6 ms·

Those vehicles typically have many more axles and double-wide wheels to distribute the load.

• Retric 2y ago
  It doesn’t help that much. Each tire of a fully loaded 18 wheeler carries 4.4x the weight of a typical car tire. 4.4 ^ 4 = 378x the damage per tire but there are also 4.5x the tires so your at 1,700x the damage. That’s an oversimplification, but it doesn’t really matter if it’s 99.9% or 95% of the damage ware is still absolutely dominated by heavy vehicles.
  • ncruces 2y ago
    And how many more SUVs go through that road? If there's a few hundred SUVs for every 18 wheeler, it's no longer negligible: it's 10 or 30% of the damage. And it could be a lot more negligible, if that mostly drive alone, drove a car with half the weight.
    • gruez 2y ago
      That statement is only true in aggregate. If you you're taxing individual vehicle owners SUVs will still get taxed way less than trucks.
    • Retric 2y ago
      Most SUV’s aren’t that heavy. I used 4,000lb for the car, a 2024 Chevrolet Suburban which is huge only clocks in at a 5,824 lbs. Load another 1,000lb for passengers etc and (6,824/4000) ^ 4 = 8.5x a car or 0.5% what I calculated for a full 18 wheeler. Sure there’s more cars than 18 wheelers but 7,000lb is a rather extreme outlier in terms of SUV weight.
      • ncruces 2y ago
        Well, my 7 seater has a kerb weight of 2780 lbs (and it's a hybrid, the petrol is lighter); fully loaded it's under 4400 lbs. And it's probably heavier than most cars around here, because most cars are not 7 seaters, but 4/5 seat hatches. US SUVs and pickup trucks wouldn't fit most parking lots around here (to tall, to wide to even get in), but somehow the problem is never the size/weight of cars people got used to drive.