I fucking hate SUV’s, and I drive one (company car, had no say in the matter). Tax them all to hell and back.
rsuri@lemmy.world 9 months ago
World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) study that found SUVs to be 20 percent more polluting and twice as likely to kill a pedestrian in a collision compared to smaller conventional cars.
Twice as likely to kill a pedestrian…if that number holds up this needs to happen in more cities. Driving an excessively deadly vehicle through crowded areas shouldn’t be free.
Kyrgizion@lemmy.world 9 months ago
ImFresh3x@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
It’s time for Pedestrian crash avoidance mitigation (PCAM) to be enforced as standard feature. Much better solution. Large vehicles wills will need to exist, even though I agree fewer of them should.
pathief@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s not free, at least not in Portugal. You pay an yearly tax per vehicle, the value depends on the vehicle model.
viking@infosec.pub 9 months ago
I’d love to see how they calculated those 20%. If it’s merely a statistic of which type of car was involved in what share of deadly accidents with pedestrians, it says nothing about the car but rather about the drivers.
Once a car reaches a certain speed, it really doesn’t matter if it’s an ultralight vehicle or a tank.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Less mass means less momentum, so less force is required to slow it down, which means it can slow down faster in the time between noticing the pedestrian and colliding.
Higher hood means less visibility directly in front of the vehicle. It also means it’s more likely to hit the centre of mass so the body takes the full force and falls on the ground the vehicle is moving towards, rather than lower so that the legs get pushed out and the body ends up falling on the hood.
On the flip side, they are more visible and generally louder, so pedestrians might be making fewer mistakes on their end.
The differences aren’t about when they hit someone at a high enough speed any vehicle will likely kill them, it’s about the thresholds between a harmless bump and a fatal injury.
And even if the driver is the main factor, that’s all the more reason to increase the burden involved in driving them.
MajorSauce@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Indeed, but the cost of acceleration up to that speed is heavily influenced by mass.
And I don’t know many cities where you can cruise endlessly without traffic, stops, red lights, etc. Especially Paris where you would be lucky to attain 50km/h.
jettrscga@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I don’t think some millionaire earned a 2x chance to kill a pedestrian by being able to pay. I’m not a fan of fees that only apply rules to poor people.
But outright bans are harder to get passed, so fees are better than nothing.
CaptainProton@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Funny thing about markets though, when you put fees on SUVs that just means the prices on used SUVs will go down, and so you’ll have fees being leveed on only the poorest who have no choice but to buy the cheapest car they can find and the richest who don’t care about the fee.
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 9 months ago
They can still buy used regular cars.
CaptainProton@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That’s a very ivory-Tower retort - ‘they can still buy regular cars’.
If you can barely put food on the table and NEED a car (eg for work), and nearly nothing in your bank account, do you spend $3000 on a sedan or $1000 on an equally good SUV?
Second hand market prices are extremely demand driven, the equilibrium average cost tends not to change much without a change in overall supply - this just shifts the balance pushing SUVs to the bottom of the market.