Key Ideas:
Heavier vehicles are safer for their occupants but more dangerous for others: The weight of a vehicle is a critical factor in car crashes, with heavier vehicles causing more fatalities in other cars, pedestrians, and cyclists.
The heaviest vehicles kill more people than they save: Analysis of crash data shows that for every life saved by the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks, more than a dozen lives are lost in other vehicles.
Weight advantages have changed little over time: Despite improvements in safety features, the weight advantage of heavier vehicles has remained relatively constant, with heavier vehicles still causing more fatalities in lighter vehicles.
Carmakers prioritize consumer preferences over safety: Manufacturers are producing increasingly heavier vehicles, driven by consumer demand for larger, more powerful cars, despite the safety risks to others.
Regulators are ill-equipped to address the issue: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's rating system focuses on occupant safety, not the safety of other road users, and tax policies subsidize heavier vehicles.
Public awareness and concern are growing: Surveys show increasing concern about the size and safety of SUVs and pickup trucks, with researchers and policymakers starting to take notice.
Electrification may exacerbate the problem: The shift towards electric vehicles, which tend to be heavier than their internal-combustion equivalents, may increase the weight of vehicles on the road, further amplifying the safety risks.
Cars damage infrastructure in proportion to the fourth power of axle load. Not only are people in big cars killing people in little cars, they're also HEAVILY subsidized by the people they kill.
It doesn’t help that much. Each tire of a fully loaded 18 wheeler carries 4.4x the weight of a typical car tire. 4.4 ^ 4 = 378x the damage per tire but there are also 4.5x the tires so your at 1,700x the damage.
That’s an oversimplification, but it doesn’t really matter if it’s 99.9% or 95% of the damage ware is still absolutely dominated by heavy vehicles.
And how many more SUVs go through that road? If there's a few hundred SUVs for every 18 wheeler, it's no longer negligible: it's 10 or 30% of the damage.
And it could be a lot more negligible, if that mostly drive alone, drove a car with half the weight.
I used 4,000lb for the car, a 2024 Chevrolet Suburban which is huge only clocks in at a 5,824 lbs. Load another 1,000lb for passengers etc and (6,824/4000) ^ 4 = 8.5x a car or 0.5% what I calculated for a full 18 wheeler.
Sure there’s more cars than 18 wheelers but 7,000lb is a rather extreme outlier in terms of SUV weight.
Well, my 7 seater has a kerb weight of 2780 lbs (and it's a hybrid, the petrol is lighter); fully loaded it's under 4400 lbs.
And it's probably heavier than most cars around here, because most cars are not 7 seaters, but 4/5 seat hatches.
US SUVs and pickup trucks wouldn't fit most parking lots around here (to tall, to wide to even get in), but somehow the problem is never the size/weight of cars people got used to drive.
Bigger cars need more fuel -> bigger fuel trucks
They use more materials to make, require bigger places to store/maintain them and go through bigger consumables ie tires -> bigger lorries.
It's not like they're the sum of all evil, they have a small impact on the size of these things, but bringing the sizes down will help on the pathway to lowering the size of everything.
> Bigger cars need more fuel -> bigger fuel trucks
The fuel trucks aren't going to change in size, they're going to come more often. Also, oil is typically distributed in pipelines or on ships rather than trucks until the last mile. Meanwhile a fuel tanker holds some 10,000 gallons of fuel, i.e. enough for "large" 20 MPG SUVs to go 200,000 miles. Meanwhile the tanker is generally transporting the fuel less than 100 miles, so this is diluted by a factor of 2000. Because of the 4th power law, this still causes nearly as much damage as the SUVs themselves, but they're both still negligible compared to all of the other commercial trucks transporting everything else.
Obviously this doesn't even apply to electric vehicles.
> They use more materials to make, require bigger places to store/maintain them and go through bigger consumables ie tires -> bigger lorries.
Yeah, it's not a crazy influence, it's just to point out that the economy is a pyramid and if you make the stone on top smaller, there are thousands of other little places where you can shave weight. Cars account for a small but significant amount of our bulk material usage, think mining equipment -> iron ore -> sheet steel -> stamped parts -> car. If you can reduce the number of F350s we sell, we can reduce the amount of iron ore we're consuming, the size of the ships carrying it, the trucks that haul the mining equipment etc.
The US sells on the order of 4M domestically produced pickups and SUVs per year and produces 1.8MT of steel. If we, conservatively, reduced the weight of all of those cars by half or 1T ea (they're often 3x the weight of a sanely sized vehicle) we quickly eclipse US steel production, even if we exclude some parts as non-steel. That multiplies by 1.6x when you think in terms of iron ore (though most is recycled from scrap).
> If you can reduce the number of F350s we sell, we can reduce the amount of iron ore we're consuming, the size of the ships carrying it, the trucks that haul the mining equipment etc.
But you want to optimize the thing where you get the most bang for your buck.
The heavy side of the most popular SUVs aren't based on the F-350, they generally weigh around 4500 pounds vs. 3500 pounds for the lighter end, the latter being around the same as the average mid-sized sedan. Cutting 30% off of a one-time cost for something that will have a 20-year lifespan is generally not going to be the best place to optimize.
Compare this to, say, introducing mixed-use zoning so people can live closer to their jobs and drive fewer miles. This not only reduces fuel consumption on an ongoing basis, it makes cars last longer because they have fewer miles on them and then you don't need to manufacture as many, and it has direct human benefits because people spend less time stuck in traffic and drive fewer miles with risk of traffic fatalities.
There are very very few paved roads where the largest vehicles on them are large SUVs. I live on a mountain near a road where commercial vehicles are banned and we still get a few large commercial vehicles per day.
One of the roads up the mountain has switchbacks near the top that are so tight that nothing longer than 18 feet is allowed up, but at least 2x a week a box truck gets stuck.
Heavy cars have many negative impacts but road maintenance isn’t one worth worrying about.
There are vehicles that do more damage to roads than large pickup trucks. It's still the case that large pickup trucks do more damage to the road than small cars. Owners of pickup trucks are being subsidized by pedestrians and small car owners. They do not pay enough for the privilege of driving their vehicles in relation to the damage they cause.
Road damage isn’t like hit points. If a road has regular large vehicle traffic, it doesn’t really matter how many smaller passenger vehicles are driving on it—even if they are pickup trucks. Passenger vehicles aren’t going to change how frequently the road needs to be repaved.
At the extreme end, imagine a railroad bridge. We don’t care about how fat the mice that regularly cross it are.
It's not only that. Roads have to be resurfaced periodically because of weather damage regardless of how many vehicles drive on them. For any road that sees predominantly/only car traffic, this will be the dominant effect and the cars are irrelevant.
Delivery trucks certainly do and very regularly at that. A delivery truck can easily cause about 300x the wear of a large SUV or full size pickup.
A full sized school bus will regularly drive on just about any road. Fully loaded they’ll do 1000x as much damage as a large SUV.
Fire trucks, septic tank pump trucks, big furniture delivery trucks, landscaping trucks, motor homes etc… will also drive on pretty much every small local road.
And much bigger commercial trucks drive on very small local roads enough to dwarf the damage of a large SUV. My neighbor just had a foundation for an addition poured. 3 cement trucks came out. 3 fully loaded cement trucks would cause something like 20,000 times as much damage as a large suv.
I’d need to drive on my street once a day for 50 years in an enormous suv cause as much damage.
Given normal weathering and damage caused by frequent or even infrequent large commercial vehicles, larger local passenger vehicles aren’t going to increase maintenance costs.
The USA already moves a higher percentage of freight by rail than almost any other country. But rail could never work for time-sensitive loads or last mile delivery.
Perhaps they could make the rail lines and machinery smaller. One might even consider such rail to be "light", in comparison.
I'm sure it's pure coincidence that many cities already have rail lines going down roads in city centers. They probably just built the city around a historical freight line, and haven't bothered to remove it.
the freight has more axles, and you could set the baseline weight by vehicle class
but maybe this would just incentivise the sort of person that buys an F150 to drive to the shops to simply to upgrade to a big rig (for the tax saving?!)
Massive increase in the cost of public transport as buses pass their tax costs onto users.
Massive increase in the cost of freight shipping, which would be passed on to consumers, i.e. everybody, since virtually every part of the economy depends indirectly on freight transport.
It would amount to everybody paying, and thus being more or less equivalent to public funding of roads.
Freight -- Ideally this causes more investment into freight rail and more freight to be moved by rail/boat. This might cause short term price increases to expand the infrastructure, but long term it's much cheaper/greener/efficient to move this stuff on rail. Last mile (maybe last 100 miles) will always be by truck, but we have way too much long haul stuff.
Public Transport -- If tax payers are currently paying for the external costs of public transportation (via taxes to repair roads) then it won't cost anymore public money if taxpayers continue to cover that cost. For private busses this is a case of tax payers unfairly subsiding their external costs.
> The unintended consequences of this would be: ... public transport ... freight
You could obviously tweak legislation to treat such vehicles differently if you wanted. I was just getting the core idea across, not suggesting my comment should be copy-pasted verbatim into the next bill Congress is passing.
It's worth noting that unless the roads are degrading and not being repaired, those costs are already being paid. It's just a question of who is paying it.
It removes the implicit subsidy for buses, but we want to encourage people to use buses over cars and SUVs. Also, the damage from cars/SUVs is so small that the cost of collecting the fee would exceed the amount of the fee.
We do it different in Europe: pay disproportionate by engine displacement. My father's car has 10x the taxes as my mother's car just because the engine is 1.6 times larger (2.5 liters, nothing outrageous). At the same time my mother pays for that car quite close to what I pay for each of my bikes that are 8-10 times lighter and have way smaller engines (300cc and 600cc).
Which is a much better system. My country (Portugal) still does mostly displacement, and a turbo-charged 1 liter pays a lot less than a naturally aspirated 1.6 hybrid, despite the former consuming 50% more gas.
The notion of charging different fees or taxes by engine displacement is idiotic. It has nothing particularly to do with road wear, emissions, or safety hazards.
If you want a measure that can not be easily manipulated and can serve as an albeit imperfect proxy for wear, emissions, weight and last but not least ability to pay then displacement is an option for taxation.
Larger displacement engines are almost invariably in larger, heavier, vehicles. Axle weight determines road wear. I agree that using the axle weight would be better but displacement taxes were also a luxury tax.
> Larger displacement engines are almost invariably in larger, heavier, vehicles.
This isn't even a good approximation because turbochargers (which nearly all heavy, diesel vehicles have) significantly increase power at the same displacement. The 5 liter Mustang weighs less than 4000 pounds. Here's a >10,000 pound bus with a 3.2L diesel engine:
> Key Ideas: Heavier vehicles are safer for their occupants but more dangerous for others: The weight of a vehicle is a critical factor in car crashes, with heavier vehicles causing more fatalities in other cars, pedestrians, and cyclists.
I'm actually curious how much of this danger is primarily to pedestrians and cyclists. On the margins, I'd expect in a crash a 6000lb vehicle with modern safety equipment to be safer than a 3000lb vehicle with modern safety equipment, but folks have crashed modern sports cars at triple-digit speeds and (literally) walked away.
For a pedestrian or cyclist, though, getting hit by a large truck or SUV is a different story, primarily because the shape and frontal area are so much larger, and the collision rates are higher because visibility and vehicle control are much worse than smaller cars.
I'm also curious how much of the perceived safety benefit of larger cars is offset by the reduced ability to control the vehicle - in other words, I'm curious what the per-capita crash rates are in SUVs compared to normal cars.
I think a lot of this is details lost in the stats. Every car is heavier due to safety standards. A 2024 Civic is bigger than a 1994 Accord.
The pickups are less safe for all stakeholders and are a dominant category. They have poor safety features, handle poorly and have comically bad visibility.
That plus the abandonment of speed enforcement drives death. 2000lb or 8000lb car, if you get hit at 45mph, you’re dead. Velocity is exponentially more important than mass.
Even cars are getting comically bad visibility. While there might be a big piece of glass bonded to the rear quarter, it’s got a huge black painted border on the outside and frit on the inside. Then there’s fat plastic trim that obscures driver sight lines from what is left.
NHTSA would be better off at having a visibility requirement for 5th and 95th percentile men/women. I’d allow cameras to play a part, but if used, everything in the system has to be warrantied for 10 years/100k miles (similar to emissions equipment).
Yeah it's gone under the radar pretty much, but going from an early 80s car in the 2010s to a new car, it was like I was driving blind for half the time but reversing cameras are great (too bad they also cause problems where we can't really see everything).
Driving in older cars is way easier apart from power steering. The rest are luxuries like air con, entertainment. Even cabin space in older cars was vastly larger than new cars and the exteriors of new cars are vastly larger now than before.. thanks (but no thanks) to safety measures.
> That plus the abandonment of speed enforcement drives death
I don't think they need enforcement as much as traffic calming features. It simply shouldn't be possible to speed as much as people do... I live between a middle school, a special ed school and a bus stop, on a 30mph road which is 43ft wide. Basically this is what it looks like: https://streetmix.net/-/2685748 and this is probably what it should look like to reduce average speeds: https://streetmix.net/-/2685753. There are children walking and biking along this road all day. I frequently see people speeding, easily going 40, 50 even 60mph. Note that this isn't a very high traffic road either, I just looked up the average traffic counts and it gets 8-12k of vehicles in both directions PER DAY, so traffic calming would barely have an impact. If anything it might drive more people to take the highway or one of the other high-speed roads nearby instead, which would be a good thing too.
The other problem is people coming out of cross streets, and immediately pulling forward as much as possible without looking. You have a kid crossing the street who maybe doesn't know any better, or is distracted because they are on their phone or chatting with their friends, and you got a perfect recipe for an "accident" right there ... I've also watched close calls like that so many times in this area. You simply can't put a cop on every corner to do enforcement of that - maybe some automated camera systems would do it, but so does daylighting the intersections like they do in Hoboken.
And the other problem is that any time you do something that even vaguely could cause an increase in driving time, people will rage. I've seen public comment sessions where the planners literally showed the data that adding a bike lane wouldn't increase travel times during peak and actually decrease traffic and people were like "well, I don't believe it, my commute is going to slow down for sure". Same with even simpler things like speed cameras ("cash grab"), heck even increased police activity (also "cash grab"). You can show data that it will save people's lives, even children's lives, and people (even on HN) will say "but the economy... and efficiency...".
>For a pedestrian or cyclist, though, getting hit by a large truck or SUV is a different story, primarily because the shape and frontal area are so much larger,
Especially if they have raised it, which seems very common in places like Florida.
Honestly, I don't think the weight of the car matters too much in an accident with a bicycle or pedestrian. I was hit a few times by cars at low speed (10-20 km/h) while riding my motorcycle and the weight of the car did not matter, when I was rear ended if the car was 20% (300 kg) lighter it would still be 4 times the mass of (me + bike), so the impact would be similar. A car versus a pedestrian is almost identical if the car is 1000 kg or 2000 kg.
Yeah, I think the primary difference is the geometry - the SUVs and trucks present an almost flat surface and cause much more head and neck trauma - and in the visibility and controllability of the vehicle.
> Regulators are ill-equipped to address the issue: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's rating system focuses on occupant safety, not the safety of other road users, and tax policies subsidize heavier vehicles.
Ill-equipped, or asleep at the wheel? NHTSA could extend their rating system to incorporate the safety of people outside the tested vehicle, but have failed to.
Who is the target audience? Insurance companies already have the statistics. Buyers care about occupant safety and would largely ignore a pedestrian safety rating.
If you tried to force it into a combined rating you'd probably make the problem worse because then people would know that large vehicles are being punished in safety ratings and refuse to buy small vehicles even more than they do now because they can't distinguish whether a good safety rating is from occupant or pedestrian safety.
> people currently buying unnecessarily large vehicles wouldn't have a lot of overlap
Maybe I'm naive, but I think most people buying large vehicles aren't selfish, they're ill-informed and susceptible to social pressure and advertising.
The only reason I say this is because most people have big cars in the US now. But they're also objectively worse for most commuters. It doesn't add up.
Another thing when it comes to large heavy vehicles being more dangerous, is that our current guard rail design has become something that is increasingly likely to kill you. There’s a channel dedicated to the subject due to the creators personal tragedy with them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrR81g1ZkRQ
> The weight of a vehicle is a critical factor in car crashes, with heavier vehicles causing more fatalities in other cars, pedestrians, and cyclists.
In a high speed collision between two cars I can see how a weight difference could greatly increase the danger in the lighter vehicle.
In a collision between a car and a pedestrian I don't see how weight could make much of a difference.
Yes, I know that if car A weighs 50% more than car B then at a given speed A will have 1.5 times as much momentum and 2.5 times as much kinetic energy as car B, but when there is a large mass difference between the thing doing the hitting (the car in this case) and the thing being hit (a pedestrian) momentum and kinetic energy don't really matter.
Think of it this way. A large freight train moving at 1 km/hr will have way more momentum and kinetic energy than a Ford F-150 moving at 80 km/hr, but getting hit by the freight train probably wouldn't seriously hurt you (unless you happened to fall and it ran over you) whereas an 80 km/hr F-150 would very likely kill you on impact.
From what I've read the problem with these vehicles in pedestrian collisions is with the shape of the front of them. They tend to have high, fairly vertical, front ends which can sweep you up so you are rapidly accelerated to the velocity of that car. Damage would be similar to what you'd get if you fell at the velocity of the car onto a rigid surface. Cars with lower, most slanted, front ends toss you onto the hood and over the car, which is much less likely to kill you.
> Carmakers prioritize consumer preferences over safety: Manufacturers are producing increasingly heavier vehicles, driven by consumer demand for larger, more powerful cars, despite the safety risks to others.
That is prioritizing safety - of the very customers themselves, whose preferences very much do include safety! Sounds like the market functioning exactly as designed. And sounds like we need regulation here.
Is a near ideal example of why free markets can lead to a worse overall result, yeah. Everyone wants to be individually safer, this is all a reasonable trajectory brought on by incremental steps in that direction.
We desperately need regulation. The market won't turn itself around, it'll just ensure the ones that are helping are killed the quickest.
The question is, what regulation? If you just try to ban or heavily tax larger vehicles, well, there are legitimate reasons to have those sometimes. Businesses need trucks and you don't want heavy taxes on innocent small businesses. Parents involved in school activities are regularly transporting entire sports teams etc. and putting a dozen kids in two vehicles is safer and more efficient than three or four vehicles.
So you need some way to distinguish the people buying large SUVs for these reasons from the people buying them out of schlong insufficiency, but nobody seems to have a good way to do that.
Off the top of my head - a large vehicle license, which comes with increased taxes or fees or something. Businesses that require those vehicles can pay it. And maybe we can even have waivers or something for small businesses, or non-profits, or households with 4+ kids.
> Businesses that require those vehicles can pay it.
This is not distinguishing between them at all, it's just adding a new tax that makes everything cost more.
> And maybe we can even have waivers or something for small businesses, or non-profits, or households with 4+ kids.
At which point everyone claims to be a small business. Also, if someone has one child rather than four, that doesn't mean they aren't regularly transporting that child's entire sports/drama/music group to events.
> it's just adding a new tax that makes everything cost more.
Yeah, this is how you discourage people. The license on top is super inconvenient too. I mean, who wants to go to the DMV and take a special test just for their ego booster?
> At which point everyone claims to be a small business
I imagine you have hard requirements, it's not like anyone can just say so.
> Also, if someone has one child rather than four, that doesn't mean they aren't regularly transporting that child's entire sports/drama/music group to events.
Okay. But are they? Because the situation we're in right now, currently, that we're trying to solve is that the average number of passengers in a vehicle is 1.5 and the majority of vehicles are SUVs and trucks.
I don't know, I guess those people can just pay the tax. Or, better yet, don't buy a vehicle to optimize for 1% of your driving time.
If this discourages car pooling, I say "meh". Car pooling is already basically not a thing, and pretty much all trucks can only hold 5 people. You know... the same amount of people as a compact sedan.
Accident where two car ram into each other, where the weight is useful, are the minority, the vast majority is a single vehicle hitting a stationary obstacle.
US cars high clearance (and I don't want to be inflammatory, but poor average driver skills) do not help them stay on the road. I'm not sure safety is increased overall Tbf.
All of this. Plus the exhaust gasses and tire wear pollutants causing early deaths. The noise (bigger) cars make disrupting quiet places like parks and porches, balconies, bedrooms causing stress. The waste of used cars, often being transported to third world countries.
Cars kill in so many ways, especially big cars.
Is this a tragedy of the commons, or am I misapplying this term? At an individual level it makes complete sense to put your family into the safest car possible - your thoughts are with you and your family, not the strangers around you.
Personal automobile ownership is the source of more tragedies of the commons than anything else I can think of. The only personally incurred negative externality that comes to mind at the moment would be the decreased likelihood of having a healthy lifestyle based on decreased need to walk anywhere.
You still increase death risk of your children simple by sitting them in car. Car accidents are leading cause of death of children in wealth countries.
> Regulators are ill-equipped to address the issue: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's rating system focuses on occupant safety, not the safety of other road users
Not a big enough deal. Pedestrian airbags are a thing that have been invented, but are scarecely on cars or trucks. Same with external cameras for better visibility. Lots of dragging feet from the industry.
This is my concern as well, it becomes a weapons race towards the most idiot-sized vehicle possible, since a reasonably sized vehicle will put you at a survival disadvantage.
I live in Denmark, where this problem is yet very much in its infancy, but it's a clear trend. I hope regulation catches up. Some kind of bounding-box volume and weight restriction would be nice.
There is weight restriction, 3500 kg albeit that is too much already. I would go just with strict limit on energy consumption, fuel specific one. Effectively stop too large EVs too.
What about the internal organs of people in big cars? IIRC, a long time ago, after a serious collision, paramedics were at first puzzled as to why the seemingly unharmed person behind the wheel was dead. Later it turned out that their internal organs had been ripped out of their arteries because big cars have/have much worse impact zones than smaller cars.
You have that story confused or backwards. Occasionally vehicle crash victims will suffer such internal injuries, mainly the elderly who already have weak blood vessels. But big cars don't have worse crumple zones, rather the opposite.
It's not "heavier vehicles", it's trucks. A lot of pickup trucks (and the SUVs based on them) were designed to prioritize load carrying capacity over occupant safety and have worse safety features than other passenger vehicles despite being heavier, and it turns out that matters.
Despite how large vehicles are getting, people don't seem to want to have other passengers in them. Single-occupant vehicles account for something like 75% of daily commuters. Between safety concerns, sedentary lifestyles, road congestion, and the loneliness epidemic, you'd think there would be a push to reduce that number.
"Heavier vehicles are safer for their occupants.."
Only if the other vehicle is smaller/lighter. SUVs were relatively uncommon when this perception of safety was established. Its now just something people like to tell themselves as justification for buying an even bigger car.
Part of the problem is that carmakers refuse to sell small cars. If you don’t believe me try to buy a small car at a car dealership in America.
Consumers are angry about rising costs, particularly for automobiles, and having a choice to buy an affordable vehicle could be surprisingly popular.
For instance I think electric vehicle adoption is stalled because there aren’t many people who can afford a $105k pickup truck with limited range while towing (e.g. you might really need a big-ass vehicle if you trailer your horse to Ocala, FL every year, but no way you are going to make your animals sit through 20-30 charging stops). A $20k electric with (say) a 60 mile range would get me to and from work and able to do shopping and would be a great second or third car for many households.
All it takes is asking BYD what they need to enter the market.
>Part of the problem is that carmakers refuse to sell small cars. If you don’t believe me try to buy a small car at a car dealership in America.
>Consumers are angry about rising costs, particularly for automobiles, and having a choice to buy an affordable vehicle could be surprisingly popular.
Consumers may claim they care about rising costs, but the fact that more expensive SUVs are outselling sedans makes me think it's the consumers who are refusing to buy small cars, rather than carmakers refusing to sell them.
> it's the consumers who are refusing to buy small cars
I think it's more complicated. Consumers are stupid, or rather, easily manipulated.
SUVs and Trucks have much higher margins than sedans and other small cars. It is advantage to any car manufacturer to sell mostly SUVs and Trucks because you get more money per unit of work. Essentially, you do 110% of the work of a sedan but charge 150%-200% as much. It's a no brainer.
So of course the advertisements primarily focus on SUVs and Trucks. I don't know how much free will consumers truly have in a system with such intense advertising.
Poor people would like smaller cars, but they buy used cars, not new cars. Affluent people buy new cars and want big SUVs. Of course, then that's what ends up on the used market after a few years.
Try buying a sedan. Most of them have been discontinued by the manufacturer as of 2024 or the dealer won’t have one in stock or if they do have one in stock it won’t have power windows or they’ll have some excuse why they can’t sell you one.
They did it to my dad when he tried to buy a small car in he 1970s and it was a policy of American car dealers except around a short period after he 2008 financial crisis. What is relatively new is that Japanese car dealers started doing the same after the 2008 crisis abated.
>Try buying a sedan. Most of them have been discontinued by the manufacturer as of 2024 or the dealer won’t have one in stock or if they do have one in stock it won’t have power windows or they’ll have some excuse why they can’t sell you one.
>They did it to my dad when he tried to buy a small car in he 1970s and it was a policy of American car dealers except around a short period after he 2008 financial crisis.
What you said about sedans being hard to procure might be true today, but there's no way it was an issue back in the 70s. Eyeballing the chart in the article[1], 3 in 4 cars produced were sedans. It strains credibility to claim that it was hard to buy a sedan. Even today, sedans account for 1 in 4 cars produced. That's a huge drop, but there's no way that the buying experience is as difficult as you make it out to be.
The problem in the 1970s were bloated FR sedans that had a huge engine compartment but a relatively cramped passenger compartment partitioned by the transmission and driveshaft. Got 12mpg under good conditions, the more you spent the more likely you blew the head gaskets at 20k miles or had intermittent problems with the automatic transmission that no amount of rebuilding would fix.
Japanese FF sedans and hatchbacks were a breath of fresh air because they fixed all those problems. Volkswagen also made RR vehicles like the bug that were radically simple, affordable and reliable but never made the investment to make the comply with new emissions regulation and instead they came out with the Rabbit which was initially OK but the price went up and quality went down and now you have the Golf which appeals to people hypnotized by the German nameplate.
Myself it’s not a sedan that I want but a hatchback. I currently drive a Fit, but since they quit making it I will think more than twice before getting another Honda.
> or the dealer won’t have one in stock or if they do have one in stock it won’t...
This bit of American instant-gratification-addiction has always felt weird to me, and I think most Europeans (at least those who even know of this difference). Like, a new car is a pretty huge purchase. Why would you ever buy one that isn't exactly the way you want it, when all you have to do is order it with the exact options you want and then wait a few weeks?
There are Nissan Leafs available for consumers who want a relatively cheap small BEV. But the average new car transaction price is now about $47K so it seems most buyers are willing to pay more for something larger and nicer.
There's no way that BYD will be allowed to sell many cars in the USA regardless of potential benefits to consumers. It's too risky to increase our economic dependence on a country which is at best a strategic competitor and at worst perhaps an adversary. Both of our main political parties are now generally aligned to that viewpoint and it won't change at least as long as Chairman Xi remains in power.
>Part of the problem is that carmakers refuse to sell small cars. If you don’t believe me try to buy a small car at a car dealership in America.
Driving a small compact car on an American freeway would be terrifying. I have a small (by US standards) car at home, but I hired a big (by European standards) car when holidaying in the US.
It is notieable that there are more and more huge SUVs and pickups appearing in the UK, even though our roads and parking spaces are not designed for them.
You’re not wrong. But only because Democrats are terrible at messaging (and seem allergic to getting better at it). “We’ll get you needlessly dead for our own power” isn’t exactly a popular policy position if someone is willing to call it what it is.
> The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's rating system focuses on occupant safety, not the safety of other road users, and tax policies subsidize heavier vehicles.
Sociopathic. Regulations and safety standards should be updated to consider both occupants' and others' safety.
The auto manufacturers won't like this, because they are cheap and greedy.
Yeah, there is. It's called everyone having an automated driving system like FSD. The NHTSA is too concerned with me taking my eyes off the road for 2 seconds while FSD is enabled versus getting manufacturers to actually implement this stuff.
Why can I take my eyes off the road with FSD off and not with it on? They should mandate driver monitoring in every car when you're not driving with an autonomous system. As a motorcycle rider also, I'm telling you that everyone is literally on their phone when driving. I can see it all because I sit higher than everyone else. That's what the NHTSA should focus on.
Lots of countries beyond Western world have growing middle class and rich people with big carbon footprint. Framing it just a Western issue is very outdated.
...and also inaccurate. The two western countries in the top 10 for CO2 emmissions are USA (#2) and Germany (#8). Per Capita there are none, with many of the "poor little countries" we're supposedly destroying represented.
And this kind of thinking is how we end up with a society shown in the move Idiocracy. While you and your loved ones might survive at the cost of other more considerate people BUT the human race will become slightly dumber.
I can’t really understand where you’re coming from. Self preservation is at the absolute core of us all. You can’t honestly expect the average human to put the lives of unknown strangers before the lives of their own, as you say, loved ones.
Sounds like it's safest for me and my family to physically prevent you from doing that.
See how deranged this line of escalation is? How sick in the soul I would have to be to choose to harm your family to increase the safety of mine? Can you see what kind of world you're building when you advocate this?
Well put. The extrem version is a world where everybody is expected to kill the people in the other car that killed a loved one, nullifying every advantage that choosing your own safety over another’s might have.
> Well put. The extreme version is a world where everybody is expected to kill
This is a pretty bad argument, the extreme doesn't necessarily define the middle. The extreme version of free speech is a world where fraud is legal. The extreme version of fire safety is a building with openings everywhere so there's no need for doors. The extreme version of policing is having cops follow you everywhere, including into your house. You can't just reason like that.
It sounds like the safest thing for you and your family is to buy a heavier car also. You’re also not literally making that choice between someone else’s family and your own. How many people have you killed while driving? Me, zero, after decades of driving. My parents are well into their old age, have driven heavy cars their whole lives, and still haven’t killed anyone. In fact, out of many people I’ve known, with all shapes and sizes of car, the only one (as far as I’m aware) who killed someone was drunk, and drove a small sports car very fast and killed someone.
To be fair to your argument, you _are_ talking about a “line of escalation” and an issue with a lot of moral complexity. I’m not even saying you’re wrong, rather just that I think you can’t view it so simply. Do you have kids or a husband or a wife? Could you _really_ put their own lives before strangers, or do you just want to see a world where people give more compassion to their fellow human? Because I want that too; I’m just not willing to sacrifice my loved ones for it.
> Sounds like it's safest for me and my family to physically prevent you from doing that. See how deranged this line of escalation is? How sick in the soul I would have to be to choose to harm your family to increase the safety of mine?
I wouldn't throw stones, we all live in glass houses.
Pedestrians (and cyclists, etc.) could say the exact same thing about car drivers - they're putting their lives at much higher risk by not biking (or using a motorcycle, or public transportation, etc.). Heck, drivers are also endangering pedestrians' children through global warming. If you really tried you could probably name a dozen more examples of ordinary people like yourself putting others at risk for their own benefits.
This isn't to say the parent's decision is great, but that this sort of counterargument isn't all that strong, either.
> How sick in the soul I would have to be to choose to harm your family to increase the safety of mine?
First of all, this is human nature 101. Secondly, simply owning a large vehicle does not equate to 'harming your family'. Bad/impaired drivers are responsible for that. Any other inanimate objects people shouldn't own because you don't like them? People aren't going to simply put their families in Fiat's with Escalade's on the road to show solidarity with the "we need smaller cars" movement.
"Think of the children" or not, it really doesn't matter the size of the vehicle. A SmartCar, or even a motorcycle, at 30 mph is likely to kill your kid too.
Assuming weight doesn't matter, it's also a question of visibility. Large SUVs and trucks have such high waistlines and poor front and side visibility that I could easily see a child running out thinking they were visible when they weren't.
The comment ignores the discussion points around broader public safety, comments in a fashion criticized by the points made, and makes no effort to address any issue.
I think it's worth flagging, but also worth noting the issues in case it wasn't intentional.
Basic arguments for hypocrisy about actual care about environment. Trend of making cars bigger and "safer" proofs, that consumers and car manufacturers dont care about fuel consumption and increasing pollution.
You must drive a smaller car so others around you are safer. Just like how you have to vaccinated to protect others. Its part of the social contract that you signed, duh.
Actually medical ethics rejects herd immunity as the purpose of vaccination. All the recommended vaccinations are because the benefit to the individual vaccinated significantly outweighs the cost to them. Herd immunity is a public health benefit but ethically it wouldn't be enough to justify the intervention.
For HPV for example, the reason there's a period when it was given to girls not boys is that the evidence wasn't available to show a benefit for the boys. Obviously vaccinating boys means they're less likely to give the disease to anybody they have sex with, but that's not a personal benefit and so it's not an ethical reason to recommend vaccinating boys. The evidence that they wouldn't get a bunch of other rarer cancers caused by HPV was enough reason to vaccinate boys, and that arrived later.
That ethical dilemma about sacrificing one patient to save more? That's not a thing.
I caught the bad HPV variant early in my sex life (the one with buttons on the thighs, I think it's HPV 9 but my memory is fuzzy) and still have scars, as well as a long period of shame and shyness, so get vaccinated young guys, especially if you go in a hippy squat :D
I hate sounding like a broken record but my belief is that car makers are more excited about XXXXL cars in American than car buyers are. The media is consistently complicit in covering this up, sounding like the brainwashed soldiers in The Manchurian Candidate
It's not to say that we don't like big cars because we do, but walk into a car dealership looking for a small car and they will tell you they are out of stock of new ones of the model you want because the factory washed out in a flood but then they have 100 SUVs in a row unsold that nobody wants to buy made in the same factory. Your only choice is a used return that somebody sold back to them yesterday afternoon.
Go into a dealership looking for an S car and they will try to sell you an L, go in looking for an M and get an XL and so forth. If you drive out with a $25,000 car when you could could of driven out with a $50,000 car they perceive it as a $25,000 loss! No wonder mainstream car brands can't sell electrics.
Ford has no compact hatchback or sedan in the U.S., only the Brazilian built EcoSport. They killed all their cars in favour of CUVs and SUVs. Chevrolet no longer has the Sonic, having nixed those in 2022. Honda no longer has the Fit as of two years ago. Mitsubishi no longer sells the Mirage as of last month. Dodge hasn't had anything since the Dart died in 2016. The Jeep Renegade's gone as of October of last year. Hyundai had the Veloster, but those are all sold as top trim Veloster Turbo Premiums or Ns even when they were being sold. The current Hyundai Ioniq 5 is more of a mid-size and is also expensive for the size. Kia has the Forte, but it's dragging out a slow death this year. Toyota has the Yaris and Prius C, but the Yaris has grown quite large, and the Prius C is quite high priced. Nissan killed the Versa Note in 2022, so you can't get those either.
It's all been replaced with "compact" CUVs that have the exterior dimensions of a mid-size hatchback.
I have heard people lamenting the loss of small trucks for 20 years. There has never been another one as small or as light as a Ford Ranger or Toyota RN Pickup from the 90s. Rangers stopped being made and the Tacoma that replaced the Pickup got larger every model year until it was bigger and heavier than the original Tundra. It really is ridiculous because people love the utility of those smaller, more efficient old trucks. (More efficient relative to their contemporaries, at the very least. Other efficiency improvements would have come to them as well, if they still existed as a category.) Not everyone wants a land barge.
A Renault Kangoo has twice the storage space as a F-150. One of those fits in the street parking spaces around here. The other sticks out a significant amount on all sides.
Big american SUVs are not only big. They are also just badly designed.
I bought a Ford Maverick a few weeks back and absolutely loving it. It’s the size of what used to be the Ranger before the Ranger grew to be an F150, the F150 grew to be an F250, and so on.
There are actually quite a few reasons why sedans stuck around.
One is separation of the passenger cabin from the cargo area. More than once I've accidentally bonked someone in the head putting something in the hatch or have had a dog escape because they managed to leap over the seat and get out through the open hatch. It's also easier to hide valuables in the trunk, as there's no indication anything's in there unlike the open rear deck of a hatchback you can see through the windows.
Another is lower center of gravity. There's not a large chunk of metal and glass above the beltline. This helps handling characteristics and makes it easier to engineer predictable patterns for the suspension. It also helps tire wear as there's less lateral force on the sidewall from the lowered center of gravity.
There's also the structural rigidity. Sedans have a slightly higher structural rigidity to them than hatchbacks due to the three box shape creating cross bracing. It makes it easier to engineer them to survive a crash without harming the occupants.
And lastly there's aerodynamics. Many hatchback designs in the modern era are extremely rounded for stylistic reasons. This is terrible for aerodynamic efficiency compared to a proper Kammback rear design. A sedan with a properly designed rear windshield and trunk actually has far less parasitic drag because it creates a much smaller area of low pressure air directly at the farthest rear edge of the vehicle. Unless you drive a Ford Fiesta sedan, in which case you're getting the worst of everything. If you've ever seen those monstrosities that BMW calls an "X5 Coupe" this is them trying and failing to apply the Kammback aerodynamics of a modern sedan to an SUV.
> More than once I've accidentally bonked someone in the head putting something in the hatch or have had a dog escape because they managed to leap over the seat and get out through the open hatch.
There a basic nets and if one is extreme cages which separate the boot from the second row.
> It's also easier to hide valuables in the trunk, as there's no indication anything's in there unlike the open rear deck of a hatchback you can see through the windows.
Pretty much every hatchback I've seen in the last 20 years here in Europe has a removable cover.
They're spinning Mustang off into a sub-brand, like Chrysler did for Imperial. We're set to get a Mustang "offroader" sometime in 2027, and there's rumblings of a mid-size CUV to slot below the full-size Mach-E. Marketing loves these rub-off schemes meant to give inferior or fledgling products some of the shine of a halo product. They almost always end up failing, and even when they don't they damage the halo products after the first round of releases using the shared name.
I think the marketing term is 'line extension'. It very rarely seems like a good idea. As you say, even if it makes money in the short term, it almost certainly loses money by damaging the brand in the long term.
Hyundai has Elantra with its 45+ MPG (with a regular ICE), distinctive exterior, advanced safety features (at least in Limited trim), and above average manufacturer warranty.
Some of us actively hate big cars for daily use and are angered at the "SUV" (usually neither sport nor utility) unithink forced on us, and are frustrated how hard it is to find anything different.
I want basically an electric Miata for around town, can't get one.
I also want an actual utility vehicle with a long, solid, roof rack to haul a canoe or sheet of plywood. SUV roof racks are usually token, if at all. A plain old "station wagon" that's not 6 feet tall would be just fine but they don't make those any more. I settle for an Outback but it's not ideal.
They make all of the cars you want except for the electric Miata which would sell in such low quantities that it would have to be priced higher than the Taycan to be viable. Nobody's spending $180k on a Mazda.
You just don't want them.
I have a Fiat Spider for fun, and a Volvo V60 wagon for utility. My wife is 5'3" and is taller, barely, than the V60.
The Spider is dead and the Miata is dying because global sales have tanked and Mazda's only selling 6-8,000 per year in the US.
The V60 is dying because almost everyone who says they want a station wagon is lying, either outright or to themselves, and they buy a compact SUV instead. Commenters will shout in all caps on the internet that NOBODY MAKES A STATION WAGON ANYMORE, walk onto a Volvo lot, right past the V60 and drive off in an XC60.
I imagine the A4 Allroad (also a station wagon that doesn't exist!) is also on life support.
And before you go on about price, Mazda, Honda, and Toyota all sold inexpensive wagons in the US until past the point that it became financially negligent for them to do so anymore.
Nobody wanted them.
Consumers weren't tricked, brainwashed, hoodwinked, scammed, or flabbergasted-- customers did not want them so they didn't buy them so manufacturers stopped selling them-- in the US at least, you can still buy inexpensive wagons, with manual transmissions, all over the rest of the world.
> Consumers weren't tricked, brainwashed, hoodwinked, scammed, or flabbergasted-- customers did not want them so they didn't buy them so manufacturers stopped selling them
Consumers were marketed to -- i.e. tricked, brainwashed, hoodwinked, and scammed[1] -- into not wanting them so manufacturers could stop selling them and sell them SUVs in stead.
___
[1]: Not flabbergasted, though; that means something else.
The original Tesla roadster of the type orbiting near Mars was basically an electric Miata. I guess they didn't sell enough although the price was a lot less than $180k.
Unfortunately, EVs in the United States are prioritized for range now and range is a function of battery size, with a corresponding penalty of cost and weight.
There are still a few EVs models available in the US that are relatively light compared to the mainstream models, and most are going to be old/used models.
e.g. Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt, Fiat 500E, BMW i3, Volkswagen eGolf.
None of the above will be in the low 2000 lbs curb weight territory that is part of the Miata driving feel, but they are the closest you can practically find.
Your comment shows how bad car culture is. You think you're the enlightened one, but you want an electric sports car for getting "around town"? People should be walking or cycling around town. Cars are actively harmful to towns. Cars have led to generations of people who don't realise they are capable of walking further than a few steps between car and building. A kind of learned helplessness. When you step outside of car culture it's really sad to see.
> People should be walking or cycling around town.
This. Is a very out of touch opinion. I could write 20 paragraphs disagreeing, but I doubt it is worth my time to write or anyone else’s to read.
Not every person is able-bodied enough to walk and bike. Also, people happen to need to get from A to B when it is cold, dark, raining, extremely hot, snowing, or just some kind of shitty outside. People need to drive to a store for food or supplies that cannot be carried or biked back to the destination. People have multiple children that simply cannot walk or bike. Old people cannot simply walk or bike.
This concept of a car-less world is just so completely out of touch with reality, saying it louder isn’t going to change anything.
>Not every person is able-bodied enough to walk and bike
And the same goes for cars, except kids can ride bikes, so car accessibility is actually just worse.
>Also, people happen to need to get from A to B when it is cold, dark, raining, extremely hot, snowing, or just some kind of shitty outside
You can walk or cycle in all of those conditions. In fact, I have walked or cycled in all of those conditions in the past 6 months.
>People need to drive to a store for food or supplies that cannot be carried or biked back to the destination
There's very little that can't be carried on a bike or public transport, but you can always rent a car for a couple hours if needed. Let's be real, that's not why 99.9% of people are driving cars.
>People have multiple children that simply cannot walk or bike
Where I live it's common to see mothers cycle with their kids on child seats in their bikes.
And where I live it's 110F+ for three months of the year. No one sane is biking or walking anywhere as it's too dangerous. Not everyone lives in some temperate small European city.
First off, you're exaggerating. There is no place on earth that averages 40C for 3 months.
Second,I live in Tokyo, where the summer has been miserable with average temperatures of 32C, with regular highs of 36+ with 80% humidity. And yet I walked and biked everywhere and was just fine, and that's true for most of the 40M people that live here as well.
Third, it sounds like you live in a place that's not suitable for humans, you should probably move instead of making the planet even hotter for everyone else by living in your steel boxes with AC.
I didn't say average, and the highs are higher for many days. It sounds like you've never been in extreme heat, there's a huge difference between 89F and 110+F. More people are moving here than are leaving.
My "anecdote" is the fact that I live in Tokyo where we get extreme weather regularly and yet the vast majority of trips are taken by public transport, walking or biking.
You could start with a list of things the rest of the world would need in order to emulate Tokyo, which basically means turning the entire world into a walk-able city only involving the temperate band hf the planet. If you would like me to hold your hand though generating this list of material and labor costs, I'm not going to do that. If you want me to put on a PM hat and give you a sample schedule and estimated costs, I'm not going to do that either.
If you can't even figure out how to look up _anything_ about how to implement your plan, how the fuck do you expect it to ever become a reality?
You seem to not understand the point of this conversation. You admit Tokyo is a walkable city. And you think it’s impossible to convert existing infrastructure to be like Tokyo. The point of this conversation is existing infra is the way it is because of various influences and choices, some of which can be called “car culture.”
Car culture is not a foregone conclusion. Claiming 100% of the world has to be converted to Tokyo and if that is not possible then we should give up is hilarious. What an illogical, sad and pitiful argument/attitude. Cities are being changed every day, and those ongoing investments can be made to make cities more car dependent or not.
Not to mention there are A Lot of cities more dependent on cars than lots of other cities many with nearly identical climates. Tokyo isn’t the only one lol. It’s not some magical unicorn.
I agree that thinking the entire world could be replaced with Tokyo style infrastructure is incredibly unreasonable. But that’s a very fringe idea. And rejecting the rest of the conversation from that and thinking the entire conversation is about that just as silly. And frankly you haven’t even been able to engage enough to understand what they mean by it. For all you know they mean something much more reasonable than you’re imagining, but you’re so quick to jump to thought terminating cliches you can’t have a productive conversation. I don’t know why you bother to participate if you won’t participate. Try being curious and finding common ground, you might learn something.
> Not every person is able-bodied enough to walk and bike
This is true, but it also true that not every person is able to drive a car. In fact the inability to drive is way more common than the inability to walk.
Literally nobody is arguing against public transport. If you actually take the time to look into the issue you'll see it's private vehicles that are the problem. Able-bodied people using private vehicles make it significantly more difficult for those less able.
So you think most people are incapable of walking or cycling? And you're saying I'm out of touch?!
As for cold, dark, raining. Boo fucking hoo. If you had to go somewhere you'd deal with it. Cars have made people into weak, incapable little creatures. It's honestly pathetic.
I cycle with food and supplies in my panniers all the time. What exactly are you buying every week that can't be transported back without fossil fuel assistance?
You don't think children can walk or bike? Are you crazy? A healthy child doesn't want to sit still. They're capable of locomotion from about age 3.
Old people can get around too. Sure there are some who can't but it's not a majority. Again, cars have taught us this helplessness.
I just wish I could take car people outside of their reality for just a week or so. Once you see it from the outside it's so apparent. But I guess some people aren't ready to leave the Matrix. And some will fight to protect it.
> As for cold, dark, raining. Boo fucking hoo. If you had to go somewhere you'd deal with it. Cars have made people into weak, incapable little creatures. It's honestly pathetic.
You clearly have no respect for Mother Nature if this is your stance. Take care.
I do, so when I'm in the mountains I check the forecast and keep an eye on the weather. But when I'm in town? You think people are getting caught out by the weather and stranded in town? Where exactly is this "town" you speak of?
You really think it's not possible to buy food without a car? Classic American, claiming X thing is an impossible pie-in-the-sky dream when there are loads of other countries that do X thing just fine.
I walked to get groceries today, so I guess we're even on the anecdata
In cities that aren't completely car-centric and have mixed-use development, you don't need a car to get groceries, because everything is close enough to walk. Again, plenty of countries do this just fine, proving it is not impossible.
It’s not the reality that we live in. Most of the world is not a town or city of temperate climate where everything is within a half hour walk or bike ride.
I will never understand how this point is just glossed over and excused away. Ignoring the boundaries of reality doesn’t make said boundaries magically go away.
You seem to be assuming the way it is cannot be changed when much of the relevant factors are human choices that can be done differently.
I love my car but I’m really confused why you’re so aggressive about thinking cars are the only way to live.
People in a city can comfortably walk and bike in many cases, and take public transport in most other cases. I do, because I live in NYC.
But the US has very few cities proper (mostly those which grew big before that advent of the car), and even those have uneven density and thus efficiency of walking or taking a bus.
A ton of what the US taste call cities is sprawling low-density almost-suburbia surrounding a few high-density "downtown" areas. See Houston, TX for an impressive example. Biking in such places is possible but tiring, walking is mostly pointless unless you visit your neighbor or a park, and running a subway is uneconomical.
You're right, but doing otherwise is almost impossible in North America. Everything is made to benefit big business owning big box retail stores and put mom and pop small retailers out of business. If you don't have a car you may pretty much starve except for a few cities in US and Canada. No wonder online shopping is becoming so popular, it is anti-human to get into a car and then be forced to walk a mile inside a big retail store to make a small purchase.
People in US suburbs frequently live several miles from their town center, if they even have a town center at all.
Cycling simply isn’t viable to large swaths of the US. There isn’t an easy answer to this either, given that you’d probably need to tear down entire neighborhoods and rebuild a more dense town
E-bikes fix most of those problems. A 10 mile trip, out and back, at 20mph, with no concern for loss of momentum at stop signs and lights is easily do-able by anyone who doesn't need mobility aids.
In that case all the retail will go out to the suburbs and they’ll lose the jobs and have to drive out to the suburbs to go shopping. Or just lose the jobs to AMZN warehouses even further away.
Except in a lot of places where it’s easy to use public transportation and bikes, it’s still useful to own a car for around town to places a bit further away. Or when it would take you 1.5 hours by public transit (even in areas with good public transit!) vs 0.5 hours by car, on a 110 F day. This thread is about car choice, which doesn’t mean people don’t use other options when they make sense.
You should at least admit that this is an American problem. No-one in my family has a driver's license and it's not an issue whatsoever. There's very little reason to own a car in a society with a functioning public transport system.
It’s funny, a couple decades ago I studied in Vienna. I was amazed at how great their public transit was! I didn’t need a car to get around. But I made a local friend there, and at first I was surprised she had a car there. Then, yeah it made sense if you still live somewhere other than city center. Buses to metro to something on the other side of the city could still take a long time. Add cargo, a kid? No, this isn’t an American thing. Go look at how many people own cars across Europe. Plenty of people do.
I don't agree with the premise or the conclusion. There's little reason to own a car in a dense, urban area with a functional public transport system. I wouldn't bother to maintain a car if I lived in the middle of Tokyo or Amsterdam, but when you get away from the urban core, most people still own and need cars in Japan and the Netherlands.
I don't think it is fair to say that it is an "American problem". Not owning a car could be realistic if you live in a really large city where moving with public transport can potentially be faster than moving with a car. But even then I wonder how a family with kids would carry groceries unless you live right next to a supermarket.
Often times in HN you get the impression like americans are the only ones using cars to get around, but at least where I live (Finland) families generally own at least one car even if good public transportation is available. In 2021, 89% of adult men and 76% of women had a drivers license and I would say that commuting to work with a car is more common than with public transport. Despite having decent public transportation, it is just seen more convenient to use the car.
If you live in a city, you typically go to a supermarket 3-5 times a week. And if your family is small enough to fit in a normal car, you can easily carry the groceries. Those trips don't take too much time either, because urban supermarkets are smaller than suburban hypermarkets and designed for quick visits.
Going to a grocery store a few times a week is not a lot of effort. Urban grocery stores are nearby, they are optimized for quick visits, and you can often buy groceries when returning from somewhere else.
You should have emergency food at home, but many kinds of fresh foods are best eaten within a day or two. If you only go to a grocery store once a week, the quality of the food you eat is worse.
I had a friend from the Bronx visiting the other day who told me how trips across the East river that were 20-30 min by car are 2 hours by subway thanks to the Manhattan-centric nature of the system. A friend who lives in NJ close to the West River couldn’t believe I was riding the PATH train to the Red Bulls Stadium when it takes so much longer than driving. (Answer: I’m a railfan)
I fully agree and look forward to being down modded like you due to lazy people.
The only people who live in Cities that should be allowed to use cars are the ones with very real health issues and businesses that transport real physical products to heavy or large to carry.
Plus, no Trucks with trailers should be allowed in any city.
Honestly, Toyota hilux. I'm not a car guy and the utility vehicle I use is not mine and wouldn't be available in the US (it's a 4.5m3, Peugeot I think?), but I've seen Hiluxes everywhere I went, and no matter how old they were, no matter how much miles, dent, missing pieces, they always seems to work. South America, East Africa, Australia but also over Europe, Hilux seems to be a very, very solid light truck, used as one. You should still check reviews, I'm not a car guy, but to me it's the most 'trucky' a light truck can be (unless you want a 2/3 seater).
"I want A and I also want B" has nothing to do with "multiple personalities". GP didn't say they wanted an electric Miata that also is a big station wagon, they said they wanted one and also the other -- two separate vehicles.
Hey, do you eat; do you at least every now and then want food? Do you ever wash; do you at least occasionally want soap? But wait, food isn't soap and soap isn't food -- if you want both, you must need medication for your multiple personalities!
As folks elsewhere have noted, CAFE standards make "light" trucks substantially more profitable than other cars, and so yes, car makers have pushed them aggressively, including with strong marketing campaigns for the last 20 years or so.
All of the arguments from car manufacturers that they're just "answering consumer demand" ignores the point that they manufactured that demand. Change the tax structures and incentives, make trucks as expensive for the manufacturer as they are for society, and you'll see a renaissance of small cars, advertising extolling the virtues of small cars, and a societal shift towards small cars.
CAFE has two problems. The first, as you've mentioned, is the suspect bifurcation of the standards between regular cars and "light trucks".
The second problem is that the footprint-based formulas used within a category do not reflect the practical utility of the vehicles and let larger cars off easier.
A high-roof compact car like the Honda Fit can comfortably carry 5 people and opens up quite well for transporting a lot of stuff. Because it's small and light, it gets great gas mileage especially on the highway. Yet it's penalized by CAFE because it has a small footprint and so is expected to get unrealistically high fuel economy.
Whereas, a larger sedan like the Honda Civic can also carry 5 people (with some more amenities) but has a paltry trunk that can't be used to transport much more than grocery bags. Even as a hatchback, the roof is a lot lower than in the Fit, so it can transport larger items like furniture, but only if they're flat. Yet it scores better on CAFE because its larger footprint allows it to have more realistic fuel economy.
Anecdotally I'm having trouble finding certain small cars in stock (e.g. crown platinum) and suspect there is some self-interest in the dealership to explains this.
I think car-buyers are often under an illusion that an suv is "more car" when actually it's exact same components and just a larger frame. They'd much prefer to sell you the high-margin product and pocket the difference.
Just googled that car and apprently it’s nearly 5 meters long, longer than a BMW 3 Series, it’s funny that’s considered a small car over there because that’d be considered a big one over here (not even mid-sized).
Over here: small is anything from a Smart to a Renault Twingo/Ford Fiesta/VW Polo.
Growing up in the 90s, our family sedan for four people was a Dodge Spirit for awhile. I saw one a couple of years ago, and it's smaller than my Honda Fit.
Now people think they need some ridiculous GMC Yukon for their one kid they sometimes have in the car, though 90% of the time they're just commuting by themselves. Then they whine about gas prices.
This "family cars must be huge" take is a weird take, too. Can a Ford Focus fit a car seat? Yes! Then it's big enough for a couple with a child. I guess I'll add rear doors; even if a car seat would fit in the rear of a coupe, I wouldn't recommend that for anyone.
If your family requires more than 4 seats on a regular basis, sure, get a minivan; but I don't understand the appeal of an F150 or other large vehicle as a "family commuter" for, we'll say, the family of median size.
Two children fit in the back of the Focus until we got rid of it. They were 6 and 9. By that point it got leas squishy because the car seats get smaller with age.
Littlest kid went behind the driver because it was stick.
Even worse, many times SUVs are built on the same chassis as cars. Honda builds both the HR-V and CR-V on the Civic chassis, the Toyota RAV-4 is a Corolla underneath, and the Ford Escape is built on the Focus. This means many mid-sized SUVs are just tall cars.
I switch bt my Camry and my partner's Sportage. The Kia is a lumbering fatsuit of a vehicle only carrying marginally more cargo and feels like a cartoon beach buggy. But as a nation organized for war, we're conditioned to worship infrastructure, uniforms, equipment, clipboards, and the like.
Part of that high margin is because emissions and fuel economy laws are looser for truck-like vehicles, so they make everything a truck-like vehicle to avoid having to comply.
The difference in gas mileage between SUVs and sedans is pretty negligible these days. They're mostly just cars with a different body style. And for the most part they're just flat better which is why they've mostly supplanted cars in the market.
It's really trucks that have gotten stupidly big these days.
Subaru Impreza and Crosstrek are a good example of that. Same engine, same electronics, same everything except a slightly differently shaped shell on the outside. Even the interior volume is practically the same!
That one is especially confusing to me because they even have the imprezza hatchback which likes identical to a crosstrek if you squint your eyes. Maybe they don’t sell that one anymore?
They actually dropped the Impreza sedan in the latest gen, it’s only the hatchback now.
I always disliked the crosstrek since it’s a heavier Impreza on an already dogged engine but they are/were the only manual version so some people were buying them for that.
The Impreza WRX was the rally platform, kind of like how you can get a fast Civic Type R or a Golf GTI as opposed to the "regular" model. In recent years, the WRX has been spun off into a separate line, dropping the Impreza name. The regular Impreza is separate.
The media has a sick tendency to attribute to individual choice situations that are clearly caused by powerful people benefiting from other people's misfortunes. For example, young workers cannot afford houses, becomes "generation XYZ doesn't WANT to buy homes". Workers cannot find good paying jobs becomes "people don't WANT to work anymore"; and so much BS like that we see everyday in our media.
Let's not even talk about the fact that car prices are bordering on a national scam. They will list a certain model at price X, but that is only the price of the base configuration that is never on stock. Add to this all the fees that are practically impossible to escape, and car prices are always 50% or more higher than advertised.
It's an arms race too, I'm in the market for a car now and would prefer something compact for city parking, but given that every _other_ car on the road these days seems to be an enormous SUV, I'm looking at probably at least a crossover so I won't constantly feel like I'm about to get steamrolled by a 4Runner or F150
It clearly is. As the article makes out, the tax code and regulation favours large vehicles. Gas is cheap. Acting alone, there are few reasons to buy a smaller car if you can afford a bigger one. This is exactly the market “working” and why regulation is necessary to change it.
More rules aren't going to fix the problem that more rules created. We need to reduce the amount of regulation on vehicles, specifically the CAFE regulations which are the driver behind large vehicles, and let the real market forces play out. Whenever governmental regulations get involved, the market forces are distorted to what the regulations incentivize, rather than what the people incentivize.
Only if you think that the market should encourage everyone to buy the most expensive thing they can afford. Larger cars are popular with manufacturers and dealers because of higher profit margins. A consumer should be able to pick a smaller, cheaper vehicle if they want it, but this makes their business less desirable. Just because there are few reasons to buy a smaller car does not mean there are no reasons, nor does it make it illogical to prefer one.
I don't know if this is an economic concept that exists, but I'd call it an "accidental cartel." Corporations noticed that serving a particular customer base was less profitable than giving customers fewer, more expensive choices, so the market participants aligned themselves around this strategy until there are no cheaper, lower margin options left. In theory, that leaves an open market for a competitor, but to occupy that niche would be to spend resources on attracting a lower-quality customer (one who is less able to pay more, less interested in paying more, less susceptible to marketing, etc).
1. Lawmakers put an import tax on trucks, and (perhaps not entirely intentionally) made emission standards for SUVs lower than those for cars.
2. US automakers were getting their ass kicked by foreign imports that were much better made in the car segment, but not in the SUV and truck segment.
3. US automakers decided to heavily promote trucks and SUVs, the segments they were most competitive in. You know, pay to make sure all the characters in that TV show are driving SUVs and whatnot.
4. Lawmakers decided to maintain the state of affairs from 1 because they like US automakers.
The idea that "capitalism" somehow magically makes everybody do exactly what any particular person or set of persons want to happen is fascinating. How could one arrive to such a conclusion? No, that's not how "capitalism" works. It does not guarantee that the things you want to happen magically will happen because "market".
> walk into a car dealership looking for a small car and they will tell you they are out of stock of new ones of the model you want because the factory washed out in a flood
Anecdata - We had to buy a car last year to replace our old, but failing car. This matches the experience we had. We were ok with used, so that’s what we ended up with. If you’re on a tight budget, that’s where you’ll end up. From what we read and from what dealers said at the time, car manufacturers hadn’t recovered from COVID supply chain issues. And that is why there were so few small cars. We just accepted that as reality, but parent comment’s explanation would also make sense.
Relatedly, it’s infuriating that American manufacturers are only interested in developing expensive, large, luxury EVs. We slapped a 100% tariff on cheap Chinese EVs… but our domestic companies refuse to develop a $20,000 compact EV!
The cost of new cars in the US is insane. As is the protectionism of the industry. Give me cheap Japanese/Korean cars plzkthx.
The whole idea behind tariffs on Chinese products is that cheap prices will NOT be tolerated. The US is stuck with expensive cars for the foreseeable future.
Arguing from the perspective of maximizing benefit to the producer/seller instead of the public at large speaks to a deep social epidemic. What would you do differently if you owned a cigarette factory? What if you owned Boeing?
All prices of all components are listed, thus I have no reason to hire salesmen. You pick the components as if you are building a PC. There is a huge demand for this, and the savings from fewer middlemen can go elsewhere.
Of course there are several laws and policies on national and statewide levels enshrining the current anti-consumer model because it "creates jobs".
Salesmen are not an expense, they're a profit center. Every company knows this. They will sell more expensive cars and increase the dealer's profit, that's why this model persists.
Except in my imaginary scenario, me being the only dealership doing that would bring me much more from beating the competition. So others would need to adopt my model to compete if I were legally able to do what I claim (see my earlier post.)
Nobody would buy all weather floor mats for 600$ or protective finish applications if you could remove them. That’s why they bundle features you want with those you don’t
You're confusing dealer-added options with factory option packages. Cars bundle features together because they get better economies of scale by making only a few different versions of a model ("trim levels"), instead of letting everyone mix-and-match parts. Factories don't work that well when all the units aren't the same.
Dealer-added options aren't added at a factory, they're added at the dealership, solely for the reason of inflating profit and convincing customers to roll the cost into their loan.
Dealerships are owned by rich people and they contribute a lot of money to local politicians. That's why they won't go away even though they are nothing but parasites.
During normal times they add no value and create negative value for everyone. But during a downturn or when a manufacturer makes a dud model dealers can be forced to buy up excess and slowly feed it into the market as well as absorb the losses
That's not an advantage: in countries where the manufacturers own the dealerships (i.e., every country not named "USA"), they do warranty repair there too.
There really is no advantage to independently-owned dealerships, except maybe in bribes to local politicians.
This is a regulatory incentive problem, plain and simple:
1. CAFE standards use different rules for cars and light trucks. It’s a protectionist move that strongly pushes manufacturers to find ways to get CUV’s on the road instead of hatch backs and sedans.
2. And CAFE uses a “footprint formula” that relaxes standards for larger vehicles.
3. Compound that with a side impact test that started at 3,015 lbs (high) and then was amplified by the (private) IIHS test raising their sled weight (4,200 lbs?) to reflect average fleet weight, which turns into an arms race.
In the end, people respond to incentives, and we get the cars we regulated for.
Easy fix: If you want less of something, tax it. The race to ever bigger vehicles has many costs, from road wear to (now we know) human lives.
You pay an annual registration fee for your vehicle. Make that fee go up dramatically for heavier vehicles. If you pay, say, $100 for a car under a ton, make it $1k for up to two tons, $10k for 3 tons, etc..
Cool, do what lots of places do and tax based on emissions.
It wont penalise EVs while also encouraging people and makers to produce less ridiculous cars. You dont need a 5.3l V8 which does 16 miles to the Gallon to sit in freeway traffic.
They know how to avoid this, because heavy autos are considered utility vehicles. They'll claim this is bad for the economy because small companies need access to utility vehicles.
This could simply be avoided by introducing a similar model to how it is handled over here in europe, with different vehicle classes and weight limits, a higher weight class requires a more advanced drivers license. Certain utlilty vehicles 3.5t and over can't be driven here without a D class license, which costs extra, requires extra training and the tax and fee structure for these vehicles is drastically different.
Usually, these heavier vehicles also pay higher toll fees on toll roads like in France, Spain, Austria, Italy, etc.
In Austria higher engine power vehicles also cost more on a monthly basis, while registration is a 150€ one time fee, monthly insurance and tax can be around 150€ for a 200hp ice vehicle, even just a Ford Fiesta.
> for larger industrial vehicles
See, thats where the difference is, here 3.5t is considered a bigger vehicle with few exceptions. Most campers are close or overweight for the normal B class license.
I am so tired of the comments where “tax it more” is the only solution to problems. I think we should tax posters who suggest this. Then we’d have less of those comments. Win win!
Germany has a ratio of 3.9 deaths per 100,000 people, while America's ratio is 12.4 per 100,000—essentially 4x higher. And they have the autobahn. Not like they are driving slower.
As someone who regularly drives on German highways, including the Autobahn, I may ad my two cents. While German drivers are often praised for their discipline, the reality I've observed, especially in unlimited speed sections of the Autobahn, can be quite different.
Many drivers there seem to focus primarily on their perceived right to drive as fast as they want, often creating dangerous situations for others who may be able to or want to drive as fast and thus often not have time to react. I've witnessed numerous close calls and risky maneuvers that don't align with the idealized view of German driving discipline.
That said, the significant difference in road fatality rates between Germany and the US suggests there are indeed factors contributing to safer roads in Germany. However, from my experience, it's not simply due to more careful drivers across the board. Other elements like road design, vehicle safety standards, strict enforcement of traffic laws, and comprehensive driver education systems likely play crucial roles, see the pathway to a german drivers license which includes about 9 hours of practice training with a driving instructor.
Rather than looking abroad for examples of driver behavior, it might be more productive for the US to focus on improving road safety through comprehensive measures. This could include enhancing driver education, implementing stricter enforcement of existing traffic laws, and investing in safer road infrastructure.
The goal should be to create a system that encourages and facilitates safer driving for everyone, regardless of individual driver attitudes. While there's certainly room for improvement in American driving habits, the solution likely lies in systemic changes rather than simply emulating perceived behaviors from other countries.
> the reality I've observed, especially in unlimited speed sections of the Autobahn, can be quite different.
My experience is that it depends on where in Germany you are. I drove from France to Norway this week so I went through northern Germany and the autobahn was great, where it wasn't restricted because of the more or less permanent roadworks that is. I drive on Tesla Autopilot when I can which has a maximum speed of 150 kph and only once in the 600 km from Venlo to Flensburg did I notice someone get too close behind me even though many were travelling considerably faster.
It's a different story further south around Munich for instance.
I agree though that road safety in Europe has a lot to do with road design, vehicle standards, maintenance, driver education, etc.
I fully agree on that, I'm mostly travelling through the south of germany, think Salzburg to Kufstein, and that route is terrible, including the pavement.
> However, from my experience, it's not simply due to more careful drivers across the board. Other elements like road design, vehicle safety standards, strict enforcement of traffic laws, and comprehensive driver education systems likely play crucial roles
I would think elements like strict enforcement of traffic laws and comprehensive driver education systems likely play crucial roles by... leading to more careful drivers across the board.
If you drove 150 MPH on an American road you would end up 100 yards into the woods flipping over 90 times, after hitting 1 of 65 potholes that are 4 feet deep on the interstate.
That would be a poor excuse for just a few cars driving scattered across 6 lanes to make sure to block the whole thing. It's not always about driving much faster.
Americans wouldn't even understand the meaning of "discipline". "Lane discipline" for example - paying attention to what lane you are in and for what reason. Minimizing your use of left-more lanes for whoever might want to drive past you; paying attention to who has the right of way in the right-most lane, while not blocking people from entering or exiting.
But for a specific example, many Americans are let loose with a driver's license but scared of entering or exiting a freeway. When it's just about impossible to drive in the US without using freeways. (They are scared for good reason considering their lack of practice and understanding of how that works.)
Classic American answer to everything. What does size have to do with anything? Besides well understood economies of scale which clearly would favor the US?
Because when you live in a country as large as the United States, you are on the road a lot more so your chances of dying on the road go up. The quoted statistic is not per unit of distance it’s just per 100,000 people so it’s biased towards places that are smaller.
> Broken down by state, I’m sure there are states that are safer than Germany
Based on fatalities per 100k persons (not a great statistic but the one quoted in this thread), and 2022 data, then nope. Every single state is worse than Germany.
Even District of Columbia - basically a city with much less reason to drive - manages a worse score than Germany as a whole.
Eh, you really want per unit of economic productivity or similar, since driving is not in and of itself productive. For instance, you could get the numbers to look better simply by having people circle the block in their neighborhood (presumably a very safe form of driving).
I agree they have a considerate and disciplined driving culture, but on the other hand parts of the autobahn are without any speed limitations which increase accidents ("Freie Fahrt für freie Bürger").
It’s funny, because my very anecdotal experience is very different.
I’ve been to the US and Germany only once. In Berlin I didn’t drive, but saw the weirdest thing multiple times: when the traffic lights turned green sometimes the drivers of the cars up front would just go flat out, tyre screching and all, only to stop at the next traffic light 100 meters away. Really odd.
On the other hand I had to drive many kilometers (sorry, miles) in the US and thought everyone was well behaved, didn’t experience any tailgating, reckless driving etc.
US varies widely. California drivers are pretty wild. A 65 mph highway will have half the cars going 80, many tailgating. Many don’t let you merge if you use blinker. Michigan can be similarly fast, but less aggressive. PNW is much more reasonable/safe.
Americans drive more, so if you want to compare the safety of the two systems it is better to look at deaths per vehicle-km. Germany has 4.2 deaths per billion vehicle-km. The United States has 6.9.
But driving is inherently dangerous, that's the whole point. America shouldn't be let off the hook for partaking in more of a dangerous activity, as if that makes it less dangerous. If Americans don't want to die in cars they should drive less. (Trains would help.)
Per capita passenger mileage is 2x lower in Germany vs US[1]; it looks like this accounts for just ~half of the difference - and there are other factors responsible for increased mortality.
As impractical as it may be, I think the only answer is to limit the size of vehicles, either through taxation or an outright ban. Larger vehicles are worse for pretty much everything and many of the costs are externalized.
I don't care about your ideology. Tax works as a solution to deter behavior you don't want and raise revenue which can be spent on good things that make society function.
1) always has been 2) ask them, they’ll tell you the rational explanation that from their perspective it’s irresponsible to not be the heaviest car on the road
Tires today contain a large amount of plastics. So what you are breathing while walking next to a road with a bunch of Teslas driving down it is basically a cloud of microplastics.
It's worse than regular microplastics. It's 6PPD which is N-(1,3-dimethylbutyl)-N'-phenyl-p-phenylenediamine, a lethal non-plastic amine.
Moreover, this chemical has been accumulating in the environment, and making its way into food, so we're not just breathing it, but eating it too. Refer to DOI 10.3389/fenvs.2024.1384506
One thing that surprised me is that when the article talks about "big cars", I had initially assumed they meant the ubiquitous family crossover SUVs (RAV4 / CRV and the like) that have more or less completely replaced the family sedans. However the curb weight of those vehicles is more or less the same as sedans (all hovering around 3K lbs). What they actually meant is essentially just heavy duty pickup trucks, which are closer to 5K lbs.
Obviously you have never driven in Florida. It’s downright scary to drive anything under 5000lb there. Biggest trucks and suvs everywhere it’s an arms race you can’t opt out unless you want some 80year old in a expedition max to take you out.
Australia’s changed for the worse over the past 30 years as well. SUVs used to be the exception in urban areas, now they’re everywhere - usually with a single occupant.
I saw an old Hummer H2 on the road the other day. They used to appear gargantuan to me. This time, what struck me was that it no longer looks shockingly larger than anything else on the road.
There’s a real boiling frog vibe to inner city traffic. It’s so bad - so jammed up and so dirty - but we’re completely inured to it. It’s my fervent hope that the next generation - or perhaps the one after that - will think it very weird indeed to live and work alongside the byproduct of hydrocarbon combustion.
Sadly, there's no more a thing called Americans' problem. Like an STD, what are later realized as problems, usually start in the US and then spread across the globe. Not that the rest of the world doesn't have their own crap, but because US media and culture is (one of) the the loudest, what's seen in America is often interpreted as cool and then copied rather readily and quickly. Guns seem to be buckling the trend so far, however.
How much of this is consumer choice and how much is actually driven by manufacturers shaping the market in response to bad emissions regulation (CAFE)?
When I was younger and regularly getting around on a bike, I used to view people in large, high vehicles with contempt. I don't anymore. I see them as victims of an industry that lacks moral responsibility.
A quote from a GMC designer around the time this ridiculous SUV mania was taking hold:
"I remember wanting it to feel very locomotive - like a massive fist moving through the air"
It might not be obvious to Americans, but I find it very telling that American made vehicles are almost always the most 'aggressive', and often marketed that way. Why is that?
There is a simple solution for this problem: increase the payout for people who are affected by overweight vehicles.
Have a law, define a target weight + speed and then make it REALLY expensive to insure or kill people with your car.
Also in the law: if you drive around without insurance, the car is instantly taken away from you, as it is a weapon to conduct a crime :-)
Still people will drive big cars around, but the market will limit the number of people who can pay for it. And of course: new cars only and when ownership is transferred. No additional tax for existing owners.
The market would solve this problem VERY VERY quickly.
Truckers are required to have commercial licenses which makes traffic violations considerably harsher and more expensive. It would make sense to at least extend that to all vehicles over 5,000 lbs. Someone speeding in an F350 can cause a LOT more damage than someone speeding in a Miata, so penalties should be proportional.
This was all caused by the CAFE emissions standards that allow cars with bigger footprints to emit more. Nobody wants bigger trucks, and in the Tacoma community it's a standard refrain to bemoan just how fucking big they've gotten. They aren't compact trucks anymore. They're midsize today. Compact trucks do not exist.
If my math is right, the Abrams has a tighter turning radius than a Miata due to how its steering works. The Miata is around 15ft while an Abrams turning would inscribe a circle with a radius of 14ft.
I own a 2020 F150 and I hate how big it is. Turning radius is pathetic. You have to climb into the bed like you're scaling a mountain. There's two sets of steps to get into the front seat (which is gigantic, like it's made for someone 300lbs). I can't see what I'm backing up to. God help any little kid or animal in front of my truck, I'm not seeing 'em. Literally all I wanted was 2000+lbs payload and 4x4, and this was the best option.
> In total, our dataset includes millions of crashes across 14 states between 2013 and 2023.
A great source of data for this topic is the Fatality and Injury Reporting System Tool (FIRST) [a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration product]. Link: https://cdan.dot.gov/query
It has more data (covers all states) although VIN numbers do not appear to be in the dataset.
Let's consider the energy efficiency of moving a vehicle weighing about 2000kg to transport a person who weighs around 100kg. That's a ratio of vehicle to person of about 20:1.
A potential solution would be to give heavier cars worse crash ratings. This approach would take into account not only the safety of the occupants of the car but also the occupants of other vehicles.
I was wondering if real investment into public transportation and the associated infra will help solve this issue. When I travel in some Asian and European countries, I really don't feel the need for a big car (a small one can still help). But in the US, a big SUV or a van is a godsend. Kids are happier. The wife is happier. Trips are easier. There are just so many benefits to have a big car...
And the key word is "real investment". not the ones for California to build its high-speed railway, 7 EV charge stations for 7.5 billion dollars, or $300M for high-speed internet yet no family has got it
Big cars with horrible visibility combined with idiots (both in and outside of the car) who can't pay attention to where they're going because they're addicted to their media-consumption devices.
It's not a love affair. Once there are large vehicles on the road, you cannot afford putting yourself at greater risk by not having a large vehicle yourself.
Is that necessarily true? There are no smaller vehicles with overbuilt frames, more airbags, and better test rating?
I look under the hood of "large" trucks and sometimes it's a lot of empty space. It looks like a paper tiger- it's fake big. I've also read somewhere that taller vehicles have a higher chance of rollover which could make them less safe than advertised.
That's fair. However, if my car is twice heavier and larger than yours, even if your car is well engineered and has great safety features and rating, you're likely to end up worse than me in an accident. Even if my chances of rollover are higher than yours.
One thing people often miss when talking about US cars getting bigger, particularly "small" trucks, is government regulation: https://youtu.be/azI3nqrHEXM
Are these trucks are built with cheap chinese steel? Perhaps a tariff on steel would help. Also how can people afford such enormous beasts? People don't seem to realise how much money theor cars cost when paid off via a loan.
e.g.. their love for humongous wide hard to maneuver fire fighting vehicles (and their over use in situations which shouldn't require a fire truck/engine) implicitly block a lot of improvements and often lead to forced wider lanes and other street design aspects which by now are well known to hugely contribute to more deadly accidents
It's happening everywhere though, SUV sales are way, way up. 99% of people don't need a car like that.
I went from NZ watching (medium sized, even!) utes climb literal mountains in rural areas to the literal flatland of London/Europe, watching people bound their way down narrow medieval lanes in a city in range rovers and defenders - 1 person per SUV.
Big heavy pedestrian-killing trucks are just one facet among many of popularizing selfish, oafish, violent, thoughtless individualism as a culture underlying political beliefs that otherwise lack a connection to culture. Anti-vaxx, and other quack medicine is another such phenomenon. You only need to consider the 12 lives lost for every life preserved to see how shortsighted this is: unless you plan to live in your giant truck 24/7, you could be one of those 12.
It's disturbing to see comments that celebrate and excuse wallowing in that subculture.
The heaviest vehicles kill more people than they save: Analysis of crash data shows that for every life saved by the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks, more than a dozen lives are lost in other vehicles.
Weight advantages have changed little over time: Despite improvements in safety features, the weight advantage of heavier vehicles has remained relatively constant, with heavier vehicles still causing more fatalities in lighter vehicles.
Carmakers prioritize consumer preferences over safety: Manufacturers are producing increasingly heavier vehicles, driven by consumer demand for larger, more powerful cars, despite the safety risks to others.
Regulators are ill-equipped to address the issue: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's rating system focuses on occupant safety, not the safety of other road users, and tax policies subsidize heavier vehicles.
Public awareness and concern are growing: Surveys show increasing concern about the size and safety of SUVs and pickup trucks, with researchers and policymakers starting to take notice.
Electrification may exacerbate the problem: The shift towards electric vehicles, which tend to be heavier than their internal-combustion equivalents, may increase the weight of vehicles on the road, further amplifying the safety risks.
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