Your calculations are a bit off: it's the fourth power of axle weight not vehicle weight. Artics have many more axles so you've overestimated the relative damage. It's still a lot, hundreds of times more, but there are hundreds of times more cars. So car damage matters.

Road maintenance isn't the only cost. Automobiles have a lot of externalized costs that are bared by the government besides just building roads. You need to constantly be building out new cities with new infrastructure in order to make room for cars and a car centric society.

You could tax the car companies themselves to pay for it but good luck with that. Realistically if you have the political power to do something like that you probably wouldn't have a car centric society that shifts billions of dollars of cost on to consumers.

You're ascribing an awful lot of thought and direction to a party which has shown very few signs of either of those.

Seriously your claiming Starmer believes all that shit? Prove it for the love of god please because no one else had figured out what that guy actually believes in.

Yeah my bad, I thought they were commenting why everyone is surprised by the inspection, I figured everyone in the UK knows they have inspections but some folk don't even know of the concept around here. .

I would hope most every folk understand why such a tax is necessary and good but I guess I've never seen the logistical and privacy costs of tracking the miles driven worth the benefits over just flat rating the EV at registration, or making it based on vehicle weight or some other fact of the vehicle and driver. The best taxes tend to be the ones that are the simplest to comply with.

Don't know where you are from but here in America(TM) we let the states decide how and whether at all vehicles get inspected, despite the fact there are zero restrictions for driving between state borders.

I live in a no inspection state and while when I did it was annoying to have to take it in every year or two the number of tires in the parking lot I see with the belt wires poking out tells me they're probably a good thing.

If the 5 year old poses as an adult online with all the lack of age verification possibilities that come with it, it really wouldn't be their fault. Your analogy falls flat because OpenAI hasn't actually done anything illegal (unlike say selling guns to a minor).

The fires can be worse but gas cars catch on fire like 2-20x as often.

This is also a problem that is only going to get better over time, most companies are moving away from lithium-ion and they are making more and more stable. In 20 years all the batteries will be solid state and those vehicles will effectively be inert, the only flammable device will be the airbags.

This was more interesting counterpoint back in the 2010's where every Tesla that caught fire made the national news but the stats just don't back it up.

It really does. They even pointed out the teen is dead, normally lawyers would just call them "the plaintiff". The humanity they are showing is already borderline no longer lawyer like.

You really live in a post truth world don't you. Literally everything you claim to know about this case and every assumption you made while formulating the words on your post is incorrect.

In fact if you actually read the link rather than throw-up ignorance you would have realised everything is wrong. But hey, what's facts when you have opinions right?

I have never once come across a drive HDD or SSD that doesn't correctly respond to "smartctl -t long". Some drives may not respond with diagnostic data as expected because this is a vendor specific dataset without a standard implementation, but all drives ship with some mechanism for quick and extended tests, and they all respond to the same SMART command.

That being said, your past experience may not be relevant here. Unlike HDDs, SSD controllers are actually governed by a standard of what SMART metrics to respond with so they are consistent between all tools and manufacturers. Technically only SSD controllers on NVMe drives, but the controller manufacturers seemingly to not differentiate on a SATA connected SSD. Not sure if the NVMe standard also mandates a drive respond to short/long tests, but I've never seen a HDD or SSD not do so.

Corporations or lobbying, take your pick.

NCAP is an independent rating system. But the EU has safety standards that are performance based and many cases more stringent than in the USA. The USA has some more stringent than the EU. The reality is these cars meet them.

But yeah sure, discount everything I said on a technicality of how NCAP tests. Disregard that regardless of how you think the test works, that the BYD I linked to outperforms many European and American cars subjected to an identical test. Just because you have a better testing system in the USA doesn't change how good or bad a product is.

So really, what point were you trying to make? Clearly not one related to the quality of a Chinese car. Maybe try and stay on topic?

Yes it does seem like this admin believes in the "realist" sphere-of-influence pre-WWI style of international relations.

Surely by coincidence this is also the position Russia holds, funny how that keeps happening!!