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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 there is an high likelihood that weights will come down as batteries become more energy dense, which is probably necessary for full market penetration.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
>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.
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"
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hyundai Kona EV
Kia Niro EV
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.
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.
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.
And they are getting more aerodynamic for the gas mileage requirements regulations….
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).
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.
1: https://pavementinteractive.org/reference-desk/design/design...
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.
Those fuel trucks also have to operate on regular streets more than most semi trucks do, which likely compounds the benefit.
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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.
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.
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.
Edit: why disagree?
Also, the point of these specific types of regressive taxes is to change behaviour ... e.g. back to trains from cross state/country trucking
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.
One potential easy fix is to zero the federal tax on gas and make up the difference in diesel tax: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=10&t=10
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.
So if you add more axles or more wheels or make them wider all these things can reduce the ground pressure.
A very easy way to compare between vehicles is to check the PSI that you fill the tire.
Trucks can fill up the 90 psi in some cases while cars are closer to 35.
https://archive.org/details/TheHandbookOfHighwayEngineering/...
Trucks are used when rail isn't practical or doesn't exist.
How would you detach a single railroad car from the center of a train and move it to the town's sideline?
- 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.
That's not remotely true. The Sierra Club and the NRDC are both broadly supportive of carbon taxes, for example.
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 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.
> 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.
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Social engineering is generally bad. We don't need to do this, 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.
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'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.
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?
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"
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"
CAFE should be fixed but that's not enough
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 is already true for rent.
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.
That gives 200 USD -> 183 € -> 508 liter -> 134 gallon.
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.
You don't need to get perfect readings from everyone. If you tax 99% of people, that's fine.
Ah yes, the old have the police collect more information on you idea. What could go wrong?
If those people are from out of state, the tax revenue would go to their home state instead of the state they created the road wear and tear on.
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.
Taxing by mass seems much simpler.
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
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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).
Diesel is a bit dubious too. CO2 emissions are far lower for them.
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/03/1077392791/a-satellite-finds-...
Disclosure: I work for a company working on detecting these leaks. https://carbonmapper.org
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.)
(our family's diesel VW certainly was)