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Comment by wiseowise | Hacker News Reader

They’re already heavily taxed. But why vilified?

A tax can help common infrastructures (building road) or limit something (cigarettes price)

Some people think the ICE car tax(es) already in place are not sufficient compared to the damage they cause. To reduce usage, both tax and public opinion (shaming, vilifying) works great.

It’s regrettable the efforts only focus on a car motors, the most dangerous property of a car is it’s weight (and emissions depends on that weight).

Vilifying things doesn't accomplish anything because the negative opinion becomes a cultural split. People don't care about the hatred of their out-group and lots of people will seek it out to burnish their status with the in-group.

The cars in question are luxury cars that are dime a dozen. I understand heavily taxing ordinary ICE cars, but why luxury ones?

There's a huge overlap between people who seek out such experiences and those who drive recklessly and modify their exhausts.

Or maybe you're not particularly interested in cars or the people who are interested in cars and you can't tell the difference / assume all of "those" people are the same,

I actually am - mostly the engineering part of them though and to me, to paraphrase a prominent local motoring journalist, motoring is dead - EVs are a transition propulsion method and the end state is no motoring as we currently understand it and maintaining a car broadly considered lame.

The only people I've met who are car enthusiasts and don't go for the reckless/loud style of driving are people like my friend - a car mechanic who managed to form a single, road worthy Nissan Z31 from two defunct halves.

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