.
To add to this, the Missouri yearly tax is already higher than gas taxes for most vehicles, and it's legislated to go up 20% a year every year until 2026. Taxes high enough that the economic gains for electric are basically zero.
I hadn't heard this, but I'm not surprised. The right wing has essentially declared culture war on EVs. They will tax them out of existence, if they can.
My fairly outdated small but somewhat sporty car with high consumption (9l/100km rounded up) would go 5600 kms from that. Here EVs have to pay no excise and no parking fees and no yearly engine-power based taxes for their cars, while ICEs must, based on age, environmental category and engine power...
Compared to that you still pay some taxes, still that amount is negligible to the taxes some pay for ordinary ICE cars.
Get honest readings by having them read at the annual vehicle test in states that do it, and self reported in other states. Then have police report it whenever they pull you over for any reason.
You don't need to get perfect readings from everyone. If you tax 99% of people, that's fine.
Many jurisdictions require annual inspections. Those jurisdictions could require the inspection include reporting the odometer to the state.
Adding an odometer only inspection requirement to jurisdictions that don’t currently have an inspection wouldn’t be terribly onerous. You could make a device that plugs into ODBII and reads the odometer and VIN and reports it to the state, it would take less than a minute of labor per reading. Combine that with some policies that encourage oil and lube shops to get the device and provide the reading at no extra cost when you’re doing an oil change, and most people wouldn’t see any increased costs or inconvenience.
In most countries, cars are required to get an annual inspection which includes the odometer readings. It would be quite easy to also tax based on that, but it would have to be retrospective.
Odometer reading might be tricky in places like Europe where you have lots of countries next to each other, and cross borders often.
If someone has a car registered in Luxembourg and drives mainly around France, Germany, Belgium, it would be difficult to define where the tax should go
We definitely need to rethink some things with electric cars. One is taxes for roads. You're gonna have to replace gas tax and possibly even increase taxes overall since the extra weight of electric cars mean more road wear and tear (proportional to the power of 4 as another commenter mentioned). Safety is another one. We've already been seeing an increase in pedestrian deaths with one of the main reasons being increased in vehicle size and weight. Add in the fast acceleration of electric cars and their extra extra weight and the problem is going to continue to get worse. A Toyota 4runner weighs about 4500lbs and a Rivian R1S weights about 7000lbs with a 0-60 time that's 2.5x faster than the 4runner. Letting people drive a 7000lbs car with huge blind spots and the acceleration of a Corvette on a standard passenger car drivers license is pushing irresponsible in my opinion.
> possibly even increase taxes overall since the extra weight of electric cars mean more road wear and tear
I've already commented elsewhere about this, but I find it odd that as soon as EVs gain popularity, suddenly people care about the weight of cars. A Ford F-250 peaks at 7,660 lbs. and those have been around forever. I'm not saying it's wrong to consider weight, but I am saying this all smacks of vague EV hate.
> You're gonna have to replace gas tax
Texas is doing this just by increasing the price to register an EV.
> Texas is doing this just by increasing the price to register an EV.
Not just Texas: a lot of states that have weight- or value-based registration fees, and thus are already charging EV owners more (because EVs both cost more & weigh more than traditional vehicles). In California, the registration fee on the $20k price difference is about the same as the gas tax on typical milage.
And I agree that this smacks of vague anti-EV sentiment. Where were the gas tax concerns about plug-in Prius drivers?
>And I agree that this smacks of vague anti-EV sentiment. Where were the gas tax concerns about plug-in Prius drivers?
Changing the tax structure because of one car model with limited popularity isnt worth it. As the fraction of electric cars on the road increases the need to adjust taxes increases.
Sure, but the point is that large, heavy consumer vehicles have been extremely popular for decades (see: F-150, the most popular vehicle in the USA, which weighs substantially more than most EVs).
Where was the concern with weight then? Or is your argument that the low efficiency of those vehicles compensated (through increased fuel consumption and this higher taxes) for their weight?
You're projecting some collective you are imagining in your brain onto me as an individual. I had that concern then and I have it now. I hate the trend of common passenger vehicles getting bigger every year.
Yes, you're not the first one to express this concern and this thread is addressing the concern in general, not you specifically -- and surmising that the recent emergence of this concern is a result of some vague anti-EV sentiment given that weights have been increasing for years yet the general concern is expressed more frequently only more recently.
> I've already commented elsewhere about this, but I find it odd that as soon as EVs gain popularity, suddenly people care about the weight of cars
Because it's the "best" option. EVs don't use gas; so, a gas tax won't apply. The other option, other than weight, that usually gets mentioned is mileage. In order to measure mileage, though, some sort of tamper-proof counter needs to be installed and periodically read, something most people find wold be too intrusive. The weight is easy to record when the car is registered.
Because whatever the reason, we should have taxed gas cars to death yesterday. For a start, any mitigation effort against the impact of ICE's emissions on climate will make all countries bankrupt pretty quick.
It took 5mins between people starting switching to EVs in somewhat-significant numbers and the attacks on EVs beginning.
"Zero engine emissions?... but muh brake dust! they're too heavy! battery fires! cobalt mines! fuck cars, even EVs!"
Yeah, it'd be nice to see more smaller lighter EVs particularly in urban areas, including bikes+scooters, maybe mini-cars like a modernized Sinclair C5 even. But the reality is that we need large vans and trucks to deliver goods and services, and great big heavy vehicles will always be a major hazard to small light ones, and it's near-impossible to segregate them in existing towns+cities due to lack of space.
The problem is that nearly all of the EVs on the market are shitty crossovers. I am actively in the market for an EV, I refuse to buy a crossover, and I require all-wheel drive. Pray tell, /other than Tesla/ who is making anything that fits these requirements? Answer: Nobody. Tesla is the only EV company that seems to give a shit about making a normal-ass car you can drive outside of California where we have snow.
Unfortunately, I don't want to buy a Tesla for other reasons, but in the end that may be what I end up getting because there are effectively no other real options.
It's absurdly stupid to buy an EV that is a brick on wheels.
There are a lot of non "shitty crossovers" EVs on the market right now. Just maybe not one that ticks all your boxes. With that said if you are trying to get people to buy EVs doesn't it make sense to after what consumers want? The f150 has been the best selling vehicle in america for 40 years - why would you ignore trying to electrify that? Not only for demand reasons but electrifying the larger vehicles is the best target for reducing emissions. I understand and agree with the smaller vehicle argument but if we only electrify smaller vehicles americans are not going to suddenly start buying them instead of huge vehicles as they have the last 40 years.
How are you defining crossover? Not body-on-frame or more like the "lifted sedan/hatchback" like the Subaru Crosstrek or Mazda CX-30? If looking for body-on-frame, your options are really just Rivian (R1T or S1T) or F150 Lightning. If you're OK with unibody but large, there's a bunch of options that came out recently like the Audi Q8, Volvo EX-90 (even 3 row seating), BMW iX and X5, and some models from Mercedes that I can never remember the names of. All of them are all-wheel-drive.
I think you misunderstood me to think I want a crossover. I do not. The definition of a crossover is that it's a unibody chassis like a car, with car-like suspension and drivetrain, but shaped like an SUV with a similar ride height. An SUV is a truck that has an extended enclosed passenger cabin with fold-down seats.
A crossover is effectively trying to replace the minivan segment, because it can't actually do any of the things an SUV can do effectively, like towing. Minivans are actually better than crossovers in pretty much every way that matters, except for their CAFE classification.
My perfect vehicle would be a small AWD electric hatchback w/ sport suspension. A compact AWD electric sedan w/ sport suspension would be a close second. A bloated POS with a high center of gravity is pretty much everything that I loathe in the world.
Don't european manufacturers produce fully electric equivalents of their usual lines these days? All of those can be had in 4-wheel drive, say BMW, Audi etc.
Those brands know how to make solid well balanced cars, good quality interior and exterior. Since we talk about cca Tesla equivalents, price points should not be shocking (they still are to me tbh).
Have you tried driving one? They drive very differently than your typical crossover and are much lower to the ground. They're more like a compact crossover or hatchback sedan. Same for the Ioniq.
I live in Colorado. I regularly drive in places that have traction laws that require you to have all wheel drive and/or snow tires (I also install snow tires in the winter, regardless) and this comes into effect sometimes in situations where I don't yet have snow tires fitted, and it's also just generally an all around good idea here.
Fair enough. Here in Utah the law is usually just for chains. All that being said, I'll be the first to admit my own overconfidence with driving my FWD Civic in the snow.
The Overton window has been shifted. Before such arguments wouldn't have been entertained, now they are. For some, the banning of cars was probably the goal from the start.
We have this in NL. There are some modifiers though: LNG users pay much more, as do diesel users. Electric cars pay nothing even though the vehicles as a rule are much, much heavier than the equivalent cars in their petrol version.
To make up for the lower amount of tax collected on fuel sales, maybe.
Where I live (ireland), taxes on diesel are lower to the extent that it's cheaper than petrol. (done some time in the 80's, I think. To reduce fuel imports)
Since 2006 car tax is entirely based on CO2 output, previously it was engine displacement. Meaning EVs have €0 car tax. (you can tell, because you're required to display the tax-disc in the window and it says how much it cost on it.)
Switzerland has it too, each canton sets its own rules but those I lived & driven in had equation for car tax that would take into account horse power and weight of car. It would cut to 50% if CO2 emissions were below certain threshold. Seems fair.
There is no good rationale as far as I know. And yes, diesels can be crazy efficient. I had a 1.9 Citroen Xantia that on an ordinary sized tank had a 1300 km range.
We have it, but weight is a concern within a class of fuels. This causes a heavy petrol car to be more expensive than a light petrol car but may well cause it to be cheaper than a lightweight diesel based vehicle.
- Vehicle class based (I believe this is what the US uses?)
- Engine size based (this was the old one in my home country, basically being used as a proxy for emissions)
- Emissions based (this is the current one in my country. Full electric cars are taxed at the lowest rate)
I guess vehicle weight accounts for a compartmentalized externality, that of wear on the roads, but I think most of Europe has or is moving to emissions based to focus on larger externalities, at least until petrol cars are a novelty, then they might look at wear on the rounds as a factor to consider again.
> Vehicle class based (I believe this is what the US uses?)
The US allows each of the states/ territories to tax and regulate vehicles separately. In other words, what I might pay in Colorado has nothing to do with what I might pay in New York for the same vehicle.
As others mentioned, the road wear scales with the per-axle weigth. With that in mind I checked out the website and I'm puzzled.
Up to 3 axles, indeed the tax is LOWER if the same weight is over 3 axles rather than 2. Well done, makes sense.
But then, at the 4 axles table, suddenly the prices for weights between 12000 and 20999 kg are all higher than their correspondents in the 2- and 3- axle tables.
What are they try to accomplish here? "Don't put a 4+ axle vehicle on the road unless you will carry at least 21 tons with it?"
One of the four parties in the ruling coalition has rural voters as their main constituency. This weirdness might be the result of them negotiating to keep the cost of driving a tractor around low. I'm not sure what they are doing on the local roads, but I see them a lot when driving outside the city.
This might be good. I admit I look at videos from civilized countries that are not completely dependent on cars with a bit of jealousy. They built their surroundings around people, you can walk places, you can enjoy life, you get your workout just by mistake by going places. So nice. Seems we can only do that in about 3 cities in the US.
The upper middle class Tesla or EV owner insists on tax-subsidies for electric cars, not paying for roads because they don't pay fuel tax, and expecting free parking and free electricity for charging in municpal parking garages.
Apparently, those policies are saving the planet. Can we just do that scheme for every car on the road? Will it scale?
This makes sense if the tax is used to cover the costs of road maintenance, since heavier vehicles cause more road damage. It's also a somewhat progressive tax since heavier cars may be more expensive.
A regressive aspect is that this also means that public transportation pay more taxes, and poor people rely more on public transportation. Also, trucks pay more taxes and trucks are used to transport food, so this has an impact on food prices, affecting the poor disproportionately. Likewise diesel vehicles pay more tax, and public transportation & commercial transport usually runs on diesel (and will thus make this stuff more expensive)
So I think that it makes sense for taxes to separate personal vehicles from the rest.
> A regressive aspect is that this also means that public transportation pay more taxes, and poor people rely more on public transportation. Also, trucks pay more taxes and trucks are used to transport food, so this has an impact on food prices, affecting the poor disproportionately. Likewise diesel vehicles pay more tax, and public transportation & commercial transport usually runs on diesel (and will thus make this stuff more expensive)
In all these cases, the operating costs of the vehicles are distributed across a number of payers, quite unlike personal vehicles.
It depends on the place. But generally speaking if there are tickets to be paid (that is, if riding the bus isn't completely free to the rider) you can assume the operation is at least partially funded by the people that use the service. Which statistically tend to be poorer than people that ride private cars
It is also regressive in that personal vehicles, even 3 ton SUVs, account for a small amount of road wear and pollution per vehicle compared with heavy trucks. Public transport in Europe is seldom all diesel busses.
> The fourth power law (also known as the fourth power rule) states that the greater the axle load of a vehicle, the stress on the road caused by the motor vehicle increases in proportion to the fourth power of the axle load.
tl;dr vehicles with higher axle loading do significantly more damage to roads, scaling with the 4th power.
Meaning the vast majority of standard wear and tear on our roads is going to be from heavy trucks, not passenger cars. It makes sense to scale usage taxes in a similar way.
I think you're close, but shouldn't it be weight * miles?
A really naive scheme[1] would be scales at the pump that affect gas price. Weight-class based pricing would also work. It's possible to enforce with the surveillance state apparatus and microparticle-tagged fuel products.
1. Without taking into account the incentives nor human nature
Multiply it, exponentiate (?) it based on axels too, doesn't matter, I was more saying combine weight and miles driven in some way (not a literal plus/addition).
Heavier vehicles still significantly underpay if road maintenance is funded by gas taxes alone, since wear and tear increases in proportion to the fourth power of weight [0] while gas usage only increases linearly or so.
Of course, higher taxes on the heaviest vehicles would just mean higher prices on consumer goods, so this mostly ends up as a subsidy to consumption.
And they can have an axle weight of 20,000 pounds vs about 3,000 for an SUV, meaning they do nearly 2,000 times as much damage to the road. Unless your car gets about 10,000 mpg, the gas tax isn't cutting it.
Big trucks also pay a lot of other road taxes that passenger cars don't. All those stickers and tags that they all have to display, all come with a fee. I'm not claiming that they pay a "fair share" proportionate to the wear on the roads but they already do pay a lot more than other vehicles.
IDK what this means... and even if you explained the comment or directed it as part of a conversation, you would find that use-taxes are incredibly effective methods of placing the cost with usage of a shared resource.
I would also argue that if you want to make a comparison that you just find the, I am sure, studies that have been conducted by every department of transportation in the country to estimate the fair cost-of-use to vehicle type. The comment here should either find some references or be removed as snark-bait.
"Sure, in the sense that O(n) is the same as O(n^4)"...
>use-taxes are incredibly effective methods of placing the cost with usage of a shared resource.
But road wear simply is not proportional to gas use. If you double a vehicle's weight, its gas usage will almost certainly less than double (this depends somewhat on driving patterns, but air resistance is generally a significant factor in mileage), while the road wear it causes will increase by roughly a factor of 8. A flat tax on gas can't possibly internalize the costs of road wear, though it could internalize the costs of CO2 emissions, which are actually proportional to use.
several states (HI, CA, OR off the top of my head) have trialed mileage-based fees.
The problem becomes convincing anyone there's political credit to be gained by implementing/overhauling those systems. I suspect it will take as-long-as-it-possibly-can for those and bureaucratic reasons (contracts/pilots/implementation of those systems).
Isn't road damage also dependent on the road design? To handle higher loads, I think the underlying materials are supposed to be thicker. Like the base sand and gravel under asphalt pavement.
There is a road here in Atlanta that gets torn up by 18 wheelers, yet the highway can handle it just fine.
While this is a good step, I'd also like to see more action taken about commuter vehicles that represent a greater threat to other people on the road for non-weight based reasons. Like, a Tesla X weighs more than an F-150 but based on the fact that one has a low bumper and hood and the other is a brick wall on jacked-up wheels I know I'd rather be hit by the Tesla X, regardless of whether I'm on foot or in my car.
Like some kind of "higher-risk vehicle" thing, either in the form of a tax or different speed-limits or a different class of fines and penalties for traffic violations.
The cost of medical treatment is somewhat absorbed by the government, but in car accidents there are typically many more expenses like rehab and loss of income that aren't. Ya, you'll get your broken arm fixed up, but that's often just one step.
Heavy commercial trucks account for nearly all road wear. Until they transition away from diesel, almost all particulates and other pollutants, too. They should pay the most tax that goes to road maintenance.
But it also influences behaviours. This could be switching to smaller vehicles (which may not be a net-reduction in carbon dioxide emissions), or alternate means of transportation; perhaps in some areas rail freight becomes viable, or encouraging local production of goods.
That's what the trucking industry says. But that just has the effect of keeping freight logistics inefficient. Pricing-in externalities, especially for commercial activity, increases efficiency.
Just about any argument that goes "Let me keep benefitting from the commons without paying full price because poor people" is sus.
Unfortunately independent trucking companies are already stretched pretty thin, while we all benefit from these transportation infrastructures. perhaps a flat tax is just a way to distribute the burden. Ff course this is not the case for large logistic companies with massive distribution networks who regularly commit gas tax fraud.
Am I being a moron or are the weights only applicable to trucks? The lowest rung is 7.5tons.
But of course it's absurd how big cars have become. If you're a 50kg woman why do you need a 2.7ton SUV to go from stop light to stop light? Get a grip people
Batteries are a decent portion of the weight of EVs. I would think an argument could be made that if the weight of an internal combustion vehicle is based on an empty tank, an EV should be able to exclude the battery from the total weight.
if heavier electric semis are busting up the roads more and requiring increased subsidy from the public, this externality needs to be priced in so that we can properly determine whether rail/etc is more efficient
It's not that they will bust up the roads more than other diesel semis. Electric semis already carry less cargo than their fossil fuel counterparts because there are weight limits to what trucks are allowed to legally transport (that is, total vehicle weight must not exceed certain figures). This is why truck scales exist - they audit that truck drivers are not breaking the law and destroying the roads more than they are allowed to.
The battery in an electric semi increases the weight of the vehicle while empty, and if this tax merely taxes empty vehicle weight it will disproportionately hit electric semis - effectively making them infeasible to further develop.
didn't realize that, interesting and mostly agree!
I wonder how many miles the average semi (short vs long haul too) deadheads around as a % of their total miles between jobs etc, with an empty trailer or no trailer. those are still miles and if the tractor is just way heavy even while it's unloaded then it might still be doing more road damage.
I'm totally in favor of doing something but tbh I'd rather do biodiesel for actual trucking trucking in the last mile, and just work on vastly increasing the throughput and latency of our train network for long-haul. Including both building more rail, and improving throughput on the current rail where possible. Our rail system has gone back to being embarrassing, they've effectively nullified the amtrak priority mandate, etc. like I applaud the concept of the words "precision scheduled railroad" but "lol big trains cheaper" ain't it.
I know that's a pipedream but at least we can do biodiesel B99/B90 for current diesel trucks - it's generally a drop-in replacement (B90 for low-temp). Bonus, it neutralizes most of the soot from the older lower-compression diesels - there's no sulfur in it at all.
long-haul semis just occupy an uncomfortable spot between bulk transport and last-mile service, and those tend towards big and small optimums, respectively. and I get the point of wanting to develop the technology but personally I see electric semis as being useful for having fuckloads of torque/power etc than ever being the optimum long-haul design. any technology they can deploy will be better off on a rail (free guidance!), potentially electrified rail/catenary, with like 16 of them stuck onto some railcar. which we could call a micro-engine.
or even "distributed" per-wheel systems like electric cars, but on every single car/etc (would have to be split-grade the whole way) so effectively every car is a self-locomotive. like if you legitimately can get them away from grade and run them really fast, automatically, with reasonable following and self-deceleration profiles, such that they at least buffer up, catch/couple each other, and brake together etc why couldn't you run them at inhumanly close spacings? they'll bunch up and guide each other to contact IOT style (they have known keys to each other), or at least if they collide they'll hopefully auto-couple (physically) and brake together etc.
This is going to be a nuclear-hot take but I don't think it really matters that (off-grade!) microtrains can absolutely 100% safely stop themselves. If 0.1% of loads of lumber or xboxes get smashed but you can move 4x the capacity per rail, oh well, that's a matter for insurance. You can make sure you don't end up with east palestine where the poison railcars get piled into by oil cars etc. And there's already absolutely nothing any train conductor beyond an airport tram can stop if you are on the rails. Light rail operator still needs far longer than you'd think to stop the train. When you see that subway/el train coming that operator needs you to exit that car pronto, because he absolutely cannot do anything to stop it other than nail the brakes (if at speed, there is a maximum rate they can apply without derailing the train), and they tend to have nightmares afterwards. Yup, disconcerting number of train engineers will have fatal accidents in their lives, almost entirely out of their control.
if you can precision-schedule cars then you can at least make sure that hazmat is transported in a secure pattern. there is a ton more cement and wheat and sheet steel and i-beams moved around than the super-poison, and you can pad the superpoison shipments with inert stuff (or even neutralizing/absorbing agents for bad stuff). even oil spills, if they happen, are whatevs at 1-car scales really. if you limit the scale of the clamity to 1 or 2 microtrains/4-8 cars and guarantee everything else can safely brake to a halt, it's probably statistically safer in general and gets way more throughput per rail.
self-driving semis needing giant batteries and big torquey engines is just such an insanely self-invented problem, there is a guidance rail built right into it right there, many times with power source too! Even if you want to go dual-mode and drive onto roads for last-mile, use the rail to go cross-country! etc
but I also think we just probably need way more rail, having like one line for certain major routes may not be enough. the federal interstate system wasn't built by just modernizing highways, it was a whole bunch more capacity. I know there's not the political will for it and electric semis are probably what we can get, but they're not really a good technological solution.
icebreakers are an interesting case of electrification (technically hybrid diesel-electric transmission) being used for their extreme power. for when you want a ship to just fling itself forward onto the ice, then vigorously pump water between its waddle tanks to roll and crunch the ice with the weight of the ship. electric go brrr.
(same reasons the russians did nuclear icebreakers too really!)
bulldozers probably would be another good one, and conventional bulldozers are maintenance nightmares so if you can actually make a good, reliable bulldozer with low operating/maintenance costs they'd probably love that. Even if they had a runtime/chargetime cycle for generators/etc I bet (or run them direct-cord with big trailerbed generators).
There is not enough information on that link to have a position.
My comment is more about the price of goods transportation causing price increases than whatever that link is about. I have never heard about that program. So if I wrote get ready to pay $30 for the price of eggs instead of $12 would I get someone discussing the Egg Price Displacement Program?
Not sure why you’re downvoted for pointing this out. Like most recent tax proposals this would disproportionately impact the rural middle class. Farmers and truck drivers would be directly impacted and then these costs would be passed on to consumers.
Those poor enough to receive WIC and EBT payments would have this tax largely subsidized, so it won’t impact them, and the wealthy would barely notice.
edit: sorry, to be more constructive let me add https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt... as a small explanation for what is all wrong with 'roads' in america. Car infrastructure is insanely expensive and we have a ton of terrible status quos in the US that add to it.
Assuming you do not have a tribe willing and able to fight for you, move to the middle of Siberia, or Somalia, or the Sahara, etc where you will not have to compete for resources like land.
Regarding this particular tax, you opt out by de-registering your vehicle so you don't have to pay taxes on it. In general, that's how you opt out of most government nonsense, you fly under the radar and keep your money protected where whatever government can't touch it.
What I find interesting is that it's always the people you hate that are the problem. Reading through this thread's comments certainly confirms that.
Yet here we are, on the internet (itself a huge energy consumer), debating climate change with a bunch of SV elites that likely all own overseas garments, participate in fast fashion, collect iphones, or bitcoin (all very energy intensive items).
With the exception of using the Internet, I don't do any of those things, and the fact you think they're still common shows how out of touch you are with the current zeitgeist. Most tech folks are into BIFL, tend to keep phones for longer (and iPhones in particular have the longest supported service life of any smartphone on the market), and have eschewed crypto due to the scams. That's not to say all those things weren't true at some point, but we've seen a shift.
For many of these things, they're a form of status signalling. There's far more status in wearing organic, natural fiber fabrics, which are hand-made in an interesting but remote part of the world vs fast fashion from a mall made by child labor, similarly crypto scams have pretty much dirtied the look of bitcoin and others and most people have stopped involving themselves (or at least no longer talk about it).
Things are better in road environments where most drivers are in smaller vehicles. I love toodling around in a sports car in Europe. It's deeply painful in the US, especially in locales where the typical vehicle is a lifted truck that has a bumper height higher than the top of my head when in my car. There's way too many vehicles on American roadways that are literally /all/ negative from a societal perspective, and nearly all bad from a personal perspective, that people bought due to perverse incentives impacting manufacturing and pricing.