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> "Individual Vehicle Approval" rules, exempting them from type safety requirements These rules need to start discriminating between "safe for the passenger wh

• mothballed 11mo ago
  I'll always catch hate for saying this, but the quickest way to get people into small more efficient vehicles is to eliminate public roads and make the fuckers pay whatever the market rate is for their super-sized diesel coal rolling environmental destruction machine to be on a road. 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.
  • kalleboo 11mo ago
    Part of me has also been thinking "let people drive their imported huge trucks but with the understanding that if they kill someone in an accident its not just an accident, its a murder charge for willingly driving such a dangerous vehicle on public roads".
    • master-lincoln 11mo ago
      You could argue this for any car as moving such a heavy object at such speeds close to people is inherently high risk.
      • kalleboo 11mo ago
        Yeah there are always levels of risk we as a society have chosen to allow. My thinking was along the lines of how to self-regulate these imports of cars that do not follow the common safety standards our society has chosen if they are forced upon us by trade agreements or well-intentioned loopholes. ("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)
        • lukan 11mo ago
          Easier might be to just not give exemptions when public safety is the tradeoff?
        • dmurray 11mo ago
          Presumably there's some level at which this can be solved in a purely monetary way. 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.
          • Thiez 11mo ago
            A skilled surgeon can generate millions of negative micromorts per year. Should they get a pass if once a year they push a child off the roof of the hospital? What of the classic example of killing a healthy patient and saving several lives with their organs? 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?
        • Asmod4n 11mo ago
          You can get charged for murder in Germany when killing someone with a car.
          • master-lincoln 11mo ago
            How is this relevant? Is there any object which you can use to kill someone that will make sure you can not be charged with murder in Germany?
            • walletdrainer 11mo ago
              A suicide vest will do the trick.
    • wasmitnetzen 11mo ago
      I'm not sure the type of person who imports such a vehicle would have the appropriate amount of foresight to let such a law affect their behaviour.
      • deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      • lan321 11mo ago
        You'd be surprised to see people can't be classified meaningfully based on how much their car weighs.
    • 2muchcoffeeman 11mo ago
      That’s putting unnecessary burden on the victim. If you want a silly huge car you should pay silly huge fees for it. You must compensate the public for your nuisance vehicle.
      • deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
    • potato3732842 11mo ago
      Do you wonder why the world is drifting toward populism? 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.
      • enaaem 11mo ago
        Of course such laws are ridiculous, but it does lead to an interesting thought experiment. 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.
    • ndsipa_pomu 11mo ago
      Manslaughter would be more relevant than murder, but it's very rarely used as juries are very forgiving of drivers. Personally, I'd like any careless/dangerous driving charge to make use of a driving test examiner as an expert opinion and to declare whether the driving would be an instant fail on a driving test. Rather than the driving test being used as the minimum required competence for drivers, it often seems to be used as the pinnacle of most drivers' expertise. 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).
  • isqueiros 11mo ago
    Vehicle tax in the Netherlands is already weight-based. This is why the tax rate for EVs is higher than gas cars. The thing is that if you live in Hilversum and are able to import a car from the US, you don't mind the higher tax to begin with
    • CalRobert 11mo ago
      This is why they’re registered as business vehicles. Also the roads aren’t tolled, oddly.
    • mothballed 11mo ago
      No tax I've seen is anywhere remotely close to following "fourth power law" on axle weight[]. And especially so for gas taxes, as the gas/diesel cost tends to be closer to linear with weight. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
      • mavhc 11mo ago
        Agreed, tax based on damage to road, and then tax fuel the amount it costs to clean up the pollution the fuel causes, and then use the money to clean up the pollution it causes. Then who cares if you fly your private jet, or giant car, you just pay for it. Side effects include: reduced pollution, and cheaper ways to clean up pollution
      • mjlee 11mo ago
        I don't disagree that large cars create externalities, but what proportion of costs scale with axle weight? 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-public-sector-expenditure-transport-by-category/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/298675/united-kingdom-uk...
  • rcxdude 11mo ago
    Doesn't work in France with its huge number of toll roads, and in the UK where fuel duty is the largest single part of the price of fuel, it more than covers the cost of public roads, yet people still drive everywhere in increasingly large vehicles. It's not gonna reduce driving, though I do agree it should not be subsidized.
    • citrin_ru 11mo ago
      Public transport (especially trains) is very expensive in the UK. If you already have a car it's cheaper to use car even if you're traveling alone. For two it will be more than 2x cheaper than a train. If trains will be affordable I'm sure more people would use them. As to the size - during relatively good pre-COVID times SUV become popular but not many Brits can afford large vehicles today and on average cars in the UK are much smaller than in the US, I would not say it's a big problem.
      • bofussing 11mo ago
        The reason why British people are able to afford large and expensive vehicles is the heavy reliance on credit. 84% of new cars were bought on finance in 2024[1] [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6781339100e3d719f19217f1/dft-car-ownership-evidence-review.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6781339100e3d...
    • Retric 11mo ago
      Road damage is exponential with weight, so heavy vehicles are still heavily subsidized in France even if the total revenue is correct. 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.
  • vineyardmike 11mo ago
    There are many easier ways to effect this social change, if you’re willing to do basic legislation around the vehicle itself. 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.
    • oldestofsports 11mo ago
      The danger is not just related to speed, it’s about them being sp large that you can’t physically see the old lady or child walking right in front of it
    • trollbridge 11mo ago
      When I drive a pickup it’s typically for work purposes. I would not care one whit if it had pink flowers and neither would anyone else. If anything it would make it higher visibility. 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.
    • rascul 11mo ago
      > The easiest way to decrease unnecessary oversized vehicles Remove/modify the laws that caused such vehicles.
  • sdeframond 11mo ago
    I share your feeling. However > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
    • mothballed 11mo ago
      That's weird because there's no public road near me for miles and I can get 90% of the way to "town" without them. 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.
      • dmurray 11mo ago
        Do you understand why this isn't a workable solution for everyone, and likely not even for the last 10% of your journey?
        • mothballed 11mo ago
          It would work beautifully for the last 10% of my journey. The only reason why there are no private roads for the las 10% is the county tax funds that road, and only a complete and utter moron would build a road when their "competitor" has a price of zero at the point of use. People commonly ask why the public road has a monopoly; it's not that they are a natural monopoly but rather that it's literally impossible to compete with someone with zero costs (tax costs already sunk) so places with public roads have ~no competition. The second that road gets defunded by the public coffers, guy with tractor would show back up.
          • trollbridge 11mo ago
  • stagg 11mo ago
    Would be great if that was the case in the UK. Currently road tax, or Vehicle Excise Duty is related to CO2 emissions. Road upkeep is from general taxation. Road tax was abolished in 1937, I like to remind motorists of this fact when they say "cyclist should pay road tax". Although EVs now have to pay 3p per mile from 2028, which is a big change. Yeah the super-sized vehicles might pay more in fuel tax and have a higher VED rate, but nowhere near enough.
    • jabl 11mo ago
      > Although EVs now have to pay 3p per mile from 2028, which is a big change. 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..
    • tomxor 11mo ago
      > Road upkeep is from general taxation. Road tax was abolished in 1937 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-hmrc-tax-receipts-fuel-duty/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/284323/united-kingdom-hm... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/533171/annual-road-transport-services-expenditure-trend-united-kingdom-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/533171/annual-road-trans...
  • potato3732842 11mo ago
    You're getting downvoted because good enough quality roads are so cheap that market rate wouldn't really do anything. The government needs to be in the road business so it can stick its thumb on the scale.
    • trollbridge 11mo ago
      The roads where I live are paid for with a plate fee of $10 a year for cars and a higher one for trucks. 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.
    • rsync 11mo ago
      "... because good enough quality roads are so cheap ..." 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.
  • Merovius 11mo ago
    1. I'm not a driver, much less in a country with toll roads. But is it common to have per-vehicle customized toll prices? I would expect to pay a fixed per-car, per-use fee. 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.
    • phantom784 11mo ago
      What I've commonly seen in the US is that the lowest toll is for passenger cars, and then it goes up by the number of axles that the vehicle has.
      • Merovius 11mo ago
        Which, for the purposes of this topic, means a flat toll. Because we're talking (for the most part) about passenger cars.
  • trollbridge 11mo ago
    Where I presently live in the U.S., the fuel taxes and registration fees pay both for the roads and produce excess revenue used to pay for public transit. 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.
• walletdrainer 11mo ago
  Why do they need to do this? Is this a real problem in Europe? Are lots of people being killed by these imported trucks?
  • parasti 11mo ago
    Implicitly you appear to be saying that we need to reach that point before action is taken?
    • lan321 11mo ago
      The question seems legit to me.. Otherwise worded it's essentially whether there's correlation between both. Without evidence it's more difficult to justify regulation. At the end of the day a pickup is adjacent to a midsize van. To me, both seem like you're essentially getting hit by a wall...
      • EraYaN 11mo ago
        The difference is visibility, with a van you can often see as close as 1,5 m in front of you due to the short hood. The problem is a lot of the newer trucks and SUVs are so tall that a full child (or 5) just disappear in front the car.
    • walletdrainer 11mo ago
      We need to have a reason to take aution before we take action, sure. 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.
  • Jolter 11mo ago
    As the article states, US pedestrian deaths are UP 80% since 2010, while EU deaths are DOWN. You can’t probably blame 100% of that difference on the design standards of US vehicles. But probably a high proportion of them!
• bborud 11mo ago
  Yes, they should, but there are a couple of things to consider here. In most countries we are talking about very low numbers of cars that are exempted. You can see this as a safety valve of sorts: provide some leeway to ensure you don't give the automotive lobby reason to push back too hard against regulation. Because the automotive lobby is insanely powerful and you need them on your side in order to ratchet up regulations. (And I'm not just talking about those that represent the industry). 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.
  • financetechbro 11mo ago
    I think it’s bold to assume that car manufacturers are happy importing X,000 cars a year. Their ultimate objective is to sell as many cars as humanly possible. A “release valve” for the automotive lobby is just a way for them to infiltrate a region so they can entrench themselves into citizens psyche by using manipulative marketing tactics, building a coalition from within. I am from the US and I don’t think Europe should allow the import of any large non commercial vehicles
    • lamontcg 11mo ago
      Yeah, I don't think the "release valve" is the correct metaphor. This is more like a crack around a door frame that you can get a lever into in order to eventually pry it open.