> How exactly are they being dishonest?
They're comparing on a single dimension and laughing at F-150 owners.
> This is more like r/vegan showing how a vegan meal is better than a steak meal along some dimension, say, environmental impact.
Not when evaluating a purchasing decision, overall utility, or customer demographics and needs. I'm showing that morally opposed parties inject themselves and their biases orthogonally.
> In fact I would say that you are the one being somewhat dishonest by (implicitly) claiming both the benefits of being able to use it as a utilitarian workhorse, and in an urban area.
Have you ever been to a city that's half an hour to the woods? Or perhaps somewhere it's typical to find people owning acres of their own land right next to a major metropolitan? Not everything is SF or NYC.
If you want to tax an externality, do so. Many state gas taxes tax vehicle weight via the proxy of gas mileage. Right now it's the heavy EVs doing the damage that are slipping through the taxation cracks.
> they should require being licensed as a commercial driver
Okay, now we're getting into yucking other people's yums.
Some people own boats and full hog smokers, like getting muddy on the weekends and going fishing. There are millions of these folks in America.
If you want to regulate what you perceive as a negative externality, we should do it evenly against everything. Tax and regulate broadly and fairly.
Consider sex. It spreads disease and causes all sorts of relationship drama. Kids can be a nightmare. Think about all the lost productivity! Who's paying for that? (I'm joking, of course!)
In the scheme of things, these vehicles are much more good than bad. They sell like crazy, satisfy their consumers, get a lot of productive work done, and on the weekends are spent as leisure devices - getting folks muddy and smelly with beers and fish and sun. A good diversion for hard workers.
> potentially be banned from being operated on city roads due to the danger they pose to smaller vehicles and pedestrians
You can vote for that in your own district, and maybe that's correct, but other places and populations will feel differently about how they live their own lives.
> if you are driving a huge farm tractor, you cannot also bring said tractor into the city center. Not all heavy machinery needs to be allowed everywhere.
On the spectrum of farm tractor to kei car, the F-150 is tightly clustered in the middle with the rest of the "street legal" vehicles.