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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Yes, glorious. See also [].

Where I live (the Netherlands) there is absolutely no need to drive a ridiculous Dodge Ram with a 6 liter engine that emits a bazillion kg co2.

However there's a worrying trend of people exploiting some tax loophole to drive them cheaply, with road taxes going down to the level of ordinary passenger vehicles.

I'd really like us to implement similar incentives to get these ridiculous things off the roads.

[] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/growing-preference-for-suvs...

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I'd like to see vehicle tax based on some combination of weight and emissions. Say £1 or €1 for every kilo over the weight of a, hmm, Smart Car? :) Now add an emissions component, enough to make a 1 litre engine and lightweight EVs really appealing.

Road damage is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight! It would be amazing to see taxes for road repair done on that basis.

Edit: the tax of the article is based on engine power and CO2 emissions. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21862516 for calculations.

That just means basically all damage is done by delivery trucks, garbage trucks, buses etc. that you can't really get rid off. Smart, Tesla or Dodge ram doesn't make a big difference there

> you can't really get rid off.

Doesn't mean they shouldn't pay for the damage they do to the road. Why should the state subsidise them?

Because those are public utilities and you presumably want to incentivise mass transport.

By 'you' do you mean me in particular? Or do you mean the world in general? If you mean me then the answer is no; I see no reason why we should not have transparency in transport costs.

If you want subsidize certain kinds of mass transport then target the specific type. If the price of food (which is at a historical low in the western world) goes up as a result then that will simply show people where their money is being spent. If you want to subsidize it then subsidize the people who need it (low income customers).

Other public utilities, such as electricity, do not give a free ride to freeloaders who cause extra expense to the rest of use they charge for the damage done. For instance a user of electricity that has a very bad power factor will be charged a very high rate and will therefore be encouraged to improve.

There are emission-based vignette schemes (eco-taxes). Orthogonally, going above 3.5t is a steep increase in inconvenience and costs: you need a different license (C or above) which is more expensive and has to be renewed regularly and there many streets are forbidden.

I'd also want to have width factored in. Wider than strictly necessary vehicles make life worse for all road users, space is not infinite. Occasionally they even make life shorter and it's never the life of those inside those vehicles.

I believe Norway fundamentally does exactly this. From recollection, in Norway you are taxed on the following items at time of purchase:

* A CO2 tax (banded by emissions)

* An NOx tax (banded by emissions)

* A weight tax

* A scrappage fee (fixed, by vehicle type)

* Then the usual 25% VAT

I may be missing something here (in particular, annual taxes), so if there are any Norwegians willing to chime in, feel free.

There is an additional progressive tax on the vehicle price which makes expensive cars seriously expensive. And the VAT comes last and is charged on top of the total of the other costs including the taxes.

This is one of the reasons why Tesla was able to jump start the electric car business in Norway with the Model S and model X because EVs are exempt from all of that except VAT (I think, not sure). It's also effectively a regressive income tax because the more expensive cars are effectively subsidized by a larger amount of money per car than cheap cars. In my opinion we would have been able to have even more EVs if the subsidy had been the same amount of money for each car regardless of the value of the car. Then the Leaf and the Zoe would be really cheap cars.

I love my Model S but I feel that I have been subsidized more than I should have been (no I'm not giving it back).

Why not put all tax on the Fuel? Then you have everything in one tax, exactly the way you want it. Take the bike more often? Benefit immediately. Buy a lighter vehicle? Benefit immediately. Drive less wasteful? Benefit immediately. It seems like such a system would stimulate only good things.

Loading all tax into fuel just drives (heh) more and more people into fueling over the border. Fuel already is really expensive in The Netherlands.. €1,77 per liter or €6,73 per gallon, and most of that cost is tax.

(Obviously) it should be done EU wide.

That's not what EU is for though.

I believe the main problem with the tax on fuel (it already exists) is that you cannot make it as progressive as you want. It will be the same percentage regardless of how much fuel you use and so far this proved not good enough to skew the market in favour of the low-emission solutions.

It's just not high enough. I find it pretty unfair that I pay the same amount of tax on my familiecar that I use for 10.000 km a year as someone who drives is 100 km per day.

I had a citroen C1 once, because the government canceled road tax on such very efficient, small cars. Sadly his law lasted only a couple of years (and it messes a lot with the market value of these cars!). But is was nice that I only paid insurance as long as I didn't drive it. In Poland there is not even a tax on cars, so it is already only in the fuel. It can be pretty nice there to have multiple cars, a big one when you need it, a small one to use a lot. You could even circulate the big one among family, but as it is now in the Netherlands, nobody want to be the owner of the big car.

Raising the fuel taxes indiscriminately was what sparked the "yellow vest" movement last year. I don't think the French government is in any hurry to try that again, especially since there's already a strike going on right now for the pension reform.

If it came with overall tax reductions, especially with road tax reduction, it could be a financially neutral rule for a specific amount of km per year. You could make is so that it then mostly hits people with monstrous cars, not the yellow vest people in their ordinary, perhaps slightly aging cars.

"At the same time, the government is considering reducing cash incentives for the purchase of electric cars."

when there's no money left... there's no money left.

Well, the plan was always to eventually reduce the cash subsidy for electric vehicles. The subsidy was intended to help electric vehicle design and manufacturing to mature to the point that electric vehicles are a viable, affordable, and desirable option for a large number of actual consumers. This is happening. I see dozens of Teslas on the road every day (I live in Chicago, I'm not sure if my experience is typical, but I assume it is approximately representative of US autobuying trends).

So I guess I don't see it as a "we're out of money and need that income", rather I see it as a "now that the EV market has matured, we can take the training wheels off".

If your parent doing the school run a suv does make sense, and don't for get that pickups are used a lot by farmers and I suspect the Dutch farming lobby is just as powerfull as it is in the other eu states and the USA.

School runs are done by bike in the Netherlands. In addition there are much more practical vehicles that farmers/builders/<insert_mobile_heavy_work_profession> use.

Such as? Land rovers /Toyota hilux'es are ubiquitous on British farms.

And just because its how your town does it in your country doesn't automatically make it the one best way for every one.

What look like ex-army Land Rovers are pretty common on UK farms and estates, at least here in this part of Scotland, pickups are pretty rare though.

Edit: I wonder if this is because of how much of Scotland is used for grouse shooting - a pickup isn't going to be much good for transporting your pampered customers!

Not sure an Ex army Landy is exactly pampering your clients, it would be ok for the army types on a jolly red trousers and Barbour's.

Why are you shifting the discussion toward 'What vehicle is good for farmers' ? Farmers represent 2% of the population, they're clearly not responsible for 30% of the sales

Yeah, I also preferred the discussion in which the participants expressed what car I need and how I'm supposed to use it. And what I don't need, of course. They live somewhere far from me and have no idea what my family does and why. But they know what I do and do not need for transport, because they have a walking bus in their Lithuanian village and I should learn something from that first before going out there and driving my SUV.

> And just because its how your town does it in your country doesn't automatically make it the one best way for every one.

In the Netherlands, the bicycle is quite certainly one of the most practical options in practically every town.

Maybe _in the US_ an SUV makes sense for the school run...

s/makes sense/is rationalised

Gotta wonder how parents did school runs before the SUV was invented.

They probably didn't, because back then the kid would be allowed to go to school on their own.

You don't need a vehicle that size unless you have more than two children, a perfectly normal 4-door car will do. And all the usual externalities of SUVs are worse at school: the high ride height makes it harder to see small children, and the large amount of space taken up makes the parking and traffic jam round the school worse.

No, the Dutch solution to the school run is a Bakfiets cargo bicycle until the kids are old enough to ride their own.

Dutch farming is very .. intense? Quite a lot of it is done in greenhouses. Sure, if you're in agriculture you can justify a larger vehicle. That's at most 5% of the population?

More than three children.

In the 1990s every 5 person family managed fine with a normal car.

Most SUVs on the road that I see in the UK look like they probably have less space than an equivalent car - and that's without abominations like 'sports' SUVs (which seem the most pointless vehicles every invented).

It is true that most SUVs have less interior space than station wagons. The high ground clearance wastes vertical space and the trunks are quite short.

I agree that it's not a large suv is not needed, but ford, fiat and some others don't. They are stopping making smaller cars and making more suvs because 1: they make more profit, 2: customers want them and 3: profit... the customer want part is kind of silly since if you wanted a mondaeo (medium family sedan) and now it's not for sale, only option is an suv. All these stupid cross overs are there for money making.

In the US market they have a weird tax advantage. Not the case in most of Europe; you certainly see a lot of Mondeos here.

Yea. But ford are still killing the mondaeo in Europe and other countries. Their Kuga and the like make them more money... fiat are killing the 500, which is nearly the perfect city car. They make more from the punto cross over. I'm based in ireland. If you try go to some dealers, there are less small and medium cars and more larger suvs and cross overs...

Yet they are hardly seen around on many European school runs.

Unfortunately they are very common on school runs in the UK - at least in Edinburgh.

Sure, not saying that they don't exist, just not to the extent of other side of Atlantic with almost free fuel.

To be fair, I think you are correct - Edinburgh is probably unusual in this regard (affluent, fairly small, incredibly high levels of private schools).

I live in London and sometimes it feels like every second car is an SUV. UK has some weird class thing with Range Rovers: everyone has to have one,or you not really upper middle it's like an upper level of white van for working class.

I'd love to see a map of proportion of SUVs of all cars on the road in the UK - I'm sure it would correspond with population density.

e.g. Higher population density, greater proportion of SUVs.

School run can also be done by school walking bus, bike, or actual bus.

I doubt many of us would mind quite so much the tiny few SUVs actually used by workers and farmers because they absolutely need such a beast. Mind, saying that my friend with the absurdly big crew cab Toyota pickup, uses the wife's regular size car when it's just them and the kids... The pickup is for transporting 1 tonne of kit around fields -- he actually detests them to drive. :)

Just in case you don't know of the crocodile/walking bus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_bus

I believe it's more common for smallholding farmers in EU to rely on a small car runabout and a tractor, with more specialized equipment (possibly rented) for other work.

I'd expect intensive farmers use exclusively on specialized equipment.

Yup, my parents are retired farmers and they used a station wagon + three different sized tractors, shared with another farmer. Friends of them who were foresters used a Subaru Forester. Subaru makes actual workhorses, not two-ton shopping vehicles.

The fact that there even exists an argument that an SUV makes sense for a school run is evidence that we're now living in the bizarro timeline.

Why you might need to transport kids to after school / sports events - for example I regularly used to see a small kid waiting for the same bus as me staggering along with a cello that was bigger than he was.

And there is the psychological safety aspect of a big SUV with a higher driving position.

Yes yes, but people used to be just fine with normal-sized cars. The large majority of car-owning people in the world still are. SUVs are a negative-sum game; a race to the bottom where people feel the need to get a bigger car just because their neighbors have ones as well.

I used to do 800 kilometers trips for vacations with my family (2 adults, 3 kids) in a 1994 fiat punto every few years and I'm still alive, I'm pretty sure you can drive your kids to school in any vehicle as long as it has enough seats.

People completely lost touch with reality.

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