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A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us. (slate.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 157 points 8 months ago (43 children)

Yeah well let's quit making 7000 pound consumer vehicles. Small EVs would be more efficient and better for the environment because they need less materials to build and and less energy to recharge.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (20 children)

Judging by the general trend I don't think this is happening anytime soon. The overall car industry is obsessed with even bigger cars.

And even in Europe it is sickening to see those half buses on our roads. And this is especially true for big cities, where parking space is very limited and usually those cars occupy park space for 1.5-2 cars.

And knowing that the fertility rate is really going down I wonder what justifies those cars.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 8 months ago (14 children)

That's because the USA subsidizes bigger trucks as "work vehicles". This practice needs to stop and they need to be taxed more than smaller vehicles.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

State vehicle registration where I'm at is based on vehicle weight. Costs about $400 to renew the registration on my daily driver and $600 to renew for a larger truck. Motorcycles are only like $80 to renew.

Consumers are being taxed more for larger vehicles, it's the manufacturers trying to avoid safety regulations that are seeing the cost benefits.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

This article summarizes the subsidies I'm talking about. Here's an excerpt:

For now, the important point is that trucks generally are more profitable than cars thanks to two big government incentives, both of them historical footnotes.

The first is the so-called chicken tax, a 25 percent tariff imposed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 on foreign-built work vehicles as part of a chicken-related trade war with Europe. If you’re making a pickup or cargo van in the United States, profits should be higher, because foreign factories can’t come close to undercutting you on price.

The second incentive lies in the fine print of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards adopted in 1975, Gerald Ford’s reluctant response to a crippling Middle East oil embargo that sent gas prices soaring. To protect American commerce, work trucks and light trucks were subject to less-strict CAFE standards than family sedans. Trucks are also exempt from the 1978 gas guzzler tax, which adds $1,000 to $7,700 to the price of sedans that get 22.5 or fewer miles to the gallon.

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