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250mi is a good number. Enough to do a lot of errands and medium trips in a day and charge overnight.

Bolt EV/EUV has that and it's a compact.

Better to charge higher registration fees by weight.

It's the good Christian thing to do

Fuck that. The problem isnt that people want bigger cars. The problem is that NHTSA's CAFE standards favor manufacture of larger cars.

CAFE slowly reduces the amount of emissions that vehicles can have, but they fucked it up: the required reductions are greatest on the smallest, most efficient cars, and lowest on the largest vehicles. Manufacturers "comply" with these standards by dropping their smallest cars from their lineup, and increasing the sizes of everything left on the market.

Fix the fucking standards to favor smaller cars, and manufacturers will follow.

Rather than tax them a bit more, which won't actually improve safety if people just opt to pay the tax and drive them anyway, why not just straight up legislate weight limits for private vehicles, with commercial licensing as done with cargo trucks expanded to fit more conventional vehicles driven for commercial purposes that have to be large and heavy? Car companies will start making smaller cars again real quick if they're not allowed to sell them otherwise

At least here in Cali we do. My HD truck gets an extra $500~ a year tax on top of the Gas guzzler tax I paid when new. Plus the fuel costs/taxes for that. Compared to my other cars I pay about $600 more for newal on it. The Average car is like $245 a year but the truck is like $840.

Definitely fine with paying the extra taxes though. I use more infrastructure and I also require additional strengthening of crash systems and cause road damage so I’m not opposed.

Or just ban them from certain roads.

Yes, as mentioned in the article they can be 30% heavier for the same vehicle

Electric cars often weigh around 30 percent more than a gas-powered counterpart, because big vehicles require enormous batteries to propel them hundreds of miles between charges.

I'm in Texas and will have to pay a $300 registration tax on my ev for it being "heavy and destructive and not paying fuel tax". My ev is a 2018 Fiat 500e and weighs 2900lbs. I'm tired of this argument especially when plenty of trucks weigh anywhere from 4500lbs (for the smallest examples) to quite literally 80k. Raise the fuel tax and you'll solve heavy vehicles virtually overnight.

Before anyone gets on my case I'm fully aware that not all evs are as light as mine, but plenty are lighter than an f150.

Yes, but they wouldn't have to be, if not for people wanting a giant SUV with 400 miles of range. The weight goes up nonlinearly, because people aren't willing to compromise on lifestyle for the benefit of those around them. And then they expect us not just to tolerate their lifestyle, but actually subsidize it.

fuel eff requirements tied to weight

just another oil company + car company scam

Yeah, it's about reducing fatalities by engineering to the average, not engineering to the worst case.

The article literally says that the problem will just get worse as we move to electric cars since they’re heavier.

I dislike people having useless pickup trucks as much as the next guy, but I don’t think they deserve to die either. Or how about semi drivers? You know, a crucial part of our delivery infrastructure?

Maybe take the time to read next time and think with the smart part of your brain.

Fun fact: In Spanish it's called 'quitamiedos', which literally means 'fear remover'. It's not supposed to stop you, just let you drive closer to the edge :)

I'm willing to bet the super tall pickups and SUVs are more likely to hop over those steel guardrails, too. Related: Those sloped concrete dividers that have a slightly shallower slope at their wider bottom? Those are super effective, because that bottom slope deflects the vehicle's front wheel, causing it to turn slightly away from the barrier instead of continuing to smash through it.

There's a guard rail guy on YouTube who investigates how the guard rails have been fitted. They often have bolts and the tension wire incorrectly installed so much so that they don't even effectively stop small vehicles. That guy lost a family member to this type of accident and so is on a crusade kinda.

In an even better world, policies wouldn't be manipulative shitstains aimed at consumers and instead be regulation on those actually creating the thing that needs to change...

Vehicles that weigh more than 4 tons make up a significant amount of road traffic right now.
Literally everything you purchase in a store, your food, your toiletries, your clothes, any consumer good you have every purchased traveled on a road at some point in a vehicle that far exceeds 8 tons. Ambulances weigh more than 8 tons, fire trucks weigh more than 8 tons, mail is transported in vehicles that weigh more than 8 tons.
7,000lbs is an extremely low failure point for a guard rail given the number of vehicles that exceed that weight on the road today.

What would we do about semi trucks, delivery vans, busses, dump trucks, etc. etc. etc. Personally I've seen some pretty short busses but never a sport compact model.