Large Cars are a Positional Good
Americans have, over the last generation, gotten ever larger cars, to the point that the market is dominated by crossovers, pickup trucks, and SUVs and barely has sedans. Europe is not far behind, with the sedan market having collapsed and half of new sales comprising SUVs. Considerable resources are spent on these larger cars, which are more expensive to purchase, maintain, and refuel. The benefits at this point, however, are rather positional. The benefit of larger cars at this point is not about the comfort or performance of the car, but about being larger than other road users. Streets for All’s Michael Schneider described it as an arms race; this arms race that wastes resources and produces pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, without benefits even to individuals writ large, precisely the kind of problem that government regulation can solve.
The benefits of larger cars
The usual benefit drivers cite for why they want a larger car is comfort. The increase in car size from (say) the Fiat 500 or the Beetle or the 1970s Civic to modern midsize cars like the Accord and Camry has led to obvious improvements in comfort: four doors rather than two, ample front and rear passenger legroom, more trunk space.
And beyond this point, the relationship between car size and comfort saturates. Luxury sedans are still larger than midsize ones, but not by much; where the 500 had a curb weight of about 500 kg, the modern Accord is 1.4 t and the Camry is 1.6 t, barely less than a C-Class at 1.7 t and not much less than a 2.1 t 7 Series. A family car does not need to be larger than this, and when I talk to people about their vehicle purchases, at least the ones who tell me they’re getting SUVs do not cite comfort, not in the 2010s-20s.
The main selling point of luxury cars is performance. It’s this high-performance segment that Tesla competes with – electric cars have better performance specs, and where the older automakers tried to base their electric car offerings on preexisting platforms (like the Leaf, based on the Tiida), Tesla instead started by building high-performance luxury cars and expanded from there. But here there is no benefit to size – the Model 3 is around 1.7 t curb weight, and that includes batteries, which together weigh nearly half a ton.
Larger cars can also haul more goods, but the SUVs and pickups are expressly designed not to do that. The F-150’s bed has decreased with every new generation of the car; the Kei truck, specialized to have a large bed relative to the rest of the car, looks so weird to Americans that Massachusetts at one point banned it for being unsafe, while Americans on social media mocked the users as trying to prove an environmental point. The minivan, specialized to carry seven to eight passengers, has been unfashionable for at least a generation, losing out to the similarly large but lower-capacity SUV.
Instead, what I do hear from people telling me why they want a big car is purely positional: “I get to see over the other cars,” or alternatively “I can’t be the shortest car on the road because then I can’t see anything.” People are also recorded modifying their cars to be taller for the same reasons. The visibility in question does not improve if all cars get bigger; only the relative size matters. In the case of car accidents, this is even worse: in a collision between two cars the larger one is safer for the occupants, but making all the cars larger doesn’t improve traffic safety, and makes it much worse for pedestrians, and there’s some evidence of risk compensation by drivers of larger cars increasing the overall number of crashes.
The discourse on social benefits tends to exclude individual ones; thus, it’s easy to say that something that provides tangible individual benefits (such as larger dwellings) does not provide social ones. But this is something different. A purely private good does not provide positive externalities or improve the usual indicators that are usually the realm of public policy, like public health, but it improves the living standards of the owner, without negative externalities. But here, the benefit of the SUV or pickup truck to the user is purely the arms race on the road; the improvement in the quality of life of the owner is entirely about externalizing a fixed or even rising risk of car crashes to other road users. There isn’t even a social benefit here in the sense of the sum total of private individual benefits.
The costs of larger cars
While larger cars do not improve societal well-being on average, they have high individual and social costs.
The social costs are easier to explain: those cars emit much more pollution and greenhouse gases. The Camry has a fuel economy of maybe 37 miles per gallon (6.35 l/100 km) in the US; the F-150 gets less than half that, around 17.5 mpg (13.4 l/100 km). The fuel consumption ratio, 2.1, is somehow larger than the mass ratio – the F-150 doesn’t weigh 3.4 t but rather not much more than 2 t depending on model. Air pollution emissions are, for modern cars with modern petrol engines, proportional to greenhouse gas emissions; a car with twice the fuel consumption is going to also emit twice the particulate matter.
Then there is the danger of crashes. The United States has seen an increase in traffic fatalities lately, especially for pedestrians. The pedestrian fatality rate, in turn, comes from the form of pickups and larger SUVs: they have larger hoods, which hit pedestrians in the chest or (for children) the head rather than in the legs, and which also reduce visibility. Here it’s not an issue of mass but one of hood shape, but these come from the same fundemantal issue of an arms race to be larger and taller than the other cars, to the exclusion of spending on personal comfort.
Those social costs are not the tradeoff of some individual benefit. There is a benefit to the driver of the larger car, but there is no benefit to the driver of the average car on a road with larger cars. Instead, the driver of said average car incurs significant individual costs, coming from the need to buy, maintain, and refuel a larger machine. The low fuel economy costs the drivers money; most of the costs are external, but not all. The purchase price of a larger car is larger, because it is a larger piece of machinery, requiring more workers and more capital to put together; Edmunds’ price range for the F-150 is 50-100% higher than that for the Accord or Camry. Consumers routinely spend more money for better products, but here the product is not better except positionally.
The way forward
Government regulations to curb the arms race can directly limit or tax the size of cars, or instead go after their negative externalities. The latter should be preferred; in particular, a tax on car size would create a situation in which people can pay for a road that is safer for them and more dangerous for others, which is likely to lead to both much more aggressive driving by the largest cars on the road and to populist demands for large cars for everyone.
Specific taxes on large cars may still be appropriate in specific circumstances, like parking; Paris charges SUVs more for parking, justified by the fact that these vehicles don’t fit in the usual street parking spots, which are designed for the typical European car and not for the largest ones.
But outside the issue of parking, it’s better to be tighter about regulations and taxes on pollution, and about accidents. In the United States, it’s necessary to get rid of the system in which cars are perennially underinsured, with most states requiring liability coverage of $50,000 (Cid’s car accident, which was medium-term disabling but not fatal, incurred around $1 million in bills, and the insurance value of human life in the United States is $7.5 million). On both sides of the Atlantic, it’s necessary to tax or regulate pollution more seriously; the EU is ramping up fines on automakers that produce excessively polluting vehicles, but Robert Habeck, who is rather rigid on issues like nuclear power and the Autobahn speed limit, wants to suspend those fines since German automakers lag in electric cars.
On the matter of safety, it’s best to require cars to meet high standards of visibility and pedestrian safety in crashes, measured for example by survival rates at typical city speeds like 30 and 50 km/h. A car that fails these standards should not be on the road, just as cars are tested for occupant safety. If it means that the high, deep hood characteristic of the pickup truck no longer meets regulations, then fine; safety regulators should not compromise just because some antisocial drivers are acculturated to playing Carmageddon on real roads.
The key here is that regulations on emissions and personal injury liability suppress investment in larger cars, and that is good. There are other forms of capital investment in the economy competing for funding, which are not purely positional, for example housing, where German investment has been lagging due to high interest rates. Externalities are a real market failure and sometimes they get to the point that the product is, at scale, a net negative for society.
Pedestrian Observations 
I dont think the japanese experience of using taxes related to car size and weight have had the negative outcomes you fear. Instead they seem to work remarkably well, suggesting it is a very good idea.
As you describe, smaller size in itself has a lot of positive outcomes.
I agree. Front-loading the entire lifetime social tax of a large and heavy vehicle into its sticker price is the way to go. The main point is to get people to not buy large cars in the first place, not to use them less once they are bought.
People who buy new cars don’t care about up front cost that much. A 4 year lease on the most expensive F150 is over $1000/month – and taxes and license are added on top of that. Even the cheapest is still $500/month. Even $10,000 more on the purchase price isn’t going to phase the type of person buying these new. It would concern used buyers, but to the new buyers they just go to a more basic model of the same thing if they can’t meet the payment.
Most international evidence points towards that directed taxes at the point of purchase does affect what type of new car buyers get.
Getting a smaller but more luxurious Lexus, if it is cheaper than a F150, is probably a real trade-off people would make, in particular when the benefits of a very large car are so minor. Similarly even when comparing within a car class it would orient buyers towards smaller models. Should work similar with a lease or with upfront cost (though also having differentiated yearly car taxes would probably be more directly reflected in the cost/choices for a lease).
There is a pretty big additional force encouraging smaller cars in Japan though, parking spaces.
In Japan, it is expected that you find a parking space capable of storing the car you want to put in it. If you buy a large car, you’ll probably need to park it in garages and lots aimed at commercial vehicles, which tend to be inconveniently located, even ignoring that they are more expensive. Conversely if you buy a kei car, you get access to parking spaces that even a regular compact sedan would not have access to. Parking space size limits also create hard cutoffs where a few millimeters larger result in a big impact in viable parking spaces, reducing the impact of gradual size creep.
Unfortunately in most of the rest of the world, finding a suitably large parking space is made the responsibility of the government and/or building owners, not car owners. People in the US will park a “compact” pick up truck or SUV in a compact car space and get away with it, to the point that many have forgotten what a compact car even is.
I agree, and would add that at least in semi-developed countries, license plates are all linked to car registries, including brand/size/dimensions of the car.
So in a modern society it is technically/administrativly trivial to enforce a, for example, system with 3 different sizes of parking spaces.
Same with congestion charges and most toll road systems that also collect license plate numbers.
Issue is political will.
In most cases it doesn’t matter. If you have one parking space in your lot that can handle long cars they all can. The smallest cars are not enough narrower than a large one that you would typically build separate parking (motorcycles sometimes get this, more often they just park in a normal car spot). When parallel parking you can fit more shorter cars on the street so length makes sense to charge for. In other forms if you have to handle even one longer parking spot that cascades to the whole lot being built for the longest cars everywhere (sometimes you will make the corners compact cars only, but this is a small portion of spaces). The other case is if you are looking for space that is unused – if you only have room for a short car to park between some road/sidewalk and building then you can only have a short car park there. This is apparently the case in Japan, but the typically would just plant grass in those places so it isn’t an option to park there (at least in cities I’ve seen – but I have not seen most cities)
Of course, the dimensions of classes for parking lots should relate to both width and length. The length limit of a kei car is 3.4 meters.
And of course limiting length allows more parking space on both curbside, diagonal curbside, parking lot, and parking garage parking.
A standard US parking lot is 5.5 meters…
@Martin Classes of parking lots are impossible in the real world. If you have a space for a longer SUV the entire row needs to be that long. You could to a compact row and SUV row, but a compact car finding a space in the SUV row will make everyone mad and cause fights. Better to have one class. Besides WalMart doesn’t want to tell people who drive around looking for a close spot instead of taking the first parking place way out there (there are always many empty parking spaces in the back) that they have to park in the back – those customers will just go elsewhere.
You get parking lots for classes of cars only when something else forces it. There are many many ways something forces smaller spaces, but you start with the default long parking space where possible.
The East Asians seem to manage a real market for parking just fine.
Lots of things are “impossible” such as congestion charges.
In most, other domains of life it is pretty natural that someone that consumes twice as much pay more for it.
There are pretty big differences in width for modern cars. A kei car is about 500-700mm narrower than a large trucks and SUVs and commercial trucks. Typical automated/stacked parking devices have a nominal maximum width somewhere around 1850mm even with perfect parking and with realistic sloppiness most people would avoid trying to fit in anything wider than 1800mm.
Cars also differ a lot in weight, and while the weight limits are most obvious with automated/stacked garages, even regular drive in garages can and do collapse due to overloading. While American garages don’t charge heavy cars more and capping by weight even before capping by spots taken, they really should be doing so.
And even just by length, there’s no reason for a single lot/garage to even accommodate every car length. It’s fine if only compact minivans and smaller can use the automated parking structure at the mall, where a full sized SUV needs to park at a commercial vehicle lot 5-10 minutes walk away.
There’s single parking lots in the US that take 5 minutes to walk across, so an explicitly eco friendly policy could be to make all the close by non-disability spots compact, with further away rows accommodating larger and larger vehicles.
And while it is probably very difficult for the US to fix car sizes through parking policy, I don’t think it’s too late for Europe. A lot of European cities like Paris are currently building parking garages to replace street parking, and most of those parking garages should be built explicitly for smaller cars. The default should be short and narrow, with larger sizes getting more expensive and less convenient from there.
@Sassy it isn’t fine to make large SUVs use the farther lots at the mall. They will drive their SUV to the next mall where they can park closer and spend their money there instead. If there are only a handful of SUVs in your city that might be fine with you, but large SUVs are now the reality in the US and so you would turn away far more customers than you would save by having smaller parking spots. (and small like large parking places so they can get out easier)
When building a parking garage you have to be careful. Drivers may not pay attention to the max weight or size signs and drive in anyway. So you have to have enough margin in some way to get that oversized vehicle out without damaging anything (you can find them for their stupidity, but they can’t pay fines large enough to replace your parking garage that was overloaded and now unsafe). At that point you have done most of what is needed to allow the large SUVs to park in there so you may as well give them parking spaces inside.
Of course you are talking about Paris. Large SUVs are still rare enough there that you can turn away customers that drive them and do just fine. Your parking garage needs to have some system in place to ensure large SUVs (and perhaps heavy EVs?) don’t enter in the first place, but that is something that can be handled.
@henrymiller74: This is exactly the kind of American exceptionalism about the natural things way are, that results in the general state of US public transit.
Good luck parking your F-150 in a neighborhood like this:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/7jHz7SYdTYrvd7kWA
In any case, if you make it possible for for-profit developers, to meet their parking mandates (that typically are per car and not per surface area), by making it possible to have many smaller lots at the same surface area/garage, I am sure they will blossom like weeds. If you make all of them large enough to fit a F-150, you put a giant extra tax on all new construction.
It isn’t just American exceptionalism – it is reality in America (including Canada). Anyplace else that has large cars will have that. Toyko has a very different situation and so doesn’t follow the same rules and bringing them into the conversation shows you fail to understand the reality for the American suburb experience (who may or may not travel to that denser city for work but otherwise doesn’t go there)
Making it possible to have smaller lots won’t matter where large cars are common. Developers are not stupid – when a significant numbers of their customers demand places to park large cars they will provide that. When you are in a place like Toyko where there isn’t the demand they won’t provide it. Most parking lots don’t have provision for SUVs pulling trailers because there isn’t demand, where there is demand that provide for it. Yes it is a “tax” on construction, but if you want the customer that drives a F150 you better provide space for it.
Note that I opposed mandates of parking. In dense cities driving larger SUVs is annoying anyway because of the size. If you are building a parking garage in a dense city maybe you can say not enough customers drive a large SUV and thus turn any away (an in turn undercut your competition by charging $.50 less for the compact cars you serve) – the garage owner will need to run these numbers to see if they really work out or not. Where I live I doubt it, but your city might be different.
If your goal is to change things in the US you need to acknowledge reality and figure out what to do about it. The reality of people driving and wanting (or thinking they want) large SUVs is a headwind. I’m not sure what you can do about it. Those people have a lot of votes against anything you try legally (though this isn’t universal, in the dense city they probably don’t have votes – but even in NYC fear of those voters delayed congestion charges). Store owners know that those large SUVs exist and those SUV owners spend money so they want to ensure they can park nearby to spend that money (often they fail to realize non SUV owners would spend more if the SUVs didn’t make access unsafe).
The one thing going for transit is there are advantages of density. If you allow density there are places where things will get denser but they currently don’t because they can’t. (zoning won’t let them build it) Density creates traffic and that in turn creates demand for your transit system. If you invest in transit and put people in charge do well you create an alternative. However you need a long term vision. – your investments today won’t have much effect in less than 10 years. You also need a network, if transit exists but doesn’t get many people places that will itself place a headwind on getting denser.
It is possible to have a virtual transitless society such as Okinawa, which is car oriented to the extent that 80% of university students drive to university, and still have small cars and market parking in cities. Large cars and free limitless parking is not a consequence of cars as such.
Thoughts on taxing cars according to weight * 4th power, as that is what is used to determine road wear? Also, reclassifying light trucks as passenger vehicles.
The 4th power rule is specific to road wear, and is essentially a tax on trucks (actual trucks, not cars cosplaying as trucks) and on buses.
This would be a tax on EVs as much as on large vehicles. Taxes on car size and propulsion type at the point of sale seem to be the way to go, looking at places like Japan and Norway.
Beyond pedestrian safety at 30kph, what about limitations on acceleration and speed?
I think speed governors are more an issue for collisions on highways than on city streets? My understanding is that the pickup truck safety problems are disproportionately at low speed, essentially because a higher-speed collision isn’t survivable even with a sedan. But I admit to being more familiar with the urban pedestrian issues than others.
Is there a word missing here?
“…, but there is [no] benefit to the driver of the average car on a road with larger cars.”
…yes, fixed, thank you.
Hatchbacks or low slung station wagons with aggressive bumpers are still hatchbacks.
Yes, they want to brag about how rich they are. People realize it’s crude to say “I want to brag about how much money I have” so they come up with other reasons. Just like they realize it’s crude to say “there are brown people on mass transit” so they come up with “the car is more convenient” even though it isn’t.
This assumes that someone lives near mass transit, the transit operates at a reasonable frequency, and goes where the person is going. If one of those isn’t true, the car may very well be more convenient. In modern-day America, in most locations, transit is not a good option relative to driving (which should change!!)
Cover your employer’s parking lot with photovoltaics you can charge your commute in the morning and your employer can charge their peak-avoiding batteries when the cars are fully charged. Electric cars are nearly at price parity with internal combustion cars. Why would anyone want an internal combustion car when electric cars have better performance and are cheaper to operate?
People may not want an electric car if they make longer trips and have to start worrying about whether they can find a charging station and how long it will take to charge when there. Also, electric cars are NOT at price parity with gas/diesel, there’s around a 50% premium depending on make & model:
Kia Sportage is 27K gas vs. 40K plug-in hybrid
Ford Mustang is 32K gas vs. 40K electric
Kia Sorento is 32K gas vs. 48K plug-in hybrid
Ford F-150 is 37K gas vs. 63K electric
People going on long trips bring their bowels, bladders and stomachs with them. Almost all people have to stop every few hours.
Yes, but bowels and bladders can be emptied in a few minutes, which is also how long it takes to fill a fuel tank. The fastest a Tesla supercharger goes is 15 minutes for the highest power model (regular superchargers advertise 40 minutes) and that’s just for 200 miles range, which is about half or less of the range of a full tank of gas for most cars. And superchargers are not everywhere; plugging into a regular socket takes a couple of hours at best if you can even find one (a regular restaurant does not have sockets in its parking lot and if it did it wouldn’t let people plug into them and charge for free). At highway speeds one can cover 200 mi in about 3 hrs; stopping 15-40 minutes every three hours kills trip time, much worse than stopping 5-10 min every 4-6 hrs.
This may change this as charging infrastructure, but for the time being plug in hybrids are the preferred choice. One gets most of the benefit of electric (since vehicles drive less than 40 mi per day on average, a 40 mi battery range means a hybrid pollutes no more than an electric vehicle most of the time) with the flexibility of gas and its better energy density for long range when required.
In fact, since batteries and their minerals are currently a chokepoint resource, there is an argument that electric cars should not be subsidized but hybrids should. The same number of batteries that get you a 200 mi range electric gets you five 40 mi range hybrids – if a hybrid pollutes 25% as much as a gas car (compared to 0% for an electric) then for the same amount of batteries the all hybrid model results in a 70% cut in emissions vs 20% cut for a single electric car.
As the owner for a BMW i3 range extender I am not sure fully electric cars work for Americans who do 1000 mile leisure trips. You would need a 400 mile range battery or something I think.
No they aren’t. How many gasoline stations were there in 1920?
It’s not 2007 anymore. Batteries that don’t use expensive exotic materials are good enough
What other concern trollery are youse people gonna come up with? Gonna melt the grid? Air conditioning, which put a greater demand on the grid, quicker, didn’t melt it. And cars will be charging when air conditioning demand is low. Makes me wonder what other crap will float past.
But not at the fuel pump. I’ve never seen one that flushes. Not even a pissior on the island. I have a hybrid, there are more chargers than there were just a few years ago, they actually work and I don’t have to tend to them while it charges. I can go use the toilet and maybe even get lunch. Or if I brought it, eat it outside of the car!
How many gasoline stations were there in 1920?
15,000 apparently, plus another 7,000 or so curbside pumps no associated with a dedicated fuel station. Number of Tesla Superchargers in North American at the end of 2024: 2,550.
Batteries that don’t use expensive exotic materials are good enough
Which batteries are these? Every production electric car on the road uses Lithium-ion batteries of some type. Li-polymers have removed some of the need for cobalt, but not the need for lithium. Nickle-Metal-Hydrides and Sodium-Ion batteries have worse specific energy and energy density than Lithium-ion and will probably take over the fixed battery market where weight/space are not at a premium. Interestingly, where NMH batteries with their lesser need for exotic metals are still used in vehicles is . . . wait for it . . . hybrid vehicles (if the battery falls short the engine can kick in). As I said, plug in hybrids are the better choice.
But not at the fuel pump.
Don’t be a fool, no one else is. The toilet is a few steps away from the pump as the gas station, almost everywhere in the world.
I can go use the toilet and maybe even get lunch. Or if I brought it, eat it outside of the car!
Except that is the problem. If you ate at 11:30, taking an hour, then when you need to charge your battery again at 3:30 it is not meal time and you waste an hour waiting for the battery to charge when you could be on the road. The ability to drive until 5:30 (or stop at 3:30 and be back on the road at 3:40) makes hybrids the better, more flexible choice.
Lithium was never a constraint except for right wing bloviaters and internet concern trolls. It’s not 2010 anymore. Lithium Iron Phosphate doesn’t use cobalt. It uses…. wait for it…. Lithium, Iron, Phosphate and I’m sure lots of other thing that are moderately abundant. In production automobiles. For years and years because it’s not 2010 anymore.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2023/08/16/lithium-iron-phosphate-set-to-be-the-next-big-thing-in-ev-batteries/
….. It’s not 2010 anymore, they aren’t going to be making hybrids very much longer because batteries are getting tooooo cheap. Normal people, who don’t plan their lives around twice a decade 1,000 mile trips won’t want them. Or internal combustion cars.
To be fair there are 5850 locations with a rapid (>50kW) or ultra rapid (>150kW) charge points in Britain of which probably half those locations have an ultra rapid charger as half the chargers are ultra rapid – https://www.zap-map.com/ev-stats/how-many-charging-points.
So if the US only has 2500 supercharger locations and not a massive number of non Tesla ones that is pretty bad.
Supercharger is a Tesla brand and until recently only Tesla vehicles could use them. When I check
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity-locations#/find/nearest?fuel=ELEC&ev_levels=dc_fast&country=US
It estimates, I’m sure it’s an estimate, that there are 11,874 DC fast charge points in the U.S.
Other sources estimate that there are less Supercharger locations than what Onux says there are. With many more “ports”. Most chargers can service more than one car at a time. And most Tesla sites, or other providers, have more than one …. pylon.
And most of the time, most people, will be recharging a few kilowatts for their daily drive. Not hundreds of mile/kilometers at a fast charger. Most people will need one, perhaps, a few times a year.
@adirondacker12800, it’s 5850 locations with 14500 chargers.
Regardless given population alone you’d expect the US to have 29000 locations with 70000 chargers.
You are assuming the U.K. has the ideal amount of chargers for everybody everywhere.
Anecdote isn’t data. The Tesla supercharger I pass rarely has anyone charging at it and I’ve never seen all the spaces in use. I don’t have any problem finding a place to charge. Though out of service chargers is still a problem. I suspect most of the anxiety about charging is concern trollery from 2008.
There are people who make whole careers out of analyzing energy markets. I’m sure someone at BigRestStop Company can extrapolate from how much fuel they sell on Thanksgiving weekend to how much fast charging they will need in 2040. And how much it will cost to dig up the ginormous underground tanks in 2045 and replace them with a tiny above ground one for the antique cars passing through. I’m imagining a few dozen megawatts of battery on site – that can recharge off peak – and meet demand at noon on Thanksgiving.
@adirondacker12800, it’s difficult to believe we have 5x more chargers than we need, and certainly a fair few of them are still getting pretty busy even though the number has expanded fast.
I don’t know or care how many chargers there should be in the U.K. I’m not planning on driving there. You are the one assuming that everyplace everywhere is like an island off the coast of Eurasia. And that it’s ideal.
My admittedly anecdotal perception of the charging infrastructure in the small parts of the Northeast U.S. that I have driven a plug-in hybrid in, is that there is adequate charging available. I don’t choose to predict how it will look in 2040. It’s going to a lot different than it is today. Especially during the project when they dig up the fuel tanks. You’ll have to go someplace else for your morning coffee. And to charge.
It depends a lot on the country, China is at price parity and most vehicle sales there are now EVs. The long term trend is probably every country has EVs being an equivalent or cheaper price.
Why? You addressed one–access to charging. Also, battery replacement and greater risks in case of a fire in electric cars.
Internal combustion cars catch fire too. That didn’t stop them from replacing horses.
Employers will be delighted to have you charge your car until they need the PV to avoid peak charges. And charge the container or two of battery that takes up a few parking spaces, over the weekend. To cut their electricity bill even more.
Any other F.U.D. you want to spread?
Please stop saying F.U.D. My son is in the fire service. Auto battery fires are much worse and harder to put out than gasoline fires. I am in favor of electric autos, but await better batteries and better replacement battery costs. But, mainly, I ride trains and buses.
EV fires are worse, but are also much less likely to happen.
So there’s a balance.
See e.g. https://insideevs.com/news/561549/study-evs-smallest-fire-risk/
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/mythbusting-evs/mythbusting-world-evs-are-electric-cars-susceptible-catching-fire is perhaps a better link.
I haven’t said FUD in years. Lots of things catch fire, which is why we have firefighters. That hasn’t stopped us from using them.
Electric cars have reached price parity with internal combustion cars. People who look at total cost of ownership realized they do, years ago. How much “better” do you want them to be?
“Electric cars have reached price parity with internal combustion cars. People who look at total cost of ownership…”
But one does not buy total cost of ownership at the dealer. If upfront cost is higher one cannot afford the new vehicle. One could argue you could take out a larger car loan with the knowledge you will pay less for gas in the future, but for lots of people those calculations run up against the reality of what is in their bank account for a down payment.
Total cost is also very sensitive to electricity rates. Cost per kWh in California, NY, Connecticut can be close to double the national average. That is going to significantly affect the price evaluation. Gas costs more in these states too, but in some of these states charging with 33.7 kWh (the energy in a gallon of gas) costs more than double than filling up with a gallon of gas. At that point the better energy efficiency of electrics comes into play (33.7 kWh takes you 80-120 mi) but a cheap high mileage compact can easily be more cost effective in states like CA and NY.
People who aren’t bobble headed idiots buy TCO. Even the bobbled headed idiots buying new cars with dealer financing want to know what kind of mileage the vehicle gets.
FYI, Horses also come with significant fire risk.
https://www.nationwide.com/lc/resources/farm-and-agribusiness/articles/prepare-and-prevent-hay-fires
Garages catch fire too.
Despite my quibbles with Adirondacker in other parts of the thread, he indirectly makes a very important point than the mass market availability of hybrids and electrics means that many urbanist arguments against vehicles (or larger vehicles, or vehicles in the city, etc.) are going to evaporate – or at least become politically useless – once the average person is driving an LEV or ZEV.
Alon can say that “a car with twice the fuel consumption is going to also emit twice the particulate matter.” but this is only true if the fuel is used for combustion – electric vehicles emit no particulate matter no matter how large/energy efficient they are. Continuing to make this argument only means people are going to say “Now that my car doesn’t pollute there is no reason to take transit instead of driving!” (or buy a smaller vehicle, or oppose parking minimums, or not drive downtown, etc.)
Urbanists are going to need to shift track and abandon any discussion of pollution as a reason to promote transit or avoid cars. Like many technological revolutions the tipping point on electric vehicles will come fast, and any advocacy based on emissions will quickly look foolish to the point of irrelevance when a person is driving an electric car.
There is of course the issue of total emissions, but even then electric cars come out far ahead – total energy efficiency is higher for electric vehicles and burning fuels in power plants is also more efficient (due to economies of scale, things like combined cycles or district heating, and better particulate scrubbing). And of course emissions free electricity exists and solar power is taking off more and more too.
The easiest answer to this is “not owning a car at all is cheaper”. The answer to “not everywhere is configured for transit” is “transit works better with density”. The answer to “not everyone wants to live somewhere dense” is the question, “then why is housing in dense areas so much more expensive”?
If we priced car dependency according to how much it costs us both individually AND collectively—and provided for non-car-dependent living as well as we now do car-dependent living, far fewer people would drive. Most people don’t want to drive all the time; that’s why the best-selling vehicles have always been utilitarian. It’s never been about the want for cars; it’s always been about the need for transportation.
This is stupendously false logic. Price is a factor of supply and demand. The fact that the demand for dense areas is greater than the supply (leading to high prices) in no way means that all demand is for dense places.
I actually agree that we should be building more dense walkable places, for many reasons (prices mean that more people want it than have it, so let them have the opportunity to choose; placing more people close to strong economies let’s them get better jobs and improve their life, etc.) I believe doing so would lead to less driving. But those positions are independent of the fact that reducing pollution can’t be an argument to limit cars when the cars don’t pollute.
The fact that the demand for dense areas is greater than the supply (leading to high prices) in no way means that all demand is for dense places.
Thank you for obvious. What it does mean is that there is more unmet demand for housing in dense areas than in less dense areas, if that’s not too tautological.
You also can’t discount–or dispute–that the densest areas of many American cities are, in many cases, significantly marred by the presence of large quantities of automobile traffic, which then helps form the opinion many Americans have of very dense areas as unpleasant places to live. To say nothing of media overreporting of urban crimes, and of course the obvious racist histories of American cities generally. Sure, this is speculation, but given the long history of global population patterns and the fact that a century and quarter on more people live in urban areas where movement doesn’t necessitate a car than ever before, strongly denying this likelihood is verging on a “no one wants to live there; too many people live there” absurdism.
All this is to say that even more Americans would likely want to live in dense areas if more of our dense areas weren’t given unfair play by deliberately designed systemic factors, to which urbanists often pay mind, even if they’re unconscious to most others.
But those positions are independent of the fact that reducing pollution can’t be an argument to limit cars when the cars don’t pollute.
Local air pollution and climate change are linked to industrial production of every kind, because most industrial production is still highly fossil fuel-dependent at all stages, and achieving the scales of production to electrify every car in the world–while also ensuring that similar levels of motorization are possible in both, e.g. America today and Nigeria 50 years from now, because why should Americans have almost 1 car per capita while Nigeria has 1/20th that ratio–will require even larger penetration and production of renewables throughout the production chain because of intermittency (and related energy storage) concerns.
It’s a similar situation to AI right now: yes, it could all be done by renewables, but it’s crowding out efforts to clean up the current energy supply by creating demand which isn’t doing anything to meaningfully improve quality of life for 99.99% of the world’s population. Naturally, I’m not trying to say that cars are as insignificant now as AI presently is, just that to make cars actually as useful as many now find them took decades of deliberate efforts accommodation, when we can have 75-80% of their transportation usefulness for a fraction of the cost, while solving other issues along the way.
Car dependency has been and always will be only a problem to solve because we choose to make it one. Making an argument in its favor will always mean diverting global attention from problems for which alternative solutions are even more difficult to implement. Why should we make the future harder for us to make it to?
To add to what @aquaticko said, in America dense areas of cities have been family unfriendly. You can’t build apartments with more than 3 bedrooms (not that it is illegal, just that fire code makes it impractical). Even if you could, rent is already high so nobody could afford them.
Most of the parks have art and lack places for kids to play. Great for adults, but not families.
there are a lot of adult centered entertainment (the content isn’t of interest to children). Many bar, but few restaurants that are family friendly.
Schools have a reputation of being bad, often backed up by test scores.
As a result cities have a reputation of great places when you are 20, but you move out before you reach 30.
The above has become a vicious circle: everything about the city is for those without a family so anyone thinking about a family moves out thus ensuring it isn’t worthwhile to put anything for a family in the city thus ensuring people wanting a family move out. I don’t know how to break it, but it is a problem. (I know other people are working on it)
about half of the particulate emissions from cars are due to tire wear on the roads and brake pads, which will exist for both electric vehicles and ice. even in terms of noise pollution, above a certain speed the main source of sound is from the road resistance and not from the engine.
about half of the particulate emissions from cars are due to tire wear on the roads and brake pads
This is probably not true. Total particulate emissions from combustion is about 0.027g/km (coming from a US EPA source giving 2.55 lbs of PM matter released per 1,000 gallons of gas, and current US fleet average of 26.4 mpg). Total weight from brake pads and tires lost is about 0.040g/km (highly variable and ranges from 0.021 to 0.077 depending on assumptions of tire life and weight lost) – this is ~97% from tires since brake pads lose only 10-20g over use. But it is not clear how much of this lost weight is particulate emissions as defined. The figure for particulate emissions from combustion includes PM10, PM2.5 and PM-CON (gaseous emissions that will condense into particles). But much of the weight lost from brakes/tires is in the form of visible dust, while PM10 and smaller particles are invisible to the naked eye. One source I found said that PM10 and PM2.5 emissions from tires/brakes/road wear totaled to 0.0056g/km, or about a half of such emissions from combustion. A little over half of combustion emissions are PM-CON, which I suspect brakes and tires rarely produce due to heat issues (burning brakes causing a smell would be an example of an exception).
Note that while tires represent 97% of total lost weight, brakes are ~45% of the PM10/2.5 weight (makes sense given the physics of how brakes and tires wear). Electric/hybrid vehicles will do better in that regard since regenerative braking allows them to use their brakes less. And of course particulate emissions from brakes/tires, whatever they are, contribute nothing to greenhouse gasses or the nitrogen/sulfur oxides that contribute to smog.
As I said to start this sub-thread, the attempt to call electric/hybrid vehicles hugely polluting (now with tire/brake dust) is counterproductive. Telling people their electric car is just as bad as a smoke belching vehicle will cause them to disbelieve everything you say. Environmentalists and urbanists looking for reasons to call EVs dirty after decades of complaining we didn’t have electric vehicles because they are cleaner is going to jeopardize their whole agenda. If you want to reduce parking minimums because they make housing too expensive, or pedestrianize streets because it makes for a nicer experience, or take car space for bike lanes because biking is healthier then just make those arguments on economic, social and medical grounds. Don’t foolishly try to say a clean vehicle is dirty and lose people who think you are now trying to manipulate them.
I agree. For example, Ethiopia gets all of their electricity from hydropower and banned non-electric vehicle purchases so the pollution argument is totally irrelevant there.
Also the “tire and braking” argument is over-exaggerated and ignores that the health impact of public transit tire/wheel and braking is much worse as people while waiting for transit stand around poorly ventilated areas where trains and buses frequently brake.
With the exception of subways/metros, most transit stops/stations are more or less outdoors, from bus shelters to railway platform roofs. For bus shelters, the pollution from the car traffic on the road they are on order-of-magnitude outweighs the pollution from the buses.
For rail: any electric train (even extremely old ones, incl. loco-hauled) should use regenerative braking unless in an emergency, simply because it’s so easy to implement. Reasonably modern DMUs should likewise use their traction system (“hydraulic retarder” is the term, I believe) for deceleration. (Heck, a traction brake system has been developed and used even for steam locomotives.) If a railway still uses friction brakes for service braking of passenger trains, then their practices are decades out of date. (Which, to be fair, does happen. The backbone of MÁV-Start’s long-distance operations is the 60-year-old V43 locomotive, hauling not uncommonly similar-vintage coaches. The situation is much the same on those commuter services that haven’t yet been replaced with Stadler EMUs. So if you want to see ordinary passengers trains throwing sparks from cast iron shoes pressing against wheel rims, come to Hungary. Yay? We’re also the home of trains with two different, non-interchangeable 2nd classes in addition to one, sometimes two non-interchangeable 1st class(es). They run between Budapest and Szeged, but if anything, the arrangement ought to spread in the future. We’ve formerly been the home of the “hole in the takt”, where one early-afternoon departure was removed from a two-hourly clockface schedule for ostensible cost-cutting; luckily this particular stupidity has been rectified.)
For rail: any electric train (even extremely old ones, incl. loco-hauled) should use regenerative braking unless in an emergency,
Well, my original comment was about hybrids/EVs reducing pollution, and they also use regenerative braking, so again you cannot claim some advantage to transit over low/zero-emissions vehicles.
My understanding, which could be wrong, is that all vehicles with regenerative braking need brakes for the final few meters of stop, not just for emergencies.
@Onux, certainly I don’t do 100% of my braking with the regenerative brakes, just most of it.
Also EVs are heavier so there is more tyre wear, I think it works out in the wash.
@Onux: Yes, EVs and hybrids do have less brake wear, and part (or indeed most) of their efficiency improvement over ICE cars in stop-and-go urban traffic is that they can use regen braking.
Using friction brakes for the final stop was technologically necessary with commutated “DC” motors — brake torque was proportionate to speed (and inversely proportionate to circuit resistance). Most contemporary motors, whether synchronous (easy mode!) or asynchronous (kind of annoying to implement this feature) can be controlled to brake-to-zero and to hold-against-torque (e.g. on a slope) if you want to. I understand most manufacturers just don’t bother with it because that “traditional” brake application isn’t a big deal, in terms of wear or anything (perhaps with the exception of noise, if they manage to forget how to avoid the breaks squealing).
The advantage of transit (and the main point I was making to Sid) is that even on a bus, there is less tyre per passenger, so to speak. Rail has even less wear to begin with, and even that is non-polluting (wheel wear means the metal is deforming out-of-profile; material removal happens in the maintenance shop, on the wheel lathe). And transit has a brake wear advantage: DMUs, buses and some lorries have hydraulic retarders, while ICE cars don’t. (I suppose there may be some exceptions, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t common.)
@Basil,
Thank you for enlightening me on the braking technology re: electric motors.
However, transit has no brake wear advantage is this particular argument since I am specifically referring to EVs/hybrids, not ICE cars. Whatever can be done with regenerative/electric braking on transit (or hydraulic retarders) can be done with EVs/hybrids.
“In the case of car accidents, this is even worse: […] making all the cars larger doesn’t improve traffic safety“
Eh, the performance on the “crash this car into a brick wall” test in particular has improved massively over time. Intuitively, this should be a factor of hood depth (and much-ridiculed empty volume fraction) giving a longer displacement over which to distribute Δv. Unfortunately, this test being the highest-profile one and thus improving the most — more than e.g. side collision resistance — has increased the moral hazard around e.g. T-bones (analogously to the situation wrt. pedestrians and cyclists).
Separately: this feature is a thing that exists.
The cost difference is a lot less if you compare cars to SUVs and also if you look in the EV segment. For example, a model 3 is only slightly cheaper than a model Y. Car insurance is actually slightly cheaper for a Y, and the difference in electricity cost is minimal (assuming you don’t live in a few high-priced European countries or island nations). Taxes on fuel/pollution are more likely to create a shift to EVs rather than more ICE sedan purchases (Scandinavia a good example).
Pedestrian safety issues are more likely to be addressed by technology by manufacturers using camera/lidar and AI rather than changes in design or size.
A major factor for the popularity of SUVs and trucks are the higher tariffs on larger vehicles (chicken tax) which mean they are disproportionately made in the U.S. compared to sedans. So it has paradoxically made them more popular as using those vehicles signal “Americanness” and wealth. A tax on large vehicles could make it a stronger signal of wealth or political ideology. For example, people in the middle east spend exorbitant amounts of money to get a license plate with a smaller number.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
“the Kei truck, specialized to have a large bed relative to the rest of the car, looks so weird to Americans that Massachusetts at one point banned it for being unsafe,”
The Kei truck was not banned in MA because it looked weird but because of different safety standards in the US vs Japan. At the time of the (short lived) ban, Kei trucks available in the US could not have airbags or crumple zones, for instance. One can make many arguments about this (old US cars lack these two but remain legal, Kei cars don’t need them for their intended use in city, etc.) but don’t falsely say it was about how they look. Also, Kei trucks have large beds relative to size, but smaller beds than US full size pickups.
“The minivan, specialized to carry seven to eight passengers, has been unfashionable for at least a generation, losing out to the similarly large but lower-capacity SUV.”
Actually most (all?) SUVs as large as a minivan offers fold down/up third row seats in the cargo area, giving them 7-8 person capacity no different than a minivan. Much of this is fashion – in the 1970s/80s families had station wagons for capacity, but when those kids grew up their “parents’ car” wasn’t cool so they switched to minivans in the 1990s/2000s, a generation further on minivan’s are seen as out of date so people who grew up in them now prefer SUVs for driving around their kids.
Or as Adirondacker noted, many “SUVs” are not actually large but are crossovers/hatchbacks no larger than regular cars/sedans but styled differently. Yes, trucks take the top three spots for best selling vehicles in the US, but spots 4-6 are the RAV-4, Model Y and CR-V – all labelled as “SUVs” but with little of the size issues noted in this post.
“The United States has seen an increase in traffic fatalities lately, especially for pedestrians.”
But according to a chart from your link on Kei trucks (https://lede-admin.mass.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/49/2024/09/Road-fatalities-per-million-residents.png?w=850&quality=75) traffic fatalities dropped by a third from 2005-2010 as SUV popularity took off (‘light truck’ sales exceed passenger cars for the first time in 2001). Road fatalities remained flat until 2016 even as light truck/SUV sales doubled from the recession in 2009. The raise since then (and the spike in 2020 and beyond) is better explained by a reduction in police traffic stops due to the criticism of law enforcement following the deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd. Fewer traffic stops (either as a matter of policy changes or officers deciding they were not worth making should they be criticized/charged if something went wrong) meant people were driving more recklessly because there were no consequences, which led to more crashes.
As someone who had never heard the term “positional good”, I figured I’d put the definition I found on Google here: “Positional goods are goods that are valued more for their social status and limited supply than for their actual utility“
Alon, the biggest news about cars in the US is the implementation of congestion pricing in Manhattan. It would be illuminating to see/hear what the revenue impact versus traffic impact turned out to be.
The author is a textbook example of someone who talks a big game. At first, he seemed to me to know at least something especially in railways that I later found out wasn’t the case, but in the topic I’m very much familiar with I see it just obvious he just don’t know anything.
Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards and Greenhouse Gas emission regulations are the main drivers pushing vehicle sizes to extremes — along with other practices like road design influenced by fire departments(like oversized fire trucks and just extremely dumb use policy limiting lane dieting) or nationally widespread front yard setback regulations limiting possibility of any other sprawl than cul-de-sac, and there is much more.
In case you haven’t heard of them, CAFE and GHG are government regulations aimed at reducing emissions. Ironically, they contribute to the ever-growing size of vehicles. Why? Because the compliance costs for building efficient sedans are too high and keep rising. In contrast, larger vehicles are subject to looser standards, making it easier and cheaper for manufacturers to simply scale up vehicle size instead of optimizing efficiency. EU has similar incentive but it’s based on weight and it’s more nuanced that’s why the problem is much lesser here.
and of course, as all “experts” — know nothing suggest just fighting physical forces with new and better regulations that are the issue in the first place