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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

What exactly is the "flaw" in capitalism here you are insinuating here?

There are plenty of small, cheap, reliable, and efficient cars available, if that's what you want to buy. The Toyota Prius. The Honda Fit. The Tesla Model 3?

Is it a "flaw" in capitalism that some people don't want to buy those? That someone can choose to buy a Chevrolet Suburban instead of any of these options?

The market for automobiles is as competitive as it gets. If a manufacturer is making profits, it's because they're selling what people want to buy.

From my perspective, the only "flaw" here would seem to be that capitalism makes it difficult for you to impose your own preferences on others.

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With most issues American’s be like, “it is my right to shit in the stream and you can’t stop me with your preference for clean water. Go further up stream if you want clean water.” And pretty soon the whole river is full of shit, or covid, or lead, or CO2, or enormous death vehicles, or whatever, it’s a metaphor.

So yeah, I’d like to force my “preference” of having people cease shitting in the stream. Their actions are not taking place in a vacuum and they’re affecting other people negatively.

But I don't want to buy a vehicle. I want to not be hit by one whose driver doesn't pay attention to their environment because they feel invulnerable. You might respond that I could insulate myself within a similar behemoth, but I like walking and would prefer not to be burdened with the negative externalities of automakers' profit maximization strategies.

Put another way, why should I be imposed upon by others' preferences, in every respect from potential collisions to parking space to street blockages?

The "flaw" of capitalism is that individuals rarely pay the full cost of their decisions, leading to inefficiency.

Did you not read TFA? The outcome is not positive for any party. Bigger cars consume more gas, kill more people, etc, and people buy them because they can. That’s a failure of market forces to do the right thing.

> The outcome is not positive for any party.

The outcome for the buyers of those vehicles is estimated by those buyers to be positive. I don't know if it is or isn't, but it seems at least a little presumptuous to conclude that a third party (you or I) knows more about the buyer's preferences/value function than the buyer themself.

If the outcome were known to be negative for everyone, it would be a lot less common.

Not sure the howls of pain at gas stations support your hypothesis.

Do you think those buyers didn't know they'd get bad gas mileage or us it more likely that they care about other factors more? I hate the cup holder in my car. It pisses me off on a regular basis. I still think buying my car resulted in a net gain for me.

I think they fooled themselves into believing that low gas prices were a norm and that filling up a huge tank shouldn't be that expensive. I don't remember the details exactly because it didn't affect me, but I'm thinking back to a similar thing ~15 years ago where Hummers got super popular due to a combination of aesthetics and favorable tax treatment, but then the price of gas shot up following some reversal in the Middle East and lots of people decided the total cost of ownership wasn't that great after all.

I'd argue that the buyers are getting a free ride by offloading the negative externalities of the purchase to others. So we have to consider the cost of climate change remediation, the cost of accidents etc. A study by the Technical University of Dresden(1) estimated a rough cost to society of €16,000 per new car sold. 40%-60% of that cost was due accidents, the single highest cost category.

The costs will change from society to society, but given the mix of vehicles in the United States and the structure of our health care system I feel confident that A) the accident cost are higher here and B) those costs will be distributed in less equitable fashion.

1 https://stopclimatechange.net/fileadmin/content/documents/mo...

If you were hit by one of these vehicles and received a life changing injury, even if they paid you the "market rate" for your loss of ability, would you see that as a good outcome? capitilism working? The price of cyclist deaths, pollution, vehicular/pedestrian inury is not being priced in adequately. Over 90% of these car drivers have no real need for vehicles this large but when te cost to them is small who cares.

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