- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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There was a discussion a couple of years ago around gasoline taxes and how they are supposed to pay for roadway maintenance. The question came up about EVs. There were discussions about how to include EVs in the taxation system so they would pay for their fair share of the road. One of the options was to impose a tax attached to your vehicle registration based upon the weight of the vehicle. The greater the weight, the more wear and tear it produces on the road surface. This might be one solution to the barrier problem, namely moving the extra cost to the reason for the extra cost.
Tax tire sales. Heavy cars have more expensive tire s or tires that need to be replaced more often. Scales adequately for road maintenance because heavy vehicles cause more wear on roads.
I think you make want to go the other way. Making tires more expensive wont make people choose smaller cars, they will choose worse tires. And then they will crash into you because they cant stop.
It’s a good rule not to make essential safety items more expensive. Because consumers in general will always choose a cheaper, less safe option.
yeah if anything a subsidy for safer tires and doing proper maintenance on brakes and other safety system would be what you want.
what is subsidized, there is more of than there otherwise would be
and the opposite is true for what is taxed.
They’ll still have to replace them more often or won’t be able to drive their vehicles or pass a state inspection to get their annual registration completed unless their car is road-worthy, thus costing them more money in tickets and remedies of said ticket.
Sure, but the problem is that you dont want to make safety equipment more expensive, as it encourages cheaping out and cutting corners. People already buy cheap and nasty tires that dont grip well or stop well (but still meet roadworthiness), its best to avoid further encouraging that.
There is no reason not to just directly tax against the weight of the car, as defined by the manufacturer. There already is a yearly rego payments, just scale that directly against weight.
A direct tax is also clear and obvious. If someone has a large car, the rego weight tax will clearly show they are paying more. Making tires more expensive just gets rolled into the price of the tire, which are already moderately expensive, so its easier to just rationalise it and ignore it.
Sorry, the tax is a great idea but taxing the tires is a terrible idea.
I think he is close though with his initial train of thought. I remember doing some research on this many years ago and road wear does not scale linearly with weight. All other variables being equal a 1,000lb load going across a stretch of road 10 times does less damage than a 10,000 pounds load going across the same stretch once. So what we should really be doing is looking at semi trucks and the heaviest of consumer vehicles. It would theoretically make consumer goods go up in price a little, but it’s not like that cost isn’t already being paid/subsidized by consumers in other ways.
Maybe it would even push the use of railroads for goods even more than it is used now.
Why is it a terrible idea?
Taking a guess, but it would lead to people replacing their tires less often, making cars more prone to accidents, and thus probably being counterproductive and more dangerous.
It should be linked to what a driver has to do (e.g. registration) so they can’t try to minimize the cost by delaying it, especially with maintenance.
Tire inspection is still part of vehicle registration inspections. You can’t delay more than a year, and states can always require a tire change within a certain % of being totally worn out if having tires within x-% is showing evidence of causing more accidents.
Unless the argument is that any additional cost will prevent people from performing maintenance. Like, “gas prices can’t go up because people will stop buying gas”. Or “if you make registration more complicated, people won’t register their cars”.
Taxes in the US also have a precedence of decreasing as you get into higher values. There is nothing saying taxes can’t be a higher % on low quality tires. Buy a better tire that last longer, lower percentage tax tier. The point of taxation is to deter behavior you don’t want while recouping the cost of operation over time. Cheap tires that only last 1k miles can be taxed at a much higher % than those rated at 50 or 100k miles. We do that shit all the time.
Not all states have regular inspection requirements. Some are only every couple of years. But even if they did all implement something, you still would be encouraging people to wait in until the last possible moment to do it, which might decrease the amount it increases the risk, but it would still do so.
For the same reasons others have said. Don’t increase the cost of safety equipment.
There was a discussion a couple of years ago around gasoline taxes and how they are supposed to pay for roadway maintenance.
I just want to point out, even if they’re supposed to, gas taxes do not pay for roadway maintenance, not by a long shot
Some states do exactly that, or did back in the day. 30-years ago in Oklahoma, an old 2-ton dump truck with an antique plate was $20, a new Corvette $600. I think Texas flipped that and charged by weight vs. value.
ah yes, another anti-environment tax. More barriers to fossil-fuel free adoption. As you would expect, Mississippi already has this tax. Don’t be like Mississippi.
Then add some exceptions to cars that aren’t as bad for the environment like electric cars.
Maybe exclude batteries for the weight calculation.
It isn’t a hard problem to solve.
Wouldn’t be anti-environmental… it would be for all vehicles including ICE and commercial, as well.
And the heavy vehicles get classified as light cargo so are largely exempt from those taxes. They’re promoting and building heavy “cargo” vehicles specifically because they get exemptions for fuel efficiency and taxes (depending on location).
In the country I reside, everyone pays for the roads through income tax. Vehicle owners pay emissions tax. I think this is fair since everyone relies on the roads even if they never travel down a road themselves.
You can still tax large vehicles, because everyone bears the cost of having them around.
An alternative idea that I mentioned on a thread yesterday about vehicles with high bumpers, adjust the license class system to be more strict regarding vehicles. You already have to have extra training in a different license to run transport vehicles or semi trucks you should have to do the same with large vehicles, I’m not saying ban every pickup truck out there because I fully agree that trucks are a hard requirement especially in snow covered States like mine but there is a difference between having a pickup truck and having a monster truck at least in my opinion heavier or taller than low end transport vehicles
Agreed, there’s also plenty of people who think that just because they have a large vehicle, that they’re immune to the snow. Obviously there’s a quantity of snow that trucks are more necessary for, but I’ll admit to feeling a bit smug when I see ditches full of abandoned trucks and SUVs, as I drive by in my little front wheel drive sedan.
Every mile an EV drives is already taxed as we already tax electricity consumption. There is no reason to add a tax for something already taxed.
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.
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.
There was once a legend about vehicle’s size and … Well…
I would pay money to have this physically mailed to everyone. I have money because I have an economy car.
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.
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.
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.
That’s because the USA subsidizes bigger trucks as “work vehicles”.
Can you cite this? Don’t get me wrong, I understand that if it’s actually a work vehicle you probably get some tax credits/breaks, but I highly doubt many consumers are getting these breaks for buying large vehicles.
https://youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo?feature=shared
Not op, but I really liked this video, as it explains quite a bit. It is of course a biased video, but still…
I watched most of the video, it’s primarily about safety. It’s says the growth is mainly due to the regulations not applying the same to light trucks, which SUVs are classified as. This seems to contradict the claim that I was asking about.
If there is something about the state subsidizing the vehicles and I missed it, I would appreciate a time stamp. Noone needs to convince me that suvs are unsafe and an environmental disaster.
In the US it is called the 179 deduction. For trucks over 6, 000 lb gross vehicle weight you can deduct the total price for the year the truck is put in service.
Thanks for the citation, I’ll look into it.
See my post above with citation.
In Australia it breaks down thusly. (for reference average wage is about $80k per annum).
If you buy a vehicle for $50k, you’re entitled to claim a tax deduction for that cost, usually spread over a number of years.
However, if you buy a vehicle for $100k, you’re only entitled to claim a tax deduction for the first ~$56k (changes each year), unless the vehicle has a large enough carrying capacity that it can be considered to have been designed for the purpose of carrying stuff rather than people.
This rule is designed to disallow deductions for wanky vehicles. Like why should someone be allowed a deduction for driving a wanky mercedes SLK when a cheap and chearful toyota camry can perform the same task of moving a taxpayer from point A to point B. Of course, if someone buys a $300k prime mover (tractor?) designed for hauling 90 tonnes of wheat from a farm to a port, it’s just not possible to do that with a toyota camry so you should be entitled to claim the entire cost.
Suppose you have 2 vehicles, both costing $100k, one is a regular sized Toyota truck, and the other is a ridiculous RAM truck or something. Suppose you plan to sell whichever you buy, after 8 years or so, when it’s value is $50k.
On the Toyota you can only claim a tax deduction on the $6k difference between the $56k notional purchase price and the $50k sale price, which if your tax rate is about a third then you save yourself $2k in tax, so the vehicle cost you $48k to own for 8 years.
On the RAM you can claim a tax deduction on the entire $50k difference between the $100k purchase price and the $50k sale price. A third of that is ~$16k, so it only cost you $34k to own that vehicle for 8 years.
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I’m guessing you don’t actually pay attention to the tax law, then. Annual vehicle registration (aka, a vehicle ownership tax) is more expensive as the weight on the vehicle goes up. Vehicles over a certain weight limit require more complex and strict drivers license classes (granted, class B starts at 26,001 lbs which is way higher than even today’s heaviest consumer cars), and any vehicle used for work has higher insurance and regulatory costs, regardless of the size.
Buying an F350 (a truck that really only has a place in very specific situations anyway) requires so much extra work and almost always requires a class B license because of the kind of work being done with it. People who choose to get something like that because of small-dick syndrome are idiots. And that’s coming from a person who used to drive 18-wheelers and still has a compact SUV as my daily driver.
See my post above in the thread where I show the laws I am talking about and cite source.
Yeah because emission standards are based on size and weight. So why spend the money making environmentally effective equipment when you can just make everything bigger and still rake in money?
The EPA under the Obama admistration enabled this. I was surprised to learn this. It needs to change. I think trains need to change too.
Small PHEV’s would be ideal for the current generation. Battery advances will come, but we should always try to optimize with the current technology and 10 cars with a 10th the battery of a Tesla would be better for the future.
I do want to see more efficient, smaller EVs, but no one wants an EV that only gets 50 miles per charge. They aren’t worth producing from the manufacturer’s perspective.
Congratulations, the fossil fuel industry just put a hit on you
My 2016 Nissan Leaf is 4400lbs, which is more than my larger (but still not that big) 2016 Mazda CX-5 at ~3500lbs. Both manage to fit my family of 5, but the Leaf is far less accommodating and it weighs a good deal more. Small EVs are still pretty substantial. A Kia EV6 which is roughly the same size as my CX-5 weighs 5500lbs. You add a lot to a vehicle when you add an EV battery.
The article has a link to EVs by weight all but two of them were under the threshold.
Yeah but I’d like to visit my family and the nearest charging station is halfway across the state
If you are unable to find a charging station at some point halfway across the state you’re either being too picky, or blind. I live in the middle of nowhere Maine and I can still find at least one electric vehicle charger per major town. Hell there is three of them in the town next over and it’s not even considered one of our highly populated towns. I thought the same that you did until I actually looked up where charging stations are located I was pleasantly surprized
I live in Wyoming, having been to Maine, yall have an amazing and beautiful state but your definition of bumfuck no where is lacking. I checked the EV map again the ENTIRE QUATER of the state I live in that doesn’t have a single charger is where my family lives. I down south near Colorado for reasons I don’t want to get into right now but I want to be able to actually visit my family without having to take a plane between the two airports in Wyoming.
yea looking at wyoming I can see there is defo a lack of EV stations, it looks like for southern wyoming the longest stretch is between rock springs and Lareme, but that’s mostly if you lack the ability to use super chargers. I can see how it would be a pain to use an EV in that case, doable but it would stretch it a little further than i would be comfortable with as well. That being said you would never catch me driving 3 hours one way to visit someone anyway lmao
Plus, it’s Wyoming. Famously the least densely populated state. That comes with some associated costs.
The benefits are great though, people leave you alone and living here is cheap
Couldn’t pay me to live that far from an ocean. Or good internet.
Ehh 3 hours isn’t that bad, just means the trip back happens the next day or you’re dropping in to say hi while passing through town.
Your house is halfway across the state?
Many people live halfway across the state from their family.
I live in Wyoming, people not from here have a hard time understanding how desolate it is here. If I were to switch to an EV I’d have to take a plane everytime I wanted to visit my elderly mother, who would send a cousin in her ancient f-250 to drive me around, because there isn’t a single electric charger in that QUARTER of the state
Could be a student or military or live in an apartment.
Not sure any of those establishments are going to be thrilled with you running an extension cable across the parking lot or sidewalk to charge your car.
Also pretty sure they meant their family lives outside of the range of a single EV charge and there’s no charging infrastructure on the way. What would be an 8 hour drive to visit family for the holidays turns into a multi-day trip with a stay at a motel/hotel to wait for your car to charge.
Lighter vehicles should be able to have the same range as larger ones, just have to find the right battery/weight/range combination.
Yeah the current weight/range/battery combo for me in my almost entirely rural state is an ICE vehicle as much as I like EVs they just can’t get me where I need to be with the current infrastructure. Unfortunately my attempts is also revoking its green energy tax stuff, got to love Republicans. But at least we got rare earth metals now, so that means nothing has to change! (God I love my state but hate the people running it)
Without doxing myself, from my hometown the nearest charging station is 30 miles away, that’s not end of the world far its definitely feasible but its not good enough. Especially when there’s gas stations everywhere. Charging stations need to be in way more places outside cities before they become appealing to folks living outside built up areas.
Nearest one to my hometown is about 3-4 hours out. I would have to take a plane and have a cousin come get me in her truck whenever I visited my family if I used an EV the tech has come a long way but the infrastructure just isn’t always there as much as I hate that
Tldr most guard rails are designed to stop vehicles under 5000lbs. Passenger vehicles are starting to exceed that, and EVs can weight 30% more than ICE vehicles.
How about keeping the guard rails as they are and let the fat car drivers carry the risk?
Even US drivers are not quite heavy enough to make a significant difference here. This has to do with car battery weights.
I don’t think they are saying that the drivers are fat. Or at least it would be insane to say that society shouldn’t care about the safety of fat people.
It’s more likely that they said that the cars are fat which they are.
Fat car can hit an innocent skinny car on the other side of the road, in case of an accident.
The problem is if they crash through the guard rail and kill or Injure others.
Yeah you say that now but when that article comes out about all those kids in a SUV dying you will be upset that the government cheapened out.
What about trying to reduce deaths?
That’s 3175 kg for non-free folk. My car has around 1600 kg. 7k pound car is a fat fat cow.
People are saying “it’s all the electric cars and batteries…”
Yeah my VW ID4 which is a pretty decent sized electric car is 2003kg. You are looking at giant electric SUVs or electric trucks to get over that 3175kg. Even the cybertruck is only 3k and that is just a giant chunk of steel and battery. They must be including hauling weight in that…
I prefer the term wildling.
It’s the battery, and the support frame to carry the weight of the battery safely. Like it or not - cars are getting heavier.
It’s a big fat fucking truck or luxury suv with a battery. A normal sized electric car is a thing too, you know. Electrics will always need to be heavier than ice of same size and model, but that doesn’t mean it needs to weigh 3000kg. Car are growing heavier and bigger not just because of electrification, but because of growing fragile egos and growing fears in a vehicle arms race.
Trucks and SUVs are getting heavier to skirt emissions controls.
In 2010 the Obama administration passed laws tightening emissions control requirements for new vehicles. But the laws were written to allow emissions as a factor of vehicle size, larger vehicles were allowed to have more emissions.
Unfortunately, the plan backfired. Instead of reducing emissions, vehicle manufacturers just started making vehicles bigger.
It isn’t primarily the fragile egos that are driving sales of these vehicular monstrosities. It’s corporate profits and greed. Manufacturers aren’t making smaller models because they don’t make as much money on them, not because there isn’t a market for them.
A little bit, yes. The electric version of my current car is only 200kg heavier. For context, it’s a small, compact city car.
But cars are getting huge in general, EV or not. A current gen VW Polo is bigger than an older VW Golf. All the while the Polo is (still is) the smaller brother of the Golf.The F150 lightening weighs about 6,893 lbs. That’s before you put a load in it. I’d guess a load of pea gravel or similar would push it over that max weight of a guard rail. Hook up a horse trailer to it? Definitely. For the record, the F150 is the best selling consumer vehicle in the US and I doubt that’s going to change too much. I appreciate the people in here saying “not all electric cars”, but there’s absolutely electric vehicles already on the road pretty dangerously close to this max weight. The Rivian truck weighs in at over 7K lbs (7,148 lbs). The Tesla cyber truck weighs in at 6,603 lbs. These vehicles have load space that can accommodate heavy loads. Their curb weight is dangerously close to (or in the case of the Rivian over) the limit that our guard rails can safety buffer.
America has a lot of problems with things like the “Chicken Tax”, and the NHTSA regulating automakers for the purposes of higher mile per gallon vehicles, which has started and continues a trend of making larger and larger vehicles with intent to circumvent those regs and make more profit. The whole system is a bit broken, honestly.
We just need to not have these big ass trucks for the general public. You don’t need a ford 350 with rims jacked up to show you have money. You are a pavement princess.
“But I need it for my work!”
You don’t even have a toolbox on it. If it was an actual work truck, it would be a pickup with the bed replaced with one of those toolbox beds. Or you’d have a sprinter van like the actual plumbers and carpenters around here.
Flatbed sprinters are awesome. I saw one with a skid steer on it and towing a trailer.
I’ve never seen one of those, but I believe it! I bet they’re comfy to drive, too.
They have a huge gross vehicle weight for their size and a low bed.
7000 Pounds is 3.2 Tons (metric)
3.2 Tons
geez, i wonder why these guardrails wouldn’t work on a fucking Truck
This becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. If there are 7000lb passenger trucks on the highway around my compact car, I maybe start wanting to get a larger vehicle myself to protect myself from the idiots who drive them.
There has to be some sort of incentive either for smaller cars or against larger cars. Currently you can go into a dealer, tell them you want the biggest baddest truck/SUV that they have, and buy it all while having a normal license.
You’d only be paying a slight premium on whatever road or fuel tax if that while having the benefit of not getting destroyed in a car accident. As it stands, there is little reason to buy a larger vehicle unless you actually don’t like driving a car that big.
Sort of.
It’s either giant trucks, or Subarus.
Simple, if you buy a car that’s too heavy for the existing infrastructure, you either pay for the improved infrastructure or take the risk yourself. The minivan that I drive the kids in is only 4,300 lb. If you’re driving something heavier than that then, best of luck. I expect that if I’m driving a camper, and I fall off the road, I’m just done. Game over.
I don’t expect infrastructure to adapt to the minority. That’s not what it’s for.
My first car had a curb weight of 2400 lbs. It’s absurd how fucking huge these planet-destroying, environment destroying, life destroying monstrosities have become.
Okay this makes no sense. What about semi trucks or anything commercial? Did we decide decades ago that they can just fuck off and die?
Do they get hazard pay?
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Stupid post. 60,000 lb semi laughs.
Seems like we need some regulation for maximum car weight to be. It’s a safety thing now
Oooohh yeeeaaaahhhh!!!
Seems like we need some regulation for maximum car weight to be. It’s a safety thing now
