To avoid Finland’s tax a 1,000HP imported Hennessey RAM is limited to 55MPH

Compare it to similar rent-seeking taxes on land ownership (i.e. property taxes), which affect wealthier people more able to afford the tax.

I know when I was a college student, affording the registration and bare-bone insurance payments on my 25 year old honda was actually pretty non-trivial. If I couldn't afford gas on a particular month, I could find creative ways to ride-share / take public transit (sometimes) / not drive / etc. But that didn't do ANYTHING to my registration payment.

Edit: the weighted plate is for commercial use and over 9000lbs total (vehicle included). This can also cover non-commercial if you're hitting that weight and not hauling a camper. There are carveouts, but the tax increases with the weight of the expected max tow. The state charges a road use fee instead of a state tax on registration.

I think the Rivian is a much flashier truck though. It has a better 0-60 time than the un-capped Hennessey RAM, and is less than half the price.

Neither are practical for "truck stuff" (the Rivian has a small bed, and depreciation on the Hennessey is going to dwarf the value of most loads). At least the rivian is solid around town and for offroading/camping.

If you want to roll coal, you can go die in a fire. Seriously. You're assaulting everyone around you with carcinogens and cardiovascular poisons.

I'd ask how it's legal, but it's not (at least around here). A better question is why the law isn't enforced.

    It's not even good for groceries, for reasons anyone who has 
    actually bought groceries can readily fathom

Like many pickup trucks sold in America (not sure about elsewhere) the TRX has two rows of interior passenger seats and seats four people. The back seats fold away and create a large interior cargo space if desired.

Additionally, many folks with pickup trucks have tonneau covers on their cargo beds for everyday use when they're not transporting anything really big -- at that point the cargo bed is essentially a traditional car trunk/boot.

Such vehicles are popular with the significant portion of folks who "need a truck a few times a year, but want something that can be used as an everyday vehicle because they don't want to own two separate vehicles."

     A Honda Civic is 20x more practical and carries 2.5x more 
     passengers and gets 5x better mileage.

Do I wish people would drive Civics (or smaller) vehicles instead of these monster trucks? Yes.

Do I personally drive a much smaller, hybrid vehicle similar to the Civic? Yes.

Have I been working remotely for 4+ years, partly for environmental reasons, to avoid driving in the first place? Yes.

     If you want to roll coal, fine, but just admit it. Let's not 
     pretend this vehicle is in ANY way "practical". It's just not. 

I do not think anybody should be using such a monstrous vehicle for mundane everyday tasks like transporting groceries. Obivously it is overkill of the highest order and a bit of a menace.

But you certainly could use it for that. In that sense it is eminently practical.

That's what makes vehicles like this such a potential environmental nightmare. Unlike a lot of other vehicles in the "$100,000 / 1000HP" neighborhood, people might actually use this monster as an everyday driver rather than a "garage queen."

The Maverick should be the new version of that... if it actually offered any practical options!

> many of which wouldn't pass crash tests in the US. For example, the Smart Fortwo had to be increased in length to pass US crash tests.

The smart isn't really a common car in Europe. As for crash tests, some US vehicles wouldn't pass EU tests either. The two regulations test for different properties, and manufacturers optimize for that.

As for actual safety, trafic fatality is equivalent or better in Europe, especially for people not inside a car.

A starlet from 1998 gets better fuel economy already. And so does a Volvo v40 2.0 turbo. I believe a 1800kg modern day M3 sports car already gets better fuel economy than a plane if you seat it with 3 people.

Ideally the tax on non-primary homes would be so onerous that people would sell their extra homes to people who do not have homes and that would cause home ownership to increase, taking pressure off of the rental market and driving down prices.

Apartments are supposed to be affordable homes for young adults starting their lives out, not permanent living situations for anyone not financially established as solidly in the middle class or above.

You could easily add waivers for section 8 and military rentals to ensure that all sections of the population would be accounted for, and the tax wouldn't affect apartments and condos, just single homes and duplexes/triplexes/quadplexes that are either being held empty as value stores or used for rental income generators by their owners.

I would also say that once homelessness drops to lower than 1 in 10,000 (a little more than half of it's current number) you could waive 80% of the tax with the caveat that should homelessness increase above that number the full tax would come back immediately. That would provide a strong incentive for property management companies to keep rents low enough for poor people to afford them.

Come on. Gas taxes are hilariously regressive. The people—ALL the people—who can afford this kind of dumbass vehicle and who are willing to commit the offense of buying and operating it will never, ever be affected or restricted or motivated by any piddly gas taxes.

So, no. No. Of course it's not actually accomplished by gasoline taxes. That's a fantasy.

If you made gas taxes 1-2 orders of magnitude more progressive than they are right now, that would be a tiny start.

Consider what job it's doing, not what arbitrary market category it fits in.

Internalizing the externalities refers adding an additional cost to the purchase price to cover for the externality. In the example above for the pollution machine, this could be a carbon tax or a carbon offset.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Is there a cost? I would say it is priceless - because we do not have any mechanism to funnel that money into undoing the CO2. And no, planting trees are not the opposite of taking oil from deep underground. Once that oil is out it remains in the above-surface carbon cycle. While it is underground it would never even be part of it. So any price would be made up - and just funneled to some interest group. The "compensation" does not actually compensate anything. This is the danger of only thinking in "money". I paid, problem magically solved!

The carrying capacity of earth is likely hundreds of billions of humans, if we were to set our mind to it.

Just to concentrate on food alone: we are barely harvesting anything from the oceans. Even on land, using greenhouses everywhere would give us vastly more agricultural yield.

We are not using greenhouses everywhere right now, because that's a huge capital investment; and given current food prices, it's generally not worth it. But if push came to shove, we could totally do it. (Just like we _could_ totally get rid of fossil fuels, if we really had to and run everything on wind and solar. It's just not economically viable to do that right now.)

There's lots more techniques you can do to produce more calories. For example fusion power could help a lot to power lots of artificial lighting in vertical farms, and to purify sea water. (And even without fusion power, we could generate lots and lots of power from fission with current technology. It's just unpopular.)

> Maybe we also accept that some limits can't be surpassed, at least not at an acceptable cost.

I guess you would say that the suggestions I made above fall under the second clause of unacceptable costs?

Do you mean economic costs or some kind of ethical or moral or metaphysical costs?

I can see how some people might be queasy about putting fission reactors everywhere. But I don't really see anything against Dutch-style greenhouses apart from economic costs?

In any case, from what you quote here, it seems Americans driving fast occasionally is worthy the stuff of legend? In Germany those speeds would be just another Tuesday.

About half of German Autobahnen famously don't have a speed limit. The recommended speed is 130 km/h (~80 mph).

Of course, petrol costs a lot more in Germany than in the US. In practice, that tends to limit driving much more.

For more about the whole philosophy of the movement I recommend:

The Cannonball Run Countach: Supercar Legend | Full Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b7erU_DOfE

If you just take the money and bury it in your backyard forever, the central bank will just replace it after a while. (Assuming a typical inflation targeting central bank. And also in aggregate, because the central bank doesn't know exactly how much money is getting buried; but they do monitor total spending in the economy.)

If you leave the money in the bank, the bank invests it.

If you want to make a positive difference, you can use the money to contribute to eg carbon reduction efforts.

The rest of what you are saying is right: there's better and worse ways to spend that money. (In the worst case, you could buy a few tons of coal and just set them on fire.) I'm just saying that earning money and not spending it at all, doesn't automatically mean zero net emissions.

2) even the most polluting Ferrari, which according to this page (1) emits 385g/km , is still almost a quarter less polluting than this car (506 g/km according to the article)

(1) https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/cars/Car-CO2-and-fuel-economy-mp...

Those cars are designed in other countries to be larger specifically for America taste.

Americans visit Europe and chuckle at the "tiny" cars, which are in fact perfectly appropriate for three children. And those cars were designed by the same companies for European standards.

To me, that reads as fetishization on a mass cultural level, and while you can point the finger anywhere you like that fact will remain at the core.

There is no justification, on a planet burning faster every year, for the ridiculously oversized cars Americans choose. None.

You may be genuine, in which case I recommend using literally any search engine on the device of your choice to find sources which you like. Wikipedia, YouTube, or deeper - there is no shortage of sources - all you have to do is look.

That's not an argument that applies here, because Americans actually do buy stupidly big cars.

> I think you have an exaggerated view of what US auto consumer preferences look like. This is really easy because [overly defensive strawman]

No, I don't. Here's some numbers, which you could have looked for yourself, with the search engine of your choice:

" According to data from IHS Automotive, larger vehicles accounted for 63 percent of total US sales in 2013. Meanwhile, large vehicles only accounted for 25.4 percent of all vehicles sold outside the US during the same year."

> Those plots and attacks range from completely unverifiable conspiracy theories, to unintended consequences, to actions that one might reasonably argue were an attempt to interfere with public transit.

The cars are bigger. The cities are less livable. The conspiracies are verifiable, there are entire books, documentaries, and Wikipedia pages about the various fuckeries involved.

You seem to be rather defensive about this though, so feel free to think whatever you like.

> The discussion is whether or not it is even feasible to have that anywhere in the US

That may be what you wish to discuss - fine. You can have that discussion somewhere else, with someone else. It is feasible though - and necessary. Again, the fucking planet is burning.