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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Aren't they already paying more by buying a more expensive car and hence more in taxes? And they are less fuel efficient so they're buying more gas which is the primary source of funding for road maintenance?

Not every problem requires a new layer of bureaucracy. I could imagine companies gaming the tax by being just a pound shy and just all the unnecessary red tape seems very wasteful without actually fixing the problem

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They're paying more than they would have paid for a cheaper/lighter car. The fuel thing is made complicated by EVs with heavy batteries. But the fact that they've paid _something_ greater than they otherwise might have doesn't mean that they've paid their fair share. Road maintenance in most places is _not_ fully covered by gas taxes; other tax payers also contribute. If a subset of vehicles are driving a large cost in updated guard rails, it's not enough for them to pay somewhat more than other drivers -- they should pay enough that the rest of society isn't subsidizing them.

"fixing the problem" would mean banning these vehicles, which is politically impossible.

I think the most practical solution will be to take all of the externalized costs of these vehicles, and charge them to their owners. I would argue that this is, in fact, less bureaucratic than creating more regulation.

What are the externalized costs? We need to fund a committee to research and create a study to get the costs. And these are constantly changing especially with climate change so we'll need to fund it indefinitely to propose new regulations and rules about max car weight, shape, wheel distribution, center of gravity, among other things.

Don't worry, this won't be new regulation, just a sweeping ban of certain vehicles based on a number of factors

Do you ever think what the externalized costs for having thousands of regulations are to businesses and consumers? Attitudes like yours is the reason I can't buy a kinder egg in US or European eggs have exactly opposite regulatory requirements in US vs Europe.

We eschew this kind of complexity in engineering. It's the most obvious thing in the world. Anybody that works on complex systems will tell you the same. But we view regulation and government as immune from these kinds of tradeoffs. We hear things like "this bad thing should be banned" and never stop to think what that means in practice and what fragility and distortions it adds to the system

Not necessarily, you could just tax based on weight thresholds, established in legislation, in the same way you could ban vehicles based on the same factors.

The fuel NHSTA has over 1200 pages on just the new fuel economy rules. And there are dozens of agencies car manufacturers have to contend with to design a vehicle.

In unrelated news, average new car prices in the US climb to 48k while China has a new car under 10k

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a39617404/nhtsa-fuel-econo...

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