The prices will apply to vehicles weighing more than 1.6 tonnes with a combustion engine or hybrid vehicles, and more than 2 tonnes for electric vehicles. The move will not apply to Paris residents’ parking.
So sounds like it's weight based, which makes sense I think
Right, just until you realize that 1.6 tons for a ICE car is basically a medium size car (my Scenic score 1.4 tons for example) and 2 tons exclude a lot of electric cars (for example 3 out of 4 Tesla)
1.6 tons is quite frankly an insane weight for a vehicle to transport an 80kg human around. That is 20 times the weight of what you want to transport, not to mention the volume overhead and required space on the road including safety distances.
As long as you are alone, I agree. But if you have a family a somewhat bigger car is not that wasted and the 1.6 tons limit cover a lot of cars that can be used by a family.
If they really wanted to do something for the environment, like they justified the misure, they should have not put a limit on the EV (at least for now) and they should have used the engine capacity or power.
If anything people had bigger families in the past
Last time I was in France (4 years ago, before Covid) it was not uncommon to see families with 3 children, so I don't know... maybe there are not that many in Paris...
I guess the car industry did not have any pressure to not make heavy as fuck cars until now. If this takes off across the continent, that will push down car weights a bit at least.
The car I had before I went car-free weighed 1.3 tons and was big enough to sleep in with 2 people on a real mattress, or to comfortably carry 5 people with their luggage, or transport a fridge.
Wouldn't it make more sense to base it on length and width? I'd assume there's already various taxes on fuel consumption, but in parking, length and width are what actually matters.
Wait, if we talk about taking up huge amount of space, using the weight does not make any sense: a Renault Espace or an Audi A6 are bigger than a my Scenic but they weight the same (some models anyway).