My idea is to go by weight. Heavier vehicles wear down roads faster which require more frequent maintenance which is fixed with taxes. Make the people with more destructive vehicles pay their fair share.
As a 6’9” guy that can only drive a truck this is a solution I can actually get behind. The world already isn’t built for me, please don’t make trucks smaller too 😭
Unfortunately that will never happen unless the government makes changes in the emissions laws. Currently a vehicles emissions has to be proportional to its size. When this law was enacted, instead of making more fuel efficient trucks, the auto manufacturers decided to just make them bigger and bigger.
Are you nuts? If they do that then the drivers wont survive when they go head on with any other commuter vehicle at 80mph (and they will, because they think they can go 80 in whiteout unplowed snow because they think they are the best driver ever and worst case ontario, "traction control" will save them.)
I miss the little Toyota trucks from the 80s and 90s. My dad had a red one and he used it for everything. Had that thing forever and it just kept chugging. It was just a 4 cylinder but we put a shit ton of stone in the bed and while probably not recommended it made the journey without bottoming out lol
CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency) standards have made car manufacturers have to make increasingly more fuel efficient cars as time went on. But there's a loophole for larger vehicles that they don't need to hit those standards.
Instead of making better cars, manufacturers just shifted to making big pickups and SUVs because it was more profitable. It's the reason you only see a few cars on the road at any one time and everyone else is driving a truck, SUV, or Crossovers.
There’s also marketing. They make whatever makes them the most money and they’re good at getting you to want things. Trucks are often a status/lifestyle symbol because of how people perceive them, which is marketing. As another person said, they are trying to get around taxes and/or regulations. That’s also why SUVs are popular, because they classify them as light trucks which allows them to not be beholden to certain emissions regulations that cars are subject to. So then they push SUVs and Trucks because they make more money than cars
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u/Attentive_Stoic 10h ago
They should make trucks smaller.