Tell me about it. My spouse's vehicle was down for the past two months, and they've been driving an F350 Super Duty. It was >$175 to fill up.
The climate is breaking down and people are cruising around in trucks like that? I don’t know…
Because we’re able to afford multiple vehicles, it spends most of its life sitting in my parents’ driveway. They drive it once a month or so to avoid the issues that come with a vehicle not being used at all, but otherwise it makes little sense to drive it when both I and my parents have more efficient vehicle for day-to-day stuff.
Honestly, I understand what you’re getting at, but it’s a matter of perspective. Both I and my dad keep a current Class A CDL so we can drive that truck with a loaded trailer. When we need it, the alternative is hiring a semi - and it’s significantly both less expensive and less polluting per mile than a semi tractor.
This should have been widespread 15 years ago (which would have been 10 years after the introduction of the Prius).
But lets not pretend there aren't millions of trucks driven by suburbanites mesmerized by big RAM huge grill you aren't a pussy if you drive a truck advertising.
They might have cattle trucks, they might have tractors, but having a "big truck" isn't really required.
Normally when I want to take one of our tractors somewhere… I pull it with the aforementioned truck.
Having driven tractors, everything from small Renaults to large JD in tight and some larger trucks on narrow roads in EU/CH, the two aren't Comparable, one actually has utility and is needed in keeping people fed the other is just some eyesore on which to project your insecurities onto ~80% of the time.
These monstrosity should just have immense gas guzzler/taxes attached to them like in Switzerland and the Nordic countries and allow for reductions if its proven to have actual use and isn't just something that gets used to 'go to the walmart' as most are in the US.
Funny enough, gas price alone isn't deterring anyone, Hawaii has always vied with CA in as price and they are everywhere--perhaps just as many as I saw in Texas per capita.
If they think it’s somehow less money to buy a $80K truck than to rent a truck once a year, cool.
But to say it should somehow not be allowed on the road is absurd.
For pollution, I am not aware of anything currently, but it'd be reasonable to treat that similarly (probably as a tax that funds treatment of pollution-caused health issues rather than insurance, since the harms are more distributed).
> If they have an accident and kill someone, should that be punished more harshly than regular since they chose to pick a more dangerous form of transport?
If the vehicle is not street legal, yes. If the vehicle is street legal, and the driver was insured, and otherwise not negligent, then no. Perhaps the vehicle should't be street legal, and in that case the laws should be changed moving forward (but penalties should not be applied retroactively).
Incidentally, in the US, the Department of Transportation seems better than usual for government agencies in actually doing a cost-benefit analysis where they show their work with actual numbers: see https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/2016...
By this logic, every vehicle would have a different punishment associated with it.
B) the wear on the road is a fourth order funtion of weight. It would be fantastic if taxes were also proportional.
The only reason you'd get hammered for that question is the implicit assumption that nobody who owns an HD truck needs it.
You might see me drive to the store once in a while in my F250. So you'd probably wonder why I needed such a massive gas guzzling grocery getter? Well, because that day my wife took the Bolt and I had no other option. People fall for this fallacy all the time, assuming that if you see someone underutilizing their truck, they must always be underutilizing it.
But I only drive mine a thousand miles a year, and except for rare occasions only when a travel tailer is attached behind it. The rest of the time we drive my wife's Bolt, and I'll wager that my average fuel consumption is lower than most people who only have an economy car.
Buy a smaller car?
Walk?
So your solution to the incremental pollution caused by driving “too much vehicle”… is to mine, refine, and manufacture a second vehicle?
Or just walking to get groceries.
Ah, a city dweller. Let me put it this way: in the part of the country where your food comes from, walking to the store would take hours one way along two lane roads with no sidewalks.
Nope.
When you rent a car, it has to sit in the rental car parking lot. They have to build the facility. An employee has to drive there to do all your paperwork and rent it to you. The rental gets fully cleaned and inspected after a day of use by another set of employees. They all have to eat to work and a lot of energy is used to produce that food. All of this and more is encapsulated in the price.
LOL, no. It can sit in my garage getting used every couple weeks for the next 10 years. That's what I do with trucks. They are utility vehicles.
Smaller than a Bolt? The HD truck is my tow pig. And please don't suggest renting one as an alternative, that is a non-starter. I'll just assume you're unfamiliar with the mechanics of towing an RV.
F350 are rare in Europe, which does not mean that they (or similar vehicles) are not available, but they are also not as practical to use as in the US.
Good context here!
Our truck has a listed towing capacity of 12,500# - 5,670 kg.
My dad and I are driving ~90mi tomorrow each way to pick up an inline bale trailer he just bought. We checked hay prices in that area, and they're cheaper than what we can buy locally - enough cheaper that we bought eight bales to bring back with us. Each bale is ~1,200# (+/- ~200#), for a combined load weight of 9,600#. The trailer weighs 2,700#, so we'll be towing ~12,300#. The truck itself is another ~7,000#, and by the time you figure in fuel and occupants, we'll have a GCWR of right at 20,000#.
In short, tomorrow I'll be driving that truck and responsible for TEN TONS going down the road.
The BMW X3 would have to make four trips hauling two bales each: 2,400 kg = 5,290#; the trailer weighs 2,700#, two bales weigh 2,400#, leaving only 190# of excess capacity. Even then, there's no way I'd be comfortable driving an X3 with that much weigh, that distance - and that's not even considering that the trailer is a gooseneck.
I think of the truck as ~1/4 of a semi tractor. We can haul most things ourselves, more cheaply and with less environmental impact than hiring a professional hauler.
I could walk, but that would take a nice chunk of the afternoon for multiple trips.
With that set up a situation can arise where the one efficient car is in use while the other driver needs to be somewhere. It is completely irrational to expect them to maintain a 3rd vehicle for this rare case.
"5-10%" works out to once every 1-2 weeks. That seems like a pretty good reason to have such a truck, considering that if you actually needed it it would be a huge hassle to rent one. I haven't done the math on this, but I imagine that if you used it even once every 3-4 weeks you'd come out ahead on time/money.
Never-mind that if they were using the vehicle (sedan, pickup or otherwise) right up to the limit of it's capacity the majority of the time many here would be hand wringing about how they really should be using something with more spare capacity. This is fundamentally a societal expectations problem. People expect you to have more vehicle than you need. If you are maxing out what you have regularly you are "doing it wrong".
While true, when you need them, there is no substitute. So the answer is to have two vehicles, which may not be economically viable.
Also, everybody has really strong opinions on the legitimacy of owning a truck until they need help moving.
If I'm moving, I can rent a truck from Home Depot which has a considerably larger bed for well under one percent of the extra cost of buying a super-sized truck. If I move less frequently than every day for a year, I'm still ahead by tens of thousands of dollars even before you consider how much extra I'd be paying to burn more fuel, which costs more per gallon, for every trip where I'm not doing something which needs that much towing capacity. You can pay a moving company to move your stuff multiple times a year, save tens of thousands of dollars, and not even have to pack your stuff.
This is definitely true, but as a former truck owner, I can tell you that's not how it works at all.
"Hey, man, I really need some help moving, can you bring your truck over, I'll have pizza and beer!"
Not to mention the rent-a-truck is pretty new. Yes, UHaul and the others exist, but they don't compete with "oh yeah, I know a guy with a truck."
The problem with the pizza and beer approach is that it only works for short moves - if you have anything like a substantial drive it’s a lot easier to rent a U-Haul so you can make one trip rather than multiplying time in traffic by half a dozen trips.
It’s often difficult to sell a base-model truck, and you won’t get much for it.
Ours is a 2001 F350 Lariat Super Duty. Even at two decades old, we could sell it in hours for $25k+.
Ideally there'd be better systems for outright collective ownership, that would make sense & have some safeguards against potentially less than good co-owners. Alas most collective ownership propositions come with a tragedy of the commons, an inability to assess who are the good & bad players & ways for the good to hold.
If yoi compare an average M3 owner who Flys for work or vacation every 4 months to me, who has a Diesel f250 that is driven only to tow a travel trailer RV which we use every few months for work/pleasure travel, along with the relative carbon usage for say a hotel and all its laundry vs. staying in my RV I believe it's a wash.
Same practical purpose as all the 4Runners that HNers with 2-kid households own, fulfilling societal expectations for amount of excess vehicle that is required at that point on the socio-economic ladder.