If you take the average kms driven in America of ~23,000 km per year and you take the already high and heavily carbon taxed gas price where I live in Canada of

If you take the average kms driven in America of ~23,000 km per year and you take the already high and heavily carbon taxed gas price where I live in Canada of ~1.50 cad per liter then the gas cost to do those kms in a prius would be around 1,600 cad a year and the cost to do those kms in an f-450 super duty would be around 6,000 cad per year. 4,400 dollars canadian a year ( which is only around 3,200 USD) is not a big enough spread to overwhelm other, more valuable (to the consumer) considerations. It doesn't help that the well intentioned policies mentioned in the article have effectively bifurcated the market in small and very big, removing consumer choice for smaller (but still large) vehicle designs (i.e. I would love to buy a modern small truck or a hatchback approaching station wagon size, they don't really exist.) The correct conclusion to me seems to be that, given the physic situation drivers experience on the road, it's foolish to continue pushing on fuel efficiency as we are and instead we need to focus on making the road physics situation unpalatable to these kinds of vehicles to lower their value to consumers (with the added benefit of increasing road safety because the things that make the physics situation unpalatable to huge vehicles are in the same design real as all the stuff people like not just bikes on youtube push that will also make the city more walkable and bikable aka livable).