| That’s not a strange way to say something, it’s not the same idea. A bigger vehicle always costs more - you have more mass to move, stop, and many parts need to be stronger for those reasons. That can be justified if you actually need to do something which a smaller vehicle cannot do - nobody expects a cattle rancher to pull a trailer behind a Prius! - but the vast majority of the larger vehicles Americans are buying will never be used for something which requires that extra capacity. The extra bling added to justify those price tags makes them worse for the ostensible reasons people buy them, too - who’s going off-roading with premium rims and delicate flair? This is the classic externality problem: people are buying massive trucks and SUVs for emotional support reasons which would be an amusing personality trait except that they’ve reversed a half century of road safety improvements and the pollution they generate affects billions of people other than the buyers. > It’s also strange to me someone would mention tire particulate pollution in a grand comparison. The EV poster children wear through tires quicker than their comparable gasoline counterparts—softer tire compounds (road noise reduction) and weight. This similarly is arguing against a different point: my statement was simple fact - bigger vehicles pollute more, no matter whether that’s a large EV full of batteries or an oversized truck. This is a famous drawback to EVs, along with the CO2 used to create them and the mining for battery components, and one reason why both environmentalists and urbanists are careful to say that the future should be more transit, bikes/scooters/etc., and walking because the model of everyone driving themselves everywhere in a private vehicle is inherently unsustainable. EVs solve the downsides of cars the same way that methadone solves opiate addiction. > > more likely and more lethal when they happen
> Those also pay more for insurance. Again, this isn’t the point. Insurance can’t resurrect a dead person and it pays nowhere near the cost of lifetime impacts for people who are seriously injured. If they’re lucky, victims will get enough to pay for their immediate medical bills - the rest, often majority, of the cost is fobbed off to society just like all of the other negative externalities of driving. |