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Comment by davisoneee | Hacker News Reader

I'll try to find the source, but previously read that the reason SUVs are so popular is that there was some law that let 'utility vehicles' be taxed or something differently, so the manufacturers could make much more profit off them. Thus, they created this demand for a "high seating position", and pushed it on the market...and now because other cars are so large, it's an escalating war. You don't want to be a small car among giants. Nasty feedback loop.

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This. It was a regulation that was passed to encourage fleet level average MPG standards for auto companies, by the way. And just like everything else that is causing massive problems in our society, gigantic trucks are an outcome of a loophole in a system that was entirely predictable.

Here's an article from 2011 predicting our current automotive market: https://me.engin.umich.edu/news-events/news/cafe-standards-c...

And here's the relevant section that called it from the get-go - emphasis mine:

At issue was this: Some companies offer full model lines, from cars to large SUVs and pickups, but some don’t. How could there be a overreaching fuel-economy standard that penalized companies like Ford and GM, while carmakers that sold only smaller cars effortlessly abided by the rules? So the concept of vehicle footprint was added. Models that ran large, crossing specific length-by-width thresholds‚ would have less ambitious fuel-economy targets. While the Obama administration has pushed for more aggressive CAFE numbers, the amended regulations retain the footprint-based leniency towards bigger cars and light trucks.

The result is a loophole, allowing the entire auto industry to sidestep some of the more painful efficiency requirements by inflating vehicle footprints. And historically, drivers almost always lean toward larger vehicles. “In general, if everything else about the vehicle is the same, consumers prefer the bigger one, with the roomier interior,” says Kate Whitefoot, a senior program officer at the National Academy of Engineering and the lead author of the paper (she was a doctoral student at the time of the study). Combine a regulatory loophole with a built-in, well-known customer choice, and the industry lurches towards the inevitable: larger models and more light trucks.

I wonder if a state can use those same length-by-width thresholds to impose additional taxes on those vehicles. Make owning one of these excessively sized vehicles so egregiously expensive that you'd have to be literally brain damaged to get one when you don't actually need one.

It's based on vehicle weight, not height, and it qualifies the vehicle to be written off for tax purposes as a business truck, for business expenses prima facia.

It basically allows you to depreciate it over 2-5 years. That's it. Pay back the value difference in taxes when sold.

There was a brief Bush era credit on top of this, long expired, but that still haunts the interwebs with rumors of still being prescient. It's not.

Iirc, the weight cutoff is currently something like 7000 lbs, and many suvs have nominal weights of 7001 lbs, with submodels that are 6999 lbs, for locals where getting taxed as a business vehicle is a bad thing.

(Unless by taxed you meant CAFE accounting, which is different.)

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