I have to drive a freaking pick up truck for professional reasons and even I loathe the freaking thing.
Too long, too wide, too tall, too everything and anything for any road and I drive in country roads.
The craze for ever growing vehicles is going to extremes.
Tax and penalize these cars until it hurts.
Most of my friends that are in the trades prefer small vans over pickup trucks. They can fit more tools, better organized, and easier to secure. Pickup trucks are very niche vehicles.
Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there are no
risenraised vans or with 4x4 traction, which I often require to reach some remote locations, especially with rainy weather.But I would gladly trade it in for a small van.
Either that or a 1990’s 4x4 FIAT Panda, with a roof rack.
Pretty sure mercedes has some vans like that. I know of a company that build them into off road & off grid camping vans and they do rock climbing, or whetever one would call it, in them. They are still quite long and big but not like the sheer stupid toys that a modern pickup is.
So use that vehicle in austere places, and don’t park it in Paris (or any other city).
The issue here is oversized vehicles becoming norm, not exception.
Bruh, my only vehicle for close to two years was a truck that I inherited, a 2002 Chevy Silverado 1500 LS. I believe it got about 8mpg on average, but I dealt with it because I didn’t have any other way to get a different vehicle at the time.
Nowadays I drive a 2018 Ford Fiesta SE. The difference is night and day. Stops on a dime, accelerates quickly, I can fit it anywhere I want, and it gets an average of 34mpg. I went from paying between $75 to $125 every week and a half for gas to spending about $30 over the same time period.
I drive small cars in my personal life, although I currently own 2 station wagons because of family and pets. I usually get an average consumption of 6-7L/100km, which is not bad at all.
My first and most beloved car was a hatchback that could get 5,5L/100km.
I have to drive a pick up for work but I do not enjoy it, to the least degree.
Anne Hidalgo does some very cool stuff.
Just SUVs? Why not Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bently, or all the other luxery vehicles? This seems pretty arbitrary at first glance. I don’t know french car culture very well but aren’t SUVs more of a middle class thing?
Could it also be to do with the increased lethality of SUVs? A study in Ireland shows 11.5% of pedestrians hit by an SUV were killed versus 4.5% for a car.
No law is perfect and there’s always an edge case to provide a reason for doing nothing. This is definitely a step in the right direction to stop the arms race that purchasing larger vehicles has become though.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Paris intends to triple parking charges for large sports utility vehicles (SUVs) in order to push them out of the city and limit emissions and air pollution, the mayor has said.
“It is a form of social justice,” Anne Hidalgo announced on Friday of the plan to deliberately target the richest drivers to tackle the climate breakdown and air pollution.
Paris will hold a referendum on 4 February asking residents to vote for or against a specific parking tariff for heavy, large and polluting SUVs.
David Belliard, a deputy mayor of Paris for the Green party, said: “SUVs cost between €6,000 to €7,000 more than a standard car and all the studies by car firms show that they are bought by the wealthiest people with high incomes … This measure, if applied, will be directed at the richest people in order to finance the transformation of our public space to adapt to the climate crisis, so it’s a form of social redistribution.”
Under Hidalgo, Paris has for years raised pressure on drivers by increasing parking costs and gradually banning diesel vehicles, while expanding the bicycle lane network in the congested capital.
The French motorists’ association, 40 millions d’automobilistes, denounced what it called an “unjustified” clampdown and restriction on liberties.
The original article contains 550 words, the summary contains 209 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
