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It’s interesting that new legislation is baking in the idea that more “sustainable” cars can weigh a lot more. Disappointing that this means we won’t tackle the other externalities of personal motorised transport including size, safety and visibility issues, wear on public infrastructure, and sheer amount of extra material people use to get themselves around.

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I think the idea is that batteries can make the car more dense. Their concern was larger vehicles not fitting in parking spaces, allowing more weight in an EV makes sense in that case.

It is interesting that they went with weight as a proxy for size though. I expect the process for charging by weight or dimensions would come down to a list of oversized vehicle models, why abstract it a layer rather than a max width/length?

That might just be tradition. Driving license classes also use weight as a proxy.

And bigger. For any particular fuel range of interest, an ICE drivetrain is smaller than a battery one.

But yes, I agree that weight as a proxy for size is ridiculous.

They are more "dense" rather than necessarily larger.

For comparable driving ranges, EVs are necessarily larger than ICE cars.

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