I’ll get hammered for this, but why do people own cars like that, why on earth would people need a F350 super duty ? What practical purpose would it serve ?
The climate is breaking down and people are cruising around in trucks like that? I don’t know…
Acual farm usage. off-road moving of landscaping materials and tools. pulling horse or sheep or pig trailers. or boats. there are actual legitimate reasons to own such a beast but of course not everyone that owns it uses it for that purpose so accusations that the user "doesn't really need one" are rife. but that's capitalism for ya.
I grew up in a pretty rural part of the US and while those use cases were absolutely common for a decent percentage of large truck owners, they only used them for those purposes about 5-10% of the time. The more reasonable folks had a small simple car for their daily driver, and weren't worried about using their big truck as a status symbol.
>they only used them for those purposes about 5-10% of the time.
"5-10%" works out to once every 1-2 weeks. That seems like a pretty good reason to have such a truck, considering that if you actually needed it it would be a huge hassle to rent one. I haven't done the math on this, but I imagine that if you used it even once every 3-4 weeks you'd come out ahead on time/money.
How much ass does the second row of your average sedan see? I'd be surprised if it's even 5-10% of trips.
Never-mind that if they were using the vehicle (sedan, pickup or otherwise) right up to the limit of it's capacity the majority of the time many here would be hand wringing about how they really should be using something with more spare capacity. This is fundamentally a societal expectations problem. People expect you to have more vehicle than you need. If you are maxing out what you have regularly you are "doing it wrong".
There's a certain logic for that but buying a luxury truck means you're paying a LOT more — like enough to buy one or even two additional new cars for every trip you don't need a truck for — and you're paying for a bunch of expensive stuff which is less durable for the times when you do need to use it as a work truck.
If I'm moving, I can rent a truck from Home Depot which has a considerably larger bed for well under one percent of the extra cost of buying a super-sized truck. If I move less frequently than every day for a year, I'm still ahead by tens of thousands of dollars even before you consider how much extra I'd be paying to burn more fuel, which costs more per gallon, for every trip where I'm not doing something which needs that much towing capacity. You can pay a moving company to move your stuff multiple times a year, save tens of thousands of dollars, and not even have to pack your stuff.
>If I'm moving, I can rent a truck from Home Depot which has a considerably larger bed for well under one percent of the extra cost of buying a super-sized truck
This is definitely true, but as a former truck owner, I can tell you that's not how it works at all.
"Hey, man, I really need some help moving, can you bring your truck over, I'll have pizza and beer!"
Not to mention the rent-a-truck is pretty new. Yes, UHaul and the others exist, but they don't compete with "oh yeah, I know a guy with a truck."
Oh, I’m not saying it doesn’t happen but the people I knew with these luxury trucks didn’t want to get them scuffed up. The old pickup I used to have was perfect for that but it was like half the weight, too, so I’d use that as an argument that most people are fine with what used to be normal sized trucks.
The problem with the pizza and beer approach is that it only works for short moves - if you have anything like a substantial drive it’s a lot easier to rent a U-Haul so you can make one trip rather than multiplying time in traffic by half a dozen trips.
Right now there aren't great alternatives, but I'd stress that the full ownership model of a $100k+ fuel-gulping mini-monster-truck that has specific beast-of-burden uses like this is in 95% of cases nonsense. If these owners really make use of these vehicles to any extent >12 times a year, I tend to believe they are far above average users.
Ideally there'd be better systems for outright collective ownership, that would make sense & have some safeguards against potentially less than good co-owners. Alas most collective ownership propositions come with a tragedy of the commons, an inability to assess who are the good & bad players & ways for the good to hold.
I agree, my wife and I are one of these super users. We ironically have a diesel f250, we live in San Francisco and I bike or take public transportation for nearly all my day to day travel needs, as well as my commute to work. As soon as we find an electric or alternative fuel truck that meets our needs (tow ~10k lbs ~400 miles in a day) we will switch to it.
We drove around a number of rural areas over the summer and the distinction was striking: the $80k vanity trucks were in the rich suburbs where rancher cosplay is popular, and you never saw one with more cargo than a Honda Fit could handle. Out in WV, western MD or PA we saw noticeably more small efficient cars, vans, and work trucks which were clearly treated like cattle & used until they couldn’t do the job.
Doesn't track with my experience. In California, Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, New mexico and of course Texas big 3 full size trucks are what gets it done for folks.
>why do people own cars like that, why on earth would people need a F350 super duty ? What practical purpose would it serve ?
Same practical purpose as all the 4Runners that HNers with 2-kid households own, fulfilling societal expectations for amount of excess vehicle that is required at that point on the socio-economic ladder.
Humans sure are judgemental creatures. Especially from the safety of their keyboard, where they are not subject to anyone else checking them for hypocrisy. Perhaps we could be a little more realistic and assume that the majority of people just buy what they need.
> I’ll get hammered for this, but why do people own cars like that, why on earth would people need a F350 super duty ? What practical purpose would it serve ?
The only reason you'd get hammered for that question is the implicit assumption that nobody who owns an HD truck needs it.
You might see me drive to the store once in a while in my F250. So you'd probably wonder why I needed such a massive gas guzzling grocery getter? Well, because that day my wife took the Bolt and I had no other option. People fall for this fallacy all the time, assuming that if you see someone underutilizing their truck, they must always be underutilizing it.
But I only drive mine a thousand miles a year, and except for rare occasions only when a travel tailer is attached behind it. The rest of the time we drive my wife's Bolt, and I'll wager that my average fuel consumption is lower than most people who only have an economy car.
Trucks do have a use sometimes, and some people keep a truck on standby while using a more efficient car most of the time.
With that set up a situation can arise where the one efficient car is in use while the other driver needs to be somewhere. It is completely irrational to expect them to maintain a 3rd vehicle for this rare case.
Money is a surprisingly good proxy for energy and carbon impact. If it's cheaper to buy than rent, then it probably uses less energy too.
When you rent a car, it has to sit in the rental car parking lot. They have to build the facility. An employee has to drive there to do all your paperwork and rent it to you. The rental gets fully cleaned and inspected after a day of use by another set of employees. They all have to eat to work and a lot of energy is used to produce that food. All of this and more is encapsulated in the price.
Renting isn't even feasible. I couldn't even begin to tell you where I'd rent a pickup that would work for this. Supposing I found one, I'd have to make all the arrangements to retrieve it, then spend a few hours setting up the towing equipment for it, and then make all the arrangements to send it back.
LOL, no. It can sit in my garage getting used every couple weeks for the next 10 years. That's what I do with trucks. They are utility vehicles.
Smaller than a Bolt? The HD truck is my tow pig. And please don't suggest renting one as an alternative, that is a non-starter. I'll just assume you're unfamiliar with the mechanics of towing an RV.
Europeans tow some surprisingly large trailers behind small, underpowered cars. I've seen an older BMW 3-series sedan towing a loaded double horse trailer in rural Germany. They manage this by keeping the tongue weight low to work within the limits of weak rear suspensions, which of course causes trailer sway and some really impressive crashes when things go wrong. And you'll be cursing if you get stuck behind one on a mountain road. So obviously the European approach to towing is not super smart, but when people can't obtain proper tow vehicles then they tend to make do with whatever is available.
At least in Germany, cars are rated for a maximum towing capacity. BMW X3 is a small SUV and I think it is rated for 750 kg unbraked and 2,400 kg braked (up to 12% slope) total trailer weight. A loaded braked double horse trailer is probably within these limits, so it is not underpowered. Obviously underpowered towing vehicles may be pulled out by the police for safety reasons.
F350 are rare in Europe, which does not mean that they (or similar vehicles) are not available, but they are also not as practical to use as in the US.
> BMW X3 is a small SUV and I think it is rated for 750 kg unbraked and 2,400 kg braked (up to 12% slope) total trailer weight
Good context here!
Our truck has a listed towing capacity of 12,500# - 5,670 kg.
My dad and I are driving ~90mi tomorrow each way to pick up an inline bale trailer he just bought. We checked hay prices in that area, and they're cheaper than what we can buy locally - enough cheaper that we bought eight bales to bring back with us. Each bale is ~1,200# (+/- ~200#), for a combined load weight of 9,600#. The trailer weighs 2,700#, so we'll be towing ~12,300#. The truck itself is another ~7,000#, and by the time you figure in fuel and occupants, we'll have a GCWR of right at 20,000#.
In short, tomorrow I'll be driving that truck and responsible for TEN TONS going down the road.
The BMW X3 would have to make four trips hauling two bales each: 2,400 kg = 5,290#; the trailer weighs 2,700#, two bales weigh 2,400#, leaving only 190# of excess capacity. Even then, there's no way I'd be comfortable driving an X3 with that much weigh, that distance - and that's not even considering that the trailer is a gooseneck.
I think of the truck as ~1/4 of a semi tractor. We can haul most things ourselves, more cheaply and with less environmental impact than hiring a professional hauler.
Ah, a city dweller. Let me put it this way: in the part of the country where your food comes from, walking to the store would take hours one way along two lane roads with no sidewalks.
It’s a farm truck, mostly. A truck of that size is absolutely necessary when you’re hauling a flatbed trailer full of hay or livestock.
Because we’re able to afford multiple vehicles, it spends most of its life sitting in my parents’ driveway. They drive it once a month or so to avoid the issues that come with a vehicle not being used at all, but otherwise it makes little sense to drive it when both I and my parents have more efficient vehicle for day-to-day stuff.
Honestly, I understand what you’re getting at, but it’s a matter of perspective. Both I and my dad keep a current Class A CDL so we can drive that truck with a loaded trailer. When we need it, the alternative is hiring a semi - and it’s significantly both less expensive and less polluting per mile than a semi tractor.
How exactly should they be paying for the increased risk to peoples safety and the extra air pollution they create. Should we be calculating the number of years they took off people lives due to the particulate pollution? If they have an accident and kill someone, should that be punished more harshly than regular since they chose to pick a more dangerous form of transport?
> If they have an accident and kill someone, should that be punished more harshly than regular since they chose to pick a more dangerous form of transport?
By this logic, every vehicle would have a different punishment associated with it.
In terms of paying for increased risks to safety, the usual answer is to require drivers to be insured, and higher risk drivers or vehicles will result in higher insurance premiums.
For pollution, I am not aware of anything currently, but it'd be reasonable to treat that similarly (probably as a tax that funds treatment of pollution-caused health issues rather than insurance, since the harms are more distributed).
> If they have an accident and kill someone, should that be punished more harshly than regular since they chose to pick a more dangerous form of transport?
If the vehicle is not street legal, yes. If the vehicle is street legal, and the driver was insured, and otherwise not negligent, then no. Perhaps the vehicle should't be street legal, and in that case the laws should be changed moving forward (but penalties should not be applied retroactively).
Incidentally, in the US, the Department of Transportation seems better than usual for government agencies in actually doing a cost-benefit analysis where they show their work with actual numbers: see https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/2016...
Replying to the other sibling comment here about paying for its cost. Vehicles in the US are taxed mainly by taking the gas that goes into them, the more gas (diesel) they use the more taxes they're paying, so it works out as the commenter hoped, if you have a bigger more thirsty vehicle you pay more taxes to maintain things like roads and infrastructure.
> These kinds of vehicles should be treated like tractors. Very limited road access. You shouldn’t be able to drive to Walmart in one.
Having driven tractors, everything from small Renaults to large JD in tight and some larger trucks on narrow roads in EU/CH, the two aren't Comparable, one actually has utility and is needed in keeping people fed the other is just some eyesore on which to project your insecurities onto ~80% of the time.
These monstrosity should just have immense gas guzzler/taxes attached to them like in Switzerland and the Nordic countries and allow for reductions if its proven to have actual use and isn't just something that gets used to 'go to the walmart' as most are in the US.
Funny enough, gas price alone isn't deterring anyone, Hawaii has always vied with CA in as price and they are everywhere--perhaps just as many as I saw in Texas per capita.
You seem to be confused. A Ford F350 isn't particularly large. It's just a regular pickup truck and will fit into most parking spaces at Walmart. It's quite easy to drive unless you're towing a trailer. Nothing at all like a farm tractor.
I hate to tell you this, but I can and have driven a tractor to Walmart. They’re legal on the road here in most cases - they don’t even require registration, just a red triangle do denote it as a slow-moving vehicle.
Normally when I want to take one of our tractors somewhere… I pull it with the aforementioned truck.
Your replying to someone who is very far removed from the realities of productive life on a large or small farm.
250+ pickup trucks are literally just a (very valuable) tool and people like your parent's commenter think that someone who just dropped off a trailer and goes to Walmart afterwards are worthy of giving shitty looks at.
Every american should drive across the country and look at all the maintained rural land being worked and realize the founding stock of america are yeoman farmers. They may be busy and their voice actively suppressed but go ahead and start legislating what they can and can't do with their necessary tools and see what happens.
A PHEV would be a godsend to work trucks. All electric puttering around the worksite, great torque from the electric motors, but long distance range-extends with a high efficiency gas engine.
This should have been widespread 15 years ago (which would have been 10 years after the introduction of the Prius).
But lets not pretend there aren't millions of trucks driven by suburbanites mesmerized by big RAM huge grill you aren't a pussy if you drive a truck advertising.
It's no different than a Range Rover, a Bentley, a Ferrari, heck even. M3. MY f250 diesel gets better milage than my neighbors M3, and it saves the climate in many ways compared to his M3.
If yoi compare an average M3 owner who Flys for work or vacation every 4 months to me, who has a Diesel f250 that is driven only to tow a travel trailer RV which we use every few months for work/pleasure travel, along with the relative carbon usage for say a hotel and all its laundry vs. staying in my RV I believe it's a wash.
Instead of accelerating a recession, perhaps more resources will be dedicated to biofuels to keep industry and vehicles powered for decades to come.
Many industries are "beyond a crisis", which makes many of the shortfalls in supply/production/service quality, just a lingering fact that was omnipresent prepandemic and even pre-21st century.
I haven't looked into it, but this article states Henry Ford wanted hemp biofuels to run the model-T. The hemp rush would satisfy your high fructose corn syrup desires too.
Biofuels, in their current form, have the nasty "bug" of competing with food commodities in terms of commodity usage (corn for food vs fuel) and planted farm land (grow crop X for food vs crop y for fuel).
I wonder how this will impact the average car size? I would expect to see fewer big pickup trucks being used by people that don't need them in the near future?
Vehicles are bought and sold on longer time horizons than the shortage, diesel pickups were always somewhat of a rounding error and they kinda fell out of fashion hard about 5yr ago when emissions components got bad/numerous enough that the TCO didn't pencil out vs gas trucks. The OEMs saw this (the emissions driven increased TCO of diesel, not the shortage) coming ~10yr ago rolled out a new generation of gas engines for pickups, vas and MDTs which hit market in the last couple years so if anything this will drive a faster transition back to gasoline engines in those applications.
Given how polluting diesel is, this could be a good thing long term. So much of our commercial transportation is dependent on it though, so this is a major pain point short term.
Diesel is more efficient than gas as far as MPG, so CO2 is actually less per mile, NOx and particulates should be equivalent on a modern diesel with DPF and DEF SCR.
Doesn't pass the smell test - I can smell diesel exhaust from at least 100 feet away (maybe 10x as pungent as non-diesel), has to be something I'm smelling
If i let an egg rot in your yard you'll smell it too, doesn't mean it has a meaningful contribution to nox, particulate, or carbon emissions. Things can be smelly without being bad emissions-wise.
Is it a modern diesel with DPF and SCR? The smell from the exhaust of my 2021 6.7 liter cummins diesel motorhome is actually almost undetectable to me while my 2016 V10 gas motorhome had a very noticeable smell.
>NOx and particulates should be equivalent on a modern diesel with DPF and DEF SCR.
Is it? I thought the whole deal with dieselgate was that they couldn't get it to be more efficient and comply with emissions regulations, so they ended up cheating.
Dieselgate was trying to avoid using DEF claiming you could get compliant NOx output without it [1]. You can if you reduce power and efficiency during the test cycle, if you want good power and efficiency while having compliant NOx output you need DEF on a diesel engine and it works very well but does increase complexity and cost.
it'll be interesting to see the short-term market shortages caused by it.
I have a few acquaintances that are ripping diesel motors out of their boats due to the cost of operation and going electric -- problem is that many of the motor controllers used are back ordered due to the supply issues that are all over the transistor/electronics markets already that haven't been remediated.
well, at least battery prices are dropping with the market volumes.
As a scuba diver I would love to see dive boats switch from diesel to electric motors. Obviously that wouldn't work for large live-aboard boats that go out for multiple days. But it could be practical for smaller boats that run day trips. Most of them make fairly short transits out to dive sites and then sit at anchor (or drift with the current) while divers are in the water. Divers tend to be ecologically conscious so this would be a good marketing point. And besides the environmental benefits, I hate inhaling a lung full of diesel exhaust when I climb back onto the boat.
Of course there are practical obstacles in terms of safety and charging with high-voltage electrical systems and battery charging in a marine environment. Everything is constantly corroding.
It's more than transportation. "Heating oil" is basically diesel and is affected by these prices. Winter is about to hit the Northeast and many people still heat with it. To fill up my tank today would be around $1200 and I will be expecting to refill it every 40-60 days for the next six months.
I assume these are places with no natural gas infrastructure? I finally convinced my mom to convert from oil to gas, even though she has a somewhat irrational fear of gas, based just on the cost. She'll break even on the cost of the new furnace within a couple years. The cost difference between the fuels is significant.
Yep. In New England [1] roughly 2,000,000 households heat via "heating oil" or kerosene (which is more expensive). There are slightly more folks that heat with natural gas, but this is a rural vs suburban divide and New England is quite rural overall.
Heat pumps are in vogue now but usually they are supplemented with fireplaces, wood stoves or pellet stoves.
I've lived in South Texas my entire life, so my winter experience is pretty limited (though I got quite the crash course in February 2021 along with most of the state), but I see lots of talk about modern heating systems the world over preparing for the coming winter in a time of energy shortage, and I just think about how these places have been inhabited since before industrialization and I wonder how?
I suppose the question that I have is what has modernity done to us? Are people just used to a comfort standard that is getting less achievable (I'd be pretty miserable in summer without HVAC myself), or is this a life and death issue that people are no longer able live in warm enough shelter to survive?
Amazon ships all their goods on trains and big rigs both of which use diesel. Will the cost of items on Amazon go up? Or maybe just availability goes down once the edge distribution centers are depleted?
If we stop externaizing the environmental cost of cheap fuel we’ll pay a lot more for food, especially meat and shipped things. Good. We should eat less in general, less meat in particular. Buy less artificially cheap shit, ship things less casually. If it costs three times more to ship something, local production suddenly becomes more appealing (which is good in a handful of ways).
Propping up artificially cheap fuel prices, hides the true cost of things and messes up our decision making.
I argue our stability, happiness and well-being would be improved by drastically higher diesel prices. Bring it.
Tractor/trailers, locomotives, heavy construction equipment, ships, and boilers for residential heat don’t run on gasoline. Without diesel, the economy stops.
Locomotives than run on diesel have diesel-electric transmissions - basically the diesel engine acts as a generator, with electricity that turns electric motors.
When the UK electrified a lot of its railways in the 1970s, some diesel locomotives were converted so they could run on diesel or electric. If they really wanted, US railroad companies could electrify their tracks in stages, and continue to use their existing rolling stock.
It has been 45 years since a >200,000 barrel per day refinery was built in the US.
1998-2015 saw 0 upgrades to existing capacity or new builds. Since 2015, a handful of <50,000 barrel per day refineries have been built, but every single one is in Texas.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadThe climate is breaking down and people are cruising around in trucks like that? I don’t know…
"5-10%" works out to once every 1-2 weeks. That seems like a pretty good reason to have such a truck, considering that if you actually needed it it would be a huge hassle to rent one. I haven't done the math on this, but I imagine that if you used it even once every 3-4 weeks you'd come out ahead on time/money.
Never-mind that if they were using the vehicle (sedan, pickup or otherwise) right up to the limit of it's capacity the majority of the time many here would be hand wringing about how they really should be using something with more spare capacity. This is fundamentally a societal expectations problem. People expect you to have more vehicle than you need. If you are maxing out what you have regularly you are "doing it wrong".
While true, when you need them, there is no substitute. So the answer is to have two vehicles, which may not be economically viable.
Also, everybody has really strong opinions on the legitimacy of owning a truck until they need help moving.
If I'm moving, I can rent a truck from Home Depot which has a considerably larger bed for well under one percent of the extra cost of buying a super-sized truck. If I move less frequently than every day for a year, I'm still ahead by tens of thousands of dollars even before you consider how much extra I'd be paying to burn more fuel, which costs more per gallon, for every trip where I'm not doing something which needs that much towing capacity. You can pay a moving company to move your stuff multiple times a year, save tens of thousands of dollars, and not even have to pack your stuff.
It’s often difficult to sell a base-model truck, and you won’t get much for it.
Ours is a 2001 F350 Lariat Super Duty. Even at two decades old, we could sell it in hours for $25k+.
This is definitely true, but as a former truck owner, I can tell you that's not how it works at all.
"Hey, man, I really need some help moving, can you bring your truck over, I'll have pizza and beer!"
Not to mention the rent-a-truck is pretty new. Yes, UHaul and the others exist, but they don't compete with "oh yeah, I know a guy with a truck."
The problem with the pizza and beer approach is that it only works for short moves - if you have anything like a substantial drive it’s a lot easier to rent a U-Haul so you can make one trip rather than multiplying time in traffic by half a dozen trips.
Ideally there'd be better systems for outright collective ownership, that would make sense & have some safeguards against potentially less than good co-owners. Alas most collective ownership propositions come with a tragedy of the commons, an inability to assess who are the good & bad players & ways for the good to hold.
Same practical purpose as all the 4Runners that HNers with 2-kid households own, fulfilling societal expectations for amount of excess vehicle that is required at that point on the socio-economic ladder.
The only reason you'd get hammered for that question is the implicit assumption that nobody who owns an HD truck needs it.
You might see me drive to the store once in a while in my F250. So you'd probably wonder why I needed such a massive gas guzzling grocery getter? Well, because that day my wife took the Bolt and I had no other option. People fall for this fallacy all the time, assuming that if you see someone underutilizing their truck, they must always be underutilizing it.
But I only drive mine a thousand miles a year, and except for rare occasions only when a travel tailer is attached behind it. The rest of the time we drive my wife's Bolt, and I'll wager that my average fuel consumption is lower than most people who only have an economy car.
Buy a smaller car?
Walk?
With that set up a situation can arise where the one efficient car is in use while the other driver needs to be somewhere. It is completely irrational to expect them to maintain a 3rd vehicle for this rare case.
So your solution to the incremental pollution caused by driving “too much vehicle”… is to mine, refine, and manufacture a second vehicle?
Or just walking to get groceries.
When you rent a car, it has to sit in the rental car parking lot. They have to build the facility. An employee has to drive there to do all your paperwork and rent it to you. The rental gets fully cleaned and inspected after a day of use by another set of employees. They all have to eat to work and a lot of energy is used to produce that food. All of this and more is encapsulated in the price.
LOL, no. It can sit in my garage getting used every couple weeks for the next 10 years. That's what I do with trucks. They are utility vehicles.
Smaller than a Bolt? The HD truck is my tow pig. And please don't suggest renting one as an alternative, that is a non-starter. I'll just assume you're unfamiliar with the mechanics of towing an RV.
F350 are rare in Europe, which does not mean that they (or similar vehicles) are not available, but they are also not as practical to use as in the US.
Good context here!
Our truck has a listed towing capacity of 12,500# - 5,670 kg.
My dad and I are driving ~90mi tomorrow each way to pick up an inline bale trailer he just bought. We checked hay prices in that area, and they're cheaper than what we can buy locally - enough cheaper that we bought eight bales to bring back with us. Each bale is ~1,200# (+/- ~200#), for a combined load weight of 9,600#. The trailer weighs 2,700#, so we'll be towing ~12,300#. The truck itself is another ~7,000#, and by the time you figure in fuel and occupants, we'll have a GCWR of right at 20,000#.
In short, tomorrow I'll be driving that truck and responsible for TEN TONS going down the road.
The BMW X3 would have to make four trips hauling two bales each: 2,400 kg = 5,290#; the trailer weighs 2,700#, two bales weigh 2,400#, leaving only 190# of excess capacity. Even then, there's no way I'd be comfortable driving an X3 with that much weigh, that distance - and that's not even considering that the trailer is a gooseneck.
I think of the truck as ~1/4 of a semi tractor. We can haul most things ourselves, more cheaply and with less environmental impact than hiring a professional hauler.
Ah, a city dweller. Let me put it this way: in the part of the country where your food comes from, walking to the store would take hours one way along two lane roads with no sidewalks.
Nope.
I could walk, but that would take a nice chunk of the afternoon for multiple trips.
Because we’re able to afford multiple vehicles, it spends most of its life sitting in my parents’ driveway. They drive it once a month or so to avoid the issues that come with a vehicle not being used at all, but otherwise it makes little sense to drive it when both I and my parents have more efficient vehicle for day-to-day stuff.
Honestly, I understand what you’re getting at, but it’s a matter of perspective. Both I and my dad keep a current Class A CDL so we can drive that truck with a loaded trailer. When we need it, the alternative is hiring a semi - and it’s significantly both less expensive and less polluting per mile than a semi tractor.
If they think it’s somehow less money to buy a $80K truck than to rent a truck once a year, cool.
But to say it should somehow not be allowed on the road is absurd.
By this logic, every vehicle would have a different punishment associated with it.
For pollution, I am not aware of anything currently, but it'd be reasonable to treat that similarly (probably as a tax that funds treatment of pollution-caused health issues rather than insurance, since the harms are more distributed).
> If they have an accident and kill someone, should that be punished more harshly than regular since they chose to pick a more dangerous form of transport?
If the vehicle is not street legal, yes. If the vehicle is street legal, and the driver was insured, and otherwise not negligent, then no. Perhaps the vehicle should't be street legal, and in that case the laws should be changed moving forward (but penalties should not be applied retroactively).
Incidentally, in the US, the Department of Transportation seems better than usual for government agencies in actually doing a cost-benefit analysis where they show their work with actual numbers: see https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/2016...
B) the wear on the road is a fourth order funtion of weight. It would be fantastic if taxes were also proportional.
Having driven tractors, everything from small Renaults to large JD in tight and some larger trucks on narrow roads in EU/CH, the two aren't Comparable, one actually has utility and is needed in keeping people fed the other is just some eyesore on which to project your insecurities onto ~80% of the time.
These monstrosity should just have immense gas guzzler/taxes attached to them like in Switzerland and the Nordic countries and allow for reductions if its proven to have actual use and isn't just something that gets used to 'go to the walmart' as most are in the US.
Funny enough, gas price alone isn't deterring anyone, Hawaii has always vied with CA in as price and they are everywhere--perhaps just as many as I saw in Texas per capita.
Normally when I want to take one of our tractors somewhere… I pull it with the aforementioned truck.
This should have been widespread 15 years ago (which would have been 10 years after the introduction of the Prius).
But lets not pretend there aren't millions of trucks driven by suburbanites mesmerized by big RAM huge grill you aren't a pussy if you drive a truck advertising.
https://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/features/hybrid/
They might have cattle trucks, they might have tractors, but having a "big truck" isn't really required.
If yoi compare an average M3 owner who Flys for work or vacation every 4 months to me, who has a Diesel f250 that is driven only to tow a travel trailer RV which we use every few months for work/pleasure travel, along with the relative carbon usage for say a hotel and all its laundry vs. staying in my RV I believe it's a wash.
Many industries are "beyond a crisis", which makes many of the shortfalls in supply/production/service quality, just a lingering fact that was omnipresent prepandemic and even pre-21st century.
I can agree that diversification is a good thing.
I haven't looked into it, but this article states Henry Ford wanted hemp biofuels to run the model-T. The hemp rush would satisfy your high fructose corn syrup desires too.
https://wayofleaf.com/hemp/hemp-biofuels
The climate and terrain are different everywhere, so these changes may be regional efforts instead of global.
Its not the same old song and dance, whatever it is.
Except that it is... If there's land that you can grow food on, you'll have price competition to grow fuel on it.
Perhaps the diesel is not ULSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-low-sulfur_diesel
Is it? I thought the whole deal with dieselgate was that they couldn't get it to be more efficient and comply with emissions regulations, so they ended up cheating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
I have a few acquaintances that are ripping diesel motors out of their boats due to the cost of operation and going electric -- problem is that many of the motor controllers used are back ordered due to the supply issues that are all over the transistor/electronics markets already that haven't been remediated.
well, at least battery prices are dropping with the market volumes.
Of course there are practical obstacles in terms of safety and charging with high-voltage electrical systems and battery charging in a marine environment. Everything is constantly corroding.
Heat pumps are in vogue now but usually they are supplemented with fireplaces, wood stoves or pellet stoves.
[1] https://www.mass.gov/service-details/how-massachusetts-house...
I suppose the question that I have is what has modernity done to us? Are people just used to a comfort standard that is getting less achievable (I'd be pretty miserable in summer without HVAC myself), or is this a life and death issue that people are no longer able live in warm enough shelter to survive?
Propping up artificially cheap fuel prices, hides the true cost of things and messes up our decision making.
I argue our stability, happiness and well-being would be improved by drastically higher diesel prices. Bring it.
When the UK electrified a lot of its railways in the 1970s, some diesel locomotives were converted so they could run on diesel or electric. If they really wanted, US railroad companies could electrify their tracks in stages, and continue to use their existing rolling stock.
But yes; unfortunately the Germans keep shutting down their nuclear reactors. There's a lot of education that needs to happen.
France on the other hand is almost completely (80% or so?) nuclear and the Swiss have hydro and wind. So there's some wins there.
They elected a gas stooge who sabotaged wind development. Then went even further right wing.
> France on the other hand is almost completely (80% or so?) nuclear
70% and not this year. Over half of it is offline.
They at least had the sense to build about 20% renewables which is working fine.
Currently, electricity generation in the UK is 43% renewable (I'm including hydro and "bio-energy"), 16% nuclear, and 40% fossil fuels.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#E...
We’ve messed ourselves up so hard relying on oil companies the way we do, how’s it’s the peasants that are paying for endless price gouging.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_unc_dcu_nus_m.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
Here’s a map of the places that create diesel from crude oil. Note the north & south east where these shortages are occurring, and limited to.
https://atlas.eia.gov/datasets/6547eda91ef84cc386e23397cf834...
It has been 45 years since a >200,000 barrel per day refinery was built in the US.
1998-2015 saw 0 upgrades to existing capacity or new builds. Since 2015, a handful of <50,000 barrel per day refineries have been built, but every single one is in Texas.
Hopefully that will create some incentives to switch to electrical systems and invest in renewables.