371–380 of 409 posts
For people looking for an EV alternative, you can search on youtube for Chang Li trucks, they fit the bill for most people. This guy's youtube channel name implies he does this for a living, you can get more info from him, I guess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ufkBRrQoSA here is another guy who modified his, and put a small solar panel, and now his charging requirements have been reduced. https://www.youtube.com/…
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To be fair, the first gen Nissan Leaf was a piece of crap though.
It was cheaper too. The cheapest Model S you could buy back in 2012 was ~$70,000, while the Leaf started at half of that in 2010, ~$35,000.
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> You can do the job of a $50,000 pickup... I would say that a non insignificant portion of pickup truck owners, don't even need a pick up truck to begin with.
I think that’s why big shared fleets will never really take off. People don’t seem to mind spending a lot more on their vehicle than what they really need to. People spend $50k because they want that truck, not because they need it.
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You're kind of making their point for them. It's dumb to mandate helmets or any other specific technology because it removes the possibility for something better or for context-based decisionmaking. Suppose you ride your motorcycle into the desert and then lose your helmet into a canyon. Your phone is dead. Your choices are a thirty hour walk out of the desert which might cause you to die of dehydration, or riding yo…
I'm not sure how you think I'm making their point for them. They said safety rules infringe on their freedom, and added an example of a more severe safety rule that would infringe on their freedom. I pointed out we also implemented a rule that does the thing they implied was more severe. Meanwhile, there is a general necessity defense to violating all traffic laws for your motorcycle example. We don't list every poss…
They argued against mandating helmets in cars. Your point was that we could do something better than helmets and less inconvenient, namely airbags. But that is an argument for not mandating helmets. And the same argument generalizes to any specific technology. What happens when someone comes up with something better than an airbag but then it doesn't satisfy the rule "is an airbag" and is therefore prohibited?
> Meanwhile, there is a general necessity defense to violating all traffic laws for your motorcycle example.
In practice this kind of general exception either consumes the rule or isn't available when it legitimately applies. If you can say you lost your helmet and would have been stranded then everyone says this and you can't enforce the law. But if you can't claim that when it's true then the necessity defense isn't meaningful.
And for the same reason the exceptions are typically excessively narrow. Suppose you lose your helmet while camping, so you have plenty of food and water and can make the 3-day walk back to civilization. There is no risk of death. But then you have a three day walk for what would have been a two hour ride, which is going to make you late for work on Monday. Is not being late for work a necessity? And yet, is it reasonable to punish someone who makes that choice?
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> But a 30mph head-on collision with another vehicle will almost certainly kill you in one of these trucks. A 30mph collision in the average American SUV will kill all the occupants too, because they have absolutely no safety features.
Except for airbags, seatbelts, crumple zones, automatic braking, etc.
"Look at how strong this truck is, it survived an accident with barely a scratch!" just means it transferred all the energy to the wet squashy piles of mixed meat inside.
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You're thinking of car tax and fuel tax. But also, the value of roads scales poorly with any of these things. The ability to have a package delivered to your front door is valuable regardless of whether or not you even have a car, and the value of it depends on what's in it rather than how much the truck cost. The most sensible way to fund any kind of basic infrastructure is from general revenues.
The point is to discourage use of certain vehicles, not to fund anything. But yes, truck used to haul building materials for a building site is the vehicle fulfilling its purpose and any replacement for that purpose being suboptimal. Truck bought to haul 2 bags of groceries is not. Tax the second one.
How do you do this without taxing the first one?
If someone buys a truck to haul building materials to a building site, they are understandably not going to buy a separate vehicle just to haul 2 bags of groceries. But then how do you know what anybody is using it for the rest of the time? The list of legitimate purposes is unlimited. You're a homeowner who is into gardening and always bringing home mulch and saplings and renting landscaping equipment for projects. You're a retrocomputing enthusiast whose hobby requires you to be constantly transporting old mainframes. You're a parent who has to transport an entire junior varsity soccer team to practice every night.
How do you propose to distinguish any of these from someone who only buys a tank to carry home groceries?
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If cars had been as popular as guns when the U.S. Bill of Rights was written, then such a right might have been included. Hypothetically, "Motorized transportation, being necessary to the mobility of a free State, the right of the people to keep and drive automobiles shall not be infringed." Imagine the vehicles we would have. For one thing, the impossible-to-meet CAFE standards, which make it economically infeasible…
It's worth noting that freedom of transit and use of public ways (literally the original "right of way") is such an ancient and obvious part of common law that the Framers didn't deign it necessary to include it as an explicit right, instead relegating it with "the rest of them" in the Ninth Amendment.
In the PNW these are absolutely everywhere and for good reason - they're exactly what most people need when they need a truck bed for hauling capacity. Plus, many are 4/AWD and have relatively high clearance so they're great adventure wagons for forest roads and getting out there. If a manufacturer made a truck similar (or slightly larger - not much room for people 6' and over in them) available for the market here,…
For people looking for an EV alternative, you can search on youtube for Chang Li trucks, they fit the bill for most people. This guy's youtube channel name implies he does this for a living, you can get more info from him, I guess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ufkBRrQoSA here is another guy who modified his, and put a small solar panel, and now his charging requirements have been reduced. https://www.youtube.com/…
$9k for the little car and $11k for the pickup isn't bad
If such products were made in the country, or if a streamlined process existed for import, the cost could be reduced significantly.
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Hasn't this caused an arms race of sorts where these trucks get bigger and bigger to the point where now some models have worse visibility than enormous M1 Abrams tanks: https://carbuzz.com/news/the-abrams-m1-tank-has-better-visib...
It's definitely one of the reasons cars in general have gotten bigger, you can't deny that better survivability in crashes is good marketing material. Trucks are just among the larger of them.
IOW, it's a market failure (externality).