alt Hacker NewsFor people that don't watch the video (I don't even know if this is in the video): road wear is a function of axle weight to the fourth power. [0]
That means a 6,000lb escalade creates 3x the road wear than a 4,500 wagoneer from 1990.
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This model is the basis of the 1993 AASHTO guide on a flexible pavement design, which is not the state of the art, but is still commonly used. This is why pavement design is mostly controlled by commercial traffic. For estimation purposes, I would not even consider the load of passenger vehicles in a flexible, pavement design.
You are incorrectly assuming the Esclade isn't on 32+" tires with 285+mm width and the Wagoneer isn't on pizza cutters. Tire size has increased greatly on SUV and light trucks, which exerts less ground pressure.
It's not realistic to do this on a heavy truck, which run 110+ PSI on heavy wall tires and why they cause the power law damage to roads.
Keep this in mind next time some crank on Nextdoor dot com goes off about taxing bicycles. "Sure, as long as we're both paying according to the road wear and tear we cause".
one garbage truck - 40,000 pounds wears road 2000x than escalade.
The other key takeaway from the video is that carmakers are highly incentivized to sell SUVs because they're still classified as "non-passenger work vehicles", which have looser emission requirements making them cheaper to produce.
The bug in the law really seems to be that cars that really aren't intended as work vehicles are being treated like them.