[salmonfamine]

"fixing the problem" would mean banning these vehicles, which is politically impossible.

I think the most practical solution will be to take all of the externalized costs of these vehicles, and charge them to their owners. I would argue that this is, in fact, less bureaucratic than creating more regulation.

[bko]

What are the externalized costs? We need to fund a committee to research and create a study to get the costs. And these are constantly changing especially with climate change so we'll need to fund it indefinitely to propose new regulations and rules about max car weight, shape, wheel distribution, center of gravity, among other things.

Don't worry, this won't be new regulation, just a sweeping ban of certain vehicles based on a number of factors

Do you ever think what the externalized costs for having thousands of regulations are to businesses and consumers? Attitudes like yours is the reason I can't buy a kinder egg in US or European eggs have exactly opposite regulatory requirements in US vs Europe.

We eschew this kind of complexity in engineering. It's the most obvious thing in the world. Anybody that works on complex systems will tell you the same. But we view regulation and government as immune from these kinds of tradeoffs. We hear things like "this bad thing should be banned" and never stop to think what that means in practice and what fragility and distortions it adds to the system

[salmonfamine]

Not necessarily, you could just tax based on weight thresholds, established in legislation, in the same way you could ban vehicles based on the same factors.

[bko]

The fuel NHSTA has over 1200 pages on just the new fuel economy rules. And there are dozens of agencies car manufacturers have to contend with to design a vehicle.

In unrelated news, average new car prices in the US climb to 48k while China has a new car under 10k

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a39617404/nhtsa-fuel-econo...