Also, with large vehicles more generally, there’s this awful snowball effect where people go “I get to sit up high and it’s bigger, so I feel safer! Besides, when I’m in a regular car I feel like I’m going to get crushed like a beer can.”
This of course ignores that:
Pedestrians are fucked
With everyone buying bigger, heavier vehicles, the energy involved in most collisions is significantly greater and I doubt anyone’s much safer for it. People in smaller cars just get screwed.
It’s not even just “political”, it is politics. Deciding to collaboratively make an operating system (infrastructure, practically) which is free for everyone and asking anyone using it to help out is doing politics, at least in a world where people are politically motivated to restrict people’s ability to go and do that somehow.