As EV sales surge and cars get heavier, parking garages will have to change | Hacker News Reader

As EV sales surge and cars get heavier, parking garages will have to change

cnbc.com

22 pointscebert72 comments

> One potential issue relates to the load of what we drive. According to the institution, the average vehicle’s weight has increased from 1.5 metric tons in 1974 to nearly 2 metric tons in 2023.

> In a statement, it said the reason behind the weight increase was “due to electric and hybrid batteries and the size of cars increasing.”

The weight of a Suburban SUV is 3 tons (6000 lbs) although a Forrester is only 1.75 (3,500 lbs) but a Corolla is only 1.5 (3000 lbs). The roadster weighed under 1.5 tons but the rest of them are all above 2 tons [1]. I still would place money on most of the change has been about car size (sedan -> SUV) vs car type (ICE -> EV).

[1]: https://www.way.com/blog/how-much-does-a-tesla-weigh/

> I still would place money on most of the change has been about car size (sedan -> SUV) vs car type (ICE -> EV).

And you'd win - the reasoning is known as "SUV loophole" [1].

[1] https://www.distilled.earth/p/the-loophole-that-made-cars-in...

Agreed, also see https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/weighty-issue-of-e... for more

But in the last 20 years sales of Suburbans have not increased.

but the suburbans have gotten bigger and heavier

They got a lot heavier around 20 years ago, compared to 30 years ago, but since then they've been about 3 tons.

The market share of SUV's went from 27% to 50% from 2010 to 2019.

This is misdirection. The other person was trying to wave away the weight of EVs by pointing to the Suburban that weighs 3 tons. Now you come with the entire category. But the most popular SUVs weigh the same as other cars. For example the RAV4 weighs about the same as an Accord, and half a ton less than a Model Y.

The "other person" clearly called out the entire category.

> I still would place money on most of the change has been about car size (sedan -> SUV) vs car type (ICE -> EV).

I'm sorry to break this to you but 1974 isn't 20 years ago anymore.

But this does highlight some hypocrisy on the part of drivers (in general).

When it's pointed out that switching from ICE to BEV has a fraction of the impact of switching to something like public transport, the response is invariably that "every little bit counts", "I'm trying to do my part".

When it's pointed out that EVs are heavier than the equivalent ICE, the response is invariably "but just by a fraction", "cars were getting bigger anyway".

Just like if you say "I can't own a BEV because [reasons]". The answer will be "you don't care enough about the environment", "you could always use [terribly inconvenient, expensive, or complicated solution]". If you suggest public transport or a bicycle instead of a car suddenly the inconvenience matters, "but the bus is crowded", "only comes every 30 minutes".

The point being that if you let drivers self-evaluate their actions they will always find the explanation that provides them, individually, with better cover. Try to propose objectively better alternatives for the stated purpose and the wave of dislike will bury you not because it's wrong but because nobody likes someone removing their cover.

You've met many people IRL who hem and haw like that? It must be in social circles where being anti-car is high status and they feel obligated to pay at least a bit of lip service.

I too was wondering where these people are that discuss the morality of their car choices with each other.

Internet discussions on divisive topics always contain morality/finger pointing. Goes for HN too. So I'm incredulous of your surprise seeing you've been around the internet for at least 7 years. For cars it's vehicle size or technology. For food it's animal or plant. There will always be a discussion and sometimes morality can't stay out of it.

Also GP moved the goal posts a bit, why "IRL"? Is our discussion here worthless or not representative because we're not "IRL"? Yes, I do have such discussions of morality of choices in real life too. It's easier to have them on the internet because separating from your identity helps make whatever case you want to make. IRL is harder because you can't just close the tab and pretend it never happened so if you have some convictions you have to really stand by them.

Am I to understand that you never, ever discuss the morality of things with anyone? Or just not cars? Not even in principle?

I specified IRL because that's what I'm curious about. You spoke about motorists in general, so you must have spoken with enough of them to have formed the opinion that they respond to your questioning in such a manner. I move in very different social circles, some people I know cycle to work not for the environment but to save money, so the thought of living, breathing humans speaking the way you described comes across as strange to me.

I worked very closely with the people who wrote the related regulation (and a lot more) and contributed to that at EU level for years and years. Yes, certainly such debates came up a lot. As for action, the people I know cycled or took the train to set an example or because they liked it. I actually don't know a single person who does this to save money but this may be a factor of the bubble I live in.

Closer to home I have the same experience. It's not limited to driving. People are always looking to justify their choice and cherry pick the arguments for it. You name it, there will be an objectively correct argument to support it. You don't need to be pro-environment to claim you are. One neighbor who owns 2 Teslas couldn't give a damn about the environment but that's not stopping him from bragging to everyone who will listen that that's why he bought the cars. Another one has a PHEV that is never driven electric, same story. And another one constantly talks about the health and environmental benefits of cycling while his bike is a permanent fixture of the living room wall. Virtue signaling can come as an afterthought.

But most of these discussions were internet discussions though, just because its so easy to take part in a lot of them. For years on most sites (HN included) posts on ICE/BEV would surface the same discussions with each "side" pumping up the arguments that supported their views while trying to downplay the others' arguments even at the cost of hypocrisy.

Thanks, I understand where you're coming from better now. It's sort of the opposite with me, I move in circles where I sometimes have to be careful about even being slightly positive about EVs since so many are rabidly against them.

I've been around the Internet for about 35 years and the WWW for about 28 years, but I've never ran across a discussion of people talking about the morality of car choices. Apparently I've been visiting the wrong forums.

Either you're reading too much into this and hanging on the word "morality" (which mind you, I haven't actually used or suggested in my original comment) just to be super pedantic, or you've actually never read the comment section on car articles on sites like HN, Reddit, or ArsTechnica just to name some more popular ones.

Yes, at least similar conversations. Among the people I can cite:

* My next door neighbour

* My Mother

* My Father

* My Nana (who doesn't even drive!)

And there's not a particular "anti-car is high status" issue (I'm not even sure what that means). It's a simple reality of being in the UK where a lot of column inches are dedicated to pushing a heavy pro-car, pro-pollution narrative.

I should have perhaps written "acutely environmentally aware" instead, where cars are a necessary evil at best, and an unforgivable sin at worst.

Writing that would not have changed my response. The people I’ve cited have a similar level of awareness of climate issues as your average British person.

Ok I’ll bite. I’m a “driver” and I live in a place where it is impossible to goto work without driving. When my ICE car finally stopped working I bought a heavy EV car because I care about climate change (not environment, but GHG emissions). Would you agree that in my case it was not hypocritical and probably not all EV drivers are hypocritical?

Not speaking for OP here, just giving my own 2 cents.

As a strong believer that we need major change to fight climate change, and a believer that switching to EVs isn't even close to good enough, I can't blame someone in your position. The blunt truth is that this challenge is far too great for individuals making choices to tackle. This is exactly the type of challenge that requires government intervention. I'm aware that the USA is particularly bad but I can attest that the UK isn't far behind in being in total disarray.

An example from my own life: I needed to travel between two cities in Northern England with my partner. I calculated that the train ticket for 1 person was the same as the cost of diesel. Factoring in the disgracefully unreliable train infrastructure, I'd have paid twice as much to have a worse travel experience (buses to/from stations, train probably being delayed/cancelled). Who in their right mind chooses the train under these conditions?

Government has the power to change this calculation by funding public transit, adding costs to driving, among other things.

Different people make different arguments. I am keeping my ICE vehicle because I drive dramatically less than the average person, so selling it and buying an EV means it ends up with someone who drives more.

That said, 1 person going from ICE to EV is better for the environment than 1 person going from EV to public transportation. Manufacturing and transporting gasoline produces roughly the same emissions as producing the electricity to charge an EV in the US.

> That said, 1 person going from ICE to EV is better for the environment than 1 person going from EV to public transportation

How could that be? 50 people driving in 50 cars can't possibly be more efficient then them riding in a single electric bus. That's before you consider the infrastructure dedicated to personal cars. It's the first time I hear that personal transport could be more environmentally friendly than public transport.

Once a price drops by 50% no matter the discount you can only save the other 50%.

Put another way suppose ICE = 100%, EV’s = 49%, public transportation = 1%. If you start with 1 person in an ICE and 1 person in a EV that’s 149%, moving to 1 ICE and one public is 101%, where moving to 2 EV’s is 98%. Yes, 2 public is hypothetically much better at 2% but that wasn’t one of the options considered.

> That said, 1 person going from ICE to EV is better for the environment than 1 person going from EV to public transportation.

50 people going from EV to public transit is much better for the environment than 50 people going from ICE to EV.

"The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons."

Yeah, people are only "environmentally friendly" only up to the line of inconvenience, if we want to live sustainably we'd have to have the living standards of South Sudan or Benin[1].

Yeah I realize this is doomerism and "Why bother?", but, realistically, why bother? Some people have the deus-ex machina fantasy that "some technology will come along and save us all" and other than that, IMO there's only pain in the future, either most of the planet burns up, with all the human conflict along the way (fighting over water and food), or the whole planet actually commits to living like South Sudanese (hah, what was that about having fantasies?), and even then the emissions until now will still have an effect decades into the future...

[1] https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days...

Welcome to hypocrisy of techbro virtue signaling. The very same people will say with straight faces that BEVs are cheaper to operate calculating battery->motor consumption, ignoring charging/auxiliary losses and multiplying that by residential grid prices and/or completely ignore fuel excise and other road taxes that BEVs are exempt from.

It's weird to single out EVs though. They can be heavy sure; but they don't have to be. Just like ICE cars. People buying hummers, big SUVs, muscle cars, heavy trucks, has been a constant in the US for decades. That has never been an issue. It's only when they are electric that certain people start caring very selectively and only about those EVs.

And for all the talk about parking garages collapsing, there seems to be a distinct lack of collapsing parking garages. It's all hypotheticals and maybes.

It kind of is a non issue. Sure, there probably are a few old parking garages with a bit dubious construction and maintenance issues. The issue there is not heavy cars but people cutting corners when it comes to building codes, concrete quality, inspections, etc. Plenty of that going around. The apartment complex that collapsed in Florida was a good example. Usually there are plenty of signs when buildings or bridges aren't in a good state. It's only when that is ignored for years on end that bad things start happening.

But mostly parking garages aren't telling people with trucks and suvs to turn around just yet. Because it's perfectly safe as far as they know and they've been hosting people with pointlessly heavy ICE cars for decades. A few more aren't going to tip the scales.

This is a non issue. And it's repeatedly in the news because ICE car manufacturers and fossil fuel companies are trying to slow down the coming double digit percentage dips in their market share; all the way down to net zero eventually. We're going from millions of EVs to tens of millions of EVs in the next few years. Most of those won't be trucks or suvs. Or particularly heavy.

There are plenty of good reasons to start taxing heavy vehicles and polluting vehicles and I'm all for that. But I'm guessing that's not the solution these people are advertising here. This is more of a FUD thing and less of a call for actual policy changes to happen.

> I still would place money on most of the change has been about car size (sedan -> SUV) vs car type (ICE -> EV).

That might be true in the US, but the weight issue exists in Europe too. For instance we are going to soon trade our minivan (1.7t, 3,700lb) to an ID.Buzz (2.5t, 5,000lb) — 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. The ID.3 is heavier than our Minivan!

Doesn't weight also influence things like particulate emissions from ground friction? Maybe vehicle taxation in the future should consider weight?

Maybe they should tax tires (perhaps by the amount and type of wear products). The more tires you wear through, the more tax you pay.

Yes, but heavy vehicles also cause wear to roads. I like your idea though because the tax depends on use.

I'm assuming the amount of road damage is proportional to the tire wear. You could probably have different scales depending on the characteristics of the tire in question. Metal saw blades vs. soft slicks.

This is a hilariously perverse incentive for governments, since worse roads now mean better revenue and saving the cost of maintenance.

I'll add it to the list.

Governments don't work like corporations at all, so this "perverse incentive" is, frankly, nonsense.

Governments can get replaced by an electorate that aren't happy with, say, the state of the roads. In fact, you'll usually see a lot of potholes magically get filled in around local election time.

Also, the revenue raised by vehicle taxes are usually completely blown away by the costs of maintaining infrastructure, dealing with accidents, enforcing laws, etc. The above reason is why governments tolerate all this expense. If they were a corporation, huge amounts of work would have gone into getting rid of cars to reduce the expense line they cause.

You can rerubber tires though. It is done alot on truck tires.

Unless the tax is low people will just apply rubber.

Is that a thing most people do at home? Otherwise it could also be taxed easily.

No, you can’t vulcanize tires at home, unless you want to produce road alligators.

You need a proper workshop with a vulcanization oven. I don't think it is practical to diy.

Seems easier to tax mileage and nominal tire wear than tax actual tires still, I think.

Taxing mileage is not easy. Especially weighting it by tire wear (weight of vehicle etc.

Although we must also consider the location of the pollution. Particulate pollution in an empty desert has different consequences than the same in a school district.

In states with annual (or other periodic) safety inspection, taxing mileage is super-easy.

Taxes on these things are usually regressive so no thanks...

VMT is strongly correlated with income, so people with higher incomes would pay more tire taxes.

I am homeless and on disability and I live in a minivan. I drive a lot because I have to. The percent I would have to pay in taxes of my income would be far higher than someone who is rich. That is what a regressive tax means.

With taxation, we usually use "progressive" and "regressive" relative to a baseline of proportional to income: "A progressive tax is a tax in which the tax rate increases as the taxable amount increases."

So it isn't enough to say that VMT is correlated with income: if it goes up with income but decreasing as income increases a tax would be regressive, and if the reverse it would be progressive.

I think you'd have to do the math. VMT is very correlated with income and many low-income people have none. Higher income people choose bigger cars with expensive tires.

Have a look at https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/23cpr/chap3.cfm While none of the figures there have exactly what we want, they do suggest that VMT goes up less than linearly with income. For example, 3-23 and 3-27 show distance per vehicle and distance per driver going up way slower than income (but rich people have more vehicles and more rich people are drivers). Overall, richer people spend a much lower fraction of their income on transportation, and that's been stable for decades: https://www.bts.dot.gov/data-spotlight/household-cost-transp...

The trend goes in the right direction. If you are absolutely dedicated to making this strictly progressive, despite the clear externalities of driving justifying a "sin tax" approach, you could exempt from any proposed tax the market price of a 195/55R15 tire or other index of basic tire price.

Consider the following three taxation systems:

A: 20% up to $10k, then 15% up to $100k, then 10% on income above that

B: 15% on all income

C: 10% up to $10k, then 15% up to $100k, then 20% on income above that

Using the standard terms, A is regressive, B is flat, and C is progressive. But using your terms the "trend goes in the right direction" for all three.

I'm not attached to tire taxes being progressive; my objection here is about diluting the meaning of progressive and regressive.

(My preferred approach here, as in lots of places, is https://www.jefftk.com/p/pricing-benefiting-everyone : tax the thing without worrying about the tax being regressive, and pair it with a strongly progressive equal-per per-person transfer.)

That's the system I prefer as well! Why are we debating this? I only engage with this argument because bad-faith car addicts often try to block any kind of reform by saying it harms the poor. But as you say on your page, redistributing the revenues of these things per-capita is naturally progressive, and that doesn't need to be means-tested because income taxes are already progressive and the refunds would be income.

We're debating this because you countered "Taxes on these things are usually regressive so no thanks" with "VMT is strongly correlated with income, so people with higher incomes would pay more tire taxes" which sounded like you thought it was a claim that the proposed tax would not actually be regressive.

(This isn't a disagreement on policy, but me being pedantic about terms.)

Sin taxes tend to be regressive.

Lorries, SUVs, etc. are not driven by the extreme poor travelling to work, so taxes can be staged in a way to be less regressive on this front. They can also be targeted in a way to reduce negative impacts, e.g. reduced rates for buses or rates for different pollutant levels of tyres/brakes.

> The more tires you wear through, the more tax you pay.

People wont replace tires if you make them more expensive, which might result in more accidents, costing the taxpayers more in the long run.

Here in Norway they recently introduced weight as a component of the one-off registration tax for new vehicles[1].

For vehicles over 500kg it's about $1 per kg, so not a huge deal but it's something.

[1]: https://www.skatteetaten.no/person/avgifter/bil/importere/hv...

Road damage is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight, so this might be a good idea; most of the damage is from a small fraction of heavy vehicles, mostly lorries.

For dummies like me:

The load on the road from one axle (2 wheels) is 10 times greater for a truck than for a car. However, the fourth power law says that the stress on (damage to) the road is this ratio raised to the fourth power.

The road stress ratio of truck to car is 10,000 to 1.

Most particulate pollution comes from tires and brakes, EVs are heavier and have more torque/power than most ICE vehicles so ye sit matters

A lot of countries already tax vehicles on weight

EVs probably produce more tire particulates but definitely make less brake dust, since most of the braking is regenerative. Not sure how that balances out in the grand scheme of things but it’s not a clear cut thing.

This is nonsense. A Tesla Model 3 or Model Y or Chevy Bolt is much lighter than an Escalade or Chevy Suburban.

More anti-EV propaganda. Shame on "journalists" for reprinting this junk without even the most basic fact checking.

I can't help but feel the immense reach of the fossil fuel industry and its various special interests investments in these articles. It shows the incredible depth of control they have over the media and government everytime we see these opinion pieces full of lies presented as facts and news.

The US EPA seems to have a reasonable dataset for testing weight hypothesi:

"Data on Cars used for Testing Fuel Economy" https://www.epa.gov/compliance-and-fuel-economy-data/data-ca...

  curl -s 'https://www.epa.gov/compliance-and-fuel-economy-data/data-cars-used-testing-fuel-economy' -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36' --compressed | xmllint --recover --xpath '//a[@class="file"]/@href' - 2> /dev/null | sed -e 's;^.*=";;' -e 's;"$;;' -e 's;^;https://www.epa.gov;' | while read url; do echo "Fetching $url"; curl -LO -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.0.0 Safari/537.36' $url; sleep 2; done

EVs are pretty darn heavy. See this wonderful graph.

https://insideevs.com/news/527966/electric-cars-from-heavies...

Oh look, another hidden cost of cars.

They have gotten that backwards....

So the rise of SUVs isn't a problem?

I’m sure the municipalities are on top of this one. Probably just have to raise taxes to cover the cost of the new garages. Maybe the new garages can be more dense and also have solar on the roofs. Oh, and charging too.

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