If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose
slate.com
slate.com
And make sure that it affects fuel delivery trucks in the same way that it affects other heavy vehicles.
Anything else would be plainly unfair.
edit: doing a quick fit, it seems to just be quadratic with weight though, while damage goes more like the fourth power as noted in sibling comment.
As for miles driven, AFAIK there's nothing direct non-linear there, just some duty and taxes on the fuel.
[1]: https://www.skatteetaten.no/person/avgifter/bil/importere/hv...
Makes sense given it's an article about regular cars.
I live in a snowy place, and the number of people I see running absolutely bald summer tires in the winter is horrifying.
That said, one doesn't have to have a car to get to work --- for almost 5 years, rather than put miles on my truck I rode a bicycle to work, and in the past I've walked to work at need --- hoping to get back to riding to my new job, just waiting for a connecting road through a development to be finished and the ride will become markedly shorter, facilitating this.
Two wheel motorcycles today as they stand should be outlawed.
Injuries per minute or per hour seems like a more apt unit to compare
Here in Germany regulations are unnecessarily complex and your best option is to get 10-20 year old Velomobiles that can legally be driven as S-Pedelecs (up to 45 km/h) because they were at some point certified for that speed.
But getting a new velomobile, that you can easily drive faster than 45 km/h by muscle power alone, certified to be powered electrically is apparently near impossible (i.e. not financially feasible).
Not even sure where I'd park it, maybe my building's small motorcycle parking lot has some space.
Definitely... The market is too small and everything is built by hand. You can get reasonable used ones for 4000-6000€, but you probably know that.
Otoh you save gasoline which pays for itself after a while (3 years in my case, not counting insurance or maintenance).
> it hardly has more space to bring stuff than a normal bike
It's a bit more and it's safe from the elements. Some 4-wheel models have an actual trunk.
> the rain
Doesn't bother me either, riding bicycles in the rain is surprisingly ok.
> I am not claiming to be rational here
Maybe try one out. I was convinced of the concept when I could easily keep up with my SO who was doing 45 km/h in a e-VM during a test ride.
That said: I don't own a VM either because it never made sense... Either my workplace was too close or too far for a VM to make sense. But I think there is a sweetspot of around 20-40km one way, where a VM is a great alternative to normal bikes and cars.
Unless more regulation like the one discussed in the article are passed to stop the suv trends, I would never even consider riding something like this.
That's the first thing that comes up every time VMs are mentioned. It's definitely not false, but I feelel that some points should be mentioned:
1. Over all VMs are a lot safer than bicycles: 1.1. If a car touches your bicycles handbar you've lost. In a VM the handlebar is inside. 1.2. You ride feet first which increases the length of your "crumble zone" significantly. Watch this and tell me you would have survived in a normal bicycle: https://youtu.be/5aujzL__SZE
2. Huge trucks are not as common in Europe. Everybody here is worried about SUVs getting too big here, but our SUVs are tiny compared to (some) American trucks.
3. Due to the E-Bike boom, cycling infrastructure is becoming a lot better with huge stretches of smooth, paved bicycle lanes along major roads. We are getting there.
4. Some sports cars are only slightly heigher compared to Velomobiles (e.g. Mango: 0.9m vs. Porsche 911 1.2m) and are often painted super bright colors. If a driver overlooks a VM he will probably also overlook a sports car.
(To be fair, I think that there is some "this object does not participate in traffic" recognition happening in the brain that just marks VMs as unimportant. I did a test drive some time ago were we were shouted at because we "drove towards [the other guy] at high velocity" ... while we were literally waiting to pass a parked car. I assume that we just "appeared" for him and his brain decided that therefore we must have been moving at high velocity.)
2. I know but still too big ^^
4. I think width play an important part too, on motorcycle I had cars merge on me as if I was not there multiple times :(; easier to disappear in the blindspot.
(Funny anecdote, I would have expected the reverse with people ignoring VM because they underestimate the speed :).
Other accidents like the one in the video above are surprisingly non-fatal ... iirc the guy in the video was doing ~60km/h when he collided feet-first with the tree ... got up and recorded a youtube video about his accident :-)
There have been and continue to be efforts to get something like this to market. There are a lot of hurdles.
That may unfairly impact people who already cannot afford to live close to where the jobs are.
Once those are separated, providing a tax reduction system for lower incomes would become possible.
I'm curious though; is road damage based on total vehicle weight, or just the weight on each tire? If the latter, I think the formula should reflect that in order to incentivize vehicles to distribute weight across more tires in order to minimize road damage where that makes sense.
I'm also curious about how much wear is caused by vehicles vs other factors, like the weather. I'd guess that probably depends a lot on the local climate in each state.
I should also point out that maintenance costs aren't the only cost associated with road usage; even light cars take up space on the road, creating traffic and thus reducing the utility for other drivers. Any charges should thus include the cost of additional lanes needed to accommodate those vehicles regardless of their weight.
In an ideal world I'd probably base the cost on miles driven, plus an additional charge based on an estimate of additional maintenance costs incurred depending on mileage, vehicle weight, number of tires, and the local climate. But then you also have to take into account the bureaucratic cost of enforcement, and how complicated you can make things before those costs exceed the benefits of accurate distribution of costs to consumers. Definitely a complex issue.
4.5 tons over two axles is approximately 25 times the damage of a sedan with 1 ton of weight on each axle. But that's not the same as a semi truck dealing 625 times as much damage as the sedan, or nearly 25 times as much damage as the Hummer EV. Given it costs over $100,000, I don't see 25x as many Hummer EVs hitting the road than big rigs in any given year.
> Consider a standard sedan with two axles and a total weight of 2 tons. Assuming an even distribution, each of its axles would bear the weight of 1 ton. Now consider a semitruck with eight axles and a weight of 40 tons -- each of its axles would weigh 5 tons. The relative damage done by each axle of the truck can be calculated with the following equation, and comes out to 625 times the damage done by each axel of the sedan.
> Considering that the truck has eight axles and the sedan has two, the relative damage caused by the entire semitruck would be 625 x (8/2) -- 2,500 times that of the sedan.
> “The damage due to cars, for practical purposes, when we are designing pavements, is basically zero. It’s not actually zero, but it’s so much smaller -- orders of magnitude smaller -- that we don’t even bother with them,” said Karim Chatti, a civil engineer from Michigan State University in East Lansing.
Not the same for bridges though:
> In reality, the relationship is more complicated. For instance, adding extra axles increases the total weight of the vehicle, making it more damaging, especially to bridges, where the total weight instead of axle weight is the main concern.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
Isn't road wear non-linear, with heavy vehicles doing disproportionate damage compared to lighter ones?
Ever noticed how the trucker lanes on the highway are the first to get potholes?
The taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize luxury toys. Let the owners pay a fair amount relative to the strain they're adding to the system (and FWIW, I'm saying this as someone who's immediate family members [plural] own Rivians).
* I was surprised to learn the gross weight of a Rivian the other night at dinner while peeking at a relative's car registration documents on the kitchen counter :p
Or is the real measure ground pressure? Apparently semi trucks run 6000lb up front per wheel and 4300lb in the rear. The Rivian runs 1400lb.
With asphalt, which is softer, I imagine the road damage more readily accumulates over time. Whereas the concrete on freeways I guess has an actual sheer strength and either breaks or it doesn’t.
I am neither a mechanical nor civil engineer, so just curious how the wear manifests.
This is correct, and it's why your conclusion is nonsensical.
No one is subsidizing luxury toys. The amount of damage done to roads by an e-Hummer or Rivian is mildly above that of, say, a Camry. Both do hundreds of times less damage than an 18-wheeler. The amount of damage done to a road by a passenger sedan is functionally zero, and for a Rivian or Hummer, it remains essentially zero.
The weight of large electric vehicles is an important issue! It makes a huge difference in cases of, for example, striking a pedestrian. But road damage is not a major issue for electric vehicles.
One caveat would be that a lot of road repair is funded via gas taxes, so road damage per dollar paid towards road repair may be lower for electric vehicles. But if we make heavy vehicles pair "their fair share", the Rivians will pay pennies, and the truckers will all go bankrupt.
I still think the alternative to pay per weight*distance is good - trucks should be last-mile delivery, not the primary source of transportation for goods in North America. Cargo trains are much better in many different dimensions, even more-so if they're electrified (Though, that's an impossibility in this market)
(At least, I think that the argument you’re making is about modern logistics and modern rail freight being surprisingly incompatible. But it’s hard to tell since you haven’t actually provided a rebuttal.)
And when you move the volumes of freight we do, that helps us fulfill our business case, which is "give us your stuff. Here's the paperwork saying we take responsibility. We'll make sure it arrives at point B on time, compliant with customs and all import/export laws, and compliant with all your industry's off-the-wall niche requirements, without you having to do so much as think about it anymore."
This isn't feasible using only rail without multiple governments across the world investing billions or maybe trillions of dollars/Euros in new track. Especially in America, where the rail network has always gotten outcompeted by truck freight for many different reasons. What you're describing is a pie-in-the-sky ideal, not what's necessarily feasible without making freight prices skyrocket due to high rail demand, low capacity, and the probably 25+ years it would take to change this. If not 50-100 years.
> It’s a rule of thumb for comparing the amount of pavement damage caused by vehicles with different weights, in terms of axle loads:
> (W1/W2)^4
> In the equation, W1 is the weight of an axle on vehicle 1, which we would compare to W2, the weight of an axle on vehicle 2.
For W1 of 4 tons on an axle and W2 of 1 ton on an axle, vehicle 1 does 256 times as much damage to pavement as vehicle 2.
OK so take a loaded semi-truck at 40 tons / 80 000 pounds. How much more damage does it do than the 4 tons W1 of your example?
How's the road still even there at all after the semi-truck passed on it?
The answer is: because even the W1 vehicle at 4 tons cannot even dent that road.
Now I'm not saying a 4 tons car is a good thing but honestly 1 ton to 2.5 tons, I don't think it's even possible to measure the tiny damage they do.
But 5 tons is not the standard. The federal axel limit is 20,000 pounds, so a fully loaded truck could be doing the same amount of damage to the road as 10,000 sedans. I doubt this is the average axle weight of all semis on the road, though.
Regulations that say a normal household passenger vehicle can't weigh over X can be made to apply to everyone.
What’s also funny is in many parts of Europe, their idea of a “small” car seems to be very different from ours. I’ve heard people there classify cars like the Honda CRV or the VW ID.4 as “big”.
Instead they are taxing a pretty bad proxy for those actual policy goals.
i.e. this incentivizes companies to reduce weight rather than add safety measures, and to use light materials regardless of if they cause more environmental damage. Hypothetical example: carmakers might use more aluminum & titanium, which may cause lots of harm to produce, rather than iron.
Just tax the thing you don't like: pollution & using resources you want to control distribution of.
Wired has really fallen. It's like they don't understand markets or incentives at all. Also - isn't tesla one of the safest cars on the road per mile? So it's really inane to write a hit piece on their alleged safety without say actually looking at their safety results
and in a democracy, this can't happen because those being taxed have political power to prevent it, or dilute it. Therefore, a proxy gets taxed indirectly, which also dilutes the said tax to more constituents, thus spreading it out thinly enough to not "cause" the ruckus in said group of constituents.
I mean maybe, but TFA is from Slate. Moreover, the article argues in favour of taxing the thing we want less of: weight. Weight means more power required to start, more mass to change direction and stop, more materials required for the larger batteries, and more of a literal impact on pedestrians.
Just... no. That's a luxury we don't currently have. Get as many ICE cars off the road as quickly as you can, then worry about right-sizing by levying taxes based on weight. Why on earth would you give ANY disincentive to people from buying an EV? If someone wants to blow $150k on a hummer EV instead of buying another diesel pickup, great! Anyone claiming it's somehow more dangerous to a pedestrian is just being belligerent - if you get hit by the average 3/4 truck doing 60mph you'll be just as dead as the hummer despite the hummer weighing slightly more.
I think people in the US fail to realize that even the heaviest passenger vehicle does almost nothing to a road in comparison to a single semi-tractor. You can find various studies but even the most conservative put the average OTR truck at 2500X the damage of a passenger vehicle:
https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
Regular re-testing means those driving heavier (read: more dangerous) vehicles would have to maintain competency rather than be punished in proportion to the consequences of their incompetency. The usual moral qualms about revoking licensing would be somewhat side-stepped as well since you could at least knock a bad driver down to the basic class and reduce the damage they're likely to do.
But big is higher drag and higher drag is less mpg and the only way to be allowed less mpg is heavy as per EPA rules.
There are many tradesmen, farmers, etc who would love to buy one of the small trucks that used to be available. They are great for tossing tools into and going to fields, work sites, etc. But trucks with that wheel base now require an efficiency level that isn't feasible. Many have resorted to using UTVs in their place where it makes sense, but those can't completely fill the gap since they aren't street legal.
Regulations always have intended consequences.
Only if you use coal/gas plants to generate your electricity. Mostly, there are better options. Many EV owners also have solar panels, for example. Or alternatively they'll use charging stations that are mostly powered by renewables (because that's cheaper for those who operate those commercially). The bottom line is that generating electricity indeed generates some emissions sometimes. And generally a lot less than burning petrol/diesel do.
> Gigantic batteries consume larger amounts of critical minerals like graphite and lithium that are in short supply worldwide.
Lithium shortages are mostly on the refining side; there's plenty of lithium on this planet. And for cheaper cars there's also sodium ion. Likewise, we're not exactly running out of carbon. Scaling up graphite and lithium production is a bit of a logistical challenge. We're much better at producing epic amounts of oil. The problem with that of course is that we need to stop doing that. Vastly less oil in exchange for a little bit extra graphite. Maybe we can even turn (some) oil into graphite.
This reads to me like a puff piece that is designed to lazily (without much critical thinking or journalistic expertise) rehash some cliches and half truths about EVs. We can guess at motivation but probably some advertising money can be traced back to the usual suspects in the burning dead dinosaur juice sector.
Are cars needlessly big and heavy in the US. Yes. No doubt about. That started years ago, long before there were EVs. And the trend continues. It's not because batteries are heavy but because people thing they need big heavy cars. It's perfectly doable to make a small, lightweight EV. There are some sports car conversions to electric that weigh less than the original without loss of range and with a lot better performance.
Or even PHEVs which typically have 1/10th the batteries and 1/10th the range of an EV, yet reduce fuel usage by 90% since most people's daily driving is under 50 kilometres or 30 miles.
The problem is moreso speed, not mass, when discussing pedestrian fatalities.
Better yet, protect pedestrians from getting hit in the first place with better street design for more walkable cities. There are tons of examples of protected bike lanes, pedestrian islands, and more frequent crosswalks with stiffer penalties for blowing through them, regardless of what the vehicle is.
Keeping constant acceleration, compare hummer against corolla. Hummer is going to squash pedestrians.
1. The Hummer EV is not going to do a ton of volume. Compared to other vehicles on the road, esp commercial, it's a drop in the bucket. "in 2022, GMC delivered 854 Hummer EV Pickups. Currently, the cumulative number is 857."
2. People do not consider the weight of the vehicle when purchasing. No one cares. And it's not something we should need to consider. The Rivian (a 'quarter ton' truck) weighs 7,000 lbs, a good 2,000 lbs more than my RAM 1500 (a 'half ton' truck). This is counter intuitive and not obvious to most buyers.
3. Batteries are the problem, but battery tech is truly in its infancy. They will continue to get lighter and more efficient.
Why would we want to penalize the transition to EV with more taxes and fees on owners? Ignore the fact that Hummer owners "can afford it" - what about other EVs? We want more adoption of EVs. We need to figure out another strategy. Manufacturers should carry the burden here because they are the ones producing these heavy vehicles. That is a slippery slope though because again it will stifle innovation.
This will be a messy transition but progress is progress.
Of course they don’t care. Because it’s only others being hurt. Which is why we need to push the problem back to the source. We shouldn’t allow deadly machines to be operated around urban spaces. If you need one out on the farm, that’s fine. But it’s not appropriate to take in to the city.
You might not care about putting lives over appearances. But others do.
> Our aim is to make it impossible to own a huge polluting 4x4 in the world’s urban areas. To do that, we need people everywhere deflating 4x4 tyres, week-in, week-out.
absolutely unhinged activities.
They aren't safe everywhere, and they create some strong traffic degradation.
The pedestrian crash problem has more to do with our terrible alternative transportation traffic mixing. If the US took a more serious approach for bike lanes and pedestrian accessible infrastructure, the injury rate would decrease. Heavy vehicles is not a new problem. Look at gross vehicle weights of cars and light trucks before 1980.
But yeah, growing taxes on that proportion would make sense.
How about just not taxing everything and everyone into oblivion? Reduce all the wasteful government spending, and remove most of the government.
Just look up total inflation over the past several decades and it becomes very clear why so many are struggling just to make ends meet. And again, so many of the commenters here think giving the gov more power is the answer.
1) Government taxation model.
Tax payer X makes $100. The government takes $40 (excluding for now the additional taxation on every purchase, sale, savings, etc). The government spends $20 of that just to fund itself. The government spends the other $20 on whatever. X has $60, and things he cares about MIGHT have been given a fraction of that $20.
2) Other.
Tax payer X makes $100. He spends $40 on whatever the hell he wants to support or fund. He still has $60. Something he actually cares about, for example a local hospital, has $40.
No matter what other factors you add to complicate matters, the existence of any middle men add cost and reduce efficiency.
Let’s say we do away with government and regulating companies then, in the interests of efficiency and liberty. What’s the state of play a few years into that experiment, do you reckon?
I consider that fine evidence that we over-regulate in some areas. I reckon there’s also a lot of evidence that we under-regulate in others. By contrast, I don’t think it’s evidence for a general proposition that any reduction in regulation is a priori a good thing - despite what the Murdoch press would say.
Perhaps a cartel like situation such as the Hanseatic League.
Would we need any coordination at all, you reckon? After a time, would people say, “hey, these hospitals shouldn’t have to go cap-in-hand every month looking for funds, we should set something up to make sure they get what they need”, or no coordination at all?
And what about “businesses” that inherently aren’t very profitable? Let’s say there are two schools in town - one profitable and one not. The profitable one is profitable because it optimises for profits. The unprofitable one optimises for things that are harder to measure - student experience, community, etc. Would people choose to help fund the unprofitable one out of their own pockets when there was another option that’s profitable? What would be the consequences of that over time?
And finally, how about bad actors - companies that produce a dangerous product that kills or harms people, or that negligently fail to maintain a nuclear power station? Or just really big, heavy cars that tear up roads and the planet and kill people more often than the alternatives. How would we handle such actors, or would we just not handle them - let the free market sort it out?
Should hospitals need to beg? No. Just require payment for service. Maybe it'll cost you $100,000 to get a broken leg fixed. But if you weren't paying that in taxes for the past 3 years, you've got that and more spare.
Competition: That's how it works. If the school is optimised for profits, wouldn't that mean the parents think it does the best job? Otherwise they can just start their own school (without government interference), or individuallly home school.
I do think one of the few things government should do is set human and environmental safety requirements, such as not putting radium in kids toys. Alternatively, if parents find radium in kids toys, they should find the people responsible and deal with them appropriately.
Everyone’s answer to anything they don’t like is “tax it moar!!” but it’s just throwing money away. I would be more OK with a mandatory donation to like the Girl Scouts rather than sending even more money to the government to just be wasted.
And clearly taxes that fund roads are soon going to need to be completely revised, since they can't all come from gas anymore.
Whatever the gas tax is replaced/supplemented with, I would be surprised if it doesn't take into account vehicle weight, since the whole point is to fund road maintenance. And remember that road tolls roads already take weight/wheels into account, so there's plenty of precedent.
Heck, NYC is implementing congestion taxes now, if we want to talk about the possibility of new taxes. Nothing "DOA" about it.
There are federal taxes, which generally will be levied uniformly across the country.
There are state, county, and municipal taxes, of which the rates will all vary as well as whether any specific tax is levied at all (eg: Oregon has no sales tax).
Certain taxes will be levied by multiple levels of government, such as gasoline tax which is levied by both federal and state taxes.
Most countries' taxes are far simpler because their structures of governance are simpler, so it's worth keeping in mind that mindset shouldn't be applied to the US.
Any time someone suggests a tax that kind of, sort of, might be, correlated with energy efficiency, it is violating what should be the prime directive of climate change - every gram of CO2 emitted should be treated equally.
Doing studies on the environmental impact of Hummer EVs is missing the forest for the trees.
The minute you establish any category of energy usage that is more pure, more sanctified per unit mass of CO2 output, the invisible hand of the market will shift as much as possible into that loophole, until it is so obscene it can't be ignored. Hummer EVs are just one example.
Focusing on weight is just starting a new cycle of missing the point. My motorcycle is really light, so does that mean it's the most efficient method of transport? Are semi-trailers used because truckers like wasting money?
The counter argument remains: "we must do something...and this is something". I don't need to see that again, but if you have the urge - do you really believe it? Can we achieve any goal through lying about the fundamental criterion of success, by micromanaging out of ignorance?
Everything done to fight climate change is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic to avoid thinking about the insurmountable political task of raising fuel taxes enough to make a difference.
If you have given up, then there is nothing left but social justice and mitigation for poor countries affected by climate change. So own it. Be clear about it.