Until I was about 10 years old we managed with one of these for a few years. A Peugeot 205 (the fancy 4 door kind!) for a family of 5. Plus a dog. Of course this was the UK, where journeys are generally much shorter and if my mum hit a curb whilst parking I’m sure we’d all have been instantly killed because it was basically made of paper, but I don’t recall it being that tight.
(quietly mutters after age 10, we got a Volvo 960 and it honestly felt like a palace with hundreds of acres of space, and probably why now, as a double-income-no-kids-ever-thanks household we drive a Highlander and never use even a fraction of the space. What was my point again? Oh yeah. GM. Space. Good. etc)
Passenger cars don’t (practically speaking) cause road wear. It’s almost exclusively caused heavy semi trailers. I agree we should have a fair solution to this problem, but to do so we have to consider the road damage is heavily correlated to the weight of each vehicle and assign the costs accordingly.
The road damage caused by a single 18-wheeler was equivalent to the damage caused by 9,600 cars. The study seems to have based its calculations around the number of axles per vehicle. The study found that essentially, road damage was related to the 4th power of the relative loads. That means that if one vehicle carries a load of 1,500 pounds per axle and another carries a load of 3,000 pounds on each axle, the road damage caused by the heavier vehicle is not twice as much, but 2 to the 4th power as much (2x2x2x2 = 16 times as much road damage as the lighter vehicle).
Or where an 80,000-pound 18-wheeler full of cargo is compared to a 4,000-pound passenger car, the truck is 20 times heavier than the car. But taking the 4th power of the relative loads, the semi would cause 160,000 times more road damage than the car. (But my simple calculation is not taking into account the effect of any weight distribution caused by the greater number of axles on the big rig.)
I agree that trucks cause road wear more so than cars. That said, I’m paying gas tax to help fund the roads in my ICE while the EV driver doesn’t + gets a (theoretical) 7500 tax incentive on their lease to entice them to be early adopters. Something’s not right there. Eventually, the gas tax has to go up to continue to pay the cost of increasing infrastructure repairs…with more and more EVs beginning to hit the roads, it’s a double-whammy for the ICE driver. Less tax collected + higher cost of road maintenance, while the EV driver gets a pass.
Those truck drivers pay that tax as well, so when the inevitable happens, that means the truck driver is going to pass that cost onto the consumer.
Silverados can be had for cheap. A coworker just leased a Silverado with a $48K MSRP (granted that’s fairly cheap for a pickup) for 36/12 for $350/month. I don’t know how Rams compare to that, but that could be a big reason for the difference in sales.
I leased a $43k Silverado for less than $300 with minimal due at signing. So in the sweet spot it’s good, however I’m seeing some F150 deals on the forum that were better than that for what I think is a better truck.