It barely fits in the bloody car park. So bad for pedestrians and the environment.
I’ve been referring to these as babykillers. Good luck seeing a kid crossing the road if you’re in one of these.
don’t need to see them if you can glide through them like butter 👍👍
I call them 3 and a half tonne child killers. These and Range Rover, Q7s X5s etc.
What I find totally ironic is the arseholes who drive these things park at the shops then bring out their hemp shopping bags. ‘Yeah let’s protect our environment’ fucking hypocrites.
It’s never been about protecting anything. It’s just wealth projection.
Handmade organic hemp bags project wealth far more than generic 15c plastic ones.
Why do people even like inefficient, huge cars if they’re not going to use most of its features, not even in the foreseeable future? Such a bloated design for an everyday car, and even more potentially dangerous at that… those Japanese cars have a more elegant and sleek design, as well as efficient. Well, I would like good public transportation too.
No matter how you look at it, all the pros of those kind of cars turn into cons when they’re used as cars for everyday personal transport.
Big car goes vroom!
As your wallet implodes though.
As a big dude I can’t comfortably fit in a lot of smaller vehicles. I used to love my truck. Now I’ve settled on a Crown Victoria, the thing is a boat made for land.
I live in America so it’s far from the worst offender.
I think I can understand that, it’s just that some people just get the biggest car they can find only as a status symbol and think of nothing else about it, then when they get an inconvenience they don’t even think that it’s the cost of having that design. Not to mention the environmental impacts. But if I were in your situation, I certainly don’t want to feel cramped in a car, especially if it’s in America where you’ll be driving fora significant portion of your day. I mean your car could be inefficient, but it’s probably because efficiency wasn’t accessible for you in the first place.
In America they are mostly bought because of consumerism and fragile masculinity.
Where I live trucks are at around half the vehicles. My wife and I play a game where we try to spot a truck hauling something that they actually needed the truck for. Most trips I’ll see dozens of trucks and zero being necessary.
Do you see them on the weekends when they’re hauling their 4 wheelers, boats, or motorcycles? You probably don’t make it to the outdoors much, but there’s good reasons to have a pickup.
A Chevy Bolt EV hatchback can tow right sized utility trailers, boats, campers, bicycles, cargo boxes, motorcycles, ride on lawn mowers and ATVs. With the roof rack it can move kayaks. Before someone chimes in to say it can’t, I own one, I live in a rural area, I do these things and have done them for part of the last 150,000kms.
If the little ol’ bolt can do it, think about all the larger vehicles that could do it too. The idea that you need a weekday driver pick up truck to have enough utility for weekend fun is a myth told by truck salesmen and people trying to justify the unnecessary purchase they made.
I looked into if it would be possible to tow a small trailer with the Bolt, but it’s not rated for any towing load so it’s an insurance liability. Is your model rated for towing, or are you just accepting the insurance liability?
My insurance company tells me that when a trailer is attached it’s covered under liability, no different than a cargo box on a hitch. Rated capacity never factored into the discussion, just don’t overload the OEM hitch that I have installed.
But now we’re talking about differences in people’s specific insurance coverage, which may vary by country, state, province, provider, and legislation and not the overall point which is that owning a daily driver pick up truck just because you occasionally tow is more an excuse than a nessecity for many , many truck owners.
How heavy are these towed things. Some boats are well over 1000kg and small towballs aren’t rated for enough down force to properly handle them. Plus a large enough trailer will start pushing you around if you don’t have enough mass in the tow vehicle.
In America they are mostly bought because of consumerism and fragile masculinity.
Where I live trucks are at around half the vehicles. My wife and I play a game where we try to spot a truck hauling something that they actually needed the truck for. Most trips I’ll see dozens of trucks and zero being necessary.
Smol pp
These things are so incredibly ugly on top of everything else that’s wrong with them. Thanks for all the brilliant names in this thread though, wankerado is my favourite so far.
I agree. We should stop buying internal combustion engine cars.
100%. I’d go one further and say stop buying cars altogether but our infrastructure is woefully underprepared for that.
I would love to go electric, but I can’t afford an eutectic car and I live in an apartment with no chatting stations.
On top of that, I still have misgivings due to the longevity of current battery technology. Current Li-ion batteries have a pretty strict life span. Combine that with the fact that I will probably never be able to afford a new car meaning any car I do own in going to be running on an already old battery box and replacing the battery box is very expensive. Also most electric vehicles are artificially rendered unrepairable by the user, requiring “licensed repair technicians” to repair them, at a premium price of course. It’s just not in the cards for poor people. Not to mention the environmental and humanitarian impact of li-ion battery manufacturing.
Electric vehicles could be part of the solution to our environmental problems, but capitalism is crippling then at their knees.
Lifespan is not really a huge issue. You might lose 5-10% of the battery after 100k miles. Tesla’s degradation after 200k miles is 12%. There is much less maintenance that needs to be done on them overall. It is indeed a larger cost up front but even with our cheap gas here in the US, it can pay for itself after 6 or 7 years.
But you are correct that access to them for poorer people. We do need to make a push to at least get level 1 chargers in apartment garages.
As far as environmental impact, cobalt is the worst of it but that is being passed out. Lithium mining is done where there is no life at all. A large chunk of the lithium in our batteries is from the Atacama Desert which has large portions that have no recorded instances of rain. Regardless, it is still significantly better than using fossil fuels in internal combustion engine.
For what it’s worth, here’s my anacdotal experience.
I traded in a Hybrid Camry for a Hyundai Ionic Electric almost exactly 3 years ago.
The Electric version was $40k (it was a demo so about $5k cheaper than brand new) and about $8-10k more than the petrol only model.
The first year of driving it I saved a minimum of $4k in petrol compared to the old hybrid and that is with the electricity costs factored in. Though it was closer to 4.5 when solar was taken into consideration.
This year I saved a bit more due to higher petrol prices and was a minimum of $5k saved compared to the hybrid, and again closer to 5.5 with solar.
Both years I did about 25,000kms. So after 2 years the difference in price has paid for itself, though we still have a loan for the car in theory the extra savings from not paying for petrol will help to pay the rest of the loan off. Though it’s mostly being eaten up by inflation.
We are lucky enough to be in a position of semi- owning our own home so we could install power in the carport and solar. If we were renting we certainly wouldn’t have done that which makes a huge difference. Also if we couldn’t charge at home it’d be a massive hassle to charge away from home, which I’ve only had to do 5-6 times in the last 2 years. We only have a travel charger at home it is 2.2kw and very slow but we don’t, and haven’t needed a faster charger.
For battery life, my car has I think, an 8 year warranty on the battery having at least 90% capacity remaining. My range is typically 330kms on a full charge. If I get down to 90% capacity and still have 300kms off a charge I won’t notice the difference.
I worked out the rough difference of my car compared to the petrol in terms of carbon emissions from making the battery just using global averages for making batteries. My car hit even with the petrol at about 70,000kms, after that it significantly drops off on the carbon emission side even when using 100% grid power from only coal power while petrol cars keep producing.
For the global average driver at 10,000kms a year it’s obviously about 7 years to break even, for myself it’ll be the end of year 3 in theory.
I can’t say much on replacing batteries even though currently it is very expensive, battery technology and capacity keeps getting better, so one would hope that would mean in the future it would cost less to replace and give you more range. But then how will the shareholders reap the benefits of record profits every year.
I never really did the serving on my hybrid, but I’ve found the service costs pretty comparable. The last 12 month service was $360 and that includes 22months of roadside assistance.
I want to also mention it is the smoothest car I’ve ever driven which is nice on long trips.
I know there’ll be people who will not care about any of this and others will still consider electric cars bad because of {insert small inconvenience or difference to petrol cars}, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. They’re a good start for individuals to make the change if they have the means, but the largest corporations are the biggest polluters which need regulations and rules put in place before they will start doing there share.
Apologies for rambling.
I agree with you for the most part. However I could never let go fully because I marvel at the ingenuity of the internal combustion engine.
It sucks that we can’t really do this because many people rely on the second hand market for cars to be affordable
I agree with you for the most part. However I could never let go fully because I marvel at the ingenuity of the internal combustion engine.
Hi American here - please don’t let those things take over your roads, it sucks for all the reasons you think it does
If you live in the City then these things are pointless, but in the country they are some of the handy vehicles to have. And they sell like hotcakes out here.
Ah, I see you’re getting our pedestrian bonker 9000 down under!
I’m a fan of the bear basher myself, but those are good too!
Child-runner-over-er more like.
If the bull bar doesn’t squash them, then the tail pipe emissions will get them instead! Not to mention climate change.
The bodies are all so tacky too. It reminds me of a super soaker or nerf gun.
It’s just crazy that these things are allowed.
Ok, let people buy them if they really want, but they shouldn’t be allowed to use them on the roads that other people have to share with them!
They should be allowed to drive them, but pay a price for them. Tax the absolute shit out them and don’t allow it to be a taxable right off for “business purposes”. But then I also say that should go for all four wheel drivers. 30 years ago the only people who had anything bigger than a station wagon were people that actually used them for recreational use. The argument of “it’s safer for me to drive them” is the same argument people use when the gun debate is used - it’s only safer because everyone else has one is not a valid argument.
People don’t need four wheel drives - they have them because it’s convenient. If you want that convenience then you should have to pay for it.
taxing them wont remove their massive blind spots that make them so dangerous. Even fwds have some use cases but these don’t, to my knowledge there isn’t any thing these stupid things can do that another vehicle cant do better besides maybe running over children, no one needs one of these.
I’m not a fan and would never own one of these, but I think the usual argument in these threads is that these have a larger towing / carrying capacity.
These mofo americans are ruining it for everyone. I have stopped watching hollywood movies as they tend to show these cars and most regulars get brain washed and start buying this shit.
Honestly. Starting to see these in the UK too, and all I can think is who the hell needs one of these things??
I can’t imagine they’re easy to drive around or park given their size, and they must guzzle through petrol. Even if you had a big family, surely you’d just get an SUV with not totally exposed to the elements boot space.
Tbh, I would get an electric one. They’re handy for moving larger items. It’s not done often, but there are moments where I wish I had enough space to, move a desk or a TV for example. That’s why one of my friends keeps an ancient minivan alongside his new EV crossover.
Unless you already have one, for the sake of all the costs you’d need to pay to have a second car, I feel like you’d be better off just hiring a small van or something for a few hours when you need it rather than shelling out on a massive pickup.
I was considering that as well, but where I live, hiring a vehicle can be difficult, availability is questionable, and it’s also kinda expensive, my plan was just to give my current sedan to my partner. We’d be able to get some utility from a ute.
For complete fairness to everyone we should tax every vehicle on road or path from scooters and bikes to b-doubles based on the 4th power of axle load to properly account for the impact on road maintenance costs. Then additional levies for disproportionate environmental costs and harm to vulnerable road users. Keep the overall tax amount the same but shift the burden so people with smaller vehicles pay substantially less than they do now. And then add strict liability for anything much larger than a kei car.
I agree 100%
Yes, however with that it’d be more expensive to administer taxation on bicycles etc. Than what they’d bring in… So not really worth doing at all.
Since the amount of damage caused by bikes to infrastructure would be small, the govt could just slap a tax for the cost to the purchase price of every bike. Not saying I’d agree with it but there are ways to make all road users pay their share.
Surely human powered transport should have tax breaks in order to encourage adoption by promoting affordability though.
I can’t afford a fancy lift. Sure as hell wouldn’t be going around parking it places though.
But my masculinity
Your truck nuts will hang just fine on a car
Can they be fined for not fitting inside the car park?
