Same thing is happening with electric vehicles. A gigantic EV kills a pedestrian just as dead as a gas powered one. And the huge batteries needed to move a huge EV negate any climate benefit.
The horse has been out of the barn on this one for some time now. Every major manufacturer has been pumping out monster SUV’s for years. Easy to blame the manufacturers but they build what sells for a profit. As soon as people stop buying them they will stop building them. Like with so many of the world’s problems, we are all great at pointing figures but not so great at admitting our own contribution to the problems or at modifying our behaviour in a way that would solve them. Most cars are driven with one person in them most of the time. We “need” at best a two seater but to avoid the inconvenience of finding an alternative the few times most of us require more we convince ourselves we can’t survive like a civilized human being without at least 5 and preferably 7 or 8. Until we are all prepared to take a long hard look in the mirror and admit that the real problem is us change will come slowly and very painfully.
We often put our family of four plus a guest into our little Subaru and even a Toyota Echo. They all seat five and have surprisingly large trunks. When we used to do ski weekends, we put a box on the roof. This is how people did it for generations before pickup trucks and giant SUVs. what did you do when you were a kid?
As an avid commuter on an electric bike, rapidly approaching 15,000 miles, which eliminates burning 240 gallons of gas if you drive a Prius, I fully agree. Car bloat is horrible, and large SUVs and pick-up ( without tools on board) are the worst offenders of bike safety (along with BMW drivers for some reason). The crazy thing is I still feel better arriving at work on a bike despite the safety concerns. It is healthier mentally and physically. Perhaps people would get out of those giant hunks of polluting metal if they could just experience the quieter and more joyful alternative.
I'm going to spitball an idea here: Train your kids to behave themselves in the car, and then you won't need to space them out in multiple rows. This is a reason I hear frequently cited by parent friends who justify their purchases of huge new SUVs. They say their kids fight incessantly while driving, so they "need" the physical separation. I can understand the appeal. There are times when having 3 growing kids across the back row of my Subaru Outback is simply awful. They provoke and poke each other, resulting in chaos. But I also think that buying a massive, expensive, polluting vehicle doesn't truly fix the problem of them not knowing how to behave in a cramped space. It's better just to train them.
I’m not going to offer an opinion on this, but I just want to say how nice it is to see you back in print again, Katherine. I miss your contributions to the >old< Treehugger.
OK, I >am< going to offer an opinion. One cure for EV bloat would be if manufacturers competed on efficiency. “Our car averages 5 miles/kWh.” “Well, ours averages 6!” And so on. Higher efficiency demands lower weight and lower frontal area. “Our car averages 8 miles/kWh” would give pretty good bragging rights.
Thank you, Nicholas! Similar to Lloyd, I've started doing my own thing here on Substack, so please do check out my newsletter! And I published a book this summer, so keeping busy :)
The reason vehicles have gotten bigger and heavier is, true, because the government mandated all these safety measures to protect occupants inside the vehicle. So no, we're not going to have smaller and lighter cars like the classic 1966 VW Beetle shown at the top—that world no longer exists and hasn't for over 50 years.
Strike one.
I find it interesting that there's such a beef about SUV's being "too big and heavy" when *every* EV weighs significantly more than their ICE counterpart. And, all that mass of big heavy batteries causes more wear-and-tear on the roadways—as well as more particulate pollution, because roadway particulate pollution is a function of VEHICLE WEIGHT and driving habits, not what engine is powering the drivetrain.
Strike two.
It's also disingenuous to preoccupy one's self with pedestrian deaths and injuries at the expense of the occupants of the vehicles who are involved in non-pedestrian accidents. According to the IIHS, in 2021 there were a total of 7,388 pedestrian deaths from vehicles, an increase of 13% over 2020. The NHTSA says in 2021 there were a total of 43,939 vehicle fatalities—and that's WITH all those car modifications made over the past 30+ years to improve safety. Should we sacrifice occupant lives by making lighter and less safe vehicles? The same safety measure fatality rate in 2000, extrapolated to today, would necessarily equate to another 3,000 fatalities at a minimum and likely double that if percentage reduction in safety measures equates to an equal increase in occupant fatalities.
Strike three.
What it comes down to is that there are far more distractions available in cars today with the increase in available technology, as well as more aggressive driving tendencies as roadways have become more crowded and collective societal anxiety skyrockets. Retrograding vehicle designs exchanges one problem for another as a zero-sum loss.
One thing said below about me is true, I am anti-car. The embodied energy of a small car is quite high. The embodied energy of a similar sized electric car is even higher. This does not even touch the embodied energy in Ford F150s (one of which passed me illegally on a curve this morning) or the Ford Lightning. All cost the planet to much. We really need a rethink of the entire transportation system, making sure that we minimize embodied energy and negative health impacts. That's why I chose an electric bike, low embodied energy and minimal pollution. Bigger vehicles do not solve anything except changing the scale of the problem, and now the problem is massive, making us dependent on a transportation system that is killing us. How many strikes is that?
An e-bike isn't going to move a four-person family to their vacation spot, the grocery store, a restaurant, church, or family reunion. So you end up with an e-bike (or plural, e-bikes) and a vehicle that can hold and transport all four family members as a single unit. I don't see that as a "rethink of the entire transportation system", I see it as a marketing campaign for e-bike companies.
You know all those e-scooters that were rolled out a few years ago (think: Lime, Razor, Segway, etc.) around the world as a fix for last-mile mobility? So many people were injured, some fatally, and so many scooters maliciously tossed into waterways and the trash that quite a few municipalities have rethought them as a "solution" because submerged batteries become a liability to corrosion risks (plus replacing them is expensive.) Did that revolution result in a "rethink of the entire transportation system"? No.
What, exactly, would replace automotives in your reimagined utopian future? How would people travel? How would we maintain economic growth if transportation is severely restricted? And before you take the time to respond, recognize that no, our financial liabilities aren't just going to disappear—$32 trillion worth of U.S. debt alone needs to be paid off, to say nothing of inevitable future liabilities as the population ages and natural disasters like California's Big One occur. The entire world is integrated, interconnected, and reliant on cheap energy to sustain the world economy. That is the #1 foundational truth that everyone needs to acknowledge before going off about ridding the world of cars.
You are correct, an e-bike, or bikes, is not going to move a family of 4 to a vacation spot. Trains or buses can if the transport system is designed in such a way as to do so. It is not now, it is designed around cars, which are loaded with embodied energy even if not powered by fossil fuels. So to are trains and buses , but far less per passenger vehicle mile than cars. Airplanes might have less embodied and propulsion energy than cars in the future (again per passenger mile) but that future is cloudy since the batteries needed don't exist yet.
My excitement about e-bikes is not that they are the answer to all transport problems, it is because they can replace for for shorter, individual trips or commutes in a healthy and redemptive way. Other options are needed for longer and group trips. We do not have those options as available in the US as there is in Europe, but we could move that way. This is the foundational notion we need to recognize: fossil fuels have got to go, and we have to reduce the total embodied energy of our transportation system rapidly or we lose it all. I could argue with your other points, but that seems futile if we don't agree that our transportation system is flawed and unsustainable as it presently exists. Just because we cannot envision a change in its present reality does not mean that it will continue to work indefinitely.
Energy, especially fossil energy, will not stay cheap. Already its costs are far higher than we actually pay. We do have a huge debt, but our debt to the planet is even greater, and it will pay us back in spades if we do not change. Nature bats last. Continuous growth, as others have said, is cancer. Perhaps (and this is likely anathema to you) we need to degrow (especially in the US) and have a global "jubilee" about debt.
Reality, in your mind, is a continuation of a present that is killing both the planet and us. We can't escape Earth, we are part of it, presently acting as a parasite. So what do you propose? Doing nothing? And what is reality? Ronald Reagan and company are gone and their policies both ineffective and incorrect. So what is the alternative you would propose? I am waiting to hear. In answer to your question, "who pays"; everyone proportional to their existing wealth. A 90% tax bracket for Jeff Bezos sounds about right.
Why do old people need to drive giant SUVs? I don’t understand. This article is about the toll of huge cars. Also old people make up a large share of pedestrian deaths in the United States. Talking about the dangers of large SUVs shows support to these old people at risk.
OK, no body has gotten it yet so I'll make it plainer that the rant by Lloyd goes far beyond emissions, embodied carbon, and the rest. To wit:
"I raised my family in VWs, selling the Beetle because a baby seat didn’t fit (the ad pre-dates baby seats and seat belts)"
Because the baby seat didn't fit. And why doesn't it fit? Because of government fiats (mostly by MPG mandates AND the extras mentioned by VB that raise the cost of cars, families have declined in size - dramatically.
Let's drop that he brought up the Beetle. Cars HAVE been getting smaller because the "do-gooders" that infest govt agencies demanded that they make such choices rather than families. And families, have now little choices in the matter, were restricted in the size of their families because how many families had the financial wherewithal to buy two (or more) cars to haul around 5 or more kids in baby seats?
Very few. And what happened?
Birth rates plummeted here in the US (and elsewhere). How many of our grandparents (at least mine) were part of large families - 4 to 8 kids? Enough new lives to take their place in Society to become good citizens (at least that used to be the norm - raise up the little barbarians to be decent citizens).
Who then went to work and via taxes, successfully supported the Ponzi scheme that are our First World social pensions (e.g., Social Security here in the US). Now with a < 2 births/woman, we are below replacement levels. And now those pension plans are going bankrupt.
It's taken years for the problem to assert itself but how many of the "2 workers per 1 retired person" are going to allow Government (that has created this problem because of shortsightedness and the "Left hand, right hand" problem) to keep taking more and more of their income that is no longer going to their own families?
Those on SS, that paid via their taxes, are going to get screwed. Occam's Razor.
So because those that hate cars have been making them go away for decades, one slice at a time by infesting government to rig the rules to make them go away.
Already, I see letters to the editor by seniors complaining about the shabby treatment they are getting from Government. And yes, they are saying that their Government just is trying to throw them away - that's real hate.
"Those on SS, that paid via their taxes, are going to get screwed. Occam's Razor."
Government sees retirees as a liability. But I would argue that those on SS or who are nearing SS have little to fear of having their payments reduced, for two reasons:
1. Crisis mode will result in a removal of the income cap on SS contributions.
2. There will be enough coverage in the next 20 years to assure current and near-term retirees full benefits.
Those up-and-coming types, say, Gen X (like myself) who will be HOPEFULLY collecting SS benefits in ~20-30 years face the prospect of much-reduced payments. Those who are just entering the workforce would do far better to allow them to opt in to SS rather than make it mandatory, because returns on the stock market have far exceeded returns on US Treasuries which underpin SS. But that can't be allowed, because allowing them to opt in (not out) would severely deplete payments into the system and only exacerbate the inevitable.
The inevitable is this: total SS collapse, because it was designed as a Ponzi scheme, and every Ponzi scheme eventually implodes catastrophically.
And the flip side is that because government zeroed in on cars and forced them smaller, people, in trying to find a way to transport their ENTIRE family in one vehicle, turned to pickups and SUVs.
And now, those types of vehicles are in the gunsights of the anti-car/degrowth/depopulation/hate the suburbs and rural areas people.
The Great Die-off is now happening and it is happening by our own hands and will come more surely than any "Climate Boiling" silly Doomsday prophecies.
And will the last doddering oldster with a cane please try to reach up the turn off the last working light switch to save the Planet, please?
Same thing is happening with electric vehicles. A gigantic EV kills a pedestrian just as dead as a gas powered one. And the huge batteries needed to move a huge EV negate any climate benefit.
The horse has been out of the barn on this one for some time now. Every major manufacturer has been pumping out monster SUV’s for years. Easy to blame the manufacturers but they build what sells for a profit. As soon as people stop buying them they will stop building them. Like with so many of the world’s problems, we are all great at pointing figures but not so great at admitting our own contribution to the problems or at modifying our behaviour in a way that would solve them. Most cars are driven with one person in them most of the time. We “need” at best a two seater but to avoid the inconvenience of finding an alternative the few times most of us require more we convince ourselves we can’t survive like a civilized human being without at least 5 and preferably 7 or 8. Until we are all prepared to take a long hard look in the mirror and admit that the real problem is us change will come slowly and very painfully.
many working people drive the large family vehicle during the week, how does a family 0f 5 do stuff together?
We often put our family of four plus a guest into our little Subaru and even a Toyota Echo. They all seat five and have surprisingly large trunks. When we used to do ski weekends, we put a box on the roof. This is how people did it for generations before pickup trucks and giant SUVs. what did you do when you were a kid?
As an avid commuter on an electric bike, rapidly approaching 15,000 miles, which eliminates burning 240 gallons of gas if you drive a Prius, I fully agree. Car bloat is horrible, and large SUVs and pick-up ( without tools on board) are the worst offenders of bike safety (along with BMW drivers for some reason). The crazy thing is I still feel better arriving at work on a bike despite the safety concerns. It is healthier mentally and physically. Perhaps people would get out of those giant hunks of polluting metal if they could just experience the quieter and more joyful alternative.
I'm going to spitball an idea here: Train your kids to behave themselves in the car, and then you won't need to space them out in multiple rows. This is a reason I hear frequently cited by parent friends who justify their purchases of huge new SUVs. They say their kids fight incessantly while driving, so they "need" the physical separation. I can understand the appeal. There are times when having 3 growing kids across the back row of my Subaru Outback is simply awful. They provoke and poke each other, resulting in chaos. But I also think that buying a massive, expensive, polluting vehicle doesn't truly fix the problem of them not knowing how to behave in a cramped space. It's better just to train them.
I’m not going to offer an opinion on this, but I just want to say how nice it is to see you back in print again, Katherine. I miss your contributions to the >old< Treehugger.
OK, I >am< going to offer an opinion. One cure for EV bloat would be if manufacturers competed on efficiency. “Our car averages 5 miles/kWh.” “Well, ours averages 6!” And so on. Higher efficiency demands lower weight and lower frontal area. “Our car averages 8 miles/kWh” would give pretty good bragging rights.
Thank you, Nicholas! Similar to Lloyd, I've started doing my own thing here on Substack, so please do check out my newsletter! And I published a book this summer, so keeping busy :)
This is laughable, yet again.
The reason vehicles have gotten bigger and heavier is, true, because the government mandated all these safety measures to protect occupants inside the vehicle. So no, we're not going to have smaller and lighter cars like the classic 1966 VW Beetle shown at the top—that world no longer exists and hasn't for over 50 years.
Strike one.
I find it interesting that there's such a beef about SUV's being "too big and heavy" when *every* EV weighs significantly more than their ICE counterpart. And, all that mass of big heavy batteries causes more wear-and-tear on the roadways—as well as more particulate pollution, because roadway particulate pollution is a function of VEHICLE WEIGHT and driving habits, not what engine is powering the drivetrain.
Strike two.
It's also disingenuous to preoccupy one's self with pedestrian deaths and injuries at the expense of the occupants of the vehicles who are involved in non-pedestrian accidents. According to the IIHS, in 2021 there were a total of 7,388 pedestrian deaths from vehicles, an increase of 13% over 2020. The NHTSA says in 2021 there were a total of 43,939 vehicle fatalities—and that's WITH all those car modifications made over the past 30+ years to improve safety. Should we sacrifice occupant lives by making lighter and less safe vehicles? The same safety measure fatality rate in 2000, extrapolated to today, would necessarily equate to another 3,000 fatalities at a minimum and likely double that if percentage reduction in safety measures equates to an equal increase in occupant fatalities.
Strike three.
What it comes down to is that there are far more distractions available in cars today with the increase in available technology, as well as more aggressive driving tendencies as roadways have become more crowded and collective societal anxiety skyrockets. Retrograding vehicle designs exchanges one problem for another as a zero-sum loss.
One thing said below about me is true, I am anti-car. The embodied energy of a small car is quite high. The embodied energy of a similar sized electric car is even higher. This does not even touch the embodied energy in Ford F150s (one of which passed me illegally on a curve this morning) or the Ford Lightning. All cost the planet to much. We really need a rethink of the entire transportation system, making sure that we minimize embodied energy and negative health impacts. That's why I chose an electric bike, low embodied energy and minimal pollution. Bigger vehicles do not solve anything except changing the scale of the problem, and now the problem is massive, making us dependent on a transportation system that is killing us. How many strikes is that?
An e-bike isn't going to move a four-person family to their vacation spot, the grocery store, a restaurant, church, or family reunion. So you end up with an e-bike (or plural, e-bikes) and a vehicle that can hold and transport all four family members as a single unit. I don't see that as a "rethink of the entire transportation system", I see it as a marketing campaign for e-bike companies.
You know all those e-scooters that were rolled out a few years ago (think: Lime, Razor, Segway, etc.) around the world as a fix for last-mile mobility? So many people were injured, some fatally, and so many scooters maliciously tossed into waterways and the trash that quite a few municipalities have rethought them as a "solution" because submerged batteries become a liability to corrosion risks (plus replacing them is expensive.) Did that revolution result in a "rethink of the entire transportation system"? No.
What, exactly, would replace automotives in your reimagined utopian future? How would people travel? How would we maintain economic growth if transportation is severely restricted? And before you take the time to respond, recognize that no, our financial liabilities aren't just going to disappear—$32 trillion worth of U.S. debt alone needs to be paid off, to say nothing of inevitable future liabilities as the population ages and natural disasters like California's Big One occur. The entire world is integrated, interconnected, and reliant on cheap energy to sustain the world economy. That is the #1 foundational truth that everyone needs to acknowledge before going off about ridding the world of cars.
You are correct, an e-bike, or bikes, is not going to move a family of 4 to a vacation spot. Trains or buses can if the transport system is designed in such a way as to do so. It is not now, it is designed around cars, which are loaded with embodied energy even if not powered by fossil fuels. So to are trains and buses , but far less per passenger vehicle mile than cars. Airplanes might have less embodied and propulsion energy than cars in the future (again per passenger mile) but that future is cloudy since the batteries needed don't exist yet.
My excitement about e-bikes is not that they are the answer to all transport problems, it is because they can replace for for shorter, individual trips or commutes in a healthy and redemptive way. Other options are needed for longer and group trips. We do not have those options as available in the US as there is in Europe, but we could move that way. This is the foundational notion we need to recognize: fossil fuels have got to go, and we have to reduce the total embodied energy of our transportation system rapidly or we lose it all. I could argue with your other points, but that seems futile if we don't agree that our transportation system is flawed and unsustainable as it presently exists. Just because we cannot envision a change in its present reality does not mean that it will continue to work indefinitely.
Energy, especially fossil energy, will not stay cheap. Already its costs are far higher than we actually pay. We do have a huge debt, but our debt to the planet is even greater, and it will pay us back in spades if we do not change. Nature bats last. Continuous growth, as others have said, is cancer. Perhaps (and this is likely anathema to you) we need to degrow (especially in the US) and have a global "jubilee" about debt.
and who pays for this? the already struggling middle class taxpayer
not only in taxes, but costs of goods and services
debt to the planet, call india and china and talk to them it,
and the vast majority of "transportation re-imagined" is it relies on unproven, or non existant tech
this is a religion to y'all, and not even close to reality
Reality, in your mind, is a continuation of a present that is killing both the planet and us. We can't escape Earth, we are part of it, presently acting as a parasite. So what do you propose? Doing nothing? And what is reality? Ronald Reagan and company are gone and their policies both ineffective and incorrect. So what is the alternative you would propose? I am waiting to hear. In answer to your question, "who pays"; everyone proportional to their existing wealth. A 90% tax bracket for Jeff Bezos sounds about right.
Great piece, Lloyd!
And with this added rant by the anti-car crowd, we plainly see that they all hate old people.
And I await the effort to connect the dots to tell me why. It should be amusing especially as Lloyd put the answer in his own hand.
By the way, I am 69 years old and started commuting at 64 on the electric bike, so don't give me any lip about hating old people. I am one.
hey this guy is 96 his e-bike keeps him young https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/05/14/dutch-treat-this-guy-is-biking-through-his-90s
And so did you, Lloyd, even as you have the answer in your post.
All caused by Government fiat.
I'm closer to 70 than sixty and my point still stands, Reread Lloyd's post as the ramifications of his rant directly apply to us.
Why do old people need to drive giant SUVs? I don’t understand. This article is about the toll of huge cars. Also old people make up a large share of pedestrian deaths in the United States. Talking about the dangers of large SUVs shows support to these old people at risk.
OK, no body has gotten it yet so I'll make it plainer that the rant by Lloyd goes far beyond emissions, embodied carbon, and the rest. To wit:
"I raised my family in VWs, selling the Beetle because a baby seat didn’t fit (the ad pre-dates baby seats and seat belts)"
Because the baby seat didn't fit. And why doesn't it fit? Because of government fiats (mostly by MPG mandates AND the extras mentioned by VB that raise the cost of cars, families have declined in size - dramatically.
Let's drop that he brought up the Beetle. Cars HAVE been getting smaller because the "do-gooders" that infest govt agencies demanded that they make such choices rather than families. And families, have now little choices in the matter, were restricted in the size of their families because how many families had the financial wherewithal to buy two (or more) cars to haul around 5 or more kids in baby seats?
Very few. And what happened?
Birth rates plummeted here in the US (and elsewhere). How many of our grandparents (at least mine) were part of large families - 4 to 8 kids? Enough new lives to take their place in Society to become good citizens (at least that used to be the norm - raise up the little barbarians to be decent citizens).
Who then went to work and via taxes, successfully supported the Ponzi scheme that are our First World social pensions (e.g., Social Security here in the US). Now with a < 2 births/woman, we are below replacement levels. And now those pension plans are going bankrupt.
It's taken years for the problem to assert itself but how many of the "2 workers per 1 retired person" are going to allow Government (that has created this problem because of shortsightedness and the "Left hand, right hand" problem) to keep taking more and more of their income that is no longer going to their own families?
Those on SS, that paid via their taxes, are going to get screwed. Occam's Razor.
So because those that hate cars have been making them go away for decades, one slice at a time by infesting government to rig the rules to make them go away.
Already, I see letters to the editor by seniors complaining about the shabby treatment they are getting from Government. And yes, they are saying that their Government just is trying to throw them away - that's real hate.
"Those on SS, that paid via their taxes, are going to get screwed. Occam's Razor."
Government sees retirees as a liability. But I would argue that those on SS or who are nearing SS have little to fear of having their payments reduced, for two reasons:
1. Crisis mode will result in a removal of the income cap on SS contributions.
2. There will be enough coverage in the next 20 years to assure current and near-term retirees full benefits.
Those up-and-coming types, say, Gen X (like myself) who will be HOPEFULLY collecting SS benefits in ~20-30 years face the prospect of much-reduced payments. Those who are just entering the workforce would do far better to allow them to opt in to SS rather than make it mandatory, because returns on the stock market have far exceeded returns on US Treasuries which underpin SS. But that can't be allowed, because allowing them to opt in (not out) would severely deplete payments into the system and only exacerbate the inevitable.
The inevitable is this: total SS collapse, because it was designed as a Ponzi scheme, and every Ponzi scheme eventually implodes catastrophically.
And the flip side is that because government zeroed in on cars and forced them smaller, people, in trying to find a way to transport their ENTIRE family in one vehicle, turned to pickups and SUVs.
And now, those types of vehicles are in the gunsights of the anti-car/degrowth/depopulation/hate the suburbs and rural areas people.
The Great Die-off is now happening and it is happening by our own hands and will come more surely than any "Climate Boiling" silly Doomsday prophecies.
And will the last doddering oldster with a cane please try to reach up the turn off the last working light switch to save the Planet, please?
Missed.