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Comment by sjcoles | Hacker News Reader

Tax the hell out of them to pay for upgrading. There's zero reason why a 2500lbs vehicle should pay the same tax as a 7000+lbs one.

Giant SUVs and Trucks for non commercial use should have been effectively regulated/taxed out of existence a decade ago.

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It's an easily justifiable tax as well. Road wear scales to the 4th power of axle weight! Incentivise smaller cars, it means less road wear, higher fuel efficiency, and it's safer for pedestrians.

Many states had such taxes for decades for exactly that reason. Some of those laws are even still on the books, just not enforced.

Interestingly, Rhode Island tried something like that. They had toll roads where only semis had to pay.

I thought the solution was a great idea. The cost is centered on the vehicles causing 95-99% of road wear in the state, by only charging a small fraction of drivers it reduces the overhead of the system from RI's perspective, and by only charging people who would have large bills it reduces the overhead from the perspective of the drivers being charged as well (if you pay a $3 toll and spend 5min handling the broken online billing portal after a billing letter was sent via a $0.63 stamp then that's a bit wasteful, but if you have a $100 toll the billing doesn't magically cost more, allowing the aggregate tolls across the state to be lower since they have a higher take rate). Plus, if it makes shipping more expensive, it transitively affects the people causing the most shipping instead of externalizing that to the other citizens, ideally causing a small downward pressure in aggregate shipping volume.

Anywho, it was struck down as unconstitutional. We'll see what happens in other places and times, but I don't have high hopes. At best we'll get a patchwork of special cases and exemptions that protect incumbants, don't fix the problem, and _hopefully_ don't inadvertently encourage even bigger vehicles.

This is not entirely true for consumer passenger vehicles, even ones weighing 7k pounds. There are many other reasons to tax but road wear is not as easily justifiable until you hit semi-truck weights. In general roads are made based on laden truck weights, the difference between a 4klb car and 7klb car does not make much if any difference.

Small businesses can literally get $25,000 as a reward for buying a vehicle over a certain weight.

> Tax the hell out of them to pay for upgrading

We should but we won't.

At the end of the day, people really like their big cars, and local dealerships tend to be the largest small businesses (along with local real estate agencies) in most Congressional and State Assembly Districts.

You can argue that walking and biking are better or something like Strongtowns, but at the end of the day, it is what it is.

> At the end of the day, people really like their big cars

That doesn’t apply to the entire planet so surely this could be different in the US as well.

Here in America, bigger is better. We love big, whether it's cars, CPU core counts, burgers, or tits and ass.

> doesn’t apply to the entire planet

Even in Asia, MENA, and South America as well, if you can afford a big car you will buy one.

There's a reason pickups like the Hilux, D-Max, Ford F150, and Vigo are a luxury in ASEAN and the MENA, SUVs like Scorpio or Fortuner in India+Nepal, and pickups like Tacoma and Toro in Cental+South America

The EU isn't representative for the rest of the world either.

Eh, even Europeans appear to getting larger vehicles. SUV's hit 51% of all new European car sales in 2023. Granted though it's mostly compact and sub compact CUV's.

https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/suvs-surge-new-milest...

Yep. People just like big cars.

I love biking and walking, but it just isn't popular.

>At the end of the day, people really like their big cars

No one's stopping them from liking and buying them. They'll just cost more.

> They'll just cost more

And that's why no one will do anything.

Something popular that cost $35,000 in 2024 suddenly costing $45,000 in 2025 is a political suicide.

Rising new car prices are already a major political crisis. Taxing and making it even more pricy is just a self own

> At the end of the day, people really like their big cars

People like big cars because they want the other guy to die in a crash.

For some people yes, for others (like me if I buy a car) they're just fun to drive (that said, I can afford the tax)

Ironically, they were regulated into existence (in the US, at least) thanks to the CAFE standards, which require vehicles to obtain a given milage per area. Large cars therefore have less stringent pollution standards than small cars.

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