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Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

economist.com

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Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#201

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

carabiner wrote: post #178

This was all caused by the CAFE emissions standards that allow cars with bigger footprints to emit more. Nobody wants bigger trucks, and in the Tacoma community it's a standard refrain to bemoan just how fucking big they've gotten. They aren't compact trucks anymore. They're midsize today. Compact trucks do not exist.

A picture is worth a thousand words: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EpUOgrdUYAELoAQ.jpg:large

These two have the same bed length: https://www.the-sun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2023/06/E...

I own a 2020 F150 and I hate how big it is. Turning radius is pathetic. You have to climb into the bed like you're scaling a mountain. There's two sets of steps to get into the front seat (which is gigantic, like it's made for someone 300lbs). I can't see what I'm backing up to. God help any little kid or animal in front of my truck, I'm not seeing 'em. Literally all I wanted was 2000+lbs payload and 4x4, and this was the best option.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#202

Post by jeffbee »

dnadler wrote: post #103
globular-toast wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment shows how bad car culture is. You think you're the enlightened one, but you want an electric sports car for getting "around town"? People should be walking or cycling around town. Cars are actively harmful to towns. Cars have led to generations of people who don't realise they are capable of walking further than a few steps between car and building. A kind of learned helplessness. When you step outside o…

People in US suburbs frequently live several miles from their town center, if they even have a town center at all. Cycling simply isn’t viable to large swaths of the US. There isn’t an easy answer to this either, given that you’d probably need to tear down entire neighborhoods and rebuild a more dense town

> People in US suburbs frequently live several miles from their town center

It is not the responsibility of the citizens of the central city to accommodate suburban drivers.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#203

Post by nradov »

Groxx wrote: post #127
erikaww wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car makers would adjust but road freight would fight this tooth and nail

If only we had other technologies for moving heavy things without using concrete roads

The USA already moves a higher percentage of freight by rail than almost any other country. But rail could never work for time-sensitive loads or last mile delivery.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#204

Post by galkk »

Tanoc wrote: post #59
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

I hate sounding like a broken record but my belief is that car makers are more excited about XXXXL cars in American than car buyers are. The media is consistently complicit in covering this up, sounding like the brainwashed soldiers in The Manchurian Candidate It's not to say that we don't like big cars because we do, but walk into a car dealership looking for a small car and they will tell you they are out of stock…

This is true to a ridiculous extent. Ford has no compact hatchback or sedan in the U.S., only the Brazilian built EcoSport. They killed all their cars in favour of CUVs and SUVs. Chevrolet no longer has the Sonic, having nixed those in 2022. Honda no longer has the Fit as of two years ago. Mitsubishi no longer sells the Mirage as of last month. Dodge hasn't had anything since the Dart died in 2016. The Jeep Renegade'…

Sedans are useless. I consider them car evolution dead end. They take as much road space as their counterparts, but carry less.

Hatchback, universal, minivan, suvs are much more practical.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#206

Post by energy123 »

bradley13 wrote: post #95

Easy fix: If you want less of something, tax it. The race to ever bigger vehicles has many costs, from road wear to (now we know) human lives. You pay an annual registration fee for your vehicle. Make that fee go up dramatically for heavier vehicles. If you pay, say, $100 for a car under a ton, make it $1k for up to two tons, $10k for 3 tons, etc..

That has the unintended side effect of penalizing EVs. You'd want a weight penalty, but separate ones for ICE and hybrid and EV.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#207

Post by nradov »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #160
thot_experiment wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars damage infrastructure in proportion to the fourth power of axle load. Not only are people in big cars killing people in little cars, they're also HEAVILY subsidized by the people they kill. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

We do it different in Europe: pay disproportionate by engine displacement. My father's car has 10x the taxes as my mother's car just because the engine is 1.6 times larger (2.5 liters, nothing outrageous). At the same time my mother pays for that car quite close to what I pay for each of my bikes that are 8-10 times lighter and have way smaller engines (300cc and 600cc).

The notion of charging different fees or taxes by engine displacement is idiotic. It has nothing particularly to do with road wear, emissions, or safety hazards.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#208

Post by Bloating »

dataflow wrote: post #58
thot_experiment wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars damage infrastructure in proportion to the fourth power of axle load. Not only are people in big cars killing people in little cars, they're also HEAVILY subsidized by the people they kill. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

I feel like this means taxes should be imposed on cars proportionally to the fourth power of axle load too.

I feel like many things too

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#209

Post by Retric »

simongr3dal wrote: post #186
spacebanana7 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that function is so convex, almost all of the cumulative damage to roads is done by lorries, buses and fuel trucks. Cars, even big ones, are negligible compared to the fourth power of bus weight.

Those vehicles typically have many more axles and double-wide wheels to distribute the load.

It doesn’t help that much. Each tire of a fully loaded 18 wheeler carries 4.4x the weight of a typical car tire. 4.4 ^ 4 = 378x the damage per tire but there are also 4.5x the tires so your at 1,700x the damage.

That’s an oversimplification, but it doesn’t really matter if it’s 99.9% or 95% of the damage ware is still absolutely dominated by heavy vehicles.

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