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Comment by yrro | Hacker News Reader

Car size should be regulated and a maximum should be enforced. Pavement parking (and other antisocial forms of parking) should also be banned.

In the UK, local authorities are in charge of parking enforcement. In Oxford they largely don't bother: I see vehicles parked on yellow lines every day. I can't fathom why, this is an opportunity to raise revenue!

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An article shared recently said that road damage is weight^4. Make a car tax based on vehicle weight and the market takes care of itself. For the right classes (such as wheelchair accessible) it can be a tax write-off.

UK car tax is currently based on vehicle type- but it's based on CO2 emissions https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-rate-tables

typically this is related to weight/size - except in the case of electric vehicles which are heavier than their ICE counterparts

This (and tax subsidies) is the reason behind the proliferation of large plug-in-hybrid SUVs - being a plug-in hybrid lowers CO2 emissions (at least on paper), but in practice many/most owners will never actually charge the car, so the CO2 emissions will be even more unrealistic than they already are.

This doesn’t address needlessly large EVs that damage roads and are a threat to pedestrians and bicyclists. These larger EVs are also inefficient use of battery cells than they’d be in smaller vehicles. Would love to see more Mini/Smart car EVs

A Tesla is heavier than a petrol Range Rover. All EVs are heavy.

The weight difference of comparable ICE cars and EVs is sometimes surprisingly small when you look at the variant of the EV model with the smaller battery.

For example, the BMW X3 is 1670 kg. The Tesla Model Y (SR RWD) is 1778 kg.

That's only for big cars.

The smallest Tesla is a D-segment car, cars around 4.7m: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-segment

There are 3 different car categories smaller than the smallest Tesla.

For smaller cars, EVs are a mess, they're between 25 and 40% heavier than equivalent ICEs, that's a humongous difference.

Well, they did say this:

> Would love to see more Mini/Smart car EVs

Teslas are big cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-segment, they're not Minis. The smallest Tesla is 4.7m long.

There are 3 car categories smaller than the smaller Tesla.

But yeah, EVs are heavy.

The larger an EV is the less efficient it is because it has to carry the unloaded battery with it, and it needs more battery for the same function. I don't have the number but I would bet that the energy need is a square of the vehicle weight. It's the same problem rockets have where they have to expend fuel just to carry fuel.

> Would love to see more Mini/Smart car EVs

The Renault Zoe was a best seller in some countries because it's a great city car. Sadly Renault have cut back production due to diminishing margins due to supply chain issues (official version), which is a shame. There's also the Fiat 500 EV.

It's sad that MINI/Smart are no longer small.

Also, there was an article recently that (at least in US) the CO2 emission norms are not absolute but relative to car size; to the absurd point that to fit into the norms, it's easier to make the car bigger, rather than to lower the emissions of a smaller car. Hence, SUVs.

Absolute in the UK

I'm not sure I have seen many large plug-in hybrids on UK roads

Seeing more Volvo SUV PHEVs recently, big ones too.

PHEV shouldn't be sold to who don't have slow charging equipment at home. It's one of the best solution with home charger.

Larger vehicles makes less efficient use of precious space. Vehicle size needs to be addressed as well as weight.

This is a great idea and would handily deal with the escalating “momentum war” between selfish drivers who buy the biggest, heaviest vehicle they can afford in order to be safer than their counterparts in a collision.

I’d propose we make the tax highly non-linear too…

As a friend od mine recently discovered, Range Rovers have an airbag under the bonnet that pops up in case of frontal collision, presumably to protect pedestrians.

They hit a deer on a country road and that airbag caused £6,000 of damage to the car...

Who's laughing now? ;)

I hope the deer had survived the encounter.

You're right on the money. I've heard it a few times from my associates (in UK), who don't feel comfortable driving. They want to go for the big car so they can be safe. But what about other road users?

You can also notice how pushy all these Range Rover drivers are on our very narrow roads.

Safety is a reason why many people claim to purchase these cars but frankly I’m not convinced. These cars are comfortable and luxurious - appealing to safety is a way to tell themselves their purchase is practical and not frivolous.

In any case I agree; these vehicles do not in fact make us more safe, overall.

France is doing this (albeit with a carveout for electric cars).

It’s my understanding that personal vehicles are irrelevant compared to large trucks for this very reason.

Where even the most innocuous residential street will have a garbage truck that damages the road far more than cars do.

Not that their aren’t many more problems with large cars in terms of pedestrian safety, congestion, waste of parking space, etc.

Yes let the rich have the big cars, us peasants will kneel to the taxes as always...

I mean, I'd rather no one have large cars and the need by addressed by business but that opens up loop-holes and other abuses. For those who are truly waste, let's at least get some other money for other uses. Both McMansions and pavement-boats are grostesque excesses... but policing morality never ends well so taxes are the gentler stick.

I feel that all those people who talk about reducing car size and use probably don’t have a family. I have twin 6 month olds and the only cars we currently use is the Toyota Corolla from a local car sharing service. Two car seats in the back leave basically just enough room between for my wife to fit sideways inside the middle seat. She can’t stay in there for longer than a few minutes and if we get in a car accident, she is not gonna have a good time. Also, have you tried putting a child in a car seat while avoiding hitting their head on the roof of the car? It’s a tricky thing. Those are two reasons that two people who worked hard on reducing their environmental footprint end up in a situation where we have to look into buying an SUV. And don’t get me started on avoiding cars altogether: with hospital appointments that take 15 min to drive to but would take hours of public transit to get to, the need to buy more food at a cheaper price and the fact that transit options are often not accessible with a stroller (good luck bringing a double stroller up and down a few flights of stairs) means that you need to use a car. My suggestion: please either fix public transit so families can actually use it and organise the city so services are accessible, or offer cars that can accommodate a reasonable sized family while being environmentally friendly.

Fyi, I live downtown in a major North American city that is known for having good public transit.

All valid problems. The car lobby (and their pet politicians) aren't going to do anything to fix it though. And we will all have to live with the consequences.

Agreed, instead of addressing any of the problems that push people to buy big gas guzzlers, they leverage those problems to divide the population. If you look, you will see these wedge issues everywhere. We won't get anywhere at addressing any pressing issues in our society if we let the medias keep dividing us.

Isn't the answer to this a minivan?

We are still deciding between an SUV and a minivan. What might make us choose the SUV is the ground clearance. Where we live there is a lot of snowfall in the winter, and the extra ground clearance can mean the difference between getting beached on packed snow or ice.

The article is talking about the size and weight of vehicles.

In this context, there is effectively no distinction between a modern minivan and a modern SUV.

1995 Honda Civic - curb weight of 2100 pounds.

2000 Ford Focus - curb weight of 2500 pounds.

2023 Toyota Corolla - curb weight of 3000-3100 pounds (depending on trim level).

2023 Toyota Sienna ("minivan") - curb weight of 4600-4700 pounds.

2023 Toyota Highlander (SUV) - curb weight of 4300-4500 pounds.

2023 Honda Odyssey ("minivan") - curb weight of 4500-4600 pounds.

2023 Honda Passport (SUV) - curb weight of 4200-4300 pounds.

2023 Honda Pilot (SUV) - curb weight of 4000-4700 pounds.

Anyway, the minivan is slightly heavier than the equivalent SUV - but close enough to not really matter.

> a major North American city that is known for having good public transit

Compared to most large East and Southeast Asian cities (Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore), public transport in American cities is generally lousy, especially if a 15-minute drive (that's about 10 – 15km, maybe) turns into a multiple-hour affair. At that rate, one might as well walk.

Seems a good time to drag up this ad that demonstrated how much space cars take up again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYn8aQIpNH4

Wow, I watched that with the sound off and was surprised it's actually a car manufacturer's ad. What a misfire. In turn, that reminded me of this legendary ad misfire:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strand_(cigarette)#Marketing

This Fiat advert from the seventies is remarkably honest:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/22/8e/70/228e700a28f190746ea9...

Parking issues are caused by number of vehicles on the road and lack of planning. Many roads in the UK are very narrow with narrow pavements: There is no space to 'properly' park even if all cars are small-ish.

I have rarely seen roads with parked cars blocking half the road in Europe (at least in France) whereas this is common here in the UK.

I'm not sure narrow roads in old cities are due to lack of planning, they didn't have crystal balls

And some of the "planning" that was done to make our cities car friendly was absolutely horrific - look at what someone thought was a good idea for Edinburgh:

https://www.gcat.org.uk/blog/?p=682

Edit: thankfully never built!

See Glascow's M8 which did get built!

Narrow roads are not only found in old cities... They are everywhere.

But still for historical reasons, towns, villages, country lanes have been around far longer than cars

When most roads/streets are narrow it makes it acceptable to plan new ones narrow too. I live in a neighbourhood built in a green (farm) field in 1990s - residential street are wide enough for two compact cars to pass each other but nowadays half of the street used for parking (for lack of better places).

Narrow roads should be a sign of planning. They do a far better job of restricting vehicle speeds than a nice wide open straight road with a 25mph (or equivalent) speed limit sign. My US city would benefit from far more narrow roads. But even the “quaint and quiet” residential streets are so wide that cars feel comfortable flying through at double the speed limit. And I’m not talking about the occasional reckless driver. This is how the standard traffic flows because they have so much space and open sight lines. We have nothing in the way of traffic calming for pedestrian interactions. Posted speed limits are the only mechanism used to designate road speed. It doesn’t work.

All the more reason to reduce the number of cars on the road: prioritize active and public transport (so that people choose to use them where possible instead of driving a wasteful private vehicle).

Other measures should also be considered but our Tory government will never contemplate them.

The article does discuss one of the main causes - safety.

If you require various crumple/impact zones for safety reasons, which are usually all about controlling the impact deceleration over a longer period of time, i.e. less g-force on the occupants etc, then the relevant car parts get larger. Doors get thicker, front and back get extended etc.

I suspect it would be quite difficult to walk back those changes, so it may be better to roll with them a little, and dictate better minimum sizes for car parking spaces. (Which might dovetail quite nicely with the increased weight of electric cars - which apparently causes issues with multi-storey parking structures which are designed around lighter cars, and may not be structurally safe if filled to capacity with vehicles 50-100% heavier than expected).

(Not counting the truly ludicrous outliers - like the mentioned EV Hummer and Rolls Royce etc).

You can get an older reasonably sized car which has an NCAP rating of 5.

Note bigger cars will have more mass and thus momentum & energy to dissipate, might be less nimble and certainly in the early days of SUV types were easier to roll.

It's worth noting that NCAP ratings aren't necessarily comparable over time. New tests are periodically introduced and they generally become more stringent[1].

A 5-star car from 2015 is likely to be significantly less safe than a 5-star car from 2023.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_NCAP#Rating_history

Fair point.

E = 1/2 m v^2

Drive slower and everyone is safer

>In Oxford they largely don't bother

Funnily enough I saw a traffic warden issuing tickets in Oxford last week.

Was it by chance on August the 30th? That would have co-incideded with the ultra rare "blue supermoon". Next one is in 203x...

I was in Oxford again today and saw another one.

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