Big trucks happen to be a popular market in the US. If you build cars in the US, you’ll have to serve that market. Even more so if your goal is to prove that an EV can be anything that an ICE can be, and more.

Which confirms the old adage: "Money does not come with taste".

These rules need to start discriminating between "safe for the passenger who bought it" and "safe for everyone else sharing the public space". Let people easily import some old Model T or a cute kei truck but not something that will kill someone else's kids who they can't see.

On other hand the RAMs are not relevant for the average citizen. Crazy fuel consumption is a showstopper. And the ones with some extra cash will continue to import with German „Individual Vehicle Approval“ equivalent. In my eyes it’s another useless European regulation. Let poor people import cheap Toyotas from overseas.

They are all business vehicles as the premiums would be so insane no person would pay it (which is a hint why they should not be in the road). The problem comes when the crash out costs the business and then you get nothing due to type of insurance (pretty much we pay nothing you pay everything yourself), or the ability of companies to fight endless court battles which your insurance likely does not cover.

My way of middle fingering them is reporting them every time they are either on the curb when there is a parking spot (not legal, blocking pedestrian access is only partially legal when there is no parking pace nearby and you leave enough space), or when they overextend onto the road which is a judgement call and up to the enforcing officer.

You also need to keep notice of people trying to get the municipality to widen parking spots and block that.

Having said that I think these American pick-ups (and large SUV's, they are part of the same problem) are a common sight here as well and should not be allowed on the road (unless maybe you can show you need one for work or business).

I'm European and I'll go one step further: I'm profoundly concerned that the majority of people in Europe seem happy to imitate all the bad things that the US has, but fiercly reject all the good things that the US has.

My mom who is originally from Bergschenhoek claims her elder brother taught her to drive, in a Dodge truck, probably post WW2 in a model like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_T-,_V-,_W-Series

I don't know whether there are hordes of bejaarden buying Dodges for nostalgic reasons, but that would mean the Dodge brand has some insane staying power. My guess would be that is absurd and unlikely.

I really dig your deadpan sprinkling of Nederlands. Some words have that etymological acuity that makes them irresistible to just deploy. I was always amazed by how many Yiddish and French words there are in Hollands.

Yeah, so that would be rampantly anti-Democratic authoritarianism... Peaceful transfer of power is pretty much at the core of why democracy works in the first place, and once you start engaging in political persecution because you don't like some trade-off involving safety ... yeah, that's no longer a democracy but something else.

American regulations created a dichotomy where there's no middle ground. Big car or sour cream dollop with no space and no power.

Americans want big because big means "safety". An SUV feels safer next to the semi than a Smart car. They also want big to haul the occasional furniture between moves, go on the occasional road trip, bring all the gear when camping, or bring back a massive shopping haul.

American housing is way less dense outside the cities. There's no reason for a compact car if you live in the burbs apart from gas mileage.

At the same time, more and more people want to build bike lanes and people infra near roads. "Strong Towns" movement, etc.

We're putting more bicyclists on the roads next to big cars now.

The average weather pattern of the region a person lives in plays a part, the amount of public transportation avaliable plays a part, how densely packed cities near you are plays a part. What car is avaliable is obviously a big part. All that stuff will be probably be considered before the "overall safety" of the car you want (and can afford) to get.

The people who can afford to think about safety will most likely be considering "passanger safety" rather than at the societial level. The more big cars around them the more someone concerned about safety will feel the need to own and drive in a big car. Sometimes you need the bigger car for the larger range a bigger gas tank allows. There are still places where you can find around 400 km between gas stations, especially if you are driving outside normal buisness hours.

One topic for the American car market has been how the "mid-sized" or "mid-range value" car space has been vanishing. That the options are increasingly moving towards either minimal passanger/storage Eco-Cars or the larger Trucks and SUVs. That plays a part, the used car market plays a part, and other world events play a part.

So at least from one point of view here all that leads to a lot of topics like this where there are people who have only lived in the US (and often not even moved around to other parts of the US) pushing their world view on others. You also have people who "have been to the US" claiming qualified expertiese based off their point(s) of reference, valid or not. The "US needs better public transportation" crowd will usually come out as well with sometimes more militant views against car use and ownership.

But all this circles back to the idea that the "normal American" has time to think about this or try to act on any of this. Some do, some don't, most won't really think about this unless a headline prompts something from their brain. The hard thing for the "normal European" to understand is the economics of distance and scale at play in the US given just how much space between cities and towns there can be.

People can blame the "American Dream" or the auto-industry, or whatever else you might want to imagine has contributed to the damage done in the last century of road construction and sprawl. The end result is that most Americans don't have a choice but to own a car, and may be far too tired to be trusted at the wheel of a vehicle. Multiple people driving less than a few miles to work may be involved in an accident with someone who had driven hundreds. Miles driven in a year is part of insurance calculations for a reason.

This was much more comment than I intended to give.

Business automobile insurance doesn't work any differently than consumer automobile insurance. Liability payouts don't usually (ever?) have deductibles. I was recently sideswiped by a guy driving a massive pickup truck for work and their insurance paid me promptly and fairly without any fuss at all. At least the state liability insurance laws I am familiar with do not change just because you're a business.

This is the appeal to worse problems fallacy. Both are problems, both need to be addressed.

"dismissing" a politician sounds like an easy fix but we probably don't want hyper-polarized dismissal wars where politicians are "shot down" immediately after being elected. That's why there are other mechanisms such as not re-electing, public shaming, transparency fora etc. ... we need to work on strengthening those, the accountability and transparency.

Just as a starter for ten, is that 30% increase distributed around the US or concentrated in certain states? I can't imagine we've seen the same increase in New York than in rural Alabama (and if that's the case, how much of it is really attributable to car designs)?

To be fair, you can really lay that particular one at the feet of the demographics in this comment section far more justifiably than you can blame the obese people you saw in the deep south for it.

I saw some of those on some US army vehicles on the German autobahn. And what perfectly illustrated their danger was when they almost got rear-ended while entering the left-lane in front of a passing Audi at mild autobahn speed.

Had it been a yellow blinking light, the left-lane driver would have been better alerted to the fact that someone was about to go left. Instead, it was a muted blinking red, at the same intensity as the car's tired red back lights, that looked like nothing more than a defective back light.

Such a stupidly dumb design.

US soldiers/DOD etc PCS'd to EU manage (not always well).

And, us EUians get the advantage of seeing just how disgracefully oversized US cars and trucks are.

Aside: No yellow indicators? I'd rather US red ones than the 1"x3" mini-yellow-indicators that are becoming more common.

But still, I wish they would ban them.

See page 12 on https://etsc.eu/wp-content/uploads/15-PIN-annual-report-FINA...

They'd quickly find out when they're not being subsidized by the general public and people actually have to pay their way to use their vehicles through tolls to people amortizing their road maintenance costs, that the smaller more pedestrian safe cars are the ones that make sense to operate.

What you really care about is that we are able to tighten regulations for 99.9% of cars. That's what is going to make a difference. Not running after the 0.1%. It just isn't worth the effort.

And we do this for new cars. We constantly ratchet up the safety requirements. Ensuring we slowly make the overall fleet safer. Not only do the Euro NCAP rules get stricter over time (hence "ratchet"), but the "NCAP star rating" is being tilted towards what are now termed as "Vulnerable Road Users". (Note that the percentage weights haven't changed that much but the rules that decide the number of stars have).

(The reason we now have the concept of Vulnerable Road Users rather than just pedestrians is so we can broaden the scope to include cyclists)

Note that the 99.9% / 0.1% figures are _guesses_ and that they are most likely way too conservative. I was not able to find exact official figures on exactly how many excempted cars are have valid registration. But I could find some numbers on the specific class that large US pickup trucks belong to. And when you compare these to total automobile sales, these numbers are trivial. That's 0.076% of EU car sales that year, and 0.057% of European car sales.

It would be thoroughly pointless to focus on them.

A Ram was certainly relevant for this dead woman - https://www.rtl.nl/nieuws/binnenland/artikel/5521908/rouveen...

https://www.parkeerbord.nl/wetgeving/is-parkeren-op-de-stoep...

This spot used to drive me absolutely insane when walking to school with my kids - the gemeente even added marked parking spots and drivers just stole the footpath anyway, so we had to walk in the street, and the gemeente straight refused to issue tickets. The guy on the phone told me "it's not causing any trouble" because hey, it's not like _he's_ ever had to push a pram in the street.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/YD5w84R19TGQgPX78

The problem is coming from the other side, the Americans are threatening to start a new trade war if the EU doesn't permit their murdermobiles on the European roads.

IMO pedestrian safety should still come above all else, but this is not an initiative coming from some EU representatives who want to own a Cybertruck. Blocking these cars can have impact on the war against Ukraine and the prices of fuel and other import products on the short term.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC9a3GR1HJY&t=371s

> I said there was no way this truck would pass a pedestrian impact safety standard. Now, I wasn't wrong that the truck won't pass a pedestrian impact safety standard, it won't! And that's why they can't sell it in Europe. [...] But I didn't realise that America has no pedestrian impact standards. [...] America actually allows companies to self-certify a variety of aspects of safety.

It's crazy because the numbers don't line up with the theory. If you look at US traffic deaths by year, they were basically flat in terms of vehicle miles traveled between 2010 and 2019 and then took a big jump from COVID which is only now starting to come back down.

Meanwhile in Europe road fatalities were also fairly flat up until 2019, and then went down significantly from COVID.

Now we have to guess why the responses to COVID had the opposite effect in each place, but it's pretty obvious that the difference was a primarily result of COVID rather than differences in vehicle safety regulations, unless the vehicle safety regulations all changed in 2020 and everyone immediately replaced the installed base of cars everywhere overnight.

Europe on the other hand has a much higher level of intermingling between pedestrians and vehicles. This puts pedestrians more often in harms way, and likely will lead to out-sized dangers that aren't seen as frequently in the USA. Pedestrian safety is a key requirement for European car safety.

If the EU is politically forced into accepting the US standards: The slack will need to be picked up by European insurance companies, who should charge extreme premiums for unsafe designs, effectively blocking the sale of the vehicles from dangerous, young, or casual drivers and limiting those designs to those who truly need them (which I suspect is very few.)

This should also go a long way in addressing inexpensive Chinese vehicles that ape the American designs. Since that is more likely going to be what is on the roads.

I live in a very bike friendly country, so culturally closer to Europe in terms of transport, but if you walked into a drive through you may well be stopped by police.

Drive throughs have long since stopped serving pedestrians.

Generally anyone trying this is inebriated.

As someone with experience in the US, Europe and Thailand, I feel qualified to say: nope, you most definitely do not, at least not on that basis.

Actually, truck culture is one of the points on which Thailand and the USA share a lot of values. That notwithstanding, I’m afraid you’re stuck with your New World cousins just as they are stuck with you, there’s nobody closer.

Local governments here try to encourage cycling by putting in as many dedicated bike lanes as they can, but they never seem to get much use (where I live they're used almost exclusively by bike delivery people and a few people like myself).

The roads can be lethal and many drivers have a great deal of animosity towards cyclists (probably helped to no good degree by the likes of people like Jeremy Clarkson / Top Gear which spent a decade joking about and belittling cyclists).

  such as indicators in the same color as the rear lights, are perfectly legal.

Why were you even driving in London?

It's time to also take into account area when it comes to vehicle tax in my opinion, even European "cars" (SUVs) are bulging out of normal parking spaces these days.

Look at the license plates of these "tokkie tanks": they all start with a "V" (https://www.anwb.nl/auto/autokosten/grijs-kenteken) meaning the owner pays reduced tax.

In Ireland, public transport usage now is also much bigger share of commutes than pre-covid, particularly in Dublin, though I'm not sure if that's due to local factors or if it's replicated across Europe.

I think the reason you don’t see many big cars is that we are generally so poor that we can’t afford what we would like to buy. At least where I live… Also our streets are old and narrow which makes it impractical.

In NL, for example, I see plenty of large EU cars driving around with only a very occasional US "monstrosity" like a pickup truck, and I don't even live in the city.

The EU is a strong negotiator, we just prefer that everyone works with the carrot because the stick is uncivilised and hurts a lot.

(For Europeans)

France has a layer where they translate from the Euro standards to their own system, but that's no different from having to mentally translate temperature units or distances.

The trade wars go both ways. Certainly it can be a bit of a collective action problem when it comes to individual countries that are smaller than the US, but the EU as a whole should be able to negotiate on even-enough footing with the US on these kinds of issues.

Larger vehicles use more fuel; they’re more often diesels which attract a higher tax; and they pay increased registration fees and tolls.

Total tax on diesel fuel is about 71¢ a gallon (about .16€/L). When they fill up their F-350s, which get around 12mpg (20L/100km), they’re paying $21 in road tax, or about 6¢ per mile (.3€/km).

In larger cities, there are often even more tolls/fees like in NYC which are raised whenever they need more money to pay for public transit.

RIP Cor H., one of a kind. I'm pretty sure the fact that in that neighborhood even now people are religiously parking on the street and never on the sidewalk is a remnant of his presence in this world.

If you get injured because the municipality refused to act they are on the hook. Thell them you want it on paper they say they will do nothing to prevent this and you want them telling you specifically you have to walk on the street because they do not act on illegally parked cars.

Edit: where I live I have the option of specifically reporting a dangerous situation which in your case I would: near school zones with children involved it always is in my opinion but who am I to judge. It also helps if more people complain. We have a load of parking tourists here since the municipality mode the payed zones so more traffic and more annoyances. My first messages got impolitely unanswered but after a year of complaining by pretty much everyone they finally start doing things.

The government doesn't want to have it's agents doing "aha, gotcha" stuff on technicalities and the strict letter of the law except where doing so aligns with broader public support because doing so without that support will not endear the government to the people. Reporting a Superduty for parking like an ass in the same way that a bunch of other people are parked like an ass because you don't like the Superduty isn't gonna change the enforcement calculus.

They’re clustered around areas of idiots with means. I’m nowhere near a us military base but there’s a bunch of these where I live, including two or three owned at houses I pass by on my way to work.

If the US government wants to give its soldiers perks, they can rent or loan them a local car. Probably cheaper all round than flying/shipping in their financed Dodge RAM anyway.

Then again, American personnel being arseholes to the locals is well established from Okinawa to Croughton so it's probably endorsed as a power thing.

That is… not how we do things around here. It sounds like a baked-in conflict of interest and a wonderful way of making them chase the money instead of doing their policing job.

The EU is trying to minimize the damage for its constituents, they're not interested in a stupid power play. Threats of reciprocating in trade wars are meaningless if the leadership you're threatening doesn't care if their people starve.

Playing tough doesn't matter anyway, the American voting public will just blame the EU for all the bad things that happen if the EU's actions do have an impact, laugh at the EU if a diplomatic solution is found, and the American leadership will repeat whatever the last guy to verbally jerk off Trump said for at least the coming three years.

In a way, it's kind of impressive. The EU was not ready for America to devolve into this level of clown politics this fast, and that left them unprepared.

Funny because the last time I believe that it was the US that requested help in Iraq and Afghanistan and not the other way around.

> pay whatever the market rate

would only work if there is a market. And infrastructures like roads are a natural monopoly[0], so there could be no market.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

2. How is this dependent on privatization? Every car is registered. So it seems pretty easy to enforce taxes on cars. And to do so based on model, weight, whatever you want.

In other words, from what I can tell, making people pay their fair share seems simpler in a public system, if anything. It certainly doesn't require privatization.

FWIW I have little skin in the game, as I said, not a driver, so I would probably benefit both by having to pay less tax and by reducing overall car usage.

The easiest way to decrease unnecessary oversized vehicles, frankly, is to require them be painted pink and flowery. Many men in America pick big vehicles as they're perceived as masculine, and a basic paint job to attack this psychological would probably work.

Less jokingly, add mechanical speed limits to them. Big heavy vehicles are extremely dangerous, but that danger is closely related to speed.

Other options include adding excessive cameras and radar equipment, so the front of the vehicle isn’t a blind spot. Cars have plenty of cameras and mirrors already, so it’s not novel to drivers. It’s a missed opportunity already since this could really be implemented by major manufacturers within a year.

Edit: I am really curious why there is no real vehicle physical size tax in Germany. Let’s take reference as VW Golf. Smaller cars cost less, bigger more. I agree to pay more, but current insanity with RAMs and vans should be somehow regulated.

You can’t probably blame 100% of that difference on the design standards of US vehicles. But probably a high proportion of them!

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/b2ad/live/a20a6d...

from: 'Carspreading' is on the rise - and not everyone is happy about it - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7vdvl2531o

Throws in the term "Chelsea Tractor", in Australia in the 1980's they were called Toorak Tractors or simply Yank Tanks.

So, understand that the things I'm about to mention are not universally true for all Americans, obviously. For any feature, there's a statistical distribution over the population of individuals. I'm not saying that "All Americans are more X than all Europeans". I'm saying that "The average American is more X than the average European, even if that difference is dwarfed by the standard deviation within which each of those populations".

Here's some that come to mind:

1- positivity. Americans seem to have more of a can do attitude, Europeans start out with the negative belief that attempts will fail and things don't change.

2- friendliness. I lived 1 year in Chicago and in that one year I was approached on the street 3 times by random people who just said "hi, how are you doing? Nice day". In the 10 years I lived in London that happened exactly zero times.

3- shared identity. In Europe there's endless "cultural bickering" between neighboring countries over their miniscule, irrelevant differences. I don't perceive this across American states. The one thing that all Europeans agree on is that we're happy we're not American. How pathetic is that.

4- emphasis of freedom and free speech.

5- work culture (partially). I'm not going to say that I want Europe to emulate American work culture whole sale, because in America there's more abuse from employers and that's a negative aspect. At the same time, one thing I think is great is that in the US it seems that some significant fraction of people actually believe in the jobs they do. In Europe people say that, but we all know it's fake, we're just here for the paycheck. This might just be American positivity spilling into work life.

These are all things I've heard Europeans explicitly point to as undesirable:

1- American positivity is fake

2- American friendliness is fake

3- American shared identity is actually lack of identity

4- The concept of Freedom is American propaganda

5- enjoying your job is Stockholm syndrome from being abused by your employer.

Here's one in Utrecht https://urbanists.social/@Fuzzbizz/109608802470660144

People are strange.

Even when the EC actually _wants_ to do something, it typically struggles to get it done in under a decade.

>lobbying is recorded and publicly accessible

As in the meeting dates or the actual talks? Mind dropping a link?

This is interesting, how is this accomplished?

Over here there was some proposal some years ago to move to a per-mile taxation, with higher tax in congested areas. All managed by some kind of GPS device in each car. There was much opposition as people didn't want the government spying on them via this GPS device, so the plan was eventually dropped.

A simpler approach would be to just record the mileage during annual inspections, but hey why make it simple when you can have some public-private grift making zillions on selling these GPS devices and running the infrastructure for them..

Why on earth you would want a pickup truck instead of a van is beyond me. This ain't Oklahoma.

Also, it's very rarely an "accident" with a road traffic collision - that implies that there was no fault involved with the collision and "just one of those things that happens". (I would consider an accident more like a tree suddenly falling or an undiagnosed medical condition).

There was an interesting court case where only giving tolls to 18 wheeler was problematic but the equivalent fee for cars would have literally worked out to under 1 cent.

The state also sends a certain amount of fuel taxes to local governments in accordance with how many miles are travelled in an area.

New construction must privately pay to build the roads and then transfer ownership to the government. So the cost really is private. By far the most expensive part of maintaining roads is replacing bridges. Hence why so many bridges have rules about weight limits for trucks.

I suppose if you really wanted a user fee on roads you could have a system of tolls on bridges, intersections and interchanges, but that would be really unpopular.

If there is only one thing you take away from this discussion I hope it is:

Roadbuilding is fantastically, stupefyinlgy expensive. One can hardly believe just how expensive a safe, standards-based, high quality, durable stretch of asphalt is.

You know how you drive somewhere and then there are some cones set up and a lane of traffic is blocked off while two or three machines and a handful of guys repave a short section and then 20 seconds later the cones end and you're back up to full speed ? You just drove past millions of dollars of budget.

As far as a speed limit… what governed speed are you proposing? Being in a pickup pulling a trailer already makes you a cop magnet, and I never go even 1 MPH over the limit. It’s already expensive enough fuel economy wise and they aren’t exactly vehicles with fast acceleration.

Incidentally of people I know who have died in vehicle accidents recently (last 5 years) all of them were because they got hit by a large commercial truck (typically 35 tonnes). One died when he crashed his motorcycle. That’s it.

Look at the numbers. What would you expect if Individual Vehicle Approvals represented an actual bridgehead for manufacturers? You’d expect noticeable growth over the past decades. But it is still a rounding error.

If this were a strategy to make Europe soften regulation, it hasn’t worked. Rather, the opposite is true. The ratcheting of regulation is actually so stringent manufacturers have to worry about cars sitting unsold for too long. Right now there are a lot of unsold cars in Europe that come 2026 will be unsellable. Because they won’t meet requirements. And these are cars that meet 2025 regulations. Not pickups from the US that have to be approved individually.

Remove/modify the laws that caused such vehicles.

https://cldnr.prod.webx.talpa.digital/talpa-network/image/fe...

For one, typical pickup trucks seems to have much worse forward visibility than most SUVs. To the point that even an M1 tank sees forward better:

* https://carbuzz.com/news/the-abrams-m1-tank-has-better-visib...

This is an incredibly niche product in Europe, so far I’ve seen no evidence that the current state of affairs isn’t perfectly fine.

No need to fix things that aren’t broken, or don’t even look to be trending in that direction.

Approximately nobody wants these cars in Europe! Everyone who wants one and can afford one already owns one, there’s no lack of supply.

For cars that can be sold without having to get special approval, the obnoxious drivers are a minority (well, maybe BMWs excluded ;-P).

But what driving/parking manners would you expect from someone who went out of their way and paid extra to get e.g. a Ram or an F-150? They're almost guaranteed to disregard any inconvenience they cause with their driving.

Depends on the country. Here in the UK you can do it from a website, takes 20 minutes.

I responded to the person you're talking to, have a look at what I wrote.

Easily modified to go as fast as 50 MPH on a chassis not designed for it. Drivers aren’t licenced and often are young kids. No registration. No insurance. No training. Very hazardous to pedestrians.

Umm... yes? Since this whole debacle started, the EU has been shooting itself in the foot with all the sanctions that hurts its industries.

On the other hand, the US did the smart thing and did not give out weapons for free, it charged for them.

In the end, the US will be the winner of this war and Europe will come out of it incredibly weak economically. And it will have to turn to the US for help. Again.

You quoted me but I was commenting on my country, an egalitarian country in the Pacific.

Everybody I see driving around me seems in a rush, act as if the roads are exclusively for cars (despite the Highway Code reiterating recently that the pecking order is most to least vulnerable), and get annoyed at some perceived hold up should they be unable to overtake (a minority of the time).

Sometimes I think it might even be as simple as an anti-fitness / jealousy thing. I'm abused more often when I'm running and cycling than any other point in my day. Anecdotally I've heard that the abuse and animosity is even worse for women doing both of these activities, than what I've experienced.

A bunch of Japanese compacts and subcompacts do it too and it was basically unheard of on any vehicle from any continent until the last 15yr or so when backup cameras proliferated.

Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.

The CAFE footprint rule killed compact cars because huge cars were permitted to be exempt. I don't see why we'd need another such exemption, other than the business vehicle exemptions we already have (otherwise vans and trucks would be impossible to afford for anyone).

As for a punitive tax on minivans: if those minivans take up more space on the road/parking spaces/public spaces, I don't see why not. The impact doesn't need to be high enough to kill minivans in general, just enough not to drive an 80% minivan to work every day.

Usually road deaths is all deaths and pedestrians get split out as a sub category. Primary sources and academic papers are typicaly good. Analysis thereof almost always has a policy it's trying to advance and will frequently mix and match to that end. Internet comments are worse still.

See the debates about how the European funds (ReArm Europe) should be spent, and whether or not it should be allowed to be used to buy US equipment. Or the recent procurement of additional F35 (at least Belgium, Netherlands, Italy and Germany have ordered more).

Also, none of the re-arming plans seem to consider the assumption that the US logistics (airlift & tankers) could not be relied on.

I was skeptical of this being true since fuel duty is notoriously high in the UK, so I did a quick fact check.

Based on the change in 1937 you are "technically" correct, in that none of the motoring taxes are ring fenced for road funds since 1937.

However the opposite is true of what you are implying... income from fuel duty alone is generally around 3 times larger than all road maintenance spending (a fairly steady +25bn/yr [0] Vs -8bn/yr [1] over the last decade).

In other words, although it's officially one big tax pot, motoring taxes pay for road network expenditure more than 3 times over.

This is why they are introducing the per mile EV tax, because fuel duty provided a proportional tax to road use, but EVs skip that and electricity can't be so easily taxed for road use specifically.

TLDR, UK road users pay for far more than the road network.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/284323/united-kingdom-hm...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/533171/annual-road-trans...

Usually what happens is smaller cars subsidize everyone else due to paying a disproportionate tax vs axle weight^~(2-4 depending on fatigue pathway). Depending on tax structure possibly pedestrians/cyclists too but they are usually parasitic on tax basis.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

That can be fixed. Starting with removing business tax exemptions for such cars.

If you want a silly huge car you should pay silly huge fees for it. You must compensate the public for your nuisance vehicle.

Because I read comments like that and I don't.

A murder charge for a crime without intent? In the rich west? There just isn't the political will for that. A policy like that is about as serious as luxury space communism.

I've also connected my private roads to a couple other private roads so no one has a monopoly on my way to town.

As for the "barriers to entry" mentioned in that article, is absolutely wild. My road and most the ones in our grid network were made with little more than a dude and a tractor (I think you can get suitable one for $10k off craigslist). I initially made mine with an axe, a light truck, and a rope (to rip out small trees) and there's nothing stopping anyone adjacent from doing the same if I'd block the road.

It’s so ridiculously bad that even an M1 Abrams tank has less blind spots: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/140dgn8/many_popu...

https://www.carsized.com/en-us/cars/compare/porsche-cayenne-...

But or course you are correct this is not only about American cars. Europeans can build big cars as well.

Cars are taxed by engine displacement in Germany. It's rather low compared to insurance and gas cost though. Indirectly larger cars are taxed through high gas tax.

Add in the absolutely stupid design of larger passenger vehicles and you get the current trend.

The monstrously large (5.8 meters) G63 6x6 is considerably rarer (i have never seen one in person).

Honestly getting past people isn't that much of an issue. There are normally passing spots where you pull over to let people through.

"Chelsea Tractor" is more of a dig at people Range Rovers for the looks and it never been using off-road.

There is a brand in the UK that have decided to "own" the label. Not sure why you would want/need a Ineos Grenadier in London, but some people will buy one.

https://www.chelseatruckcompany.com/

Also, the numbers for at least the US are apparently just wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

1.27 fatalities per 100M VMT in 2023 (the latest year with data), 1.11 in 2010, that's a difference of 14%, not 30%. Even the peak during COVID was only 24% above 2010. The only way I can see to get 30% is to use the during-COVID number for only the total number of motor vehicle fatalities without accounting for population growth or vehicle miles traveled, which is not a great metric for making comparisons.

The majority of traffic stops in the US are, cop parks on the side of the highway somewhere the speed limit is lower than the speed people drive there, every car on the highway is doing 70 in a 55, whoever drives past gets a ticket and the government fills their coffers but the speed everybody actually drives on that stretch of highway remains 70.

Now suppose the cops stop doing that for the stated reason. If you then drive past them at 110 instead of 70, are they still going to not pull you over? Good luck with that. Even if they're actually trying to minimize traffic stops, that one's the one that makes the cut.

So then what happens if they stop doing the usual ones? People are then going to drive 70 in a 55 because they can get away with it, but that's what they were doing to begin with. You could argue that the fatality rate would be higher at 70 than 55, but then why would that change relative to the baseline where that was what was already happening?

So the argument would have to be that idiots had the impression that they could do 110 without getting pulled over, even if that wasn't true, and then did that and managed to make contact with an overpass before driving past a cop. Which doesn't seem as plausible, because speeds like that on empty desert highways shouldn't have raised the fatality rate that much (e.g. it's not that high on the autobahn in Germany), and speeds like that in traffic where there are other cars traveling significantly slower will trigger a visceral feeling of danger in nearly all humans unless they're on drugs or have significant mental health issues, and in those cases they wouldn't have been deterred by the prospect of traffic enforcement anyway. Which is why people drive somewhat over the speed limit even when that could get them a ticket -- because it doesn't feel dangerous -- but also why they don't drive a lot faster than the other cars -- because that does. Traffic enforcement or not.

Moreover, regardless of how much of a contribution was made by that vs. COVID, the numbers still don't line up with it being vehicle safety regulations.

https://lae.mit.edu/2024/06/28/study-quantifies-premature-de...

EU regulators bent over to German companies allowing those cars on the road without additional restrictions. We all pay for that.

And since horse riders are legally equivalent to vehicles it's pretty much a "fine as long as you don't shit in the driveway" situation.

In Leeds, not so much. Not many tourists, the bike lanes aren't universal enough to convince some people who don't want to ever be on the roads, and there's a very car-heavy culture, even in city centers.

I'm from Leeds, and while the council has been putting in (some decent, some bad) bike lanes across the city center, I rarely see other cyclists on them. Just the odd commuter and tons of delivery cyclists.

I'd agree on all your points.

Trunk based 3rd rows were eliminated at the behest of the 30yr ago equivalent of people like you because they performed very poorly in rear end crashes.

There are 27 EU countries, so if it's "a different sticker for each country" that seems easy enough, except, all the ones I thought of do not require stickers so...

Side effects include: reduced pollution, and cheaper ways to clean up pollution

Right, but driving has far more externalities than just the cost of the roads. For example:

> Results suggest that each kilometer driven by car incurs an external cost of €0.11, while cycling and walking represent benefits of €0.18 and €0.37 per kilometer. Extrapolated to the total number of passenger kilometers driven, cycled or walked in the European Union, the cost of automobility is about €500 billion per year. Due to positive health effects, cycling is an external benefit worth €24 billion per year and walking €66 billion per year.

From "The Social Cost of Automobility, Cycling and Walking in the European Union", https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218... (which I heard about from a CityNerd video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp75-46PnMY )

One of the principles of Libertarianism is equivalent compensation for damages. What is a fair compensation if someone causes death? A life for a life? Code of Hammurabi? Such laws have existed before, but there is indeed no apatite for that in modern times.

So if the government is going to be arbiter of fair compensation, the best it can do is to prevent harm from happening as much as possible. Claim that as a society we did our best to prevent the death, and assign victims and token amount of money. But this also means that not doing everything you can to prevent deaths goes against Liberatarian principles, because you allow for more unfair compensation.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6781339100e3d...

Absolutely not. You can't even turn around in the driver position of a tank.

Those kinds of exotic variants are for the Dubais of the world, for rich Arabs to power up and down sand dunes, not for the Autobahn and narrow medieval streets. I’ve only seen it at a motorshow.

People in London bought 4x4s (in part) so they could still comfortably travel down roads covered in highly aggressive speed bumps. The joke is that we made London roads miserable to drive in a sensible small car (even at safe and legal speeds, I usually have to stop on approaching some of this stuff in a bog standard A1).

There are plenty of factors at play, but sometimes incentives are obvious

"Not my car" :)

This is, essentially, how the US government survived Trump 1.0, and is why Trump 2.0 has been so concerned with gutting bureaucracy and placing vapid yes-men in the cabinet, but they can't really do that in Europe.

It's one of the few times where EU bureaucracy is a huge advantage.

The US has previously discouraged Europe from building out its own defense industry, the current situation is due to that a dovish view of Russia therefore less of a need to spend money on equipment and troops for a land war.

In the UK the most recent budget allocates £1.6 billion for maintenance. According to statista £13 billion was spent on roads last year.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/298675/united-kingdom-uk...

("murder" is a bit an extreme reaction but the more realistic idea may be to make harsher judgements the more pointlessly large and dangerous the vehicle is)

Weight also matters of course. Hopefully this relatively simple ruling will fix some of that too.

Speaking or fun over, whoever made that illustration should be run over by a tank. Fix the size of the goddamn kid or fix the distance and change the size of the kid. Having both variables move serves to only add confusion and annoyance.

For example, a Mercedes Sprinter in the standard long box configuration (as is used by local grocery delivery services, plumbers and the likes where I live) is 7.4 meters long , way longer than even the longest American pickup trucks (for some of them, several meters longer!), and is just as wide as them.

In custom box or pickup bed configuration (used by e.g., gardeners), these vehicles get wider (and sharper).

You do get problems in rural areas with idiots in Chelsea Tractors though. Leave them in the city -- there's no room for you in rural areas.

(For those whining about having to do the school run, just got back in my 1.6m wide car with 2 kids, 6 bags, skateboard and guitar, no problems on the 8 miles of single track road even when the lorries come the other way)

I am quite tall, even for Dutch standards, but the hood reaches my shoulder easily. It also drives around quite a busy neighbourhood. So I expect this specific car to kill someone within the next 5 years or so.

The EC is not that slow when it comes to the American trade wars. The timeline suddenly shrinks to months instead of years because this stuff could majorly disrupt the economy (and safety) across the European continent.

The EC may not fear the (mostly disinterested) European citizen body, but it does fear immediate actions by world powers.

For each lobbying company/group you can download a pdf listing all their activities.

Of course, we don't know what happens beyond the official encounters, as there is no legal requirement to report "I bumped into X lobbyist in a restaurant and we had a chat".

We spend multitudes of times more than our only realistic threat. And that threat can't even wage war with Ukraine, you expect Russia to be able to fight Poland, yet alone the rest of the European countries?

Also, just a reminder: US servicemen have not been sent to fight a war for European souls since almost a century. Whereas European soldiers are actively deployed even now in the middle East for wars that Washington started.

Please start looking more at facts and less about propaganda. Of course Europe should step up in being more independent defense-wise, but you'd be a fool if you think the US does not enjoy and leverage the current status provides.

The entire strategy for the last 80 years has been built around this edict.

The US doesn't give one rats ass about Egypt. The US won and got their way in Suez and the international seas in general. Europe lost.

There is no right in geo politics - only might. It's completely machiavellian. This is because you don't get to elect your neighbors leaders, and so they aren't beholden to you. International politics fundamentally doesn't work like national politics because of this. You can't stop Putin, Trump, or Xi, from taking what is yours unless you have the steel and oil to stop them. You can't sue them or vote them out like in national politics.

It seems that the policy of the current US government is to split the world between themselves, Russia and China. And I guess that's a legitimate policy, even though I think it's both impossible and incredibly misguided.

How you feel makes sense though. The US does not and has never had Switzerland's back (and vice-versa).

Which is another reason why freight should be delivered by rail. Yet haulage companies have no incentive to maintain an efficient rail network, when they could exploit a subsidised road network instead.

> there shall be no obstruction in the driver's 180° forward direct field of vision below a horizontal plane passing through V1, and above three planes through V2, one being perpendicular to the plane X-Z and declining forward 4° below the horizontal

> For vehicles with high driving positions (driver's eye points more than 1,650 mm above the ground), a 1,200 mm tall cylindrical object with a diameter of 300 mm must be visible when placed 2,000 mm in front of the vehicle

According to Claude a Dodge RAM fails both of these. At 80cm (2-year old, a dog, or someone crouching down), depending on driver position, an object might be obscured by the hood in a comically large 5-8 meter area ahead.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

It's hard because the people pushing for new rules very transparently want rules far beyond what the public wants or considers sensible. If they were simply asking for that it'd probable be done already.

Pedal fatbikes for riding on snow and sand have existed for at least 20 years I’d say.

That’s who in industrial estates you’ll often find concrete roads, instead of tarmac, for lorries making 90 degree turns.

American style trucks might be big, but presumably they’re nowhere near 44 tonnes.

Of course, articulated lorries only drive on major roads; your average residential road gets no lorries, so all the wear is from smaller vehicles.

If the average Dodge Ram causes X millimorts of deaths per year (per km? per km on suburban roads?) and every dollar spent on public healthcare (drug interventions? road safety? Fire departments?) saves Y lives, you can increase the tax by X/Y, trust the government to spend the extra revenue in the most effective way, and everyone comes out better off.

What’s the total cost of all road maintenance vs amount spent on groceries? How about vs all groceries plus all home goods?

The second that road gets defunded by the public coffers, guy with tractor would show back up.

Why not compare with the GMC sierra 2500 of whatever year?

Seems correct on relative length but not width; the F-450 Super Duty body is a bit wider without mirrors than a Sprinter with mirrors;

It sounds so enlightened to shuffle micromorts around. What good is it to the parents of a child killed by an unsafe vehicle that increased taxes going to healthcare will ensure that 320 elderly people can live 3 months longer?

You would have to basically subsidise everything.

They are unpopular since they effectively require a very small private association to maintain them. They really hurt property values (one reason I bought my place at a bargain price). Most jurisdictions try to prevent creating them because they lead to disputes between neighbours, or poorly maintained private roads become a problem when an emergency vehicle needs to get down one.

The budget for local roads is also quite small, since they don’t carry much truck traffic. My township of 5,000 people or so has 3 part time guys who maintain the roads and a few pickup trucks and a dump truck for hauling the asphalt. That’s it.

The most expensive part of road maintenance is replacing bridges.

Which has resulted in trucks become more useless as actual trucks, since they've evolved into SUVs with a tiny bed you can't fit a sheet of plywood into.

A standard mercedes sprinter in van configuration is 2020 mm wide without mirrors, which is as wide as the RAM and just 10mm narrower than the f150. I suspect the sprinter has wider mirrors, but I don't have the F-150 numbers to compare to so I'll leave that unanswered. Pickup configurations of the sprinter go much wider (and have extended mirrors to fit) - a common compact pickup bed configuration has a 2030mm internal bed width for example.

Note that the F-450 Super Duty is not applicable to the discussion as it won't work in the EU: A standard vehicle (class B) has an upper weight limit of 3500 kg. The F-450 Super Duty would have to be registered as an actual truck (class C), which requires a different drivers license and the use of a tachograph to track all driving and adherence to resting period rules. We don't use those vehicle classes unless strictly necessary.

It's the norm in many businesses for employees to drive their work vehicle home and park it where they live, so they're everywhere. Not as many as regular passenger cars of course, but you'll see them on any residential road. Gardeners, plumbers, electricians, delivery services, this is the norm for all of them (a perk of sorts). Even big name-brand logistics companies, as it's common for the drivers to be independent contractors owning the van themselves so home is the only place to park.

They are also used for errands. They're legal for private use proportionate to the amount of VAT paid irrespective of registration type here, so you'll see them pick up/drop off kids, do groceries, recycle bottles, etc. in such vehicles too. Pretty sure that would be just as legal where you are given familiar EU rules.

I believe the typical limit is 40 tons. I don't know if our tons are the same as your tonnes.

The EU countries have limits of 40 Mg or higher (except Albania). Netherlands allows vehicles up to 50 Mg.

Of course this is all for 5+ axle vehicles. A 5-axle 40 Mg big rig is putting a 8 Mg of load on each axle (if it was perfectly distributed).

A Dodge RAM 1500 loaded up has a gross vehicle weight of about 3.27 Mg - about 1.64 Mg/axle. Fourth power law means about 566 loaded RAMs would equal one about 40 Mg 5-axle big rig in terms of road damage.

As I said, I rarely see Sprinters, might be an Amsterdam thing due to how hard it is to drive and park them here. Ford Transit / VW Transporter / MB Vito / Renault Trafic are far more common. It doesn't seem like much, but an extra 20cm width + 1m length make a massive difference in overall size and driveability.

These are strictly professional cars. When they are not "in duty" they're probably parked at a garage.

On the other hand, an American open truck driving/parked in a residential area is almost certainly some show-off.

Source: I live here and see it every day. Family, friends and customers are doing it, plus many eons ago I too was a tradesman driving home every day in the company work van.

(Heck, many companies wouldn't even have a place to park all their company cars at once, many such smaller companies run out of regular residential buildings with no dedicated parking.)

I really struggle to see the logic where Russia could've won this earlier, but is holding back major resources, I don't see the evidence, yet we know that they've lost 1M people between deaths and severe injuries. Those aren't things you recover easily from.

https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian...

Like your idea sounds good in principle, especially if you're from a country with no automotive jobs, but then what do you do then with tens of thousands of unemployed people of the auto sector being displaced by the Chinese? Will you agree to pay more income taxes to fund the increased unemployment deficits of the others? How do you think those people will vote? What about maintaining some national sovereignty? Shall we just become a vassal state to China on automotive as well?

You can't throw such oversimplified solutions to such complex issues that have very deep ramifications.

If you haven't noticed, the EU economy and jobs market in general is already bad as it is, it won't be able to absorb tens of thousands of unemployed career switchers into to other domains that aren't hiring right now anyway, or if they are hiring, they're very picky due to the increased supply of talent with domain experience.

Currently, the defense sector is absorbing some of the slack of automotive layoffs on the production/manufacturing side in some countries like Germany, but that won't last forever. If peace happens in Ukraine, that will dry out as well as the glut of orders will be scaled back.

It’s coming from the fact that we’re already in a difficult time with a slowdown in economy and then get bullied into spending the money we could be using to help our own people on new US weapons.

All for Trump to then sign half of Ukraine off to Russia.

I don’t want those people to lose their jobs, which is one reason why their bosses need to be dragged in to the 21st century.

They can also be upgraded to increase their range using after market batteries.

So we’re already at 15 years and counting.

Maybe the batteries will wear out, but what will a replacement battery cost in 10 years? Presumably even less than now.

The comment by Lio beside this one also makes it hard for me to take a view like yours.

To get where you want, you need the venn diagram where what the automakers want, aligns with what consumers want, to align with what the government wants, which isn't happening right now, and it's not something the government can force without massive repercussions. China has had 10+ years of focus exclusively on the EV and battery sector domestically, during good economic times to get to where they are.

And Chinese government can subsidize their industry longer than you can stay solvent, as long as they know they'll bankrupt your industry in the long run and then make you dependent on them for manufacturing. Competing with China can't be done on equal footing because they don't play fair and never had.

I think you're really not qualified to say anything about Europe if you didn't know Ukraine existed until 4 years ago.

I think “a couple of hundred” is an absolutely reasonable estimate. Even in big cities like London or Paris you’re not going to find more than a couple (counting all the Mercedes G 6x6s too)

The people driving these cars exist mostly outside of inner cities.

If you disagree, you can do so like an adult instead of spewing out completely unnecessary and unjustified insults.

Anyway, "greed is good".

Ad hominem. I did not create it to disagree with you specifically, your stance is not that unique, as you can see I've replied to similar positions. However, when you admit the quiet part out loud I feel like you have no rebuttal and are fine with the exploitation in favor of money standpoint, which should bring your other standpoints in question if this is your guiding principle.