this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
651 points (97.0% liked)
Fuck Cars
14079 readers
2068 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
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.