Weight-based motor vehicle tax
skatteetaten.no
skatteetaten.no
Things are better in road environments where most drivers are in smaller vehicles. I love toodling around in a sports car in Europe. It's deeply painful in the US, especially in locales where the typical vehicle is a lifted truck that has a bumper height higher than the top of my head when in my car. There's way too many vehicles on American roadways that are literally /all/ negative from a societal perspective, and nearly all bad from a personal perspective, that people bought due to perverse incentives impacting manufacturing and pricing.
My options for a small electric car in the US are the Chevy Volt (retiring at the end of this year) and the Nissan leaf (retiring at the end of next year?). I guess there's also the mini Cooper, but it's electric version only comes in a 2 door model that is impractical if you have children.
Edit: sorry, I missed the small and EV part.
"There are /many/ options for AWD vehicles without it being a crossover, but none of them are EVs."
There are optional for AWD EVs that are sedans (not sub compact though, but also not crossovers). Stuff like Benz EQE, EQS, etc. Audi makes some too.
I used to be an Audi fanboy for the real mechanical quattro AWD system of my late '90s sedan. Front, rear, and center differentials, always connected. But now, for fleet efficiency, basically everyone is going to some kind of clutch-based, disconnecting AWD on demand. So at this point, I feel like these hybrid/EV style drive axles are no different and quite likely to improve costs and reliability, since drive electronics should outlast clutch packs.
Motorcycles don’t have that problem. Neither did cars back before seatbelts; a bit of shattered pre-safety glass old school windshield never hurt anyone.
I'd wager around 70% of Europeans live in the surrounds of a big city and countryside so bigger cars would definitely sell. They started selling the Raptor here and it sells pretty good. Not sure who came up with the idea that European car needs = small econobox.
In fact there is a new chinese make that only sell SUVs and they are the #1 most sold here in Spain.
As a fan of light compact trucks, the kind they don't sell here in the U.S. anymore, my understanding is that a badly-written function in the CAFE standard calculations is one of the primary reasons I can't buy a truck that's smaller than my bedroom. The function calculates acceptable mileage based on vehicle footprint, and was nominally intended to encourage better fuel efficiency, but had the perverse effect of making trucks larger. Even then, it's legal to sell smaller trucks, but manufacturers have to pay a fine that apparently ruins the profit margin for them. And then there's the infamous chicken tax, and so on.
Hyundai Kona EV
Kia Niro EV
These two have been around for a few years and are on the second gen. You can get a low mileage first gen for under $25k, which means you may get an additional $4k federal tax credit. One issue to watch out for is the cover for the gear reduction unit should be replaced with a magnetic one and cleaned periodically, to avoid motor damage.
Volvo EX30 - out next year, going to be under $35k
There's also the generation of used compliance EVs like the VW eGolf and Hyundai Ioniq hatch.
All are sold as SUVs but they're really compact hatchbacks with some SUV like styling.
Even though I don't have a lot of interest in car culture, I'm a big fan of the Smoking Tire Podcast, and the host -- who has his own Porches, Lamborghinis, etc. -- has said multiple times that he thinks most people who drive trucks would be better off in a station wagon, and most people who drive SUVs would be better off in a sedan (edit: he actually said minivan, not sedan). (His daily driver around LA is a scooter.)
Obviously there are exceptions, but it makes sense to commute in a commuter car.
We have 7 in our family so need a minivan at the least. I don't think they make station wagons with 7 seats anymore. We live in a climate with long winters so we need at least one AWD/4WD vehicle so at least some of us can get out. And we tow a trailer so need the capacity. Having one vehicle that does it all is more cost-effective for us.
At this moment though, we have a 12 passenger commuter van that is horrible in the snow and can barely pull the trailer, and a compact hatchback as our all-weather vehicle. That means we can't all go somewhere in inclement weather so we're in the market for the aformentioned SUV.
I don't think SUVs should cease to exist, but we should stop subsidizing them with broken CAFE rules that incentivize manufacturers to make SUVs/trucks/crossovers to the exception of cars, and price them accordingly. Most Americans don't have 7 people in their family, so the most common vehicle on the road shouldn't be designed to accommodate an exceptional circumstance at many other costs to society.
I recently replaced my aging Prius with a Rav4, and the versatility improvement is so dramatic. We went from renting/borrowing trucks and vans about every month to not needing one yet. The extra few inches in every direction multiplies together to be rather significant. Plus, it has a roof rack.
I'll hang onto my sports cars, but my daily driver is forever going to be a crossover. This thing beats every hatchback, liftback, sedan, and wagon I've ever owned in every utility metric.
I remember when a neighbor bought a new washer/dryer and gave their old set away to whoever would haul it away. A couple came to get it in one of those huge late-model bro-dozer pickups. This was a ~$60K vehicle. All I could think is that there's NO WAY that couple was ever going to score enough free stuff to make up what they spent on that vehicle.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/rental/load-n-go-truck-rental/31...
The main reason people like driving crossovers is that it raises their seating and viewing height relative to other vehicles on the road because we're in one of the dumbest arms races ever with vehicle height, where anybody who buys a sensible car loses.
It didn't exactly wow anyone with how cool it was, but on move-in day I had a lot more friends than I remembered from the year before (we had taken the rear bench seat out and left it at home, so I had tons of cargo space).
That's all the internet is now.
The Rav4 is basically the kind of car most people should get instead of a lot of what's popular today. The Rav4 is a hatchback on tall suspension. What car enthusiasts want is the hatchback without the lift because tall cars don't handle as well and to top it off, are usally less efficient.
Road wear is a cubic function of weight and our roads, I think it's reasonable to ask why cars have gotten so big and who's going to pay for the increase in damage done to our roads?
So, somehow, the largest, newest vehicle in my fleet weighs the same as my 10 year old sub-compact 2+2 and barely more than a two-seater that's a foot shorter in length and like 2 feet shorter in height. And a modern Mustang is like 500-900lbs heavier than mine.
Crossovers aren't the cause of fat cars. Mustang isn't unusual in the fact that it's a heavy coupe, there are lots of examples of coupes that are somehow much heavier than crossovers. For example, a new Forester is 3528lbs but a C8 Corvette is 3647.
I was half joking because there is no clear definition of what it is.
The name do not translate, most SUV aren't sporty nor utilitary. At least they are vehicles.
Wheel size? you said it, all are growing bigger and bigger yeat after year regardless of category.
off-road capability? nope
ground clearance? nope, a tesla model Y or that new Kia sit closer to the ground than many non SUV.
hatchback shape? nope, there are now SUV coupe, concertibles, and some will rank pickup trucks in the SUV category.
how high are the driver/passenger seated? nope again, some vans are higher.
I think what now caracterize a SUV isn't even a combination of these variables but more a tag from the brands marketing team and a general perception based on the car looking vaguely more boxy and bulbeous than other models of the same brand.
There’s no coherent formula for what an SUV/crossover is, but ride height is my rule of thumb. But then I ask myself “where does the Jeep Wrangler fit in?” - afaic, it’s an SUV.
- it has comparably as large wheels as most euro SUVs
- it looks bulky and square
- it sits comparatively as high from the ground than most euros SUV.
- it is bigger and probably heavier than most euros SUV. [1]
And many manufacturers have introduced the concept of SUV coupe like Mercedes or BMW.
Given these caracteristics, it could just be called an SUV in the euro market. The only reason it is not is because it was introduced to play on the nostalgy of a pony car of the 60's.
[1] I think what of the most sold car in the SUV category in europe is the Peugeot 2008 which is just a bulkier shaped 208 with larger wheels. The 208 is considered a small/compact car. The 2008 is barely bigger and a mustang dwarfs it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Mustang_(seventh_generati...
My point here is not to debate if the Mustang is a SUV, I don't personnally consider it one. My point here is to show that there is no clear/undisputable definition of what a SUV is appart from manufacturers labelling it as one and vague perception by the public.
Because for each definition you can give you will find an example of a car labeled SUV not adhering strictly to this definition and counter examples of cars not labeled SUV adhering at least partially to some of the definition.
For that edge we have the term "crossover" (for example, the Ford Edge)
Sports cars in the category of coupe explicitly lack the "U" in "SUV" - that this is referred to as vague or debatable in this thread is a bit maddening, so I will just end with, lol.
When the crossover was in the shop, I was given a Mustang rental because the shop was out of normal loaner cars. I had no real experience with them, and was shocked that the Mustang felt larger and much harder to park than my crossover despite the compromised interior. So it is interesting to me that you quote such a high curb weight too.
I don't quite understand it. The "density" of cars seems to vary and yet they all have similar mass. It really does make me wonder how much it is engineering necessity versus some kind of weird regulatory mess where the engineers are targeting certain weight classes in spite of very different packaging.
And they are getting more aerodynamic for the gas mileage requirements regulations….
It probably makes sense to at least remove the implicit subsidies of them though (they should never have been allowed separate emissions treatment aimed at commercial vehicles), if not something like the article suggests.
I feel like this has to be Poe's Law in action.
Larger vehicles are actually not safer, either for the occupants or for others on the road, counter-intuitively they are less safe. So, in actuality you've just outed yourself as a selfish a-hole who chooses the most anti-social option possible without actually looking at any of the data to make an informed decision. If you actually cared about your family the about the safest vehicle you can buy is a sedan, and you'd invest the money saved in keeping good quality tires on the car, keeping up with maintenance, and taking a performance driving class.
The existence of your unnecessary behemoth lumbering down the road is an attack on my right to a safer road, as well my right to live on an Earth that doesn't require me to live in a hermetically sealed bubble with filtered water and air to get away from the excessive pollution caused by your behemoth (not the least of which is the microplastics it spews everywhere).
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/driver-death-rates-remain-h...
1: https://pavementinteractive.org/reference-desk/design/design...
Trucks are used when rail isn't practical or doesn't exist.
If you want to do a quick test yourself , next time you are on a highway look at the places the trucks are from (obviously they can be registered elsewhere but it gives you an idea).
If you import to a port it usually travels by rail after (cause ports have great rail links) but if you are going business to business in the US it’s often by truck
It is very well optimized and efficient, but you're not going to order something with standard UPS or Fedex style shipping and see it delivered by rail. Whereas in days past the railroad covered a significant amount of mail and parcel shipping due to higher service speeds and frequencies.
I do wonder if there could be room for better logistics and an expansion of rail to cover faster (ie < 2 weeks) shipping scenarios, but this would require investing in the rail and signaling infrastructure and opening and infrastructure to competing service providers.
My package from China has arrived by rail, it took about 3 whleeks, and Aliexpress tracking showed it going through kazahstan and Russia
This does result in usually less tonnage transported by rail, but service that is more flexible to faster shipping.
For a lot of things, consumers are like "What do you mean I won't get it for 2+ weeks?" CANCEL.
I haven't done the math myself, but I suspect we are all subsidizing interstate trucking (and perhaps air freight) compared to its actual infrastructure and emissions costs. This does lower prices of many essential goods, but also tilts things in favor of large corporations who can ship things cheaply all over the country (ie Walmart, Amazon).
In general, I suspect that if most of us went back in time 25-30 years we'd be pretty shocked about just how much friction there was to everything. It's not a linear or absolute improvement--and some of the downsides are significant. (Cities you often wouldn't have wanted to live in back then are really expensive today.) But you also spent a lot of time and effort doing things that are essentially effortless today.
There also used to be these computer shows (Ken Gordon?) at local event centers where vendors would have all sorts of parts and CDs for sale. But mostly you bought your big ad-filled computer magazine and called a number. By late 90s, online ordering was coming in. Local "computer stores" (or camera stores or...) were frankly all showing their age by the late 80s or so.
There can be value to local merchants. But it's harder to make the case for local distributors of mainstream manufactured equipment.
This isn't actually true, huge amounts of small parcel ground shipping goes by rail. You're correct that it's slower, but not by a huge amount.
Costs grow enormously to shrink delivery times from around a week cross-country to only a few days, by far the best option is moving the fulfillment point closer to the destination. Amazon, Target, Walmart, Uline are some companies that do 1-2 day shipping cheaply almost anywhere by ground.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=plot+United+States+rail...
How would you detach a single railroad car from the center of a train and move it to the town's sideline?
Pickup is more difficult though.
Why would electric cars be any worse than combustion cars for these?
The overwhelming problem with giant electric SUVs is the opportunity cost. Given limited capacity for battery making, and considering that we are using the last bit of our emissions budget to make them, it is obviously better to make them as small as possible. Slapping a 180kWh battery pack in a Rivian is ridiculous. With the same materials you could make 500 electric bicycles.
But - at least around me - EV chargers seem to be mandated (for at least for some of the spots) when any large or image-conscious organization builds or renovates parking infrastructure. For the purpose at hand, it doesn't matter whether the mandate is legal, or just "or what will they say about us on social media???".
We don't think of nor call it "parking" at the gas pump, but we do at a charging station. There's a reason that's the case.
Many people will have a dedicated charging space at home (taking up only epsilon extra space for the charger), but all the Tesla super-charger, Chargepoints, EVGo, ElectrifyAmerica, etc en route chargers will require more parking space per EV than the equivalent petrol station per ICE.
In Berkeley, California the share of EVs on the road is only about 5% today.
At a 150kW charger that would be 30 hours of charging, or an average 5 minutes a day.
One charger would thus serve 200 cars in the US, 400 in the EU.
In the UK 2-in-3 cars have private parking space and thus potential for home charging. I expect the US to be a fair higher number as there's more space, but lets stay that figure.
That would make one charger serve 600 cars in the US, 1200 in the EU.
The largest chargers I've seen are half a parking space for two spaces.
Thus to serve 280 million cars you need to provide charging for 100 million, which at 600:1 car:charger ratio would be 160,000 chargers.
There are about 115,000 gas sations in the US. 2 chargers per gas station, using a total of 2.5 parking spaces, would be enough.
Thus moving to 100% EV would save massive amounts of space across the country.
EVs eliminate that middle parking spot most of the time. And, tbh, even on road trips, gas cars spend a significant amount of time stopped. They just spend less of that stopped time getting fuel.
Fast chargers are basically only needed along highways, where they take the place of gas stations. You only need those for long-distance driving, but most driving is short-distance.
On the other hand, a lot of slow/midspeed chargers are basically just regular destination parking spots equipped with a charger. They take up zero additional space. As EVs become more and more common, we'll see an increasing number of parking spots being equipped with chargers. Because this allows EVs to charge where they are parked anyways this means you can essentially get rid of gas stations inside cities - which ends up saving space.
Right now we just happen to be in a bit of an awkward in-between phase. When the majority of cars are EVs, the ecosystem will change to fit them better.
How much bigger and heavier is an electric SUV vs a regular one? How does a ModelY compare to a Mazda CX-5 for instance?
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/tesla-model-y-2021-...
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/mazda-cx-5-2012-suv... https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/tesla-model-y-2021-...
Smaller, more efficient vehicles with smaller batteries are definitely better and should be incentivized.
If you want to compare them yourself, don't forget to include all of the externalities from drilling, transporting, and refining petroleum before it reaches the pump. Tailpipe vs tailpipe certainly doesn't tell the whole story.
EVs are happening. It's a huge win for the environment and all the environmental orgs that pushed for it. Stop trying to rewrite this revolutionary change as a hidden nefarious L. You're just making yourself sad and the youth jaded.
It’s like people will not be satisfied until we eliminate cars and all other modern inventions.
EVs are, at best, stagnation. At worst they simply go even further to hide the enormous external costs of everyone using giant, heavy wheelchairs to move around anywhere.
A trivial example is total number of miles driven. If we end up driving twice as much then that's your CO2 gains gone right there. Considering that's exactly what's happened since 1983 does that seem unlikely?
Do EVs do anything to reverse this trend? Do they do anything for pedestrian safety? Do they do anything about the need for parking and huge roads? Do they do anything about noise and particulate pollution of tyres? Do they do anything about road rage? I could go on and on.
Focussing solely on one single metric is extremely foolish, but of course it's exactly what the car manufacturers want because they've found a solution for that one metric.
Yes, it seems unlikely that we would double our number of miles driven because this is a factor of time spent driving, population, and speed. There's no indication that speed limits will increase or that people are interested in longer commutes, and population growth is stagnating.
> Do EVs do anything to reverse this trend? Do they do anything for pedestrian safety? Do they do anything about the need for parking and huge roads? Do they do anything about noise and particulate pollution of tyres? Do they do anything about road rage? I could go on and on.
Climate change is a much more significant problem than these. I can live with wide roads and parking lots; it's much harder to live with our global breadbaskets succumbing to increasingly severe droughts and the geopolitical destabilization that entails.
And there's no way we're going to pivot away from ICE cars to public transit quickly enough to meet climate goals even if there was the political will to do so (and there isn't, because lots of people get a lot of value out of cars, and even places with lots of public transit options are seeing a rise in car ownership and usage). There's just no way it's going to happen over the next century.
Moreover, there's tons we could do about pedestrian safety, tire pollution, road noise, etc without eliminating cars, but we lack the political will even to do these things so there's certainly no way we're going to abolish cars and transition to public transit / cycling lifestyles.
> Focussing solely on one single metric is extremely foolish
It's foolish to treat all metrics as equally important. You can't live without food; you can live with car noise.
> of course it's exactly what the car manufacturers want because they've found a solution for that one metric
Yeah, car manufacturers love paying Tesla so they can keep making ICE cars /s. Cars are wildly popular in the west (car adoption is increasing across the board, even among the Dutch); the auto industry doesn't need to do a psyop to convince people to drive--it's just much more convenient than the alternatives even where the alternatives are very well developed/supported.
The only correct bit here is that they do require more CO2 to manufacture, but this is made up for by the dramatically reduced operating emissions in the first few thousand miles or so of driving (depending on the source of the energy used to charge it). Further, the grid is getting greener all the time, so operating emissions and the manufacturing emissions are both falling quickly while the operating emissions of fossil fuels remains extremely high (literally and figuratively).
Compared to efficient cars, this crossover point is as late as 50,000km. It does not pay off as rapidly as you are implying. Something like a Kia Niro with a normal-sized battery starts with an embodied CO2 deficit of ~5t. Something absurd like a Rivian is 20t in the hole from the jump and will never be CO2-positive except when compared to something equally wasteful like an ICE Hummer.
I find it a little hard to believe that e.g. lithium extraction is fundamentally worse than oil extraction and processing.
It's one possible way of getting full market penetration.
The other way is to subsidise EV's heavily until the market takes off. That's what was done here in Norway, now 80% of new cars sold are pure battery EVs [1]. The best selling model of car in Norway now is the Tesla Model Y.
The subsidies are gradually being phased out.
Their curb weights in lbs are:
Model Y: 4,555
SQ5: 4,288
M40i: 4,392
GLC43: 4,233
So, yes, a model Y is heavier, but only by about 250 lbs. At a 4th power that could be an extra 30% damage compared to an ICE, but even the lightest SUV here is doing something like 3.5x the damage compared to a Honda Civic. So, if you think road damage is a valid concern, electric cars aren't particularly special - SUVs in general should be a bigger worry.
this is crazy to consider when you know that parents with three children in car seats cannot find a sedan that can hold three car seats, and wagons disappeared to be replaced by SUVs because of... EPA emissions standards.
So it could be argued that the emission standards are the cause of this extra wear, which is additionally ironic when you consider asphalt is an oil product
I think that's only half-true. In the US, people weren't buying many wagons when they were available. For the majority of people who don't use their SUVs off road, this seems irrational. I've heard a number of people say that the higher seating position makes them feel safer, though that feeling is not reality-based.
It is based in reality, albeit a kind of self fulfilling prophecy.
As more and more taller cars (large SUVs and pickup trucks) appear on the road the more dangerous it is for smaller cars. The crumple zones on a compact or sedan don't do much good when the front and rear bumpers of SUVs and trucks clear the hoods of smaller cars, effectively putting the bumper at eye level.
I expected that to be illegal, but it seems that it is not in the US. A quick look suggests that for typical unmodified SUVs the issue affects repair costs more than occupant injuries. Homebuilt monster trucks are, of course another issue.
[0] The original "sport-utility vehicles" were built for off-road usage and had 4WD but that hasn't been true of almost anything marketed as an SUV for decades.
This is exactly why Subarus are massively popular in Alaska.
Because that's a kind of regulatory fiction, right there.
So let's cut the crap!
For the majority of the so-called SUV market the "s" in SUV is a long lost myth, and if we're being honest then it's just Utility-Vehicle (UV). But you say they sit higher off the road, perhaps that's technically correct, but actually false when compared to off-road vehicles. But we've already acknowledged SUV's are not really off road vehicles, but rather normal passenger vehicles with normal road tires, normal suspensions, and lower center's of gravity. The Model-y is really just a slightly taller/longer version of the model-3. But how much higher, well if you look at the ground clearance, then it's only ~1 inches higher off the ground. But overall the vehicle is taller, will a larger overhead canopy, and the seats are places over booster blocks to raise the eye-level higher. It's really an illusion, the Model-y is really just a sedan, that technically meets the minimum requirements to say it's an SUV. You can safely consider the modern SUV as the equivalence of old-school station-wagons.
If it waddles like a duck... quacks like a duck... you might be dealling with ducks my dude.
It doesn't magically make back row wider, so you can't fit comfortably 3 taller adults regardless of seat arrangements, but 3 child seats are easy. It then has exactly same space as usual 3-seaters like Seat Alhambra, its VW equivalent etc. but you drive much better, more powerful and also safer car (ie frontal crumple zones).
If you think about 3 solid wide seats for 3 adults, such a car wouldn't fit in regular parking spot in most EU/Switzerland and struggled on narrower roads, yeah we normally don't do that kind of stuff here since roads and parking spaces are shared among everybody.
BMW series 5, Audi A6 etc are sedans. These are strongly declining too; SUVs make more about 40% of sales of new vehicles in Europe.
"Multimac" is the first brand that came up on Google: https://thetravelhack.com/blog/multimac-car-seat-review/
Regarding car seats, they are just THAT much bigger these days. My family had 3 car seats in a rabbit, in the early 80s.
This is a categorically untrue myth. Lots of car seats are stupidly wide thrones, but there is no reason you have to buy those ridiculous things. Diono makes a full line of car seats which fit 3-across in any midsize car. They're even cheaper than a lot of seats from the biggest brands, starting under $200. [1]
People are buying SUVs because they want them and because we've made it attractive to do so:
* Externalize excess road wear costs onto all taxpayers due to gas tax
* Overall trends contributed to pathetic selection of good sedans
* Finally, Reasonable fears that since "everyone else" is driving 3-ton monstrosities, perhaps they won't be safe in a car 5 feet shorter than the truck that hits them.
It won't be easy to reverse any of this, since the only lever is to replace gas tax with a fair road tax like this Norway one -- the rest of them are functions of the trend. Sadly, anything that raises taxes on a majority of Americans (those who drive big SUV things) would be political suicide.
[1] https://store.diono.com/radian-3r/ (No affiliation with them, though I've purchased 4 of these so far personally.)
This is true for electric or hybrid, but in general, heavier ICE vehicles will have lower economy which means they buy more fuel and pay more fuel taxes. In many states trucks cost more to register too. So it's probably pretty close to proportional.
Historically gas was a reasonable proxy for road use, but that is going to be increasingly untrue. It's reasonable to see EVs as a tax dodge against road use taxation that can primarily be taken advantage of by the well-off, but in AZ it's $100-$200 a year.
Either give EVs a 1¢/mile use tax or give everyone the tax and remove the gas tax, or drop them both and become more efficient ;-).
Registration in Michigan for a Model 3 is over $500 a year and used to be closer to $700.
If you assume 12,000 miles a year that's only $720 total since the 3's release at 1 cent a mile.
Nobody's forcing anybody to buy the giant ones, though, so a few good choices existing is enough that "car seats" isn't a reason on its own to buy an SUV.
It just seems super wasteful to me the number of vehicle-miles that are driven in the suburbs by enormous and medium-sized ("Tall Hatchback Camry") SUVs with a single driver carrying a couple bags of groceries. Most of the time, most commuters and even people with up to 2 small children ought to be perfectly fine driving a 4-door compact, which is substantially more fuel-efficient and lighter than even the midsize SUVs. But the incentives don't exist to make people consider that. They figure, "Oh well, I'll spend $25 extra on gas each month but it's worth it so that I can transport lumber once a year."
https://diono.com/diono-journal/the-original-and-the-best-3-... solves the three car seat problem even in a smallish sedan.
The Kia Carnival seats 11 in Asia …
Commercial vehicles still have some variation because the purchaser is not the driver.
That's the first time I hear this argument. I thought that SUVs replaced them because car makers found that they can justify a bigger price on a bigger, heavier vehicles. Intuitively an SUV should emit more (heavier vehicle, more wind resistance).
I know that John Deere used EPA emissions standards as a smoke screen for them of their unwilling to allow third-party repairs on their tractors. Perhaps they are using the same maneuver here?
SUVs and the like exploit a loophole in various standards like fuel efficiency requirements because they are not "cars" but "Light trucks" and therefore those standards don't apply to them; which makes them cheaper to design and build for automotive companies.
The "Light trucks" category was supposed to be used for light commercial vehicles, not personal vehicles but then the law of unintended consequences had a love-child with profit seeking corporations and their linguistic games.
Literally the only reason SUVs and trucks became popular is because the automotive manufacturers could make more money doing it that way and convinced the consumers to buy them. NotJustBikes did a good intro video on the subject.
* https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-wants-to-close-the-suv-lo...
I agree about wagons though. Subaru still makes them. The Lexus CT200h is pretty much a wagon. It would be nice to see more "crossovers" that took more from the sedan side, however, none of the modern ones have jump seats except (maybe ironically) the Tesla Model 3.
We've graduated to four kids which eliminates the vast majority of vehicles from our set of options. Kia, Hyundai, Toyota, and GM all make ≥6 passenger vehicles that are not-minivans, but the options are very limited and put you into the SUV category.
Yeah, not to mention, the SUVs he's comparing are especially large.
Comparing passenger cars illustrates the point as the model S weighs almost the same as the Model Y.
Mercedes E-class weighs 3,700 lbs compared to a model S which..still weighs 4500 lbs.
And no, I would not compare a model S to an s-class.
Unless they're dead-set on an EV, they're much more likely cross-shopping the Model Y ($48K base MSRP) against a luxury ($57K base, $62K base, $67K base) SUV than an economy ($27K base MSRP) SUV. If they are dead-set on an EV, they might cross-shop against the Ariya ($43K base, but also 4323 lbs).
Edit: 7klbs is also the magical number where the tax write-off goes up by ~$10k. So there is incentive to keep it above that weight. Public pays multiple times: reduced tax revenue, higher energy usage/emissions and higher road deg. Complete insanity!
If you look into people's buying choices I think EVs actually do make it worse quite a bit. For instance we are going to soon trade our minivan (1.7t, 3,700lb) to an ID.Buzz (2.5t, 5,000lb). And even officially that car is the replacement for the car we currently have. If you go from a VW Golf (1.3t, 2,800lb) to an ID.3 (1.9t, 4.100lb) you can see that it's not helped by picking a smaller EV.
I do agree with you that large SUVs are the problem but EV SUVs are really worrying. Rivian's trucks are over 3 tons and the new Hummer EV is nearly 5 tons!
Those fuel trucks also have to operate on regular streets more than most semi trucks do, which likely compounds the benefit.
A typical medium sized car weighs about 1 600 kg and has two axles, so an axle weight of 800 kg. The artic has six axles and weighs 41 000 kg, 6 833 kg per axle. The artic has over 5 000 times the effect on the road.
Do your road repair money not come from fuel tax on hundreds of liters of diesel per fill?
I can see this becoming an issue for EV's but that can be fixed by taxing mileage and weight. Though the mileage part is tricky as its going to be a cat and mouse game of fraud and privacy concern.
It's not a privacy concern. The mileage is already recorded as part of the periodic safety test, annually in the UK, every two years in Norway (and the rest of EFTA I think).
> Do your road repair money not come from fuel tax on hundreds of liters of diesel per fill?
No that goes into the general treasury funds, as far as I know. It's about 0.60 GBP per litre in the UK. Typical fuel economy gives about 3 km/l so a tax of 0.20 GBP per km.
UK HGVs travel about 25 x 10^9 km per year so the income is about 5 x 10^9 GBP/year. The UK spends over 11 x 10^9 GBP per year on roads, mostly maintenance, more than double the income from diesel fuel duty.
Rates for each state are available through their respective DMVs. Max-weight rated class-8 trucks (overweight is handled by by-instance permit, not registration) are 80,000lbs, and they are not cheap anywhere that I'm aware of.
So.. you're almost always going to stop at a "CAT scale" and get a "weight ticket." You're going to hold onto that ticket because if you do get stopped at a state checkpoint, and they show your weight differently than the scale ticket, the scale company will cover the cost of your ticket if their scale was in error.
Most companies will either make this a policy or will _very_ strongly encourage their drivers to always get a scale ticket.
Yes, semis would have much higher taxes under that scheme. We also have to acknowledge that would be a largely regressive tax given that's they way most basic goods are transported and the cost would be passed on to consumers equally, most of which are less than wealthy.
Edit: why disagree?
Also, the point of these specific types of regressive taxes is to change behaviour ... e.g. back to trains from cross state/country trucking
Usually you want progressive taxation - where the burden falls on those with more money. Regressive taxation doesn't mean changing behavior back, but rather where the burden of the tax falls.
One potential easy fix is to zero the federal tax on gas and make up the difference in diesel tax: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=10&t=10
Then mandate that vehicles over X weight can't use gasoline unless they have a special exemption. Not ideal, since the revenue still only vaguely goes towards the highway system and doesn't pay for the whole thing, but hugely improved.
The exemption thing is possibly an issue but I don't think it would price out new diesel light vehicles (and IMO, that possibility is just... unimportant) if you were careful about removing the tax on pumps that aren't accessible to heavy vehicles. I believe some states do similar things already, but most of them instead have some weird reimbursement process.
So if you add more axles or more wheels or make them wider all these things can reduce the ground pressure.
A very easy way to compare between vehicles is to check the PSI that you fill the tire.
Trucks can fill up the 90 psi in some cases while cars are closer to 35.
https://archive.org/details/TheHandbookOfHighwayEngineering/...
- Land Value Tax - Carbon Tax - Space and weight tax on personal vehicles
Of course any of those mean challenging entrenched interests so are deeply unpopular. Hell, even environmentalists hate the carbon tax even though it's THE most effective climate policy.
As well as removing the obviously terrible carveouts (light duty truck carveouts to start). An electric F-150 is about the worst personal vehicle imaginable for road wear. We need to encourage people to only use a vehicle of a size they actually need.
Land value tax: you move to a cheap place, some time later its value increases and now you have to pay more tax, why?
Tax on personal vehicles: it was EPA mandates that led to the current huge truck situation in the US, so maybe remove those instead of forcing people to pay even more for worse vehicles.
This also has the effect that being a landlord is disincentivized, and property prices have a downward pressure which allows more people to become home owners.
Homeowners already get crazy tax breaks that our society bears the cost of. This would just be an even bigger shift to funding government services on the backs of renters rather than homeowners, as any increase in taxes that "landlords" are assessed is passed on to renters.
That does not, however, seem to be a real justification for giving a check to a person a few towns away who does not own any property and who didn’t improve our neighborhood. What’s the justification in your model for giving him a cut?
There is an opportunity cost for society from every piece of land we cannot use for something new. That's reflected by the value of the land. If the value to the owner is much lower than the value to someone else, we aren't using the land efficiently.
It's also unearned income. It's ideal to tax unearned income because you don't create negative incentive for desired activities. It's in essence a tax that comes at no cost to society.
A lot of human activities don't use that much energy in the grand scheme of things. Playing board games, walking around a neighborhood, going to concerts or shows at the theater, these are all things that use very little energy when compared to heavy manufacturing, transportation, and most agriculture. Since most humans will bear the costs of climate change as it begins to destroy our past investments, I think it's fairly reasonable to fix that damage based on how much carbon activities generate.
> now you have to pay more tax
I mean I buy a cheap stock and it's value goes up, why should I have to pay tax on that too!? The value of the land has gone up because it has more amenities and benefits as well. If you feel you are not benefiting from the increased investment around your land, then you should sell it so it can be put to better use.
> it was EPA mandates
Correction: it was the exemptions from EPA mandates that created the huge truck situation. The fix would be to remove the exemptions for "light trucks"
This is the key point! There is an opportunity cost for society from every piece of land we cannot use for something new. That's reflected by the value of the land. If the value to the owner is much lower than the value to someone else, we aren't using the land efficiently.
It's also unearned income. It's ideal to tax unearned income because you don't create negative incentive for desired activities. It's in essence a tax that comes at no cost to society.
This is already true for most implementations of property tax (at least in the US). You get reassessed and then pay tax based on the new value.
The group that has tried hardest to mitigate probably is California with prop 13, and even that can only limit property tax increases to 2% per year. When we study that we see that it can always happen just because inflation is a background force in play. And then also, look at all the wonky side effects that take place when you try to prevent this from happening.
The idea behind LVT is basically that the most morally acceptable way for the government to raise money is by owning all of society's land and renting it out at full value to citizens. There are many reasons for this, can be read here https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr... but the answer to your question is "because the land belongs to the people and you're just renting it from them, so you have to pay more as the value increases"
CAFE should be fixed but that's not enough
This is already true for rent.
Social engineering is generally bad. We don't need to do this, because people should decide for themselves what they need.
And 46% already means that it's not the norm to not own a car.
Ran across this Youtube Channel the other day. "Not Just Bikes"
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A
This guy is an Urban Planner I think. Makes a pretty compelling case for things that make Urban areas more livable.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...
Fwiw, I'm very much pro car-last infrastructure.
If it weren't for this incredibly massive car subsidy, we'd have a much more balanced transportation system today.
People's choices affect others. Heavy vehicles wears more on tires and road surfaces, adding particles to the environment which cause thousands of deaths each year.
"Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins."
Every successful, decent civilization is a balance between limiting personal rights where they impede on the enjoyment, safety, and security of others.
And extraordinarily few people are deciding anything for themselves. The epidemic of monster pickup ownership isn't some careful evaluation, but is decades of extremely successful marketing.
So insurance company shouldn't raise your premiums if you are a bad driver and crash your car every month?
There are like 10 private actors trying to socially engineer me. Among them are car drivers that act in an agressive manner when they see a bicycle on the road, they want to discourage cyclist from using the road and do it very effectively.
That's the difference between social engineering (policies designed to produce an outcome) and market forces (policies reacting to changing environments).
Social engineering is a layer on top of market forces that rarely works as intended because people aren't very good at predicting the behavior/reaction of markets.
The idea that you can reduce all of society to market forces is preposterous.
If you take you argument about 'social engineering' to it's logical conclusion, it would mean that we should not stop people from starting open pit fires in parks and causing wildfires, we should mandate vaccines, chlorinate water, have food safety standards and other idiosyncratic outcomes.
Good thing I didn't say that then.
> If you take you argument about 'social engineering' to it's logical conclusion,
Logical conclusion or comical extreme?
Marketing is social engineering the US plenty; you need a bigger truck/suv so you feel high up and safe -- at least this is what the worrisome folks think.
Since you take a stance against social engineering, would you agree to completely defund the road transport network, given that it is acting as a massive social engineering operation in favor of cars?
That's not remotely true. The Sierra Club and the NRDC are both broadly supportive of carbon taxes, for example.
I don't believe most people appreciate the changes we (99.999%[1]) need to be committing to, indefinitely, to actually do something to reverse our impact on the planet.
Carbon tax isn't a solution. Feel free to come up to Canada and see how well it's working.
Our iceberg lettuce is up to 7$/ea except for the 10% we get from California. The other ~90% is from predominantly Ontario green houses, all of which are being hammered by the Federal carbon taxes(Provincial are already carved out).
[1] made up
On the topic of vehicle weight based taxes, I strongly agree. Family size to passenger count(sum of all family owned vehicles of all kinds) being another good one to target.
> Our iceberg lettuce is up to 7$/ea except for the 10% we get from California. The other ~90% is from predominantly Ontario green houses, all of which are being hammered by the Federal carbon taxes(Provincial are already carved out).
To be fair, this is the doing of the Ford government. Ontario had a cap-and-trade program under Kathleen Wynne (however bad she may be), which the Ford government scrapped for no apparent reason. By law, the federal government had to step in and implement a carbon tax, which Ford knew in advance. This increase is purely due to his government.
There are also other things that create massive carbon emissions. Cement is the most prominent I know of by adding 8% of global carbon emissions (https://psci.princeton.edu/tips/2020/11/3/cement-and-concret...)
It does, though. We seem to have lost sight of the sustainability dimension of our planet. Cows can fart all day long and the carbon/methane cycles will recapture it, sustainably. In contrast, we cannot pull oil out of the ground in any sustainable way, since it was all created 100 million years ago in a one-time geological event that is unlikely to ever occur again in the history of Earth
Most popular carbon tax proposals are revenue neutral. Whatever the government collects in carbon taxes would be redistributed to everyone as a check.
You're correct that this will be painful though, especially for regular people. A lot of people believe that just because it's revenue neutral it won't be painful. Every tax causes a deadweight loss, regardless of how that money is spent. Climate change may, in fact, be a bigger deadweight loss, but the problem is that people don't perceive it as such because even if a carbon tax prevents a hurricane, nobody would ever know. Also, the benefits of the carbon tax would be distributed for everyone in the world, but the costs would be concentrated only on citizens of countries with a carbon tax.
Then there is interest. Money today is better than money tomorrow and certainly better than money in a year. This is especially true for the poor. Then there's what happens when you give an average poor person a check (This isn't an insult. It's perfectly understandable that a person being beat down by life would be interested in spending money on something or someone instead of food.)
Our healthcare costs also need to be considered. The solution for people to handle inflation caused partially by the carbon tax is to eat less expensive food. This means cutting out fresh fruit and veggies, meats, fish, and other nutrient dense food.
Carbon tax is solving nothing at an extraordinary cost. We still have people driving to the corner store, tossing out two full ass garbage bags every week with recycling bins mismatched and full of food crusted paper, unrecyclable materials, food itself, and much more.
Other problems exist too. Think about the average IQ in North America. It's reported in some places as 93-95. Many people simply are not capable of doing this without significant help.
Discussion of climate change on HN is quite the experience. Suggestions outside of the approved methods get downvote love. While having the view that a tax will solve anything is applauded. We will get precisely nowhere on climate change because every damn person thinks it will cost them nothing.
Nobody(ish) will do anything before they are told to either. Anything unpopular will never be brought up as a rule.
Put more simply: We're living in our mess and will do so until the mess falls over and we get stuck underneath without a soul to call for help.
--edit-- I don't use garbage collection. I don't recycle, I reduce and reuse. I don't drive.
Also fun was that this remained full price during the year that my state suspended its gas tax for economic relief due to high gas prices.
Weight and mileage based taxation absolutely makes sense, since road damage increases with the 4th power of axle load. But matching those taxes to damage caused means heavy trucks will pay the vast majority of tax, since they do the vast majority of damage. This may be unpopular with Amazon.
That gives 200 USD -> 183 € -> 508 liter -> 134 gallon.
My fairly outdated small but somewhat sporty car with high consumption (9l/100km rounded up) would go 5600 kms from that. Here EVs have to pay no excise and no parking fees and no yearly engine-power based taxes for their cars, while ICEs must, based on age, environmental category and engine power...
Compared to that you still pay some taxes, still that amount is negligible to the taxes some pay for ordinary ICE cars.
A gas BMW 3 series actually has a very similar curb weight to a Tesla Model 3, around 4,000lb.
At 30mpg, $200 worth of gas tax would buy 425gal of gas and take me ~12,700mi. I usually driver under 8,000mi per year.
It's definitely not crazy, but strange that it is costing more than our gas tax.
You don't need to get perfect readings from everyone. If you tax 99% of people, that's fine.
Ah yes, the old have the police collect more information on you idea. What could go wrong?
If those people are from out of state, the tax revenue would go to their home state instead of the state they created the road wear and tear on.
Adding an odometer only inspection requirement to jurisdictions that don’t currently have an inspection wouldn’t be terribly onerous. You could make a device that plugs into ODBII and reads the odometer and VIN and reports it to the state, it would take less than a minute of labor per reading. Combine that with some policies that encourage oil and lube shops to get the device and provide the reading at no extra cost when you’re doing an oil change, and most people wouldn’t see any increased costs or inconvenience.
Taxing by mass seems much simpler.
If someone has a car registered in Luxembourg and drives mainly around France, Germany, Belgium, it would be difficult to define where the tax should go
I've already commented elsewhere about this, but I find it odd that as soon as EVs gain popularity, suddenly people care about the weight of cars. A Ford F-250 peaks at 7,660 lbs. and those have been around forever. I'm not saying it's wrong to consider weight, but I am saying this all smacks of vague EV hate.
> You're gonna have to replace gas tax
Texas is doing this just by increasing the price to register an EV.
Because it's the "best" option. EVs don't use gas; so, a gas tax won't apply. The other option, other than weight, that usually gets mentioned is mileage. In order to measure mileage, though, some sort of tamper-proof counter needs to be installed and periodically read, something most people find wold be too intrusive. The weight is easy to record when the car is registered.
Why should we tax them, again?
Because whatever the reason, we should have taxed gas cars to death yesterday. For a start, any mitigation effort against the impact of ICE's emissions on climate will make all countries bankrupt pretty quick.
> Texas is doing this just by increasing the price to register an EV.
Not just Texas: a lot of states that have weight- or value-based registration fees, and thus are already charging EV owners more (because EVs both cost more & weigh more than traditional vehicles). In California, the registration fee on the $20k price difference is about the same as the gas tax on typical milage.
And I agree that this smacks of vague anti-EV sentiment. Where were the gas tax concerns about plug-in Prius drivers?
Changing the tax structure because of one car model with limited popularity isnt worth it. As the fraction of electric cars on the road increases the need to adjust taxes increases.
Where was the concern with weight then? Or is your argument that the low efficiency of those vehicles compensated (through increased fuel consumption and this higher taxes) for their weight?
Sounds like we're on the same page!
"Zero engine emissions?... but muh brake dust! they're too heavy! battery fires! cobalt mines! fuck cars, even EVs!"
Yeah, it'd be nice to see more smaller lighter EVs particularly in urban areas, including bikes+scooters, maybe mini-cars like a modernized Sinclair C5 even. But the reality is that we need large vans and trucks to deliver goods and services, and great big heavy vehicles will always be a major hazard to small light ones, and it's near-impossible to segregate them in existing towns+cities due to lack of space.
Unfortunately, I don't want to buy a Tesla for other reasons, but in the end that may be what I end up getting because there are effectively no other real options.
It's absurdly stupid to buy an EV that is a brick on wheels.
The Kia EV6 is a crossover...
Kia/Hyundai seem to be making some of the better "normal" EVs (not luxury vehicles), but have other issues. Unfortunately they're all crossovers.
Those brands know how to make solid well balanced cars, good quality interior and exterior. Since we talk about cca Tesla equivalents, price points should not be shocking (they still are to me tbh).
A crossover is effectively trying to replace the minivan segment, because it can't actually do any of the things an SUV can do effectively, like towing. Minivans are actually better than crossovers in pretty much every way that matters, except for their CAFE classification.
My perfect vehicle would be a small AWD electric hatchback w/ sport suspension. A compact AWD electric sedan w/ sport suspension would be a close second. A bloated POS with a high center of gravity is pretty much everything that I loathe in the world.
Diesel is a bit dubious too. CO2 emissions are far lower for them.
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/03/1077392791/a-satellite-finds-...
Disclosure: I work for a company working on detecting these leaks. https://carbonmapper.org
Where I live (ireland), taxes on diesel are lower to the extent that it's cheaper than petrol. (done some time in the 80's, I think. To reduce fuel imports)
Since 2006 car tax is entirely based on CO2 output, previously it was engine displacement. Meaning EVs have €0 car tax. (you can tell, because you're required to display the tax-disc in the window and it says how much it cost on it.)
(our family's diesel VW certainly was)
- Vehicle Value based
- Vehicle class based (I believe this is what the US uses?)
- Engine size based (this was the old one in my home country, basically being used as a proxy for emissions)
- Emissions based (this is the current one in my country. Full electric cars are taxed at the lowest rate)
I guess vehicle weight accounts for a compartmentalized externality, that of wear on the roads, but I think most of Europe has or is moving to emissions based to focus on larger externalities, at least until petrol cars are a novelty, then they might look at wear on the rounds as a factor to consider again.
The US allows each of the states/ territories to tax and regulate vehicles separately. In other words, what I might pay in Colorado has nothing to do with what I might pay in New York for the same vehicle.
Up to 3 axles, indeed the tax is LOWER if the same weight is over 3 axles rather than 2. Well done, makes sense.
But then, at the 4 axles table, suddenly the prices for weights between 12000 and 20999 kg are all higher than their correspondents in the 2- and 3- axle tables.
What are they try to accomplish here? "Don't put a 4+ axle vehicle on the road unless you will carry at least 21 tons with it?"
Apparently, those policies are saving the planet. Can we just do that scheme for every car on the road? Will it scale?
A regressive aspect is that this also means that public transportation pay more taxes, and poor people rely more on public transportation. Also, trucks pay more taxes and trucks are used to transport food, so this has an impact on food prices, affecting the poor disproportionately. Likewise diesel vehicles pay more tax, and public transportation & commercial transport usually runs on diesel (and will thus make this stuff more expensive)
So I think that it makes sense for taxes to separate personal vehicles from the rest.
In all these cases, the operating costs of the vehicles are distributed across a number of payers, quite unlike personal vehicles.
Yeah but it affects more the poor, collectively.
> The fourth power law (also known as the fourth power rule) states that the greater the axle load of a vehicle, the stress on the road caused by the motor vehicle increases in proportion to the fourth power of the axle load.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
tl;dr vehicles with higher axle loading do significantly more damage to roads, scaling with the 4th power.
Meaning the vast majority of standard wear and tear on our roads is going to be from heavy trucks, not passenger cars. It makes sense to scale usage taxes in a similar way.
Not sure how it works for electric cars, come to think of it.
Of course, higher taxes on the heaviest vehicles would just mean higher prices on consumer goods, so this mostly ends up as a subsidy to consumption.
I would also argue that if you want to make a comparison that you just find the, I am sure, studies that have been conducted by every department of transportation in the country to estimate the fair cost-of-use to vehicle type. The comment here should either find some references or be removed as snark-bait.
"Sure, in the sense that O(n) is the same as O(n^4)"...
But road wear simply is not proportional to gas use. If you double a vehicle's weight, its gas usage will almost certainly less than double (this depends somewhat on driving patterns, but air resistance is generally a significant factor in mileage), while the road wear it causes will increase by roughly a factor of 8. A flat tax on gas can't possibly internalize the costs of road wear, though it could internalize the costs of CO2 emissions, which are actually proportional to use.
The problem becomes convincing anyone there's political credit to be gained by implementing/overhauling those systems. I suspect it will take as-long-as-it-possibly-can for those and bureaucratic reasons (contracts/pilots/implementation of those systems).
A really naive scheme[1] would be scales at the pump that affect gas price. Weight-class based pricing would also work. It's possible to enforce with the surveillance state apparatus and microparticle-tagged fuel products.
1. Without taking into account the incentives nor human nature
Your intuition is correct. It's one of the few times we get to use the fourth power so it is aptly named The Fourth Power Law[1].
There is a road here in Atlanta that gets torn up by 18 wheelers, yet the highway can handle it just fine.
Like some kind of "higher-risk vehicle" thing, either in the form of a tax or different speed-limits or a different class of fines and penalties for traffic violations.
And by that logic you're using we don't need fines for speeding, just let the insurance company know.
...and by 'they', what you really are saying is the end consumer will pay 100% of the tax, which has been passed on to them from the trucking company.
Just about any argument that goes "Let me keep benefitting from the commons without paying full price because poor people" is sus.
They already do.
But of course it's absurd how big cars have become. If you're a 50kg woman why do you need a 2.7ton SUV to go from stop light to stop light? Get a grip people
The battery in an electric semi increases the weight of the vehicle while empty, and if this tax merely taxes empty vehicle weight it will disproportionately hit electric semis - effectively making them infeasible to further develop.
I wonder how many miles the average semi (short vs long haul too) deadheads around as a % of their total miles between jobs etc, with an empty trailer or no trailer. those are still miles and if the tractor is just way heavy even while it's unloaded then it might still be doing more road damage.
I'm totally in favor of doing something but tbh I'd rather do biodiesel for actual trucking trucking in the last mile, and just work on vastly increasing the throughput and latency of our train network for long-haul. Including both building more rail, and improving throughput on the current rail where possible. Our rail system has gone back to being embarrassing, they've effectively nullified the amtrak priority mandate, etc. like I applaud the concept of the words "precision scheduled railroad" but "lol big trains cheaper" ain't it.
I know that's a pipedream but at least we can do biodiesel B99/B90 for current diesel trucks - it's generally a drop-in replacement (B90 for low-temp). Bonus, it neutralizes most of the soot from the older lower-compression diesels - there's no sulfur in it at all.
long-haul semis just occupy an uncomfortable spot between bulk transport and last-mile service, and those tend towards big and small optimums, respectively. and I get the point of wanting to develop the technology but personally I see electric semis as being useful for having fuckloads of torque/power etc than ever being the optimum long-haul design. any technology they can deploy will be better off on a rail (free guidance!), potentially electrified rail/catenary, with like 16 of them stuck onto some railcar. which we could call a micro-engine.
or even "distributed" per-wheel systems like electric cars, but on every single car/etc (would have to be split-grade the whole way) so effectively every car is a self-locomotive. like if you legitimately can get them away from grade and run them really fast, automatically, with reasonable following and self-deceleration profiles, such that they at least buffer up, catch/couple each other, and brake together etc why couldn't you run them at inhumanly close spacings? they'll bunch up and guide each other to contact IOT style (they have known keys to each other), or at least if they collide they'll hopefully auto-couple (physically) and brake together etc.
This is going to be a nuclear-hot take but I don't think it really matters that (off-grade!) microtrains can absolutely 100% safely stop themselves. If 0.1% of loads of lumber or xboxes get smashed but you can move 4x the capacity per rail, oh well, that's a matter for insurance. You can make sure you don't end up with east palestine where the poison railcars get piled into by oil cars etc. And there's already absolutely nothing any train conductor beyond an airport tram can stop if you are on the rails. Light rail operator still needs far longer than you'd think to stop the train. When you see that subway/el train coming that operator needs you to exit that car pronto, because he absolutely cannot do anything to stop it other than nail the brakes (if at speed, there is a maximum rate they can apply without derailing the train), and they tend to have nightmares afterwards. Yup, disconcerting number of train engineers will have fatal accidents in their lives, almost entirely out of their control.
if you can precision-schedule cars then you can at least make sure that hazmat is transported in a secure pattern. there is a ton more cement and wheat and sheet steel and i-beams moved around than the super-poison, and you can pad the superpoison shipments with inert stuff (or even neutralizing/absorbing agents for bad stuff). even oil spills, if they happen, are whatevs at 1-car scales really. if you limit the scale of the clamity to 1 or 2 microtrains/4-8 cars and guarantee everything else can safely brake to a halt, it's probably statistically safer in general and gets way more throughput per rail.
self-driving semis needing giant batteries and big torquey engines is just such an insanely self-invented problem, there is a guidance rail built right into it right there, many times with power source too! Even if you want to go dual-mode and drive onto roads for last-mile, use the rail to go cross-country! etc
but I also think we just probably need way more rail, having like one line for certain major routes may not be enough. the federal interstate system wasn't built by just modernizing highways, it was a whole bunch more capacity. I know there's not the political will for it and electric semis are probably what we can get, but they're not really a good technological solution.
icebreakers are an interesting case of electrification (technically hybrid diesel-electric transmission) being used for their extreme power. for when you want a ship to just fling itself forward onto the ice, then vigorously pump water between its waddle tanks to roll and crunch the ice with the weight of the ship. electric go brrr.
https://www.history.uscg.mil/Browse-by-Topic/Assets/Water/Al...
http://www.mightymac.org/cgcmackinaw.htm (love the pic with the Speer, that is a Saultmax bulk cargo freighter, what a fucking fatass)
(same reasons the russians did nuclear icebreakers too really!)
bulldozers probably would be another good one, and conventional bulldozers are maintenance nightmares so if you can actually make a good, reliable bulldozer with low operating/maintenance costs they'd probably love that. Even if they had a runtime/chargetime cycle for generators/etc I bet (or run them direct-cord with big trailerbed generators).
Get 10-15 years out of it before need more fuel.
My comment is more about the price of goods transportation causing price increases than whatever that link is about. I have never heard about that program. So if I wrote get ready to pay $30 for the price of eggs instead of $12 would I get someone discussing the Egg Price Displacement Program?
Those poor enough to receive WIC and EBT payments would have this tax largely subsidized, so it won’t impact them, and the wealthy would barely notice.
Just another general fund tax.
And if I can't opt out, how is this not tyranny?
In all seriousness, do you really think that any government system on earth could work if people got to opt out of laws they don’t like?
edit: sorry, to be more constructive let me add https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt... as a small explanation for what is all wrong with 'roads' in america. Car infrastructure is insanely expensive and we have a ton of terrible status quos in the US that add to it.
Yet here we are, on the internet (itself a huge energy consumer), debating climate change with a bunch of SV elites that likely all own overseas garments, participate in fast fashion, collect iphones, or bitcoin (all very energy intensive items).
For many of these things, they're a form of status signalling. There's far more status in wearing organic, natural fiber fabrics, which are hand-made in an interesting but remote part of the world vs fast fashion from a mall made by child labor, similarly crypto scams have pretty much dirtied the look of bitcoin and others and most people have stopped involving themselves (or at least no longer talk about it).