this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Probably significantly less than the cost to maintain roads because now every vehicle would be significantly heavier. Oh and bridges!
The US could compensate by people driving less of the unnecessarily large vehicles.
Look large pickups and SUVs have a function, but driving a 2 ton vehicle to and from the office by yourself is not a green choice.
Make road taxes based on weight.
In terms of EVs I would love a solution for the range. I drive relatively small commute and if there was a way to leave 2/3 of the batteries in my garage and only install them when I want to visit grandma it would be great and save a lot of weight.
Yeah, that will never happen.
I'm 100% on board with this. But we'll never see it happen. And regardless, in this context that means that ICE vehicles on average would be taxed less. Proves the point that there is an additional cost that people don't actually ever acknowledge with BEVs.
Then you'd be paying much higher taxes for something you're not actually leveraging. Normal people will basically never do this.
Well flat vehicle taxing based on weight, ICE engines are taxed additionally by tax on fuel. Not all taxation needs to/should happen in a single space.
If the US raises gas prices the desire to drive gas guzzling pickups and SUVs will automatically lower (I hope).
And about paying taxes for something im not leveraging.. depending on the tax burden and possible energy saving based on reduced weight I don't know. It might just be fully impractical as a system that allows for easy swap in and out of batteries might add so much weight and complexity it makes the whole exercise pointless anyway.
I'm mostly just hoping on improvements in battery tech in general. That aging EVs can be equipped with newer batteries with higher power density.
Considering that the point of gas taxes ARE to obtain funding to repair roads... Transitioning to weight/travelled distance based registration taxes would mean that you want to double tax ICE vehicles to obtain those funds. That would be a bit silly to do...
I'd probably just raise the gas taxes and inroduce the new taxes for EV's
… bridges? The things over engineered to be able to support more weight for longer periods of time than they are required to?
I think they’ll be just fine. 🤦🏻♂️
https://infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Bridges-2021.pdf
We're not doing good in maintaining them already... Now you want to increase weight load on all of them 30-100%...
Our bridges are not in good shape in the USA.
But sure, let's live in your delusion! That will only lead to success! Totally won't lead to people dying avoidable deaths.
The majority of EVs weigh less than quite a few SUV and pickup ICE vechiles driving around today. If this is such a concern, why isn’t the whistle also being blown about these vehicles?
People are not replacing their ICE SUVs with BEV sedans... And ICE sedan vs a BEV sedan is 30-100% heavier. I would presume the same would happen to SUVs as well. And sure enough we can look!
Volvo makes a car that's effectively the same, but one electric and the other gas. The EX90 and the XC90
EX90 - 6213 lbs
XC90 - 4522 lbs.
Gee golly! Dead on what I stated.
Ford F150 lightning! ~6,500 lbs
F-150 XLT SuperCrew w/ 4wd? 4,705 lbs.
Because we've been ignoring this problem for decades and nobody actually listens to people who talk about actual problems in this country. Also, because people like you don't care to read articles like the one I linked above.
Increasing weight will be a multiplicative amount of damage that it does to the roads/bridges. A 30% increase in weight may be something like a 2-3x amount of wear that it causes on a road. It's well known that trucks and SUVs do probably about double(if not more) the damage to roads as sedans (https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-our-roads and https://www.profitgreenly.com/p/road-damage-fees-and-profit). Car companies aren't going to tell you that this is happening... They would sell less cars then. Government has been telling you for decades... you ignore them now. Or worse, your local government doesn't give a shit and spends the money like morons anyway.
I've been reading these articles for decades now... and every news org has covered it at some point probably many times over the years. examples:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/17/why-us-bridges-are-in-such-bad-shape.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/thousands-of-us-bridges-in-poor-condition-as-pace-of-repair-slows-report.html
And I could find more... but google has become really bad over the years at finding "historic" web pages.