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Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

Pass a higher gas tax. If we paid European gas prices most new cars would get much smaller pretty quickly.

Tax is not the answer. People are already paying the stupid tax on the $60k pickup truck (I laugh at your down votes), but that does not stop people from buying them. They know they are overpriced, maintenance costs are higher, environmental costs are higher, tight parking is an issue, and garage space is too tight, yet they buy them any way.

It used to be people bought trucks because they were the tool they needed but they are a status symbol now. For gods sake can we please go back to small sporty BMW status symbol?

Not everything needs a tax. Just change crash test ratings and manufacturers will have to adapt.

European regulators also take pedestrian safety much more seriously than US regulators. You only see cars in Europe with the pedestrian safe sloping nose.

They certainly take driver training much more seriously.

This is the real solution. The quality of drivers in the United States is atrocious. It's laughable what constitutes "driver's education" here. Every state is different, but likely none of them treats driving as the dangerous, serious-at-all-times activity it really is.

Some European jurisdictions also have meaningful vehicle inspections. There doesn't seem to be any US state that will take your car off the road for being jacked up five feet in the air.

Living in an ordinary US metro area without a car is a punishment we reserve for drunks and the desperately poor; we haven’t the heart to inflict it on those who are merely bad at driving. What are we going to say? “Sorry, kid, if you want to be a functioning adult you’d better move to Manhattan.”

In the US, you bring your own car for your driving exam... And this is barely a joke !!

I'm not sure about that. I see cars like the Cadillac Escalade here in Austria. Not many of them mind you and almost always only outside hotels like the Intercontinental. I assume to ferry wealthy tourists around in what they are accustomed to in the US.

Electric hummer on the way--9000 lbs, 0-60 in 3 seconds.

Tires go from 100% tread to 0 in about the same amount of time too, I assume?

Even the huge trucks are electric now.

https://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/f150-lightning/2022/

YEP.

Electric cars are something we must do to halt climate change, but we need to recognize it's an example of doing the same broken thing, just better.

At the end of the day we will have a more green version of what we have now, carrying over all the existing flaws of automobile oriented infrastructure (ie. pedestrian deaths, traffic).

Migrating away from automobile transportation solves "traffic" in only the most obtuse sense of the term - there aren't literally passenger cars contending for space. We care about traffic because it deters us from going where we'd like to and makes remaining trips take longer. I think pretty much everyone acknowledges that walking, cycling, and transit are slower than driving and will deter even more trips. We spin that in a positive way, as encouraging the development of more neighborhood-level communities and businesses. But then it's hard to explain why "traffic" is a problem you're solving. Traffic has the same effects as the solution you're selling!

Traffic is an issue with automobile oriented infrastructure because automobiles are such a space inefficient way of transporting people.

In the context of a conversation of how trucks are getting bigger and bigger, it's worth noting that the size gains are having implications on traffic too!

The point being though that electric cars will be just as space inefficient as ICE cars. If we want to move more people, more efficiently and avoid traffic jams and new highway construction, we'll have to opt for different solutions.

Clearing a traffic jam is only valuable to the extent that people get where they're going faster than they would have via the traffic jam. It's frustrating when the freeway moves at a a light jog, but that's as fast as a city bus was ever going to make progress, anyway.

F-150s are huge trucks? What's a semi to you? Or even a 350? Most people who own 150s don't need them, but they're not huge trucks.

In my mind the Ranger (like the F150 of years ago) is a “normal” pickup truck. The modern F150 is seriously exaggerated even for a pickup.

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