301–310 of 414 posts
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You know you linked to a fictional news site, right?
Terrible source, yes, but it happens to be at least roughly on point in this instance; if my dim recall of the relevant engineering is correct, road damage grows quadratically to the pressure exerted on the road by tires, and EVs are typically nearly twice as heavy as ICE vehicles.
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> Road taxes are often use-based, where gasoline is the way they extract "use" taxes. 26% of road funds come from gas taxes; 11 percent from tolls, another 25% from the federal government: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... Now, about those "paying their fair share of 25% of the cost of the roads" gas taxes: In Utah, the gas tax was $0.245 in 1997. Today it's $0.34, when adjusting for inf…
>> Does Utah give people with small 3000lb gas cars a tax break, and penalize 5,000lb pickup truck owners? Yes, if your car has less weight you use less gas and therefore have a “tax break” compared to the guy on the 5,000lb truck. >> EVs start to get popular and suddenly now everyone's very concerned about...road wear? Would it be better to ignore the problem?
Would it be better to focus on the larger problem, rather than distract with a symbolic but ultimately meaningless and punitive "solution"? Yes, it would be better to ignore it for now and focus on adjusting the gas tax to properly reflect how fuel efficiency increases allow for less and less gas to be bought for heavier and heavier weight. To skip over everything noted in the OP comment that hasn't been done to have ICE drivers "pay their fair share" only to then to focus on the tiny minority of EV drivers rings pretty hollow.
>if your car has less weight you use less gas and therefore have a “tax break” compared to the guy on the 5,000lb truck.
What if you have an older and less fuel efficient car? Why should new car buyers get a tax break vs older car owners when it is vehicle weight that is doing the road damage? Would it be better to ignore the problem?
A former girlfriend of mine came home one day with one of these devices plugged into her car. She was the kind of person who just said "yes" to whatever was on the form and she simply picked the lowest price option. My head immediately goes to the scenario where theres been some kind of an accident. Maybe it's a fender bender or maybe a pedestrian was hit. In one case you have a couple damaged cars and a deductible.…
All new cars have a blackbox that records what happened before a crash. So it would just stop the constant monitoring point.
If you want to buy a car that doesn’t have such a device, do you need a 2010? A 2019? Country dependent?
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> people who consent to tracking tend to be safer drivers because they aren't afraid of the insurance company seeing their driving habits Is that true? The handful people I know who have/had these devices are definitely wouldn’t fit that category. And most removed it after a while because their premiums went back up (because of their driving). They just chose it because it offered cheaper rates and they all said the…
That seems to support the point you replied to. You point to a group of people who opted out of monitoring and exhibited risky driving behavior, leaving leaving lower risk people in the monitored group
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It was just Volkswagen insurance(I think it was really underwritten by AXA?). She got a deal where any new VW got a year of free insurance, but because she was under 25 the tracker was mandatory, and getting insurance elsewhere would have been super expensive at her age, so financially it made a lot of sense, but after the first year we paid extra specifically so she could have insurance without the tracker.
That's called extortion....
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WA state is also ridiculous about this: I can understand a road usage tax to replace the gas tax we're not paying, but they also charge an additional fee on top of that for a state fund to add more EV charging stations, even though logically it should be ICE drivers who are paying this to help incentivize the transition! People who already bought EVs clearly aren't concerned with the number of charging stations which…
It strikes me just how detached and ignorant your perspective is, largely not because it bothers me that people like you exist, but how it seems practically impossible for such detached and decadent perspectives to proliferate without collapse being imminent. So you, member of the spoiled rotten, pilfering upper strata, parasitizing the larger society while at the same time degenerating it, want the regular people yo…
I think billionaires are buying private planes, not EVs. The people buying EVs for their daily transportation several orders of magnitude closer to being homeless than they are to being billionaires.
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It was just Volkswagen insurance(I think it was really underwritten by AXA?). She got a deal where any new VW got a year of free insurance, but because she was under 25 the tracker was mandatory, and getting insurance elsewhere would have been super expensive at her age, so financially it made a lot of sense, but after the first year we paid extra specifically so she could have insurance without the tracker.
That's called extortion....
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> people who consent to tracking tend to be safer drivers because they aren't afraid of the insurance company seeing their driving habits Is that true? The handful people I know who have/had these devices are definitely wouldn’t fit that category. And most removed it after a while because their premiums went back up (because of their driving). They just chose it because it offered cheaper rates and they all said the…
The problem with this tracking nonsense is that it doesn't change anything. The business model is still the same. Unless the insurance company pays out less claims there won't be any savings.
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The only issue with your scenarios is that nobody will ever get in trouble for killing a pedestrian.
I don't see this has a hot take. A couple weeks ago a car intentionally rammed into me from behind. I called 911 and the police took 30 minutes to arrive on the scene. The officer talked to me for about 3 minutes and then threw up their hands and said they wouldn't do anything because I didn't have a plate number and couldn't identify the driver. The police didn't even want to bother trying to get footage from nearby…
Honestly if there's no injury, the police aren't going to care too much about damage to your car. They figure you're insured, so you'll be taken care of.
In most cities they have bigger fish to fry and a car accident with no injuries is just not that important. I don't think they're entirely wrong.
> Insurance companies may think you’re a higher-risk driver if you’re accelerating fast, braking aggressively, making sharp turns, using your phone while you drive, coming home at 3 a.m., taking dangerous roads or simply driving a lot. Is there any proof that any of these behaviors actually correlate with tangible risk? (I mean, I can understand that "simply driving a lot" increases risk.) Personally, I'd be more int…
Casualty insurance companies just want the numbers, then to set the markup, then profit. They've filled out that elusive intermediate step. If it means finding a way to get a customer a discount then that's ok, as long as they have the customer. The biggest factor they can monitor is verifying miles driven. Miles driven, unsurprisingly, has a bigger impact than virtually anything else someone signing up to be monitor…
In general, no surprises.
What really surprises me is that my insurance company never asks for an odometer reading. I haven't changed insurance in years. It's also hard to estimate how many miles I will drive in a year because my life situation changes every few years.