Trump Administration Plans to Gut Clean Car Rules
(www.nytimes.com)
New fuel-economy standards, which President Trump said he finalized Saturday, would kill a federal effort to speed the transition to electric vehicles.
Electricification is the one thing that could make the price of gas irrelevant for Americans
Either you get an EV or you pay gas money to the oil mob.
Two things:
1 The federal CAFE standards we have need to be gutted. They're one of the reasons our roads are what they are today.
2 The President is a douche who I don't trust to put a common sense policy into place. He's not capable of common sense.
2 The chicken tax should go with when we eventually repeal all these shitty tariffs
Best case is probably all those standards being gutted, so they can be replaced with more reasonable and future forward standards whenever the whole trump regime is out and hopefully behind bars.
Personally I hope we get some standards that disincentivize enormous vehicles. Maybe tax based on some calculation of vehicle weight and fuel/energy consumption? A lot of EV’s are extremely heavy, which is bad for a lot of reasons, but are much more efficient than gas/diesel vehicles of similar weight, so they shouldn’t be “punished” as hard. But smaller/lighter EV’s are still better than big heavy ones imo
And I’d also like to see limits on new non-commercial vehicle size. Way too many massive compensator trucks clogging the streets and running over cyclists and pedestrians.
Heavier cars wear down roads slightly more, so from a road perspective weight matters more than fuel economy. From en environmental perspective both matter as tire wear is a major source of microplastic pollution.
Not slightly more, the calculation on axle load has it hypercubed ie raised to the 4th power. Basically double the weight == 16 times the damage
I found that very interesting, so I did a little research, and yeah, it’s called the “fourth power law”, which is used to compare road wear between two vehicles. The strength of the road does pretty drastically change how closely the “rule” applies, but it does seem to be a decent rule of thumb for common paved secondary roads. For anybody reading, it’s based on axle loading. So if we assume a 50/50 weight balance on a standard 2-axle vehicle, its axle loading is half the vehicle weight. The difference in road wear can be calculated as
([Greater Axle Load]/[Lesser Axle Load])^4^
So if you compare a Hummer EV at roughly 10,000lbs, so 5,000lb axle loading, to a 1st gen Miata at about 2,000lbs, or 1,000lb axle load, the Miata would have to drive down a road 625 times to do a similar amount of damage as the Hummer driving down it once. That is a fairly extreme example, but you get the idea.
So at what point is highway maintenance more expensive than a railroad?
A single year of federal road funding is more than amtrak has gotten in its entire existance
Whenever oil producers and auto manufacturers can’t pay off politicians anymore
But more seriously, more money goes into road maintenance than rail maintenance even in the EU, which has way more rail than the US. And while I’m a big fan of trains for transportation, cars still make a lot of sense for a lot of people across the US. Trains are great for connecting population dense areas to each other. The US has a heck of a lot of “middle of nowhere”, that’s way too far from urban areas for it to be reasonable to build rail to, to be reasonable to ride a bike to the nearest town that has a station, or even have a bus route that would be going by.
In my dream world we would convert pretty much all the 4-lane roads in the US into 2 lanes of car traffic on the inside, with narrower lanes on the outside for bikes and scooters and whatever other small slow things on wheels, and light rail either on one side or what is now the median. I figure if it’s worth having 4 lanes, it’s probably worth having light rail.
Which is the thing people don't get about higher registration fees on electric vehicles and why they may be necessary (sort of). Tax on fuel paid at the pump funds roads, but since EVs aren't buying fuel and weigh as much or more they should probably pay something towards road maintenance. Assuming keep the current funding model, which I'm not convinced is the best model.
I'm fairly pro EV and most taxes like fuel tax have always felt a little regressive even if I'm able to pay for it just fine. I don't know what the actual answer is, but it does seem like the short fall could likely be generated by better taxing wealthy corporations and improving public transportation.
It seems to me that registration should be the point where a vehicle owner has to pay for public road usage. Some vehicles that need gas/diesel aren't registered for public road usage (e.g. farm equipment), and some vehicles which don't need gas/diesel are registered for public road usage (e.g. EVs). Therefore gas taxes are misaligned, but registration is by definition aligned with public road usage.
The only thing you lose out on is the fuel economy heuristic that bigger/heavier vehicles cost more to fuel (there's some physics to back it up: heavier vehicles take more absolute energy to accelerate up to a given speed, and an ICE only converts energy one way -- potential to kinetic -- so it's all eventually lost to heat via the brakes), therefore they'll pay more in taxes. But adding any kind of electrification into the mix (BEV, PHEV, or mild HEV) invalidates the physics behind the heuristic (electric motors can recover kinetic energy), thus the gas tax is supremely irrelevant and we instead need a different mechanism for funding roadways.
I could see a scenario where if we get to a point where a super majority of vehicles on the roadways are electric then the fuel tax is shifted over to a tax on electricity which does address some of the usage issues with a registration based tax. It also helps with location of usage a little more too since just because the vehicle was registered in one state doesn't mean it was used the most in that state.
I'm well aware we have the technology to determine exactly where and how much every vehicle is being used, but I'm not terribly interested in giving many, if any, of the current governments of the world that ability.
Bear with my ignorance, but what are the issues you see with registration-based usage taxes?
Electric usage tax has the same problem as a gas tax in that it's decoupled from actual public road usage.
edit: hit "send" before actually done writing... Whoops.
He has a concept of a plan.
They can plan to do anything they like. They planned to win a war with Iran and instead turned a former international strait into one firmly controlled by an adversary.
They are very likely to lose the House. There is a decent chance the Senate flips as well. The administration will be able to do little.
Also, who wants inefficient cars with oil prices where they are?
Also, who wants inefficient cars with oil prices where they are?
Oil execs, aka Trump's friends. US people have been complaining about how hard it is to find a car they actually want for ages. Their dealership model seems to be geared for extracting money from them, and worse mileage at higher prices would be just more of the same.
Welp, looks like it's going to be up to the consumer to decide if they want to continue paying out the ass for the "privilege" of using gas.
