America's Guardrails Can't Handle Hefty EV Trucks | Hacker News Reader

America's Guardrails Can't Handle Hefty EV Trucks

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21 pointscebert28 comments

There should be a vehicle weight tax per mile driven for the damage they cause and the infrastructure upgrades needed to accommodate them. Buying a larger vehicle is a choice and should not be subsidized by everyone else.

Violent revolution is more realistic than passing a non-regressive tax law in the US.

That must be why we have so many violent revolutions and so few taxes

"non-regressive" was doing all the work in that sentence

Plenty of taxes are progressive. Despite being demonified by the right, they couldn’t do away with progressive Obamacare when they had congress and the white house in their hands recently despite almost a decade of promise saying they’d do it as soon as they had power. Turns out maybe progressive taxes aren’t that unthinkable after all if even the republicans couldn’t kill Obamacare

As an aside, US income tax is very progressive by international norms.

https://www.econlib.org/lower-income-americans-are-taxed-muc...

Buying a smaller car is a choice. Like having the least expensive insurance policy.

I'm specifically gonna buy a bigger vehicle to keep the Toyota Corollas of the world from killing me in an accident.

Mass is the greatest, most significant safety feature you can get in an automobile.

I wonder if this is the game theory reason for so many people buying trucks now. Trucks keep getting bigger and bigger as a defense mechanism or something.

Absolutely. 1000%. I buy trucks primarily because the capability aligns with my hobbies, and secondarily because the mass affords me additional safety. My F150 is 6,000lbs. I imagine a 2,800lb Corolla wouldn't fair too well in a frontal offset crash with me.

Infact my vehicle would maintain forward inertia. The Corolla would reverse direction. That's a lot of Gs that the Corolla gets that I won't.

All of that benefit is lost if you swerve and start rolling over like trucks with a higher center of gravity tend to. All that extra weight is harder to stop if you need to as well, so it's not purely a safety upgrade.

I remember Top Gear doing a feature on this. If I remember correctly SUVs were four times more likely to turn over in an accident than a traditional saloon car.

The prisoner's dilemma indeed describes a lot of unregulated markets.

There was an article I read a few years back (I think on Vice; I might be able to find it again) which more or less made this exact argument. They used the marketing material for trucks as evidence, pointing out that much of the material would show a vehicle "conquering" something like reaching the top of a rock formation or something.

Ever since reading that article I pay way more attention to vehicle marketing, video and photo. It's actually pretty common to see the "conquering". The camera is below the car looking up at an angle. Most commonly for SUVs and trucks.

>Mass is the greatest, most significant safety feature you can get in an automobile.

"Safety for me, but not for thee"?

They'll sell you one too. But you probably care about silly things like gas mileage or legroom or number of speakers or some other unimportant metric. I can't set other people's priorities for them.

All I know is that nobody is gonna remember that time you got 53mpg on a road trip. But a ride in a cool car is not something that you forget.

You misunderstand. I want the government to prevent you from driving a car that is more likely to kill me in an accident. We are enemies here.

Not natural enemies, of course, because banning large cars makes you safer, even if you drive a large car, since otherwise everyone must drive large cars for safety, and two large cars colliding is more dangerous.

So if I was parent in a family of 6-7 I just tell little Timmy that he has to stay home while the rest of us go to the movies? Yeah, that’ll fly.

I'm not going to wade into details of the position when it's so clear from context what is meant by "large cars". Your comment is in bad faith, I think.

A minivan or a maxivan may be a better option for such a family. Who says they have to be driving a Ford Mountain to get 6-7 people around?

If you're a parent in a family of 6-7, you should probably have two cars.

> All I know is that nobody is gonna remember that time you got 53mpg on a road trip. But a ride in a cool car is not something that you forget.

What? I remember hitting 60ish mpg in my then-GF's '84 Honda Civic driving to college with the a/c off. And in my 2011 Jetta Sportwagen TDI on any trip at highway speeds; sure it put out extra NOx, but it also got extra fuel efficiency.

Big cars and mileage don't go together. But big cars and legroom often do, also big cars and speakers; I think my minivan has more speakers than my home theater, and the minivan gets better mileage than the home theater too.

'cool car' is incredibly subjective. In my case, I live in the UK and drive a BMW M3 - from where I stand the American obsession with trucks is ridiculous. Give me a driver's car any day, not some daft tank of a car where the driving experience is so woolly that the steering wheel may or may not actually be connected to the wheels.

Back a few years ago when I was bored, I briefly made this satirical blog of "Business Plans from Hell - Ideas that should never see the light of day." One of the ideas on it was "Proximity-fired collision-avoidance missiles." Basically, with existing technology, we have collision-detection mechanisms on today's cars. What if, instead of flashing an indicator on the dashboard, we just fired an explosive device to take out the threat before it could hit us? Mass is the greatest, most significant safety feature you can get in an automobile, so if you want to be safe, you should divide the mass of other cars on the road into tiny particles so you can drive right through them.

The tagline would be "Turning the arms race in vehicle weights into a literal arms race."

This has significant game-theoretic benefits for the commons as well. It would remove the incentive toward larger vehicles that tear up the road, emit greenhouse gasses, and use up oil stocks. It would also incentivize people to be really, really careful when driving, if you got blown up every time it looked like you were about to collide with another vehicle. It'd defuse (or give people an incentive to defuse) road-rage situations, since if they escalate, you might end up vaporized. It would take the assholes off the road, and remove them from the gene pool besides.

Surely next step is ERA plates in our t̶a̶n̶k̶s̶ average-sized SUVs.

Sounds like you're in violent agreement with the comment you're replying to.

As you say, on an individual level, it makes logical sense to use a larger vehicle. On a societal level, it's worse for everyone. So a tax is a good way to adjust the calculus for each individual.

It's really telling that in all your examples you go "If I hit a corolla, they're more fucked than me." An honest comparison would be "If I hit a corolla in a truck, I'm more safe than if I hit a corolla in a corolla" or "If I hit a truck in a truck, I'm more safe than if I hit a truck in a corolla." As it is, by computing "Truck vs Corolla - Corolla vs Truck" you're effectively including the increased harm to the other party as benefit to yourself, which is causing your decision making to be actively homicidal.

that's odd, because if guardrails can't handle a rivian or even a hummer ev, then they can't handle school buses, u-hauls, tire service and welding trucks, amazon delivery trucks, etc.

there's plenty of vehicles of that bulk that have been plying the roads for ages without a bunch of breathless articles to save them or their passengers.

so you can have a school bus carrying 100 nuns careen off a cliff and that's ok, but not a virtue-signaling soccer mom in a $120K (electric!) suv.

This seems like a new front on propaganda against EV's. "Ohhh, we can't handle all the EV charging. Our infrastructure would implode".

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