> 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.
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.
[1] https://store.diono.com/radian-3r/ (No affiliation with them, though I've purchased 4 of these so far personally.)