Sounds like a you problem -Car Ceo’s
In a better world roads would be closed for cars which exceed the capacity of those guard rails. Just put up a sign, do some enforcement and people will start buying smaller cars when they can’t use them.
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What would we do about semi trucks, delivery vans, busses, dump trucks, etc. etc. etc. Personally I’ve seen some pretty short busses but never a sport compact model.
Pretty much all of those vehicles require a CDL.
Seems like vehicles over a certain weight requiring a special license classification is a pretty straightforward and reasonable requirement.
But we can’t do it without simultaneously addressing mass transit, bikeped, and our general absolute psychological fixation around designing all of our society around cars first and people second.
Actually pretty much none of them require a CDL unless you’re operating commercially.
You can go buy a school bus right now and drive it around without a cdl. Only needed to carry passengers.
You don’t need a CDL to be a delivery van driver either at all.
The current GVWR limit before you need a CDL is 26,000lbs. No light duty vehicle on the road comes close to that. Even the biggest Ram 4500 caps out at 16,500lbs GVWR. The Hummer EV caps out at 10,550lbs.
Actually, you only need a CDL if you’re driving it commercially. I could walk out and buy a semi right now and drive it home. This is why you can rent Uhaul trucks and buy bus-sized RVs without a special license.
It varies somewhat by state, but that’s generally incorrect.
Because the type of vehicle, and not the driver, defines who needs a CDL, the following characteristics have been set forth to define what a commercial motor vehicle is. A CDL is required of any driver of:
- Any vehicle designed to carry 16 or more persons including the driver, such as our campuses’ mini buses.
- Any vehicle that weighs over 26,000 pounds (defined as the greater of manufacturer’s gross vehicle weight rating, manufacturer’s gross combination weight rating, actual weight, or registered weight).
- Any vehicle that carries hazardous materials that require placarding as found in Title 49, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 397.
These requirements include volunteers and temporary renters of such vehicles who are driving commercial motor vehicles on University business.
Uhaul intentionally goes right below the cutoff. Their largest truck is 26’:
https://www.uhaul.com/Truck-Rentals/26ft-Moving-Truck/
Which has a GVWR of 25,999lbs. Very precise of them and totally real.
I appreciate the correction
I did not know that, but it unfortunately makes sense. You should always be absolutely terrified for your life when you see a uhaul for a reason.
God, it truly is “for non-commercial use only”. I hear a chorus of sovcits cheering.
There are already road signs that limit vehicle weight or restrictions for these vehicles anyway.
In an even better world, policies wouldn’t be manipulative shitstains aimed at consumers and instead be regulation on those actually creating the thing that needs to change…
Vehicles that weigh more than 4 tons make up a significant amount of road traffic right now.
Literally everything you purchase in a store, your food, your toiletries, your clothes, any consumer good you have every purchased traveled on a road at some point in a vehicle that far exceeds 8 tons. Ambulances weigh more than 8 tons, fire trucks weigh more than 8 tons, mail is transported in vehicles that weigh more than 8 tons.
7,000lbs is an extremely low failure point for a guard rail given the number of vehicles that exceed that weight on the road today.It failing against a semi or a firetruck is kind of understandable but…yeah. Ambulances and then the ‘smaller’ every day vehicles? this shit is unacceptable
Require a CDL for the big vehicles. Maintain stringent requirements for the CDL.
Do you still want that electric Ram?
A good chunk of what’s mentioned in GP already requires a CDL. That’s not the issue.
I keep seeing “CDL” brought up as a magic solution, and it’s clear people haven’t looked into how it works and what it affects.
Commercial driver’s license? I AM TRAVELLING AND NOT ENGAGED IN COMMERCE
Oh, that brings back some memories of Reddit
I DEMAND TO BE ABLE TO DRIVE MY 18 WHEELER WHEREVER I PLEASE, HEIGHT CLEARANCES ARE A DEEP STATE PLOT TO TAKE AWAY MY FREEDUMB
11’8" bridge cares not for your “freedoms”
Eh, non-issue. Just slap a surgeon general warning that the car will go through guardrails if it is over 5k lbs. And put a big roadway improvement tax on pointless large SUVs, minivans, and massive trucks, which nobody actually needs. We’ve had smaller variants of vehicles for decades. Even kei vans can hold many grown ass adult men.
All this aside, we have ultra heavy truckers whose trucks already would and do go through guardrails. We should be de-emphasizing car and highway investment anyways, putting more funding towards rapid mass transit and rezoning metro areas to be walkable. Fuck $30 / hr street parking.
Maybe car sales taxes should scale by vehicle weight.
If you consume more of the road, you pay more
In the Netherlands you pay a road tax every 3 months. The amount is based on weight (because a heavier car does more damage to a road) but also on eco label. So an electric car that has the best eco label can have less tax than an old (but much lighter) diesel car.
Should the same approach be taken for the obese?
If they weigh enough to change a car’s impact on the road then…maybe?
yes
Why is your font so tiny?
i dont know
help
Ey tried to write it with ^ on both sides to indicate agreement to a comment right upwards, like this: ^yes^
But an unescaped circumflex makes the following upper script, so ^yes^ becomes yes
nice
ⁿᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒ
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An extra 30-60 lbs is only like +1% to the weight of the whole vehicle though. You could get a larger swing by just filling up the tank in a gas/diesel car.
I’m not sure that person meant that the obese should be made to pay more in automobile taxes specifically, but rather in health insurance premiums, or some other kind of
fatexcise tax.I’m of the opinion that, assuming that a licensed medical provider has performed an appropriate evaluation that excludes the diagnosis of an underlying metabolic disorder that specifically causes one to be obese, there should be remuneration made to the health system for the consequences rendered by their behavioral decisions.
Theres already precedent for this with tobacco use.
I do agree with the spirit behind that on some level, but it seems impossible in practice. Obesity, specifically the modern “obesity epidemic” is a complex systemic issue that involves government as well as industry.
They fundamentally do through taxes on emissions and fuel efficiency, plus fuel consumption taxes.
It’s just written as explicitly as it being a weight tax
they do. or more appropriately the registration fees.
well it’s a good thing the heavy as fuck electric vehicles are not flying off the lots because most of us couldn’t afford one even if we wanted to.
Anyone can afford electric cars. If my son has one then anyone can. It even fits in a room and plays songs using the colorful buttons it has
It’s not like heavy work trucks didn’t exist back then, was it just that there weren’t enough of them to care?
NGL - my last car was pretty big, but Google assures me it was only 4,100 lbs. My current car is the same size and is just under 5,000 pounds.
If you mean pickup trucks they have massively increased in size and weight.
If you mean tractor trailers there’s little stopping that.
I mean, my grand dad’s GMC from the 70s wasn’t SIGNIFICANTLY different from your F-150s today.
This looks about right… bench seats, no seatbelts, ashtray… yee haw!
https://www.streetsideclassics.com/vehicles/7277-cha/1972-gmc-c1500-sierra-super-custom
Have you seen the size of F150s today?
209-244″ L x 80-87″ W x 75-80″ H
Compared with the '72 GMC
207.75" L x 79" W x 70" H?
2-3 feet longer, 8" wider (the hardest one to change and they still did it), and nearly a foot taller. Thank you for proving my point. We can also add hood height has gone up.
Yeah, it’s about reducing fatalities by engineering to the average, not engineering to the worst case.
Hmm, these huge trucks are killing pedestrians, causing worse crashes due to crash incompatibility, destroying the climate, and now smashing through guard rails and flying off cliffs. We’d better change our entire country’s infrastructure to accommodate them.
Isn’t this just the road trying to solve the problem for us? I say we should have more ditches and guardrail barriers!
It’s the good Christian thing to do
Amen
Lol you apparently didn’t read the article… it’s calling out EVs because they’re usually heavier than the ICE counterparts. Small sedans are pushing 5k pounds now being EVs. Batteries are very very heavy.
It doesn’t help that the first EVs most manufacturers are focusing on are their large SUVs and trucks. The Chevy Bolt and Tesla Model 3 both certainly aren’t small cars in a general sense, but in the land of EVs they are. Both weigh under 4000 pounds which is less than the best selling vehicle in North America, the F150.
Totally agree, but to act like it’s only trucks pushing this weight is silly. The electric leaf is nearly 5k lbs and it’s a very small EV.
There’s a big difference between pushing the limit and significantly exceeding the limit though.
One gets you across the bridge. One gets you a nice dip in the river.
The 2024 leaf is 3509lbs according to the Nissan USA website.
3500-3900 depends on what you get for options. Add in people and their shit and you’re pushing 5k (curb weight is 4,900bs)
You keep misusing the term curb weight.
From teh googs: Curb weight is the weight of the vehicle including a full tank of fuel and all standard equipment. It does not include the weight of any passengers, cargo, or optional equipment.
If that’s the fact then it absolutely is 4k+
It’s worth highlighting that this study isn’t really about the merits of EVs. After all, you can buy an EV that weighs less than 5,000 pounds. You just can’t electrify your favorite already-large car—or even buy a hulking gas-powered car—and expect guardrails to work as intended. “Weight is a universal problem; it is not unique to electric vehicles,” Stolle said. “We have similar concerns about the compatibility of the biggest gas-powered cars with our guardrail system.” The 6,700-pound Chevrolet Silverado 1500 already weighs too much, based on the result from this research, and the 8,500-pound Silverado EV weighs even more.
Yes but you called out trucks like they’re the only issue. An electric leaf is almost 5k pounds…a leaf…
A leaf is 3500-3900 lbs, not almost 5k lbs
Well if you
squint at thatround to the nearest 5k ¯\_( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯Curb weight on them is 4,900, yes it’s not 5k that’s why I said nearly 5k…and the point I am making is that a tiny car like that weighing that much shows that batteries are not light.
You added an extra 1000 lbs to the heaviest version, then rounded up. The whole entire point of standard weights is so numbskulls don’t just make up numbers for how much things weigh, like you are. The leaf is 350-3900 lbs, not 4900 lbs, not 5000 lbs. Please go back to elementary school.
https://www.autoblog.com/buy/2022-Nissan-LEAF-S__4dr_Hatchback/specs/
Should have clarified that I meant gross weight.
I’m not the other guy.
new vehicle weight tax to fund the new guardrails
The current version of MGS was developed to withstand cars weighing a maximum of 5,000 pounds, but many of today’s SUVs and trucks exceed that threshold.
MGS being what I’ve known as W beam guardrail.
Fun fact: In Spanish it’s called ‘quitamiedos’, which literally means ‘fear remover’. It’s not supposed to stop you, just let you drive closer to the edge :)
Velomobiles weight 35kg (77 pounds) and offer very good protection compared to normal bicycles. Theoretically you could design single seat cars not much heavier. Of course for higher speeds you’d want more protection and a little bit wider.
I imagine the ideal self driving car or robo-taxi to be two seats that face each other, so when you get one alone you have plenty of space to stretch your feet or put your groceries. It could be totally luxurious, simple to call and use and fast too. And the embodied energy would be very small and the “mpg” would be insane.
It’s just sad how badly we are tackling climate change by just letting the free market run wild.
I wouldn’t say that it’s a free market when there are so many mega corporations and their lobbies in government, but I agree with the rest
Yeah. For example everyone thinks patents are great because they reward the little inventor for having the great idea. But they become commodities that can be acquired with capital and create hindrances to the free market. Effectively they protect large capital investments to prevent disruptions to change the market too quickly. Anything new takes 20 years at least to be fully utilized.
With climate change that basically means every single improvement to turn our thousands of industrial process towards sustainability or circular economy is being min-maxed for profit.
There is no “free market”. It’s only an ideology, one that is actively being used to justify creating the conditions of megacorps and legal brides.
I’d be afraid of a world where brides were illegal.
(Just a joke mate, reread the end of your comment - you clearly meant bribes, but wrote brides.)
Guardrails, much like the crumple zones of cars, are designed to give way to dissipate energy. This is a safety feature which saves lives. There isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all-traffic guardrail. It’s about statistically improving outcomes, but unfortunately they aren’t going to help in all cases. Maybe they need to be updated, but it’s going to take time to adjust to changing average vehicle weights.
For the trucks and land boats that weight more. Lol, that’s is all.
The article literally says that the problem will just get worse as we move to electric cars since they’re heavier.
I dislike people having useless pickup trucks as much as the next guy, but I don’t think they deserve to die either. Or how about semi drivers? You know, a crucial part of our delivery infrastructure?
Maybe take the time to read next time and think with the smart part of your brain.
Yes, have you looked at the weights of actual electric cars and not electric SUV and trucks? The average weight of a electric car is between 3-6k in weight. Secondly, where was the outrage when people were complaining about semis and safety? NHTSA has been at the mercy of the semi industry regarding safety updates. How long have people been fighting regarding undercarriage protectors to protect car drivers from losing their lives to the semi industry? Where has the outage been about the weight protection of those guardrails for semis? I didn’t know semis are so new to this country.
Again, SUVs and trucks drivers that just drive those for status… Boofuckinhoo.
Here a link for your average weight for electric cars.
Even a Tesla weighs less than the max weight allowed for the rails. But I guess my brain is useless.
Edit: a whole documentary for you about the undercarriage guards link.
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If the average of an electric car is 3-6k that means that is it sometimes above the 5,000 limit, am I wrong?
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You just did a whataboutism with this undercarriage thing which is irrelevant
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Yes, let’s send the pickup truck drivers to their death and do a fake sob about it, yeah? You feel good about that?
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Electric cars are not going to stay that heavy. There are plenty of battery advancements in the pipe to bring that down. There also isn’t much reason to push range much over 400mi, and even that’s probably unnecessary.
They should regulate the weight of cars. There’s no reason passenger vehicles should be as heavy as they are. For EVs they honestly shouldn’t have as much range as they do. 150 miles and improved charging infrastructure, make charging easier for folks who park on the street, is a better way to go. Folks who need to drive more than that a day should have a hybrid or ICE vehicle. Ideally a small fuel efficient one. Folks who need pickups for work should be able to buy the small European versions or work vans.
150miles is no where close to enough range for people who travel regularly. In a 3 hour trip I can do 150 miles. Depending on weather, battery degrading, and elevation that trip now requires charging multiple times which just isn’t acceptable. Let alone if you were trying to do a real road trip where you drive 1000+ miles, the amount of charge time is insane. And I want an EV for those road trips, extremely convenient for car camping.
250mi is around the right target. This pops out when you do some math on reasonable travel distances, battery charge times, and padding for cold weather.
You don’t want to use the first 20% or the last 20% of the battery, so you get down to 60% right there. This improves battery lifetime and also charges faster.
Lop off another 20% for cold weather.
That brings us to 120mi between stops, which is about 2 hours of highway driving between charges. You should be able to charge that in about 20 minutes, which is about right for using the bathroom, stretching your legs, and getting something to eat. If you want to go three hours, then 375mi is the right maximum.
None of this requires changes in battery tech or charging speed.
In short, there’s not much need for cars over 400mi range. Use any further advancement in battery tech for chopping off weight, not making them go further.
Not to mention you need to account for battery degradation over time. A 10 year old EV isn’t going to maintain the same discharge rate as a brand new EV of the same model and spec.
So far not much deg on any temperature controlled pack. More like 20+ years of good use.
The old Leafs degraded, but they weren’t controlled.
It is my understanding that you don’t fully charge your EV battery typically either. You charge it to 80% of it’s capacity and that is your “100% charged” state, for battery longevity. So you are down to %40 of your theoretical range before cold weather and the batteries wearing out over time anyhow.
Right, that’s accounted for above.
Gotcha, I misunderstood that part I guess!
Folks who need a pickup truck for work should be required to file a permit request for pirchase of said truck.
Written by someone who owns a truck
Trucks haven’t always been the fucking obnoxious beasts that they are now.
I’d love a truck… The size of a '93 ford ranger. I don’t need or want a goddamn castle on wheels. I want a low vehicle, doesn’t need two full rows of luxurious seats, with a box, with a footprint SMALLER than a fucking Nissan Altima. Yes, that is the '93 ford ranger.
The crime was artificially creating the false dichotomy.
93 97 Ranger Splash with the side steps in yellow was my childhood dream to own. I have no problems with 1/4 ton trucks specially that size, but there is honestly no need for a 1/2 ton or larger truck, specially as big as they have them now.
Edit: there was no yellow ranger in '93
I don’t know if I have an explicit issue with larger trucks for merely existing, and I don’t mean to be the judge and jury for who does and doesn’t need what amount of towing power for whatever they might need them for.
They’re just obscene as a daily driver, though. Two luxurious rows of seats, massive box, giant towing capacity. Pick TWO.
If consumers had a viable option where they could get any 2 without needing all 3, I think they’d take it. Lack of diversity where automakers try and find manufacturing efficiency by limiting offerings such that trucks are everything for everyone is why they’re designed for excess.
“Designed for excess” is the American way.
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Yeah, I love my truck but i don’t need it and it is selfish for me to keep using it imo.
I am hoping to get away with not having a car when it eventually dies but I’ll be buying an EV or a Hybrid sedan if I really need a car then.I regularly haul 800 lbs of wood heating pellets in the back of my Subaru Baja. That’ll get me through somewhere between a week and half to almost three weeks of heating, depending on how cold the weather is. Wash, rinse, repeat all winter long.
Then there’s DYI work I’m doing on the house. I usually use my girlfriend’s Tacoma for that. Plywood, lumber, gravel, and cement mix. All of it needs to be hauled, and delivery is prohibitively expensive.
None of that is required for my desk job work.
I could give up hauling the 19’ sailboat, if need be, since that’s a luxury. It’ll make me an angry man come summer, though.
What’s your plan on addressing my needs, or are you happy to let me hang?
The plan is file for a permit.
If you get denied there’s pickup trucks at the Uhaul store.
So you have no plan to differentiate on who gets a permit, and who doesn’t? That leads to one of three situations:
- Nobody gets a permit.
- Everyone gets a permit.
- Nobody gets a permit, except the friends and family of whoever’s in charge of handing out permits.
Good luck with that.
I’m not the guy who made the original comment but my plan would be, show me your business license. And as I said before anyone in need of hauling without a business can go down to Uhaul. As far as towing goes, that’s an engine/torque/frame issue. It doesn’t need to be a huge vehicle. There are minivans and crossovers with a 7,500 lb towing capacity.
To add, if you’re setup for towing then you can just use a trailer.
Brakes. You left out the important bit. My Baja will tow a lot more than it’ll stop.
Your plan would have me up the creek without a truck, especially if the Baja gets lumped into the truck category on account of it having a bed. Judging from the blank “apply for a permit” plan, it probably would.
I’ve gone down that “Just rent a truck from UHaul.” It stops being realistic when the local UHaul lot can’t handle current demand, much less whatever happens after y’all have taken trucks out of everyone else’s hands.
Take away my ability to keep my house heated, much less in good repair, and you’ll take away my ability to house myself, my family, my pets. They’re everything to me. Take everything away from a man, and see what happens. Then multiply that by every upstate, rural, blue collar man trying to get by… And see what happens to society. It ain’t gonna be pretty.
Your truck is not “everything”. You could easily haul that stuff with a trailer. And yes in a vehicle with competent brakes for it’s rated towing capacity. It’s not the government’s fault if you’re towing over capacity.
Also I highly doubt your home needs weekly DIY trips for years on end to remain functional. In fact, if that’s true you may want to look at hiring a general contractor instead of doing diy.
Edit to add - as an example a Subaru outback with trailer would work just as well as your truck depending on how heavy your boat and trailer are. But also there’s no reason a towing vehicle needs to be that large. Once the size is restricted you’ll be able to get 5,000 lb towing in cars, as it’s already a thing in Europe.
Are you intentionally defending lifted trucks that never hop a curb, or is that just an accidental consequence of your flex?
Neither. Not flexing, either. Hell, if I was, I wouldn’t be driving around a Baja. That model is the red-headed bastard child of the automotive world, catching grief from everyone.
Nah… just simple statements: I need to be able to get shit done outside of work, as reliably and inexpensively as I can. Find a way to sort out those folk who glam up their mall crawlers for whatever prestige is running through their empty heads and inflated egos, without hindering my ability to do what I need to do, and you’ll have the support of me and folk like me.
This.
Basically, if you need a half or full ton truck for work? Cool, ask for the permit. Oh, is it just to drive to your office desk job? Get a smaller vehicle or ride the bus
How is that permit process going to allow me a permit to get the stuff done that I need to do, while weeding out all the folk driving around pavement princesses?
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I can think of no better way to kill EV adoption than to intentionally make their usage less appealing than the alternative.
250mi is a good number. Enough to do a lot of errands and medium trips in a day and charge overnight.
Bolt EV/EUV has that and it’s a compact.
Better to charge higher registration fees by weight.
Our Bolt EUV only gets around 140 for a standard charge. It’s enough for our usual daily use cases, but there have been several nail biters when we started on a half charge because we forgot to charge over night.
That’s whack. A 2023 euv I use gets 240?mi in the summer and maybe 190? in the winter. Both from 80% charge.
The whole highway infrastructure tax structure will need revision as electric vehicles not paying gas taxes become more popular. Or we could just built more public transportation.
The current version of MGS was developed to withstand cars weighing a maximum of 5,000 pounds
Seems like yet another case of a flawed study or a flawed article based on a misunderstanding of the study.
Statements like the quote above make no sense as “withstanding a 5,000lb vehicle” makes no sense. A 5k lb vehicle traveling at 70MPH is carrying several orders of magnitude more energy than a 5k lb vehicle traveling at 5MPH. Likewise a direct, perpendicular hit will impart more energy than a glancing parallel blow, so what are they really rated for?
In any case, these guardrails are used in places where 100k lb semis are traveling at highway speeds, and there have never been any other doom and gloom articles written about that. I don’t think we need to completely rebuild our highway system simply because heavier cars exist.
And they’re not meant to stop cars but rather redirect them
Maybe heavier cars and vehicles should have a lower speed limit then.
Maybe we should make car accidents a felony crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
That could have an adverse effect. There are processes in place for this.
The transportation administration in your area determines speed limits using several factors. Before I moved, the city I was in adjusted speed limits for several roads over a year long period. They reduced crashes by raising the limit on a handful of roads. They needed less policing for enforcement and traffic flow improved. After the study was completed, it stayed. Another example is a road they lowered the speed limit on resulted in higher crashes. So they put it back to what it was originally. And interestingly, in a construction zone where they had to lower the speed limit for the crew, they found that the lower speed limit overall, even when the crew went home, resulted in reduced crashes. For that area they just decided to keep that limit after construction was complete.
It would be 5k lb at high speed. I would say higher than the speed limit just to be safe. There would also be specs for height, etc.
That’s at least 500 stone.
Or like 1500 bricks.
Over $8800
