Consider that the legislature pulled out a small ebike credit in a bill which provided a tax credit to buy an EV that was large enough that it would pay for 2 extremely high quality e-bikes entirely.
Now course everyone and their mother may wanna chime in and go off about some anecdote in their city for them but you really gotta ask yourself how normal is your personal experience really? Just lookin it up various averages say 41 mile commute, 16 mile commute, 20-30 minute commutes, don't matter what estimate I pull up the average is way too high to make biking feasible.
So no it ain't "americans dumb ha ha" it's "most people can't do it" and redesigning the whole country to be able to is gon take a hot minute
How many of these PPP loans got forgiven is apparently close to 100%, as it is evident a lot of these clowns had plenty of spare money to modify whats supposed to be their work truck into a lane swallowing, coal rolling, baby-on-board family car crushing, eye-level LED light bar festooned rolling death threat / mid life crisis costume accessory.
Humans will take advantage.
I am however frequently opposed to the sort of half-assed, dangerous, bikes-as-an-afterthought band-aid ideas that I've seen coming out of my city. (The ideas from the county and surrounding cities are much better.) They're almost worse than nothing because they let the people in charge pat themselves on the back for being so pro-bike while doing almost nothing to improve bike safety.
I’m considering buying a truck (to put a small truck camper in), but cannot get over the price. Dozens and dozens of used trucks that cost obscene amounts of money. Lift kits, custom rims, tints, etc. I just cannot imagine how people are affording these things.
On the other hand, the amortized yearly cost of the truck I have is basically nothing. It is not surprising that there was room for the price to go up.
Much of this crap is what also makes them completely unsuitable if not outright useless for genuine truck utility purposes, which reveals that the motivation of those buying these trucks was never to do anything practical with them in the first place, but just to project large menacing presence to other people who have to share the road with rhem.
> For tax purposes, heavy SUVs, pickup trucks and vans are treated as transportation equipment, meaning they qualify for 100% first year bonus depreciation. Note that they must have a manufacturer’s gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) above 6,000 lbs.
This is insane. I have never bought a new vehicle and thought having payments like this was the exception, not the norm.
I live in a post-Soviet country where minimum wage is something like €600/mo, yet the amount of luxury cars I see on the road is honestly staggering. I have no doubt these are on lease, but the payments and insurance must be thousands per month.
The funny thing is the tagline for Porsche here is "standout from the crowds while others dissapear". Sometimes it feels like I'm being a rebel by not having a Porsche, BMW, Audi, Mercedes or Range Rover.
(I drive a 18 year old MPV I bought for €3k earlier this year. It works amazingly well at getting me from point A to point B)
My suspicion is that this trend is driven by long loan terms, high interest rates, and loans being larger than the cost of the vehicle.
This is insane. I have never bought a new vehicle and never imagined this was the normal.
Edit: Finished a partial comment
At some point with all the EVs I was expecting to see lots cheap EVs by now. They were touted for their incredible simplicity after al. But it turns out those are not nearly as cheap and have higher insurance premiums too.
