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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

If they want to buy big trucks, we need to consider those trucks' negative externalities. A bigger, faster, heavier, and more deadly vehicle, imposes costs on everyone around it.

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Insurers aren’t properly internalizing the liability costs and therefore are pricing premiums too low for the risk these vehicles create. Maybe judgements need to be higher for deaths and injuries caused by overweight vehicles? I don’t have enough context to say. If they’re significantly more dangerous, it should be priced accordingly (based on claims data).

They would certainly be leaving a lot of money on the table if that were true.

Right, if big vehicles are more dangerous, where is that uninternalized cost being squeezed out if not the vehicle owner’s premium.

Who says more dangerous equals more expensive? Killing a victim can often be cheaper than the medical costs required to treat a severely injured person.

Or more commonly, someone who drives a compact car drunk habitually through a dangerous neighborhood is higher risk than a high-income person with a good driving record who drives a heavy car in a quiet suburb.

The people who cause the most insurance losses are often people who really don't have their lives together. They're driving cheap pieces of junk and wrecking them frequently.

> Killing a victim can often be cheaper than the medical costs required to treat a severely injured person.

Maybe, but I am rather skeptical of this claim being true under most circumstances.

And even if it is true that the payout from insurance is bigger in the case of injury than death, there's potentially lost revenue if the insured goes to jail.

>there's potentially lost revenue if the insured goes to jail.

It is surprisingly hard to end up in jail after killing someone with your car in the US. As long as you weren't drunk, weren't doing something crazy like going 40mph over the speed limit, and didn't flee the scene, the most you are generally looking at is a misdemeanor if you are charged with anything at all.

Likely the victim's medical or comprehensive insurance - most states only require very small liability limit policies that won't really cover much in a big crash.

California, for instance only requires ~30k injury coverage and ~5k property damage, not even enough to replace a cheap used car when totaled these days.

Strong agree that California’s minimums for insurance don’t make sense. I’m constantly surrounded by $75,000+ cars and have bumped up coverage amounts considerably

Weight is a confounding factor if an accident does happen, but the biggest risk that insurers deal with is the driver and the environment in which they operate their vehicle.

Attributes like weight or type about a vehicle have relatively vanishing impact on risk in reality. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/insurance-losses-by-make-and-mo...

They don't really care about a lot of the externalities, like more land used per parking spot, more energy used by transportation, increased road wear from heavier vehicles, etc.

I don’t have any data myself, but it is a common argument in the United States that automobile drivers enjoy ridiculously little legal liability for injuring or killing pedestrians and cyclists in all but the grossest cases of recklessness or negligence.

Here is a recent case where a driver of a Jeep swerved into the oncoming lane to at high speed try to hit a bicyclist. They were only given a misdemeanor.

This person should not be allowed to drive a motor vehicle. There is almost no consequences for motorists who repeatedly violate the law and risk others' lives. We should be much more aggressive about taking away people's drivers licenses who demonstrate that they are incapable of public safety.

https://jalopnik.com/jeep-driver-gets-misdemeanor-after-tryi...

If those externalities were priced correctly, people would stop buying big cars. That’s why they’re not.

This is the sort of things governments can be good at if they choose. Otherwise gas/energy prices will eventually do it for us. And it won’t be pretty.

> If those externalities were priced correctly, people would stop buying big cars.

That isn't what it means to "price externalities correctly". Pricing them correctly means that the price covers the cost of the externality. That doesn't stop people who are willing and able to pay the price from doing so.

> This is the sort of things governments can be good at if they choose. Otherwise gas/energy prices will eventually do it for us. And it won’t be pretty.

This is exactly the sort of thing you want a market to sort out. Rising energy prices would naturally create the market pressure needed to find alternatives. It's the kind of problem firms would see coming a long way off and prepare for.

> Pricing them correctly means that the price covers the cost of the externality

My argument is that current fuel and energy prices do not cover all externalities. And I'm suggesting that maybe they should.

> This is exactly the sort of thing you want a market to sort out.

Yes and that doesn't work very well when fuel, roads, and the car industry are heavily subsidized in an effort to make car culture more affordable.

Part of the problem is that knowing the true price of relevant externalities is currently difficult or impossible. We'll find out eventually one way or another. Through the price of habitable real estate and lower crop yields if nothing else.

Not only only we not pricing in those externalities, the current regulations are structured in a way that actively incentivizes bigger vehicles, above and beyond consumer preferences:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-ar...

Aren't those negative externalities already factored into things like the cost of fuel and liability insurance?

And registration! I have a large truck for only occasional dirt bike trips and I pay up A LOT of money to the government for it.

That is the point. You are showing you are in a position to impose costs on everyone around you, especially with a Hummer.

People are selfish.

I keep hearing communism is a nice idea but fails in practice.

Well, unchecked capitalism is a nice idea until the world collapses.

Capitalism is well suitable to people at their current level, which is about developing a strong ego with intelligence and clear boundaries. Communism was appropriate in the past, when people had weak notion of self, is not appropriate now, and will be appropriate in the future when people want to give more and take less. "I think my nature was always one that strove to yield itself to the great whole of which it was such a small part - and by yielding itself, to draw back into it the sustenance of life." - a pretty good allegory on the essense of communism done right.

> and will be appropriate in the future when people want to give more and take less

..5000 years later...

> people still suck > lol guys communism will work eventually just trust me bro, it's not the system it's the people that make up the system

Way more than 5000 years. People don't change that quickly.

Lol, touche. I hope for all our sake that you are eventually correct, though I fear we'll be extinct before that's ever the case

Given that all of recorded history has taken place in the last 10500 years, and that time has seen a huge diversity of social structures in civilizations across the globe, I think your pessimism is unfounded.

Yes, people are selfish. People also have a great capacity for cooperation and altruism, given sufficient cause to bind them together.

I rather hope that the impending collapse of the biosphere that sustains all life is just such a cause. Then again, we appear to be setting the world on fire at an ever greater pace.

I too only buy food that reached my town via horseback. Who cares about how useful trucks are when they could kill people?

nobody here is talking about freight vehicles

What are pick-ups used for, then? In my country they're mostly owned by farmers.

Around here they're used to drop kids off at elementary schools.

They're popular in the US:

1) As status symbols (because they're expensive, and because their "truck = freedom" advertising has been very successful) that still read as blue-collar / "red";

and,

2) Explicitly because of their size—they're perceived (pretty accurately) as being far more likely to "win" a crash than a smaller car, and they also put you up high, so you have better visibility. Not sure if the latter actually translates to more safety, but it's certainly perceived to. This is also a big reason SUVs sell well. There may be some related "I like to intimidate other drivers" factor here, too (not my uncharitable guess, as I've heard it seriously expressed by truck owners, and I'm also not saying this is extremely common—but it's common enough that I've encountered it several times). For that last part, see again: status symbol.

Some portion of the population owns trucks for the same reasons people own trucks in other rich countries, but that's not the reason they're unusually popular here. It's largely a form of class & political signaling ("I'm in your tribe, and also not poor") coupled with some tragedy-of-the-commons personal/family safety concerns.

[EDIT] 3) Aspirational purchases and poor cost/benefit analysis. Think: the lettuce you buy then don't eat before it goes bad. "I really want to get into [x activity that is easier with a truck] and I need to buy a vehicle of some kind, so I should get a truck" -> buys truck -> does not actually use truck-specific functionality anywhere near enough to justify purchase vs. use of paid services or rentals.

I use mine to transport tools and building materials.

Definitely depends on where you live. I live on the coast in the south. Tons of people trailer boats. The 'smallest' truck that can tow (actually able to stop) my boat is a Tundra.

Then there's people who own homes in the suburbs. Could I make multiple trips with my car to pick up 2500 pounds of sod for a project I just finished? Sure, I could also pay a lot to have it delivered in a couple weeks. And there's the other things like throwing my surfboard in the back or other 'fun' gear. Then there's trips to the dump, because trash won't pick up certain things.

The reality is, having at least a single truck in the family is useful for anyone not living in a city.

tell me you've never been outside of a city without saying you've never been outside of a city, lmao.

No one is saying pickup trucks are never used to haul large items. They’re saying the vast majority of pickup trucks purchased are not used for that purpose and even when they are it’s a couple of times a year, a situation where renting a truck ought to make a lot more logical sense.

I'll go talk to some farmers and ranchers and get their take on renting a truck for work. I'm betting they'll see the economic sense in that.

While I generally agree with you, I live in a large metropolitan city, and there are just as many trucks being used for work as there are vanity trucks. The work trucks actually tend to the smaller side, think Chevy s10s and the most common working vehicle is actually a cargo van, mostly Ford transit connects. And then there are tons and tons of lifted wranglers and trucks that never see a day of work. It's laughable, as I grew up in a more rural area and never saw that. Excepting of course the redneck coal rollers with hanging nuts and all. But those were not that common. And I don't think I've ever seen a Hummer actually used on a job site.

Why does this talking point get employed every time this conversation takes place? As I said:

> No one is saying pickup trucks are never used to haul large items

Obviously some people use them for purpose. The majority don’t and are purchased as status symbols in suburbia. The fact that farmer do use them does not invalidate that.

I grew up in rural America. Nobody used their Sierra Denali for farm work, unless it was to take horses to a horse show. Most use their personal trucks for recreation or utility... towing the camper to the camp site, or getting some mulch at Lowes. 1.3% of Americans work in Agriculture.

1.3% of americans use their sierra denali for farm work, that's just plain fact.

source: i grew up, and live in, rural america.

Farmer I sometimes do some work for pulls the cattle trailer with his Lincoln Mark LT. It's getting old though, not sure what he'll replace it with but he's on the list for the Cybertruck.

I live in a very rural area with cows on 3 sides. My neighbours have 400 acres of grazing land.

The vehicles that drive down my road are about 30% sedans/crossovers, 30% tractors, and maybe 20% old beater pickup trucks, like your classic 90's Toyota.

But I live somewhere that we don't encourage people to buy gargantuan tanks and use them to take your kids to school.

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