It's for the cows. The city folk that make the rules don't realize yer average cow will just about push over a barbwire fence, just to scratch those hard to reach places, so they are worried about fender holes cheese grating some poor cow in an automobile accident/s

All joking aside, I've been a mechanic in rural Oregon and Vermont for over 20 years. I'm not into hotrods, rolling coal, or any of that idiocy, I believe in climate change, I've built street legal electric vehicles from scratch, owned approximately 20 geo metros, lol, and bike commuted 14 miles to an auto repair job for years. Rural poor people need cars, in our current society. x100 in a "cool" rural place like vermont. They gotta be way over here where they randomly found some janky old house they can afford to rent. They gotta drive way over there to the job where the boss is slightly less exploitative of their desperation. We need to punch up, as a society, not down. Several recent studies show our "carbon footprint" is directly tied to how much we spend, it's like Elon musk being all "we need everyone to use electric cars", then bopping all over in his private jet. We are all out of time on climate change, we need our climate change mitigation to be numbers driven, not just make us feel good, because of classist propaganda we vaguely remember from our childhoods. If you are mad about climate change, punch up, not down.