Re:9,000-pound electric Hummer shows we can’t ignore efficie...
by Robotbeat on Thursday July 07, 2022 @10:55PM
(#32022502)
Well my personal opinion is these larger vehicles should require a special license to drive. And once we kill gasoline and diesel on our roads, we should tax based on 1) wear and tear on the roads and 2) risk to pedestrians and other vehicles.
Weight is an okay stand-in for that metric, but isn't perfect (there are ways to distribute load on the road using the wheels that reduce wear, and there are design features like a low hood or even external airbags that could be used to reduce fatalities to pedestrians and other vehicles).
But we shouldn't go there until we've all but eliminated fossil fuels from our roads.
> That way car companies are incentivized (even more) to maximize miles per kWh.
As long as battery charging times are so slow, IMO car companies already have a ton of incentive to make their EVs efficient, as range is a big differentiator and batteries are such a large cost component. I suspect there isn't a lot more efficiency that would be gotten out of a change to incentive structure.
> Also, a Hummer EV is displacing other large vehicles. And if everybody drove subcompacts or other hyper efficient gasoline cars then we’d have less of a problem anyway. But not everyone is doing that. And a lot of people don’t want to.
This is a big source of waste and inefficiency though. People just needing to commute by themselves from A to B and buying pickup trucks or large sedans with poor efficiency, then whining whenever energy costs shoot up.
As a taxpayer, I would much rather if my taxes subsidized programs that encouraged people to be more frugal with their vehicle type choices.