Just make them pay double the taxes and eventually they will disappear.
The problem is you can’t easily distinguish larger cars used for business and cars used to treat inferiority complex. Many business need larger trucks like delivery vans. If you try to tax them out of existence you will hurt pretty much the entire supply chain. You could try banning all pickup trucks but I think law is applied based on size and weight, not the specific body type.
I feel like they should also require special licenses. Doesn’t australia do that?
Maybe this is confirmation bias, but when I see a vehicle that can’t stay in its lane or can’t make a turn, it’s inevitably a full sized pickup or suv.
There’s this one street corner near me that is admittedly a tight turn, it it’s near the elementary school and there are kids who walk. Every week or so in the winter, I’ll see tire tracks in the snow, on the sidewalk where kids walk to school, every day, from vehicles that didn’t make the turn and drive over the the corner of the sidewalk. It’s not like we have those tiny one lane paths the UK is famous for, it’s not that tight, any personal vehicle can make the turn, but some drivers can’t maneuver their vehicles well enough.
I’ve actually been wondering about putting together a petition to install different accessibility to the sidewalks. Our town uses the really nice ones where the entire corner is a ramp to the street. That’s great for all of us, but there’s no protection from cars. I wonder if we can go back to the older style with a full height curb aside from a specific ramp. Still accessible even if less so for all of us, but if it’s better at keeping the cars off the sidewalk, it may be worth it
They need to have air brakes or be somewhere in the 12+ ton range to need special license.
Certain States allow you to tow a RV trailer with an additional trailer for your boat – essentially tandem trailers. No license needed.
Taxing vehicles by gross vehicle weight and miles traveled is probably a good strategy, as more vehicles are BEV and the meager gas taxes in North America fall farther behind compared to escalating road maintenance costs.
This would be great for EVs, because
- fair is fair
- politicians would stop trying to charge excessively
- more people would realize the full sized pickups are more of a problem than EV s
- if it encourages lighter EVs, that’s great!
I’m not sure. The insurance, fuel, and depreciation on these things already makes them really expensive. In my part of the country, the registration taxes are $60 per year or so, a laughably tiny fraction of the cost of owning a car. Even multiplying them 10x wouldn’t make them a major expense compared to the insurance on a pickup truck.
My insurance actually went down when I replaced my VW golf with an F150 lightning.
Conversely, my tabs cost 7x more.
But in CA, the value of the vehicle is very impactful and there’s an additional $118 EV tax considered in registration fee calculation.
They’re more of a status symbol at this point anyway. Adding more fees just gives it more prestige.
Bars
No politician would support it because of the votes it would cost them.
Maybe. If you pay by weight and distance, and focus it on EVs “paying their share”, you may get a lot of truck owners reacting in outrage over something they know nothing about. As an EV owner I would vote for it despite it costing me more, because it’s a fair way to do it, it might cut back in ridiculous trucks …. Although I might angle for the income to be dedicated to “transportation infrastructure “, not just roads
Then again, my brother got one of those Silverado EVs. That battery is three times the size of mine and the car approaches 10,000 pounds. At some point there’s got to be a weight limit
Exactly. In Canada, the right wing gained 30 points promising to kill the carbon levy (they called it a tax). Government had to kill it or get voted out.
Also half the politicians are driving these monstrosities.
Insurance rates should be much higher as well.
Oh hell no. Canada had a carbon tax on fuel and trucks sales only increased. You can’t fight fashion with taxes, people will just go into debt and then throw out the government when they are poorer. I have tiny nurses driving to work in F150s and all the do is whine about aFFoRdAbIlIty.
Its terrible how the auto industry responds with “we’ll install pedestrian sensors with auto braking” instead of trimming back the massive sizes and 50% bigger blind spots. And go figure they cost about the same to make, yet charge so much extra money… No wonder the avg vehicle is over $50k, cuz trucks and SUVs have surpassed 70k on avg smh.
Why are my C and D pillars a foot thick and blocking 20% of my view. The roof isn’t that heavy
No, but in a rollover, your massive truck or SUV is very heavy. That’s why pillars have increased so much.
Yeah but my A and B pillars are tiny and that’s where the engine and I are
I was in a collision with a cyclist once. He ran a red light and came out from in front of a box truck in a turn lane right in front of me on a road with a 45mph speed limit.
He was badly injured, but I was driving a sports car with a low, long hood, so the injuries were to his legs instead of his chest or his head. Large four wheel drive pickup trucks were already the norm in the area, so he was lucky in a sense.
Those trucks have 12-16 ft front blind spots. Brahs are running over their own children.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/foster-butler-1.4970519
I’ve noticed a lot of cyclists completely ignore stop signs and traffic lights.
