I was thinking, a process that often upsets some dopers, but the cogs are turning again. Most of the high MPG cars ususally have low rolling resistance narrow tires. This are hard rubber, higher PSI, and have a small contact patch then your typical SUV. This would seem to suggest that much more force is exerted on the road by this cars and should cause the road to wear much faster that a ‘normal’ car or a SUV. Gas taxes are sometimes used to repair the roads, so the ultra high MPG driver is getting away with not paying for the damage they cause on society’s roads.
My high-efficiency car (not hybrid, but still 40+ mpg) is also lighter than comparable regular cars and therefore probably exerts the same or less pressure on the road than those other vehicles.
And if the funding becomes a problem they’ll either raise gas taxes or impose some sort of other tax to make up the difference.
The way overpowered and much heavier SUVs (and other big cars) have shown to be a lot, lot, lot more damaging to the roads (they often tear loose bricks here), bridges, ramps and so on, than the MPGs.
The biggest factor causing wear on the road is the weight of the vehicle. The lighter the car, the less stress. Besides, any non-SUV has the same footprint and small cars have been used for years without causing major road damage.
Consider a weak spot on the pavement. The more weight, on that spot, the more stress, and the greater the chance it breaks.
Wanna blow you mind more? Consider this…
Amish buggies with steel wheels pulled by horses with steel cleats on their shoes do more damage than any car or truck yet pay zero taxes on gas, license plates, etc. They also leave road apples…which are not a tasty treat eaten while travelling. I don’t know about gas emissions, but solid emissions…I could live without.
And they’re ugly too. And their mama dresses them funny.
I believe that all of the damage done by cars/SUVs/Light trucks pales in comparison to the damage done by 18-wheelers. Now this might not be an issue on small residential streets, but that’s not where I see the most potholes.
Well, my day’s been made. Thank you, QuickSilver.
My take: Fuck society. I want my 60 MPG hybrid car. And a personal jetpack too. I mean, it’s the future right? I want my jetpack!
Dem’s fightin; words
I think the question is better phrased as “Do vehicles with high gas miileage pair their fair share of road use taxes?”
As for the answer, I have no idea. But my guess is that at some point, the states and federal government will move to some combination of fuel and mileage taxes to fund roads.
Fuel-efficient vehicles produce less pollution and help reduce dependence on foreign oil. Even if they pay an unfairly small share of road repair costs, I’d think the advantages are more than enough to make up for it.
I’ve been hyped about hybrids for some time, but I’ve recently heard a couple of things that make me not so sure:
- Gas/Electric hybrids such as the Ford Escape may need their batteries replaced after a few years, especially in colder climes. These batteries can cost as much as 5k, annihilating the cost savings from reduced gas consumption
- If everyone in the US currently drove a gas/electric hybrid, and aged cars were disposed of at the same rate they are now, we’d have a serious pollution problem. How to we dispose of all these huge, toxic batteries?
Yeah, I know, you want cites. I’ll hunt some up at lunch. Still, these points are making me less thrilled with gas/electrics. Maybe waiting for fuel cell technology is the way to go.
So are most SUV’s (IMHO). Feel better? 
I’ll stop hijacking now…
Don’t forget the personal butler monkeys!
snerk
Cites:
http://hybridcars.about.com/od/hybridcarfaq/ Summary: Cost of replacing a Prius battery 2-3k. Manufacturer gaurentees 8 year battery life. Add in the fact that hybrids generally cost 3-5k more than gas counterparts at the dealer’s lot, and poof! There went your cost savings from the gas pump.
http://carpoint.ninemsn.com.au/portal/alias__carpointau/tabID__6491/ArticleID__5487/DesktopDefault.aspx Some good stuff at the bottom WRT battery disposal. This is in regards to existent NiMH batteries, most of which are for handheld devices. Change “handheld” to “four hundred pound monster battery” and imagine every household in the US (two cars per household) disposing of one every 4 years or so.
MSN | Outlook, Office, Skype, Bing, Breaking News, and Latest Videos Interesting point here - you can save a lot more money with a hybrid if you are able to plug it in at night. Since most drivers go 10 miles or less a day during the work week, you can do all your city driving without the gas engine ever firing up. Electricity from the grid costs 1/3 the price of electricity generated by the gas engine, so there would be a really significant savings from this approach. With economics like this, it’s hard to see that hybrids won’t offer this option shortly. The downside: Most towns get electricity from coal fired plants. So much for saving emissions. :rolleyes:
Still, they reduces dependence on foreign oil, which is a good thing.
Can anyone refute these points? I’d love it if I could believe in the hybrid approach again.
A Honda Insight has a maximum (CVT model) curb weight of 1975 lbs on P165/65 R14 78S tires. It’s EPA rated at 57 mpg city and 56 mpg highway.
A Honda Accord Sedan has a maximum (EX-V6 model) curb weight of 3384 lbs on P205/60 R16 tires. It’s EPA rated at 21 mpg city and 30 mpg highway.
A Honda Ridgeline truck has a max curb weight of 4498 lbs, plus a potential 1500 pound payload. It rides on 245 / 65 R17 105S tires. It’s EPA rate at 16 mpg city and 21 mpg highway.
I’m not sure the exact footprint difference on those three sets of tires, but I doubt that it’s large enough that a 1975 pound vehicle puts more wear on the road than a vehicle that weighs 4498 pounds, plus might be hauling an extra half ton or so. There’s a three inch diameter difference between the tires and maybe an inch or two max width. I’ll leave the math and physics up to someone with a better brain that I have to prove or disprove.
The first set of vehicles I intentionally kept within one make. For bonus, here’s the specs on some other large vehicles that I see on the road all of the time:
Hummer H2 has a curb weight of 6400 lbs, with an additional payload of about a ton, for a max gross vehicle weight of 8600 lbs. It rides on LT315/70R 17 tires. I couldn’t find EPA mileage estimates for any Hummer vehicles. They weren’t listed in their documentation nor was it available in the EPA’s published data. Time to pull on my tinfoil hat!
Chevrolet Suburban has a max curb weight of 6073 lbs (4x4 model), with an additional payload of 2527 lbs. It rides on P265/70R-17 tires and is EPA rated at 15 mpg city and 19 mpg highway.
I also tried to find data on the Ford Excursion but couldn’t figure out where they hid the curb weight so went with Chevy instead.
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- Recently Oregon and California both floated ideas of making people put GPS devices in their cars, and charging people “gas tax” based on the mileage they drive, and not on the amount of gas they buy. The logic behind this was that if only 25% of all drivers switched to high-MPG cars, the funds available from gas taxes for road maintenance would fall by about 30% or more. (Which I find hysterical–because it seems to indicate that the depts of road maintenance in Or and Ca could well do with some efficiency improvements of their own–but of course that’s silly to consider now isn’t it?)
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- But as far as the weight issue goes, at some point the PSI-load yeilds to the overall load. It’s common to see signs on asphalt parking lots prohibiting large trucks from parking there overnight, because they sink into the asphalt and damage it. And by a purely-PSI-load measurement, a bicycle puts a greater load on a road than any car or trick probably does–but a road used only by bicycles would probably never suffer damage from load issues. You certainly don’t see signs on parking lots about prohibiting parking bicycles overnight.
- The main issue is that if a hybrid costs more overall to buy and maintain than a regular-engined vehicle, then the hybrid is simply not more efficient. The miles-per-gallon is only one aspect of the situation, the total cost must be considered. The price of something is generally a measure of the amount of resources that went into making it, and when resources are used, pollution is produced. So we may reasonably assume that the cost of anything is an indicator of how much pollution was produced in manufacturing it, and the best way to avoid causing pollution is to be thrifty. So therefore, the best option for the environment is to do whatever is generally cheapest. Which would be in this case–to buy an old car (one already made!) that gets reasonably good gas mileage and maintain it, and drive it for a really really long time, and generally try to avoid using it if a cheaper method of transportation is available.
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While this is true to some extent, I think your model does not evaluate the amount that high initial R&D costs are being spread to a small number of hybrid vehicles. A Chevy AVEO or Cobalt is inexpensive in part because it’s parts are cheaper to produce, in part because a lot of what’s in the car borrows from existing or previous models and in part because they’re mediocre in quality (I kid, sort of). The R&D is spread over a much higher number of vehicles, which is a sort of virtuous circle, in that the high R&D costs for hybrid cars would keep the costs of the cars high and reduce the market potential. Not that there aren’t surely some high material and production costs for hybrids, not to mention the disposal costs already mentioned by others.
I always wondered if hybrids offered any savings pollution-wise for this very reason. I mentioned it to a friend, and my uninformed position was that energy is energy, and since it ultimately came from burning fossil fuels, there would be no difference in pollution. Only hydrogen or nuclear-powered cars would reduce pollutants appreciably. Another buddy scoffed at the latter, and mentioned how many accidents there are on the roads, and how scary the highway would become if all those accidents involved mushroom clouds. So I concluded, purely through potentially faulty reasoning, that electric cars don’t help the pollution problem in any way*; only hydrogen cells would help.
Am I way off base?
- I concede that as technology improves, car emissions are reduced. But I ignore this by applying the same principle to power plants.