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[–] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)

A typical US problem, quantity over quality.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    It's not quite so straightforward. The United States has a deeply broken culture (hyperindividualism, for one thing), and these giant vehicles offer individual balm for the systemic rot. That's why we can them emotional support vehicles.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    The A Pillar blind zone annoys the fuck out of me when I am driving. So many times i do not see tall adults walking at the crosswalk when they are completely blocked by the modern car A pillars. I had much easier time seeing when driving my dad's old 90's Honda compared to a newer car from 2015+. I feel so bad for people walking the streets and hate the American car industry and lobbyist

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    My understanding is that it has to do with updated rollover safety requirements that came in in the mid-late 2000s. They have to be able to support something like 2.5 times their weight on the roof, making all of the pillars thicker. Combined with additional overall weight from other crash regulations, this means that A-pillars are yet bigger. Cars have become much safer for occupants at the expense of safety for pedestrians, who are not part of the equation as pedestrians are subhuman.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    The A pillar airbags, the old 90's car didn't have it.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    That too. I went from a 1998 sedan to a 2010 hatchback, and the latter feels like it has good visibility because of the tall window, but the A-pillar will block pedestrians in the crosswalk, and even mask whole cars. I have to bob my head around from side to side to be confident I'm not about to hit something while turning.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Glad gasoline costs so much lately so people consider fuel efficiency when buying a car

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  • 26 comments in c/news@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 51 points 4 months ago (18 children)

    Just make them pay double the taxes and eventually they will disappear.

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  • [–] 21 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I feel like they should also require special licenses. Doesn't australia do that?

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    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

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    No politician would support it because of the votes it would cost them.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    80% of road damage are the semis that weigh 60,000 lbs. What do you think will happen to the price of goods if you ban the primary transportation of those goods?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    My bad, I took the shortcut of calling g pickups: trucks. Currently large trucks are treated differently from passenger vehicles and I’m sure that would continue

    As you say, if it were truly based on road damage, commercial vehicle would have to cover most of it. That may be fair, but yeah doesn’t seem economically sustainable

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    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!
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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 27 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Why are my C and D pillars a foot thick and blocking 20% of my view. The roof isn't that heavy

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  • [–] 20 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

    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.

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