Who gets to decide that? Maybe you flew 5hrs somewhere and your jet fuel environmental damage ends up being larger for the year than the suv driver who didn't make any long distance trips

I think this points to a basic issue. The only way forward is progress like Tesla and Impossible Foods and not in some elites choosing which wasteful activities are ok and which aren't

Agree with the sentiment, though. We all want to make improvements. The strongest way to cut waste probably is less around making our current lifestyles cleaner (electric cars, easier to grow food), and more around making our lifestyles themselves cleaner (walkable cities, stop eating as much, or as much meat).

EDIT: Yeah, maybe I shouldn't ever cross the Pacific. It is a luxury in itself.

Yes I know it's impractical advice but it's technically not wrong and hopefully also funny.

-Lots of fun, at least for a little while

Cons:

-Perhaps increased possibility of not making it across

-Would have to quit your job(maybe file this one under 'pro' instead?)

The way forward isn't tied to any particular brand. Its pulling back from a marketing driven world which has convinced people that not only do they need all of it they deserve it.

I got to break it to you, this is not about making sure you get your fair share of the pie. This is about there being any pie at all.

And whatever the reason is that people are deliberately choosing massively more costly vehicles (in terms of gas and capital costs), there needs to be a lot more persuading of people in their purchasing decisions. It needs to be not cool to buy a truck to drive to the office.

I'm sure their will be an electric F350 (massive torque! The Model S P85 weighs half as much but has 50% more) but do we all need to drive one to work?!

It's so easy to point to other peoples apparently wasteful behaviour from a distance, and much easier than introspection. So the question is reasonable: Have you "deliberately" been on a not-absolutely-necessary long haul flight this year? Because then you don't really have anything to tell families who prefer SUVs.

The point is that people have so little understanding of what is going on with the climate they won't even modify their behaviour slightly, even when getting a sedan with higher efficiency and better safety will cost them much less.

So no, I'm not calling SUV owners rude, it's a rhetorical device to highlight that they are metaphorically thumbing their noses.

Choosing SUVs and trucks and other oversize vehicles that are bigger than your actual use case calls for also violently inflicts greater risk of death and injury upon other road users at no benefit to you.

This is because doubling the weight of two cars in a collision does not make either driver safer; it's a zero sum game. (It's also because bigger vehicles reduce visibility for everyone else.)

It also indirectly creates more congestion -- the vehicles have to fit on the road, slowing maneuvers at intersections and making it less feasible for jurisdictions to manage traffic by repainting N lane roads as N+M lane roads with narrower lanes.

I'm all for getting a large vehicle if you actually use it to haul, but I get angry[1] whenever I see people driving around massive brand new pickup trucks with totally empty beds, two rows of seats, and all the luxury passenger-oriented option as a "lifestyle choice" because it "looks cool" to their buddies. It's essentially a sedan with a bunch of wasted weight and horsepower that fulfills the same goal a T-shirt reading "I'm a real man who needs a truck" would fulfill.

Some references:

http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/fall-2014/pounds-kill... http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/fall-2002/suvs-really... http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/fall-2012/slower-road...

[1] Although I temper my anger with a grain of salt since maybe they do use the bed, just not this time. My anger is against the general trend, not any individual. Still, two rows of seats in a pickup truck is usually the tipoff that the owner primarily uses the vehicle like a sedan. And when I do see stuff in the bed, it's rarely something that wouldn't have fit in a station wagon or minivan. It's just so rare to see someone actually using a pickup truck to haul the kind of weight that kind of horsepower is made for...

Great if you hit a Prius though.

(Passenger miles really aren't so bad, an airliner with a few hundred people on it is doing a lot more work than a commuter's SUV)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_avia...

The price of gasoline at the pumps has gone down due to the dip in Oil Markets.

So people were drawn back to SUVs and Trucks. I don't many give much thought to Climate Change. Lots of people drive Trucks with Crewcabs as a social symbol rather than a work vehicle. And could easily get by with a Car. There's a certain masculinity tied to it.

People are able to easily get more money loaned to afford these more expensive vehicles as well.

Which is comparable, but it also ends up being an extra gallon of fuel every 100 miles (on a base of about 3 gallons per 100 miles).

10,000 miles per year at 10 mpg = 1000 gallons of gas

10,000 miles per year at 20 mpg = 500 gallons of gas

10,000 miles per year at 40 mpg = 250 gallons of gas

You save 500 gallons going from 10 -> 20 mpg, but only 250 gallons going from 20-> 40.

Of course it's best to use the highest mpg you can, but the benefit drops proportionally as it gets higher, so it's harder to justify the extra expense when a lower mpg vehicle (but still relatively high) might be much less expensive to buy and maintain and possibly even have less environmental impact to manufacture. After all someone has to mine the Lithium etc. in all those batteries.

The trucks and SUVs in OPs post are both more expensive and more material intensive than a 35 mpg sedan. I agree with you about the tradeoff as you go up the mileage scale from there, but there are lots of medium sized vehicles that just destroy trucks and SUVs on those metrics.

Just put up the instantaneous-mileage screen and you'll see how hard it is to keep it in the higher range.

Of course, this isn't a fair comparison. Personally, I'd love to see much wider use of HOV lanes, possibly with a steep up-front permit cost for people who refuse to carpool. (By the time this happens, though, we'll probably all be using just-in-time self-driving cars.)

Truthfully, if some designer got off their butt and designed a car that focused on actual use of the car in American, then SUVs wouldn't be so popular. Just saying people don't need a SUV is ignorant.

Not intended as an insult, but that's city thinking.

I guess my point was that personal ownership of small cars will be the first to decline as self-driving and service-based (Uber and the like) car use increases.

The SUV/Truck car market I believe will last a little bit longer because a large part of the use of those things is for transportation and storage of personal belongings as well as numerous children, which Uber/Lyft don't cater as easily to.

New York is the only market that I'm aware where you can ask for a (one) car seat when you request an Uber. It worked fairly well when I went to visit, but most cars only have one seat, so if you have two kids you're still out of luck.

Yeah, no

> New York is the only market that I'm aware where you can ask for a (one) car seat when you request an Uber. It worked fairly well when I went to visit, but most cars only have one seat, so if you have two kids you're still out of luck.

Interesting. I wonder why only New York? This is another one of those corporate decisions that I would really like to know how they arrived at.

For example, in Madrid we were often being told having toddlers in taxis was a big issue, as the law isn't very clear on the legality of it. You'd think that type of market would be ripe for providing a competitive edge.

I also don't really see why you necessarily have to limit yourself to one kid; there are plenty of taxis that aren't small sedans, and most Uberlike apps allow you to sit in the front, so you could pop two kids and a spouse in the back, and ride up front.

Most car seats I've seen are difficult to transport, mainly because they are heavy, bulky, don’t fit onto a stroller, and they certainly don’t roll. Once I found out Uber had that feature in New York I didn't even bother doing additional research for that trip, but could benefit from the knowledge in future trips.

We've done two plane trips with her so far, and obviously the car seat has come with every time, and it's worked out very well.

I'm not sure whether the car seat is heavy or not - just earlier, I was discussing laptop weight with someone, and I definitely don't mind carrying heavy things - so I honestly don't know if I'd call it heavy or not. It feels fine to me, and if I had to take her somewhere in a car without the stroller, it would be annoying, but much less annoying than owning a car in the city :P

I own a Nissan Leaf and a motorcycle that gets 50mpg. That gets cancelled out every year when I hop on a cross-country flight to visit my parents in FL. But I still get to signal my environmental concern every time I drive the Leaf!