this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
650 points (97.0% liked)
Fuck Cars
14070 readers
1972 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Cars should be taxed by weight.
Fuck those BEV drivers in particular?
Nope, just pay proportionally for the wear and tear you cause.
BEVs would weigh less than most of these oversized trucks and SUVs, especially with the added lift kits, dualies and oversized wheels
Chevy Bolt weighs about 3600lbs
Ford F150 starts at over 4500 lbs going up to 5500lbs for the gasoline models. (Another source says that the Lightning is around 6000lbs)
Chevy Tahoe starts at just under 5500lbs and goes up to nearly 5900lbs
Kia Sportage (a below-average sized ICE crossover) weighs 3300-3800lbs depending on the configuration
So spot-checking it seems taxing by vehicle weight would impact oversized vehicles more than it would impact BEVs. Particularly if it was structured as "vehicles over 4,000 lbs, vehicles over 5,000 lbs and vehicles over 6,000 lbs" or even better something exponential beyond 4,000 lbs.
Combine this with a tire diameter registration fee (combined diameter of all tires on the vehicle, so dualies cost 50% more on top of the extra cost of 20"+ tires) and we should start getting somewhere with financially incentivizing smaller vehicles
My point was that BEVs can weigh significantly more than their equivalent ICE car. The goal should be to get rid of ICE completely and use BEVs where personal transportation makes more sense than mass transit. There is already too much of a push to make ICE cars more desirable than BEVs. I have serious doubts that taxing vehicles by weight would do a better job of keeping these monstrosities off the road than their own cost plus the price of gas does, but putting our legislative thumb on the scale yet again to discourage someone considering a small BEV versus a small ICE car seems shortsighted.
Remember that you still tax fuel purchases.
Taxing by weight also encourages weight efficieny in BEV. Reduces weight also supports other sustainable practices, like reducing tire wear, rare earth metal usage, pedestrian safety and vehicle cost.
For towing or very long range use, the correct solution is probably some form of optional range extender in the form of a battery pack, or even better, a fuel based APU, since they are much lighter. Bonus points if it can be external or removable.
It can help make up for the loss of revenue from gasoline taxes. Roads have to be paid for somehow, and ideally the burden will fall on those owning vehicles and not society at large.
Very True, vehicle weight also has a direct relationship with how much wear and tear they cause.
People buy much bigger batteries than they actually need anyway.
I'm in the UK, could you have a word with our Gov pls? They've just announced that my 90kg electric vespa will cost 3p/mile the same as my friends 2500kg BMW iX :(
But the government ministers drive the BMW iX. How will they afford higher rates per mile?
Probably running them as taxis for that sweet sweet free charging zone! :)
I have to apologise to the Gov, either they've changed their mind, clarified or it was just vicious rumour but it appears electric motorbikes won't incur the per mile charge... woo hoo
That’s bs, gas taxes already don’t pay for road maintenance and too many localities seem to want to over-tax EVs
Let me counter-propose
This is fair to everyone - each covering their actual usage and damage caused, regardless of technology
Of course then we can go off into the woods arguing that actual trucks cause essentially all road damage but we do need those
UK is already going to tax EV owners from 2028 to make up for lost petrol revenue. Electric Vehicle Excise Duty or eVED.
2x the weight, 16x the street damage. But honestly, does every BEV need to be able to go 600 miles in one go?
The only ones that do are the attempts at extended range full sized pickups. They have an argument that it’s needed for towing and I imagine at least some actually tow.
My EV gets over 300 mile range and is lighter than any full sized pickup. I’d argue that’s a sweet spot since I can drive five straight hours on a road trip, about the same as for a gas car.
Nah. BEVs aren't actually much heavier these days.
They are in the US. Hummer EV is over 10,000lbs.
That's because its a hummer with a 250kwh battery. That's just a choice someone has made. Not all BEVs weigh that.
The Tesla model 3 weighs about the same as a BMW 3 series.