And that’s why any vehicle over 2 tons should require a commercial driver’s license. Let plumbers and tree removal services drive them and not 19 year olds whose parents want their child to survive a fatal crash at the expense of everyone else in a twenty foot radius of the wreck.

With shortages in housing, why would culture change to support smaller cars when bigger cars are better for living out of vs living out of a small car is just the worst.

Well, hood and grill shapes are mandated for pedestrian safety but everyone else is fucked.

Not everyone, but far too many.

In reality, any 'vehicle' which does not meet both passenger car safety and passenger car fuel economy standards [1] should only be allowed to be licensed as a "commercial" vehicle and should pay "commercial" rate (higher) taxes (and maybe even require a "commercial" stamp on one's drivers license to operate). If the states had done this when SUV's first appeared on the scene, we might not have nearly every car on the road being a hulking monster SUV today.

[1] which no SUV's nor trucks used as passenger cars, do because they are classed as 'utility vehicles' and have lower safety/fuel economy standards -- which is why the auto-makers went whole-hog on making/selling them, it got their CAFE averages down artificially.

In Japan there's a subset of cars called Kei or small cars, and they're very popular due to the lower tax, initial cost, fuel consumption and ease of parking.

In states of Australia registration is more expensive depending on the amount of doors and cylinders your car has. This doesn't seem to stop big cars being popular though, the #1 selling car in Australia is the Ford Ranger (which is BIG in Australian car standards). We're working on getting F150s sized vehicles even more heavily taxed, they aren't seeing wide adoption here and they're pretty highly criticised.

In cities like Rome you can see many small cars due to the nature of their streets and parking.

For highway driving these cars are a bit less comfortable but honestly modern Kei cars aren't even that bad. The Fiat 500 isn't a Kei sized car but it is also a very reasonable highway and city car, it can happily do both.

Maybe... I think it would definitely help. I think just driving a smaller car that puts you in control might cause a lot of people to switch. I know that when I've done the opposite; gone from a very performance oriented car to a random person's SUV, I've felt extremely unsafe comparatively in breaking, merging, changing lanes, parking, etc. etc. I think most people just have little experience to compare it to anymore.

I also think it's odd that people don't already choose other options w/o a tax in place, considering the price of a bigger vehicle is almost always just going to be higher because of materials and a bunch of other factors.

It’s going to have to be sorted at the DMV.

You take a defensive driving course, I’ll let you drive a tank down the road. But my neighbor’s kids should not be behind the wheel of a death dealer. Those vehicles were meant for skilled laborers, not Sally who is on her phone while driving.

A basic BMW 5 series is over 2 tonnes, with the top spec model tipping the scales at 2.5 tonnes. I mean I agree with the general sentiment but it's not just SUVs that need to go on a diet. Everything is getting heavier and heavier and heavier.

Ironically, they've been taxed into existence.

The Jeep YJ he is talking about is an 80s design, and some models topped 3200lb by the end of the run. So he is comparing the weight and handling of a car from the 80s to a car from the 2000s at the earliest (although the curb weight he cites means that the fit he is talking about would have to be a later model, from 2015 or later).

The modern Jeep Wrangler, and the one that would be contemporary to the Honda Fit weighs in at 4,000 lbs in the 2-door base model or significantly more depending on options.

If you compare a YJ to a Honda Civic of the same era, you see that the 1986 civic was 1800 lbs up against a 1986 YJ at 2800 lbs.

It's not at all about looks, it's about a different kind of handling, for off road, that's mutually exclusive with on road handling.

Yes, some people choose to emulate off road appearances, such as with fake bead locks and then only ever drive their vehicle on road. That doesn't discount the fact that there are a great many explicit choices you can make in designing and building a vehicle that sacrifice on road performance for off road performance.

The weight savings for similar power output to current PMSM motors is roughly the weight of a passenger per motor. As others have pointed out the savings become cumulative and beget more savings in other vehicle systems. So yes the difference would indeed positively affect those things.

1% or whatever just isn't a substantial savings.