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I mean, are they really proportional to weight and power? My Cayman weighs less than 3000 lbs, uses very little of it's power, in traffic, and gets 12-16 mpg (a
by rxhernandez 8y ago
I mean, are they really proportional to weight and power? My Cayman weighs less than 3000 lbs, uses very little of it's power, in traffic, and gets 12-16 mpg (around 30 in no traffic). My rx300 weighed nearly 4000 lbs and would get 21-23 mpg in no traffic. My rx300 saw almost no traffic whereas my Cayman sees a lot simply because my last job didn't care whether or not I came into work (unless there was a meeting I needed to go to).
- mikestew 8y agoTo top it off with more extreme anecdata, our Mercedes Sprinter-based RV gets 15 mpg, similar to your Cayman, but fully-loaded it weighs 11,000 lbs. (source: truck stop scale). Weight or axles, but fuel tax isn't the way to do this. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with the sedan MPG necessary to beat a 40,000 lbs. semi that gets, say, 3 MPG. (And, BTW, semis haven't done as poorly as 3mpg for a long time.)
- leetcrew 8y agothe poster you are replying to misunderstood my sentence. there's no reason to directly tax powerful vehicles, unless you are using it as a weird proxy for fuel efficiency, which is already captured by per gallon fuel taxes. I'm saying we should tax vehicles in proportion to some integer power of vehicle weight, since the road damage is superlinear with respect to vehicle weight. a big truck that weighs ten times as your Cayman does much more than ten times the damage. since we're trying to fairly distribute the costs of transit, the operators of these vehicles should be paying the lion's share of maintenance costs.