My understanding was that buses don't have seatbelts for two reasons:
* Per capita and per mile, buses are far safer than personal automobiles.
* When buses do get in accidents, seatbelts are more of a hazard than a safety feature (e.g. by preventing impaired riders from fleeing the vehicle on their own).
The latter doesn't apply to personal vehicles to the same degree, since they're preventing fatalities in different types of crashes for the latter (e.g. being flung out of the front window).
Most vehicle accidents are between vehicles. Most vehicles weigh far less than busses. And most busses spend most time travelling at lower speeds on surface streets (though long-distance road coaches are exceptions).
I've been in a bus-automobile accident, at low speed (< 25 kph). The experience from within the bus was an abrupt stop, I've experienced similar from normal braking.
The auto involved suffered major rear-end damage. The bus's front bumper was somewhat scuffed.
High-speed rollover accidents, collisions with fixed structures adjacent to a high-speed roadway, or plunging from a bridge or cliff might benefit from additional restraints. Those circumstances are seldom encountered.
For whom? Heavier cars are safer because they slow down less when you hit something. If you hit something sturdy enough to stop you dead anyway you’ll probably cop a similar amount of damage as a smaller car.
The extra force is mostly a problem for the tree, not for you. You get injured either because something squishes you (modern cars are good at avoiding that), or because you are decelerated too quickly, which is a function of speed and stopping distance.
With movable/deformable obstacles, heavier car = obstacle gets moved/deformed more = higher stopping distance.
A heavier car doesn't reduce stopping distance with heavier obstacles (a bigger car increases it though).
Your own weight has to decelerate to a stop, and the force it takes for your head to go 60 to 0 doesn't change based on what's around you. What does change its that a heavy car may resist the obstacle more -> longer distance until stop -> longer time to stop -> your head has more time to stop -> lower deceleration force on your head.
I hate that I will likely buy a larger car than my current Corolla just so I can feel slightly safer. I don't need it, I don't really want it, but given the adversarial nature of other drivers, I feel I would be putting myself unnecessarily at risk if I don't.
Funny thing is you can do this by buying a new Corolla, which is probably much larger than your current one. Car models have gotten so much bigger over the last several decades; current Corollas are bigger than older Camrys, Civics are bigger than old Accords, etc.
Another option is new smaller models get introduced and begin their own lifecycle of bloating. For example the Honda HRV is roughly the same size and price point as the CRV was originally.
In Europe you need an advance license to drive a car that exceeds a certain tonnage (3,500 kg I believe; or at least that is my license). So for certain markets there is a hard limits. I don’t think a Corolla will ever exceed that as that would kind of ruin its whole marketing.
You need a special license to drive anything with an airbrake which most semi trucks have. Also a special license for more than some weight (18000lbs IIRC). Of your semi avoids both of those I guess you are okay, but that is tricky.
Yeah this was terrifying for me when I had to move with a family. Smaller trucks were too small. Next move I'll pay people to drive those monsters or take two trips.
I think that something is electrification and the limits on energy that comes with that. Aerodynamics makes for smaller is better. However the weight of the car is up significantly.
Which definition of "bigger" are we concerned about?
For a recent example, the previous gen Honda HR-V was 171” long, the new one is 180”. That brings it to about 2” shorter than last year’s 182” Honda CR-V, but the new model of that grows to 185” long. Every time a car gets redesigned it gets bigger.
Recently disappointed with the Chevy Equinox EV announcement, it takes the name of their small SUV but makes it 11” longer. Still at least impressed by the target price, but wish it were smaller.
And you’d say “Oh well they have to put the batteries somewhere,” meanwhile on the same day Jeep announced their Avenger EV. It’s a proper subcompact with 250 mile range, but it won’t come to the US because apparently no one here wants small cars.
Also waiting for more info on Mazda’s plug-in hybrid models. The CX-60 was announced for Europe, but we have to wait for a special fat version (CX-70) for the USA.
Overall disappointed with the car manufacturers lately, and with the consumer spending habits that have pushed things this way. Would greatly increased taxes on large vehicles reduce it? Maybe, but then you’re basically saying “it’s OK to kill pedestrians as long as you’re rich.”
Correction, Equinox EV is only 7" longer than the previous one, not 11". Not great, but not as bad as I thought.
Interestingly, the Equinox has previously been an exception to the "Cars always get bigger" rule. First gen was 188.8", second gen shaved off an inch to 187.8", third gen moved it from midsize to compact at 183.1.
EV version will put that back up around 190, back into the midsize segment and larger than the original gas version.
Well I have a 2013 Hatch. 1.4t GVM. Up a few hundred kg from the 2003 Sedan I had prior at 1.1t GVM. The vehicles I'm regularly driving with/around/near SUVs that are almost an entire ton heavier at approx 2200kg. Driven by people that have the observational skills of an ex-parrot.
Saw my first Hummer EV this week. 9000 lbs and 0-60 in 3 seconds. My best hope for not dying is that they drive carefully because they don’t want to dent their $100,000 mall crawler. Yikes.
It would be interesting to know how car insurance companies treat such vehicles. The likelihood that the occupant dies (or even sustains any injuries) is probably quite low. But the likelihood that it does damage to people, structures, or other vehicles would seem to be quite high (including the risk that there are issues with the enormous battery, which have yet to be discovered because it is a new, low-volume vehicle).
The average American is also growing larger with each new revision.
"Large" American people probably won't be comfortable crammed into a 90s Chevy Geo. I think such people deserve to be comfortable, is it not a basic human right / dignity?
There's a disconnect here: why does a bigger human need a radically larger car frame? There's plenty of internal space for a larger seat. You'll note that we haven't made airframes correspondingly larger over the last 30 years.
I’m not sure that’s a great example since airline seats have become so small many obese people simply are effectively prohibited from flying. Even business seating has contracted over the years so paying a kings ransom still isn’t enough for such people to gain freedom of mobility. (Cue the Ayn Randian self control HN argument every time someone says something marginally accommodating of the obese).
I'm not going to make that Ayn Rand-style argument. I think it's disgusting that people stoop to that.
My point with the plane example was that we could fit larger seats in planes, without any particular trouble. The reason airlines don't is because it cuts into their profitability: requiring an obese person to purchase higher-classed tickets to accommodate themselves is much better for business than actually having to accommodate them with a wider seat.
Once upon a time (before some significant weight loss) I was an obese weekly business traveler. I used to fly southwest as a preference if I could because their policy was to charge for two seats if you needed a belt extender. You would get priority seating and a little card to place on the second seat that designated the seat as unavailable (no assigned seats on SWA). If the flight wasn’t full, they would refund the second seat.
I always felt that was a reasonable accommodation.
Having to accommodate them with wider seats means fewer seats in the plane, which means much lower profitability, or higher seat prices for normal-size people. There's only so much room on an airplane. Customers consistently choose flights based on seat price, so of course airlines are going to optimize to keep prices as low as possible to get customers. For people who prefer comfort over price, there's higher-class seats.
If Americans don't like this, maybe they should try losing weight so they aren't so much larger than everyone else in the world.
I don't think we could fit wider seats into airplanes unless you mean fewer wider seats than current seats. In such case it's not just about profitability (airlines aren't known to have huge profit margins anyway) but about travel getting more expensive for everyone.
I might not go full Ayn Rand but making things more expensive for everyone to accommodate fat people is a line I am comfortable defending.
Being not/being able to fly commercial airlines is certainly not "freedom of mobility". If that were the case, then no one had freedom of mobility before the Wright brothers, which is absurd.
I'm not big but I've had injuries which have hindered my mobility. Ever tried to get into a low subcompact when you can't bend as easily? The height of the seat, the height of the A-pillar/roof, the width of the door, and how far the door open, all massively affect getting into and out of a vehicle.
These are all reasonable cases to expect accommodation for! The part that I'm not convinced on is that said accommodation needs to take the form of an absurdly large SUV or pickup truck.
I'm sure it is an international issue. At the same time, I was recently visiting Switzerland, didn't see any particularly obese and definitely no morbidly obese folks. Ymmv.
Also, the Swiss diet is interesting. Pretty carb heavy with morning pastries, and bread, and cheese throughout the day.
They also bike and spend time outside a lot, when the weather is amenable.
Maybe part of our problem in the USA comes down to availability of cost effective, convenient, semi-healthy options on average- Way too much preservative-heavy calorie festivals day in and day out?
I'm not a dietician, but the state of affairs stateside is without a doubted tragic and sad.
> Also, the Swiss diet is interesting. Pretty carb heavy with morning pastries, and bread, and cheese throughout the day.
That's their culinary culture, not their daily diet lol.
Growing up American, we have a looser food regulations, but also our education system probably doesn't help. I ate a lot of weird rectangle pizzas in elementary school. In High School Health class, we learned about healthy eating, watched Food Inc and Supersize Me, but I don't think we were consistently introduced to healthy eating habits. They made it look really uncool, fuck that, I want gushers and gatorade.
In defense of portion sizes, in the US it is a cultural thing to not finish your portion at restaurant and get the rest packed up for the next day. That explains the double portions
It's actually a problem for those of us that actually use their garage for parking, as opposed to storing more junk. Most 2-car garages are around 20x20 or usable parking space or less. Even newer houses skimp on garages, because it doesn't count for square footage, and you don't really notice when it's empty.
2 modern cars, especially a mid-sized SUV or minivan, aren't going to work well with 20' of width. Even the length is problematic for clearance and being able to open the back liftgate with the garage door(s) down. A large SUV or pickup, forget it.
Heh, I bought a 2004 Subaru Forester XT. Nice size, easy to park, easy to travel with dog and kid, etc. Went to buy a newer one and it was MUCH larger, felt like a boat, much taller, much longer, etc. Turns out the crosstrek (their smallest crossover) is now nearly the exact size of my Forester XT. I'd have bought one, but it was depressingly slow.
Sadly Subaru seems to have abandoned the practical small/sport SUV. The WRX wagon ... killed off. The crosstrek, nowhere close to sporty. The Forester nowhere close to small.
Indeed, I used to drive a 2001 Forester, and the new ones look insanely large. (I haven't owned a car in the last 12 years, and whenever I rent a car I try to get an "economy"-sized car but usually end up with something much bigger).
There is also safety in a more maneuverable car. I went from a pickup truck to a Fusion (hybrid), and I've been able to steer clear of situations easier in it than the bigger truck. Also since I can't see past the SUV in front of me, I tend to back off and give more following space. If that causes other cars to try to cut in the open spot in front of me, then that causes me to back off further where I end up in a pocket behind the pack.
Also there is the concept of "safe enough". If you are on an expressway, what are the chances of a head-on accident? And although getting t-boned at an intersection may often be the other driver's fault, being hyper-vigilant can help there too (although it gets exhausting constantly looking out for the other driver).
What I'm really hoping for is that some minimal level of driver automation features become standard -- things like emergency braking, lane assist that yells at you when your driving deteriorates (so drivers realize they are getting to sleepy to drive), etc. The automatic braking alone would have prevented the last three accidents I witnessed in this past year (the most recent was a 5-car chain reaction that was most likely caused by a driver staring at a cell phone instead of the long line of stopped traffic in front of them).
Yeah I'm thinking about getting rid of my Charger and getting a large pickup truck (probably EV hear in a few years, if it's even possible). I drove a corolla at one point as well and traded up to the Charger (power/feature wise)
But when the stock truck next to you at a light has a higher hood that your roof it makes an impression on you.
A quick google shows a stock F150 at ~51” and it’s hardly the tallest. A RAM seems to be 58”. I know they’re adding pedestrian cams to the front of some trucks just so drivers can see if they’re about to hit someone at a light.
Sedans seem to be in the 55-57” range. They feel flat out unsafe at times.
Also why parents buying their teenaged children large vehicles is a tragedy of the commons type situation. They're more likely to get in accidents because they're young and and inexperienced, but hey a big car will save them..
Edit: Wow a whole reply chain spawned from this comment got nuked! Stay safe out there Americans, you've got some wild divisions amongst yourselves and its only getting worse. For the record, I love trains, subways, buses and biking but I also own a crossover sized vehicle and recognize that everyone has their own personal preferences and requirements and that no one transit solution will meet everyone's needs, I hope you all can see that too without violence.
I wonder what the right "if everybody drove this.." is? It is probably not a lotus 7 clone. What is the smallest vehicle with superb crash test ratings?
"Die" is a bad target. I don't want to be a quadriplegic if I don't have to be, and a car going 30 MPH (realistically 40, if the limit is 30) on a residential street is more than capable of doing that to me.
They absolutely can. People can and do die from falling over and hitting their head. A 30km/h impact is not trivial, it can be expected to break bones and cause internal bleeding that can be deadly. An impact to the spine or head can be very easily be life changing.
Also, residential roads in the US are usually 40km/h
I personally know someone who was hit at about 10-15hm/h and they were hospitalized and broke their spine.
My college girlfriend was hit by a car right next to me going those speeds during a turn. It seems slow, but meat on steel is pretty brutal at any travel speed. It was a four or five month recovery. Remember that the velocity of the vehicle is only a part of the picture — mass is the damage dealer here.
Mass is what contributes to inertia which allows the speed to be carried for longer... The acceleration, which is the difference in speeds, is the real damage dealer.
Right: buses, despite their size, kill far fewer pedestrians and passengers. Size is a factor for personal automobiles because individuals lack the training (and restraint) that's key to bus driving. It's hard to see a world in which the US accepts that and increases the restrictions on obtaining a license, however.
> buses, despite their size, kill far fewer pedestrians and passengers.
Is that still true after you adjust for the number of buses on the road vs. the number of cars? If not, then this is like saying driving drunk is less dangerous than driving sober since only 30% of car crash fatalities involve drunk drivers.
Yes because of the driver itself is behaviorally different between the bus and the car. The bus drivers are profesionals who drive no higher than the speed limit, they heed all traffic laws, they generally keep to the right or otherwise drive predictably, and some times they even have dedicated bus lanes. Your average car driver is not all of those things at once, if they were there would be a lot fewer people going 5 or 15 over the speed limit and driving drunk.
Those are a lot of reasons to think it's plausible that it might still be true after the adjustment. Is there actual data that shows it is true, though? Also, I've seen buses break traffic laws before, so don't pretend they never do.
According to that figure, while transit buses are safer for "Users (passengers and employees in a vehicle)" than passenger cars and light trucks are, they're more dangerous for "Others (e.g., pedestrians and passengers in other vehicles)". And isn't that exactly the same thing going on with big vs. small cars? Buses are bigger than cars and SUVs, so they're safer for their own occupants at the expense of everyone else. (Note that the figure measures fatalities per passenger-mile, not per mile, so the advantage that fewer buses would be needed than cars to move the same number of people has already been factored in.)
The USA has very pedestrian hostile laws/infrastructure and buses definitionally stop and start where there are a lot of pedestrians (and many of them will be crossing the road in a rush because they saw a bus).
That data could be representitive of buses being big and heavy or it could be representitive of them sharing space with pedestrians.
Compare the same dataset for busses on a grade separated RBT with well paid/trained drivers and platform doors and you get a very different story.
I'm highly disappointed that electric vehicles haven't taken advantage of the "no need for a engine in the front" and make vehicles that are different. Many trucks have the driver in FRONT of the front wheels, but very few passenger vehicles do that, even though without an engine there's really no reason not to.
They spent a lot of time marketing how safe the SMART car was for a small vehicle. I believe they even showed putting a semi tractor on top of the SMART car to show how rigid its safety shell was.
Which is misleading. Which would you rather do: gently set a 50lb rock on your toes, or drop a 5lb rock on your toes from 4 feet in the air (equivalent to an 11mph collision)?
A bike. If everyone just rode a bike, not only accidents would be less lethal, there would be a lot less congestion and pollution. Also we might get fitter too.
And maybe an electric motorcycle or trike for when you have to carry more stuff. And an electric car for big families, and an electric van for vacations…
The right answer is the tool for the job. Chances are you don't need a huge pickup truck when you buy $200 of groceries. I can do it in a bike with some panniers so that means everyone can do it with an ebike. Need more than $200? Just take multiple trips a week and cancel your gym membership. Need to haul a few hundred pounds of manure? By all means take the truck. It's just when you look around at the modern world today, a lot of people are sitting in traffic by themselves in a vehicle on their way to work less than 10 miles away, or buying a few things from the store less than 2 miles away as soon as the need arises. Its a lot of wasted vehicular capacity. If you were a business buying a machine that you only used a fraction of its capabilities, you'd consider getting away with a leaner machine for most use cases.
For a lot of people I talk to about getting around when it comes up, the major stopping point with biking is just the lack of infrastructure and feeling afraid of cars. Most people aren't comfortable taking the lane while biking so it becomes a dangerous experience when they don't. As the saying goes, though, if you build it, they will come. Any city I've been in that has built out a gridlike network of bike lanes seems to have a lot of people riding around. Once you build them that network you enable a lot of trips for those people uncomfortable with the existing road network.
Are there any good examples of how to do this infrastructure? In my neighborhood they took the major street in the neighborhood and took one of the lanes and painted it to be a bike lane mext to the sidewalk, and parking spots further out. No physical median, just white paint on light concrete. No one parks in those spots, they would get demolished by cars. And no one bikes there, they bike on less busy streets one block in either direction. Also, at every intersection the parking spots disappear for a right turn lane. The bike lane doesn't, but it is hard to see so the cars go over the whole way.
A nearby neighborhood did something similar but with physical medians. Much better, but still people just use less busy streets mostly.
My main issue getting to work is not those streets, but post ww2 neighborhoods that have one entance and exit forcing me on to highways with glass covered shoulders and speedlimits over 55. That is what I want them to fix. But that would actually involve earth moving and eminent domain, not just a bit of paint or concrete.
What about trucking and shipping? The US - where this study took place- is huge, and most of it is very far from ports. 18 wheelers/semis are the biggest users of the American highway system and are necessary to get goods to/from production and consumption sites
These trucks also contribute to the rise in vehicle size. I did not like driving when I was in a sedan sized car sharing the high speed highways hours from cities on those highways
Well put the trucks moving stuff in places where the people koving themselves aren't.
If they're going extremely long distances you could even have some kind of dedicated hard wearing road surface. And if lots of them are going to the same place you could get them to move in a convoy. And once they're in a convoy you could hook them together...
That’s extremely realistic. The Netherlands has a separate system for bikes. The truck system would just be what the motorized traffic system is now, be it a bit scaled down.
Even in the Netherlands cars are not dead. A few years back (pre pandemic, maybe wfh will last, maybe it won't), I was staying with a friend. They all had cars, but one had just sold their car and committed to public transportation and bicycle. Even there he was really regretting his choice. In the US it isn't even a question. The vast majority of people need a car. We can make a goal of changing that, but it will be a while. So for now, what is the least bad car?
I think you and I have different concepts of realistic, ha. How do you propose people travel from rural place A to rural place B? Public transportation? That would be extremely expensive to implement, and would operate at a massive loss to service the entire US.
The interstate system and truck delivery seems to be pretty fantastic at servicing the continental US when paired with freight trains, cargo planes, etc. And it is similarly effective for delivery of all other kinds of things including people.
These systems would be good to implement in many cities, but interstate shipping and travel is another thing altogether.
Come on. The USA has one of the best freight railroad systems in the world. A large percentage of our cargo moves on rails. But rails can't extend everywhere, and it will seldom be practical to carry perishable, time-sensitive cargo in trains. That stuff pretty much has to go by truck.
Trains can be far faster than trucks. There are various serious deficiencies in the US train system that mean that transit speeds are far, far lower than they could be. There is no real technical reason why trains can't be faster than trucks with a similar marginal cost as to today. The infrastructure and systems are simply deficient.
Unfortunately not all goods are going to the same places. Nor are all goods moving at the same pace. Freight trains are a great piece of logistics infrastructure, but they can't just be US logistics infrastructure.
The US rail system is very well established and has been well built out since before the rise of the automobile. But goods need to get from the rail depot to the end destination and right now the best we have is enormous 18-wheelers and as long as those are on the road, it's too dangerous for me to want to take a smaller car
“Collectively, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all US emissions, emitting around 24 pounds of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases for every gallon of gas.” (Source: epa.gov)
So to answer your snarky question with snark in kind, mostly from the other 4/5 of emissions.
I see parents bring toddlers in trailers to grocery stores and farmers markets routinely these days. They make these big ebikes that can even haul kids directly without the trailer now and millennial parents have been buying them.
Lots of things could be, but removing cars from the average American's life will limit job opportunities, limit economic choices, and consume a lot more of our time.
It's not about removing cars, its about limiting them and choosing a more appropriate tool for the job. Sometimes you can get away with a hand trowel instead of an excavator.
Yes, but if you own a car, then you're already paying for something that can save you time and personal energy so you can do things you enjoy, like playing with your kids, or tending your garden. Often times the quickest and easiest tool to use is what you're going to reach for, and that's a car most of the time.
And the whole thing is that the personal convenience you get comes with great costs to every other facet of life when you account for the negative externalities that a car centric lifestyle brings. Now you have a bunch of black particulate on your window sills because everyone in your neighborhood has a heavy car that produces tire dust. Maybe you live a few years less on the whole because you a literally hardly moving around all day when all the walking you do is in your home or on the way to the car, when you could have been working in at least some time cardio wise riding a bike or merely being a pedestrian for all those decades. Often times for short trips on surface streets, like what would be a 10 minute car ride turns into a 12 minute bike ride or so, because stop lights eliminate all the advantages of a powerful car on city roads and perhaps effectively set the speed limit for everyone to like 15mph regardless of the signed speed. Four minutes a two way trip on the whole is not much time wasted away from your children or your crops.
For my commute to work, its something like my choice of a 35 minute drive (not counting the circling I will have to do finding a parking spot at the other end) or a 45 minute bike ride. I probably save time on the whole even without counting the parking fiasco, considering now I don't need to find time in my schedule to work in my cardio.
If everyone rode a bicycle, there would be a lot more bicycle deaths. According to table 6 of this study, https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/21/1/47, 71.4% of the fatalities involved motor vehicles. If we apply that percentage to todays number of bicyclist deaths (900) in the USA, we get 257 deaths that do not involve motor vehicles.
If we add congestion into the mix since everyone is bicycling, I imagine a higher number of accidents would occur. Right now an estimated 67 million people in the USA ride a bicycle for an estimated 15 billion hours combined per year. 228 million licensed drivers times 290 average hours on the road equals 66 billion hours per year. Let us assume the bicyclists will have to spend three times more travel time due to lower speed of bicycles. That equals roughly 200 billion hours of bicycling per year. 200 billion hours divided by 15 billion equals 13.3. 900 257 deaths per 15 billion hours equals 3,341 deaths per year. The average number of deaths per year from automobile crashes for the last few years is about 36,000.
Even if this is a conservative estimate. I think it is safe to say you are essentially correct.
Netherlands has ~200-250ish cycling deaths a year with a ~30% modeshare.
Half are elderly.
About a third are on ebikes
87% involve a car.
That's around 0.8 deaths per hundred thousand people worth of bike modeshare not invovling a car. 1/15th of the USA and a quarter of netherlands road deaths.
This is with drunk cycling penalties being almost completely unenforced (although not sure how it compares to US drunk driving prevalence).
Granted cars are used for the longer trips so it's not completely sound, but bikes are used for congested trips. Small vehicle modeshare also shortens all trips.
My guess is the safest vehicle would look like a train followed by lightweight velo no heavier than a dutch bike (and not optimized for aero) or a recumbent trike with a roll cage and a lap belt. Also we can conclude that either current ebikes are too fast and heavy, or they result in people cycling who would be too frail otherwise.
Not everyone lives in insane car filled wastelands. Aerial pictures of lots of American cities are truly abhorrent, vast concrete and asphalt wastelands purely for car parking. The American system and people definitely need car shaming. I don't want the same thing exported to my city.
The overwhelming (and I mean truly overwhelming, to the point you often cannot even get people to engage with any criticism of cars) majority of places are the absolute opposite. Car shaming is basically rounds down to zero. Contrast that with bicycle or bus or public transport shaming which is frequent and often extremely abusive.
It's more than abusive, social media is filled with frothing car fanatics that want to kill cyclists merely for slowing them down from being able to roar up to the traffic light and stop in traffic a few seconds earlier.
While those activists are being stupid, this argument is even worse. A heavier car is intrinsically more dangerous to those around it, as the article we're commenting on explains. People can also choose how large of a personal vehicle they want to buy.
Yes, it peaked with David Foster Wallace being cheered by graduating Kenyon folks when he was making a counter-example:
. . . and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though . . .
Just putting on a bull bar on a big truck/SUV in a city center itself isn't destruction of property or intimidation even if it may lead to that. It might actually intimidate some people walking around at street level if they knew how mangled up in it you can get caught, but the vast majority aren't even aware.
They claim only to have damaged 40 cars one time. There's no evidence they did that, no public outcry in New York, and no corroborating evidence at all.
Again, there is no movement like this. There has not been a spike in vandalism against SUVs. I work with auto insurance data in my day job, and changes in damage to parked SUVs hasn't notably changed.
Now I don't think he was guilty, but the fact the media and population put him on a stage with confetti and a cheering crowd shows the state of society when the guys only public action was shooting some people in self defense.
A healthy society admits that sometimes people do die in ways that are unpreventable or not at fault without celebrating when it happens or what we see where people are itching to get in these situations so they can kill legally and be a hero.
The majority of people only got their opinions from twitter and late night talk shows so their thoughts are really only a reflection on whatever the media was broadcasting.
If you look at all the recordings it’s very clearly within the law. That doesn’t make him a hero and he shouldn’t be a public figure or celebrated. But it’s also pretty telling that the majority of the population has a gut reaction that’s illogical if you view the recordings.
As a fine paste, and a footnote in the newspaper "he should have been wearing a helmet" or "he was found with a phone". You want victim blaming in the US? Be a pedestrian or cyclist.
Well, Obama mandated pedestrian safety be included, then Trump blocked the change. Finally (hopefully) congress forced it through as part of the infrastructure spending bill:
I'm not sure people care what the result of the test is, if it costs them money or a feature they want more. That's just how Americans are.
I will say that people seem to put up with emissions standards, so it wouldn't be unthinkable to add some standards that improve the safety of other road users. But as the other comments mention, it's a hard sell; most Americans think the people on the sidewalk or on bikes should be driving instead.
Well, the safety features are for the purchaser in that case. If you let your cat drive and he goes off a cliff, you survive. That's worth an extra $1000! We're talking about a new thing; safety for people other than the people in the car.
That's what the original article is about; people buy heavy cars so that they are more likely to survive the accident than whoever they hit.
Probably the idea is to somewhat sneak that in through the back door, i.e. hope that car manufacturers would be too embarrassed to advertise with a bad crash test result, even if the bad result was "only" due to lack of pedestrian safety.
If even one car model gets changed as a result of this, that would already represent a possible decrease in deaths. It doesn't have to be a total, dominating success to be a net positive.
I wouldn’t even really call it a backdoor. The equivalent European and Australian tests already have this, and they have not seen our recent uptick in deaths.
A lot of danger to pedestrians and cyclists actually comes from the design of the car. It's currently cool to have like some sort of livestock-rammer over your front bumper that just crushes pedestrians instead of sending them up over the hood. People don't have those for safety, they just think it looks cool. We should really make those illegal on city streets. (If you drive a pickup truck out on your farm, this doesn't apply, I can see the legitimacy of that sort of vehicle choice and that sort of mod. It's for actual productivity, not style.)
Basically, the industry puts 0 thought into protecting other road users, and it's a really big problem. We should start mandating safety features for those outside of the car.
The big problem is that driving isn't just for rich people. It's a lifeline for the poorest Americans that have no choice but to trade free time for commuting time to be able to afford to live. So if we mandate expensive safety features, it's just a tax on the poor. People might be willing to pay the tax to save their own bacon, but they certainly aren't going to do it to save some random person riding their bike to work. That's why we have to dramatically rethink how we build our cities and suburbs. Things like electric cars to combat climate change are a distraction from the real issues. Fossil fuels aren't smashing pedestrians, dividing our cities into unliveable neighborhoods with 20 lane freeways, or mandating 1 parking space for every person in a 10,000 person office building. That's just cars, and electric cars fix none of it.
The good news is, it looks like all the suburbs built in the 50s are due for things like water main replacement, street replacement, sewer replacement, etc. and nobody can afford it. So we'll have a chance to densify and cut cars out of our culture for good. Until then, hide your children and hide your wives, so that people can freely rampage through your neighborhood on their way to a meeting they're already 20 minutes late for. In a carbon-sensitive way, of course.
> Basically, the industry puts 0 thought into protecting other road users, and it's a really big problem. We should start mandating safety features for those outside of the car
The Euro NCAP rating has been evaluating pedestrian safety for some 20 years now. That’s why all modern cars have tall fat noses – it distributes load across more of a person’s body and reduces injury rates. Fifth Gear did a great segment about this in the early 2000’s where they found it’s better to be hit by a 4x4 (term SUV didnt’ exist yet) than by a sedan.
There comes a point where all those safety features increase the cost of the vehicle, putting them further out of reach for those poorest Americans. Technology does not solve ALL problems. Safety improvements must come from more driver responsibility just as much as technical improvements.
Other fun fixes: tax by the weight of a car. Disallow individual purchases of vehicles where the dashboard is over 6 feet off the ground (yes, some people would make an LLC just to buy the giant car. It would stop a lot of it). Place a price cap on cars!
My favorite pie-in-the-sky-impossible-in-practice thing: force cars to be ugly as sin. Would help with the huge cars, but also has a nice side effect of getting rid of sports car drivers as well.
Comments like this make me think we should have a “speech tax”, online comment licensing requirements, and a real-name mandate.
My favorite “pie-in-the-sky-impossible-in-practice thing”: force anyone advocating for this kind of petty authoritarianism (my sardonic comment included) to wear a neon pink t-shirt in public, labeled, front and back, with “I tried to be a little dictator on the internet and all I got was this stupid t-shirt”
Yeah, clearly my comment about making all cars ugly is a serious policy proposal that I have any power to enact, instead of me just venting about driving skills and safety. Sports car driver isn't a protected class
Everyone can act like piloting a multi-ton machine through city centers is their god given right, but I like thinking about the alternate universe (and hell, the _actually existing universe_ in many places in the world) where people can feel safe, even if it means that city driving is a slog.
Depends on if you’d rather death over disfunctionally maimed or comatose. Even a without a vehicle, human bodies interacting with a velocity difference of 35 or so is not pleasant.
Yup, and approximately 0 people would die if we made the speed limit on city streets 15mph. Give the bikes going 18mph a speeding ticket too, that doesn't even make me mad.
Remember that the average speed in Manhattan is less than 5 mph. There is little to be gained in travel time by careening down neighborhood streets.
I'd be less sanguine about the potential reduction in death. It'd be interesting to see the stats in terms of distance from home to freeway, and freeway to destination and get the change in commute time compared to deaths occurring between those segments.
If you live 10m from a freeway, then at 35mph just over 15m is ok. At 5mph 2 hours seems less than acceptable. I can be math-dumb, so it wouldn't be surprising if I'm way off.
(10/35)*60 = 17
(10/5)*60 = 120
Even at just 2m away the difference in commute is substantial.
Just as a sample, I used to have a 3.5 mile commute in NYC. It's about 45 minutes by walking, 25 minutes by bike (google maps says 15 minutes, I never did it that fast), 12 minutes by subway, or 19 minutes by driving. That's with current speed limits. New York City is so clogged with traffic that walking is actually competitive with driving, and biking would be faster than driving currently if the traffic lights weren't timed for an imaginary 25-35mph speed limit (that is never achieved).
Out in the suburbs, the distances are long and speed does matter. That makes the situation very tough; 15mph speed limits are going to severely devalue your real estate investment. I really have no answer for a sane transition here, and that's a big problem American society faces.
(On the other hand, the ocean consuming New York City is going to severely devalue real estate investments, too.)
Is it any better for a pedestrian or cyclist to get hit by a Ford 150 or a volkswagon? The outcome is bad either way. Collision avoidance would be better than the lesser of two outcomes.
> Collision avoidance would be better than the lesser of two outcomes.
We could ensure collision avoidance by banning cars from cities! But that's presumably not what you meant.
Yes, it is much better (although certainly not good) to be hit by a small VW than it is to be hit by a pickup truck. European safety standards reflect this fact; the US's standards should as well.
Yeah I actually bought my nephew a fairly well kept up 20 year old crown victoria for his birthday because his single mom couldn't afford a car. So I'm guessing you wouldn't like my purchase, but I was thinking selfishly I suppose about his personal well being.
I don't think that's an especially heavy car. I don't think it's a bad choice, but I suspect a modern unibody sedan will behave a bit better in a crash. And it seems like side protection came a long way in that time too - my 2016 sedan's doors felt like like opening a bank vault after I was used to the thin doors of my 2001 car.
Don't be too confident in your nephew's well being. The Ford Crown Victoria (and similar Panther platform vehicles) has terrible ratings for side impact crashes.
That's basically a desired property exposed by covid past few years.
"So, what's good for me but who cares about everyone else?"
Go ask retirement/nursing-home workers how many times they went to work sick and then count how many residents died there.
Good luck undo-ing SUVs (and massive 4x4s) I distinctly remember the year they started becoming popular and you could no longer see down the road anymore.
Disempowered low wage healthcare workers don't really have much of a choice. Line managers push them to cover shifts. These facilities are chronically understaffed because labor intensive work is inherently expensive. Another level up often the funding source is Medicaid which is also low rent. The result is problems such as no paid sick leave, no sick leave period, and workers being capped at part time schedules so they have to string together two jobs and become infection vectors between facilities.
Yes, everyone has taken the "no choice but to murder you" option past few years.
Everyone has their excuses because there's no penalty for killing someone like that.
Your coworkers are doing it do, they won't tell you they tested positive last night or this morning, frack it they are going into work, your problem, not theirs "no choice". Every hourly wage person is doing it to you, every delivery, restaurant, cashier, pharmacist, everyone. Their comfort is their priority, not yours.
When the SUV rolls over a pedestrian or cyclist, or punts a car down the road like a soccer ball, that's exactly what they are saying "Sorry, no choice".
At least the behavior is predictable now, was hidden before 2020, now obvious.
The thing is, people don't just die quick from covid. They die slow and painful. Then there is the millions who will have long-covid maybe for the rest of their lives until they kill themselves from the chronic suffering.
So many excuses, so many murderers. Society is just bizarre.
Doesn't have to be this way but it's what everyone keeps doing.
I totally understand your point. Have you ever worked a bad job? And relied on it for yourself or even your entire household? Quitting a job when you can click on one of multiple recruiter emails and start next week, or because it's a casual job you picked up for spending money is entirely different from being one paycheck away from being late on rent.
This is why I drive a Toyota Tacoma. Being high up is also safer, your vitals will be less impacted. I'm always surprised people don't know this. Driving a small car is almost irresponsible, especially with children
I'm more confused why people are outraged at me wanting to protect my own life, or that I would need to feel judged for driving a bigger car. I'm a responsible driver and a regular citizen.
Because part of being a responsible driver is minimizing harm dealt to those around you. In the same way that that requires driving at the speed limit, stopping at cross walks, and signaling before turning, it also requires having a bumper that would minimize fatalities when hitting a pedestrian. (Internal bleeding from a chest-height bumper is much harder to survive than a broken leg from a leg-height bumper.) The difference is that the former are required by both law and morality, while the latter is only required by morality.
You make assumptions that he’ll actually cause harm. I’ve never hit a pedestrian in my car. I’ve never hit someone on a bike. No one close to me that I know of has either. I know quite a few people that have had their cars hit by drunk drivers or reckless drivers.
I don't think that assumption is required here. Whenever predicting the future, it must be dealt in probabilities, not certainties. So if you're playing poker, you must evaluate the strength of your hand based on the cards dealt so far. Retroactively saying that a decision was made correctly because the cards drawn favored it isn't a useful analysis.
In the same way, it isn't necessary to assume that he will cause harm, only that it increases the likelihood of causing harm. With a larger car, a driver is less able to see pedestrians, and children/shorter adults may be blocked from view entirely. Pedestrian injuries and deaths are on the rise in the US, opposite the general trend elsewhere. The primary difference is the prevalence of unnecessarily large cars in the US.
The probability of dying from a car as a pedestrian in 2020 is 0.2% and that includes people committing suicide by car. Dying in a traffic accident with another car is 1.1%. If you're playing the odds in poker, you worry about the latter more than the former.
What's the alternative? Should he choose to risk dying in a crash for the nebulous greater good of lowering the average size of vehicles on the road? This problem will not be solved by individual drivers acting against their own self-interest. It needs to be solved at a societal level, probably with regulations on maximum vehicle size (which already exist, but are being worked around by mfrs)
Signed, A Miata driver. If I ever get in a wreck, I'm guaranteed to lose, but at least I'll go out in style.
Yes, people should absolutely feel a social obligation to make at least some concessions to the greater good.
While this isn't a complete substitute for regulations that systematically fix issues causes by negative externalities, I'd rather live in a society where a lot of problems are avoided because my fellow citizens generally care about my well being, rather than one in which the government needs to intervene left and right.
What do they do when the society around them doesn't care and is reckless? For example, because drinking is so ingrained in many societies today, you have to do what you can to protect yourself from drunk drives.
Sure, it is. I have an SUV, because everyone else here has pickup trucks, and almost nobody can drive to save their own goddamn lives let alone mine. If raised trucks were not allowed, I would drive a sedan.
because you would have some consideration for other people. But hey, there's no law that says you have to care so you can keep thinking the way you're thinking.
Honestly it seems like a weird take to say people should care more about strangers than their own family.
As long as SUVs exist on the road I feel like it’s a safety benefit for my family to have a similarly sized vehicle to protect my wife and child. I can’t control what others do but I can control what I do to keep my family safe.
And this is the exact reason why additional regulation is necessary. Because each individual would pick the option that minimizes their own risk, while maximizing the total risk, the choice cannot be left to individual choices.
Sadly we’re in a phase of rampant individualism, regardless of any detriment to others.
Larger cars also make roads more dangerous for all users, because the lost visibility means attentive drivers cannot see and plan further down the road with a huge suv in front of them.
Reading the road is a key skill for safe driving, large cars hamper everyone’s ability to do this.
Individualism is a core feature of capitalism and the enlightenment. Group identities are cancer and although not a requirement of, parliamentary (democracy) emerged precisely with capitalism and the individualism it requires.
Sadly probably serious. Taxing bigger cars to the point it's noticeable to average driver is probably only realistic solution, even if that's unfair for people that just happen to have a bunch of kids
It’s selfish to want to protect yourself? I guess it literally is selfish. But I’m not increasing my actual risk for some hypothetical reduction of everyone else’s risk. Semis, buses, industrial vehicles all share the same road I’m on, so why would I shrink my vehicle?
And isn’t it selfish for people to insist on riding their bicycles on the roads? Why is their willingness to increase their own risk my problem? I’m not asking them to ride bikes. They make that choice.
By the way, there is about 12k drunk driving deaths each year about about 850 cycling-auto deaths each year. Let ban alcohol if we really cared about safety.
Wow, as others said I can’t tell if you are serious or not. By this line of reasoning there is also the following.
It’s optimal for me right now to :
- answer that phone call in the subway.
- Steal that item.
- Play loud music at 2am.
- fart in the elevator.
And so on
Yes, but you can also read about how when the prohibition was revealed, people obeyed without delay. It has been documented that people immediately broke their wine containers and poured them in the streets of Madinah, such that it flowed through them.
The way US goes about banning alcohol on the road is simply not working. There are really hard punishments for driving while drunk, but it is really loosely enforced. So you are very unlikely to be caught, but if you are, your life is gonna suck.
There is also hardly any accommodations for people to go out drinking outside of walking distance from you home (especially in rural areas; it might actually be safer for you to drive in a protected vehicle then risk being hit by a drunk driver on your bicycle). And to top it off, the police it self is really dangerous, so it is hard for friends or bartenders to justify calling the police on a drunk driver.
All this makes a perfect environment for people to rather “risk” drunk driving, which as we know is a disaster. I think banning alcohol is a terrible idea, providing accommodations, better enforcement, friendlier law environment, etc. will go a long way.
I wouldn't be surprised if the change in risk to you versus to others is grossly asymmetric. Taller front ends are far likelier to kill people (pedestrians) in a collision.
Caring for children by driving a vehicle whose hood is taller than some adults. I suppose it makes sense if one believes they're far more likely to encounter children only in other tall vehicles. And that increased pollution and waste won't impact everyone's future negatively.
Taken to the extreme would my family be safest in a motorized siege tower? What about all the moments near home when the kids are playing on the driveway or near the street? Or those pesky unrelated kids who can only afford a bicycle or small car?
Are you sure there weren't other factors building the good things; like say publicly funded research, unions, anti-trust, etc.? Or maybe you prefer the good ol' 12x7x365 work days, child labor, company towns, and rampant illiteracy.
Or perhaps you prefer the return of rugged individualized health systems where you can choose between death or family bankruptcy. (Not if just when, more money just means later.)
The bottom line is still the same, large advances in society and modern comforts are derived from human self interest. You might do well to educate yourself:
This line of argumentation is just a cope to fend off discussion of negative externalities which spring from the same root. It's like showing up at the funeral of a pedestrian to extol the virtues of the motorized hearse.
I've read the book. You may be extrapolating a bit too far if you think self interest is the foundation for modern civilization, its affordances, and the high life expectancy.
EDIT: Said another way, your analysis appears reductive to the point of absurdity. Modern societal advances require a lot of collective action and self sacrifice.
Your claim is unfounded. It is just as likely that “modern civilization, its wonders, and high life expectancy were built despite market forces and individualism”.
Cars today have to have rear cameras so sone of those issues with driveways are moot now. I’m terms of bikes, because you’re riding higher you can see them from further away.
In the end, speed and alertness are the most important things. Drive responsibly and pay attention and your vehicle size isn’t causing nearly as much harm as a person in a small car that’s speeding whine texting.
Cameras and object detectors can help, yet they aren't always going to be better than glass in a smaller vehicle, especially around the corners of the vehicle. Fancy tech is also more likely to fail.
And when accidents do happen lower bumpers and hoods are less likely to cause harm.
You paid half ton truck money to wind up with a midsize truck (or you got the deal of the century). Vehicle size was clearly not a priority when you made the purchase. Or at least that's what your actions say.
How do you feel about your children walking to places and other parents having your mentality? What I'm getting at is that it in your ideal world here, your children may actually wind up less safe.
This seems to be a widely disliked comment here, but I'll back you up. I drove a sedan most of my adult life, then had kids, and am now looking into buying a large truck or SUV to carry the kids around in. I can't control the cars that others are driving around me or their driving skills or sobriety level, but I can control the car I drive. It's an arms race, I admit. But I will optimize for the safety of my children above all else, so large vehicle it is.
By doing that, you are also signalling demand to the market for heavier cars, which makes it more dangerous for your children when they cross the street as this article points out.
That signaling will most assuredly occur from the rest of society regardless of the choice he makes. Since the trend will continue regardless of his personal choice, one option is clearly safer for him than the other.
And so have the other commenters that agree with you. Prisoner's dilemna, all your kids are now more unsafe. I have been alive for three people I know to get killed by cars as pedestrians. Fools
What happens if your kids decide to start walking around to places? To school, with friends, or to do stuff? In that time you've signaled to the market that you want larger vehicles on the road, which makes it progressively less safe for your children to walk anywhere while slightly more safe in your vehicle.
John Neighbor follows the market and has bought an even larger car. Now you are in the position of needing to buy a larger car as well in order to maintain your relative safety standards.
Crash test ratings are generally scoped to within the "vehicle class." So a 5-star sedan is safer than a 3-star sedan, but there's no way to directly compare to the star-rating of a vehicle in a different class. (For example, the rating tells you nothing about how it compares to a 4-star SUV... though we can speculate the 5-star sedan is probably less safe because of the massive size difference.)
The only way to have a global metric would be via underlying objective data. The only data I've found for that is "vehicle death rates per 10 billion miles," which is here. [1]
The data is a few years old (and was a bit difficult to find!), but I relied on it a lot when I was car-shopping recently.
Worse for stopping distances though, especially to the extent that SUVs (very popular in the US) have a higher CoG and therefore the ABS has to be calibrated differently. The car is "safer" in that you won't die, but not safer in terms of avoiding accidents.
I recall learning this in a class on the automotive industry about 20 years ago. We learned about unintended consequences that caused the US automotive market to favor SUVs (see the Chicken tax [1]), and some of the downsides of SUVs.
My recollection is that SUVs have longer stopping distances because the ABS has to pause braking more frequently to avoid instability or rollover. It's possible, as another commenter suggested, that I'm recalling ESC, but that wasn't very common in the early 2000s. I think it might have something to do with the fact that the nose of a vehicle dives when braking, and a high CoG exacerbates this. But it's been 20 years, and I've scarcely thought about the course since then!
No discussion of the federal government pushing Americans to buy SUVs would be complete without mentioning the favorable depreciation schedule that can (could?) be applied to larger SUVs [1] and the lower standards that they face for fuel efficiency.[2]
How exactly would a braking SUV rollover? It'd effectively have to do a front flip. The center of gravity might be high, but that would require circus car level of high to get a front flip from a vehicle like that.
I don't think ABS is going to help much if someone puts inadequate tires on your vehicle.
Also you have it backwards. Banked corners actually reduce the chance of rollover. It's why NASCAR tracks have a large slope. It allows the drivers to brake farther out and longer into the turn before beginning to transition back onto the throttle.
That was true 20 years ago. The question is how much do you ease up the brake on that specific wheel, and then how much do you reapply it? You need to know the coefficient of friction of the road to know this. Modern controllers are doing a physics simulation of the entire vehicle, and part of this is the weight transfer as you go around a corner (which is partially influenced by the CoG). They then do a physics simulation of the hydraulic brake circuit so it knows how long to run the pump to build up the desired brake pressure.
Now of course this is combined with stability control (since that is required by law) and both of them are controlled by the same code.
(On a related note, I've spent way too much time reverse engineering the calibration for the ABS for a Silverado truck. Ridiculously huge program, ridiculously complicated, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the source code is a mess.)
Software for these controllers are usually codegen'd from a Simulink model (or equivalent dataflow language), which contributes to the difficulty in reverse engineering.
Ya most of the modern systems for "ABS" do way more than just ABS; usually they're also trying to keep steering authority as well, for example. With a higher COG car, you have to be more careful of rollovers, so maybe can't help someone get a super stupid steering angle.
Modern brakes can get a lot hotter before brake fade. Until the brakes get too hot it is just a matter of brake pressure. Modern cars universally have disk brakes which shed heat better. Larger vehicles also have bigger tires which leaves more room for brakes.
In short while you are not wrong, in practice even the worst numbers are still more than good enough that brake performance isn't an issue.
Just about any car can brake hard enough to lock up all 4 tires and enter a skid (or activate ABS to avoid this)- the limiting factor to braking distance is friction between the tires and the ground.
Scaling for static friction between rubber and asphalt does not follow the friction equation you are taught in high school physics class. Generally, for a given weight of vehicle, a larger tire surface area is able to produce more maximum braking friction. In other terms, minimizing the surface pressure and maximizing the surface area at the contact patch increases maximum braking friction.
That would be true if your wheels instantly stopped turning when you applied the brakes.
The limiting factor for braking isn't the friction between your wheels and the ground, which is weight-dependent, but the friction between your brake pads and rotors, which is not weight-dependent.
this isn't quite right either. most modern cars have brakes that far exceed the limits of grip for the tires. the brakes themselves should only be the limiting factor if you are riding them down a very long hill or performing multiple hard stops in quick succession (eg, racing).
Yeah, that's why it's as easy to come to a stop on well maintained tarmac as it is on ice, snow or gravel. As long as those brake pads work well that is.
I suggest taking your bike out and practice breaking on various surfaces. You will quickly get what the limiting factor is. It's the same with a car just the tires are much wider and brakes more powerful.
GP didn't claim that braking distance was larger because of higher mass. Rather, because of the higher centre of gravity the ABS has to be calibrated differently, leading to weaker braking, thus larger braking distance.
I have no expertise in this, but seems prima facie plausible.
I think simongr3dal’s remark isn’t about them taking longer to stop, but about the use of the term calibration.
ABS is a feedback loop: brake faster until just before the wheels start slipping. That doesn’t need calibration.
There may be additional logic in ABS systems for corner cases that requires calibration, though (for example, if your front left wheel has lots more grip than the other ones, can you brake full on it and keep the car going in a straight(ish) line?), but I don’t see how higher CoG would be a factor there.
Ah, fair enough, that makes sense. You're right, if we posit that ABS is purely to prevent slipping, that would imply that it always goes for maximum braking.
> I don’t see how higher CoG would be a factor there.
Could be that the "additional logic" (whether we call it ABS or something else) aims to keep certain values (such as longitudinal or lateral acceleration) within bounds (thus releasing brake pressure when approaching those bounds), and those bounds are tighter with higher CoG.
I remember the Mercedes A-Class (with pretty high CoG) rolled over in the Swedish Moose test initially, until that was fixed with Electronic Stability Control (how?).
“When ESC detects loss of steering control, it automatically applies the brakes to help steer the vehicle where the driver intends to go. Braking is automatically applied to wheels individually, such as the outer front wheel to counter oversteer, or the inner rear wheel to counter understeer”
So, ESC activates the brakes harder than the driver indicates through the controls, while ABS activates the brakes less hard than the driver indicates through the controls.
“Just as ESC is founded on the anti-lock braking system (ABS), ESC is the foundation for new advances such as Roll Stability Control or active rollover protection that works in the vertical plane much like ESC works in the horizontal plane. When RSC detects impending rollover (usually on transport trucks or SUVs), RSC applies brakes, reduces throttle, induces understeer, and/or slows down the vehicle.”
In the end, there can be only one set of commands that get sent to the brakes, throttle, etc, so these systems must be interconnected, making the terms more marketing than indicators of specific systems in the car.
“The concept for ABS predates the modern systems that were introduced in the 1950s. In 1908, for example, J.E. Francis introduced his 'Slip Prevention Regulator for Rail Vehicles'.
In 1920 the French automobile and aircraft pioneer Gabriel Voisin experimented with systems that modulated the hydraulic braking pressure on his aircraft brakes to reduce the risk of tire slippage”
> Turns out the momentum from higher mass and the increased friction from higher mass balance exactly.
yes, in the spherical cow sense, but this isn't at all true for real life vehicles and tires. the weight of the vehicle does have a significant impact on traction, here's a quick video explaining tire load sensitivity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa2gZNqmT8
related to the above issue (and as GP mentioned), the high CoG of an SUV also poses challenges for braking performance. you want all four wheels of the vehicle to have roughly similar braking force. obviously the front wheels are going to contribute more to braking than the rear, but you don't want a huge disparity. this doesn't matter so much for the abstract question of "how quickly can a vehicle stop?", but it matters a lot for the practical question of "which direction is the vehicle facing?" if the rear wheels are contributing much less of the total braking force, the car is likely to end up sideways. this is bad if you want to do something like "remain in control of the vehicle" while braking.
> thus it's always the brake pads stopping the car, not the tires?
The tires are the only thing in contact with the ground. All deceleration force can only come from the grip between tires and the ground[1]. The brake pads in most installations can easily lock up the tires (which means now you only have sliding coefficient of friction instead of rolling friction). In other words, what matters is tire grip.
Buy the grippiest tires you can afford to run.
[1] Well, cars with aero downforce also get a lot of deceleration from that. A Formula 1 car will decelerate at more than 1G merely by lifting off the throttle, without touching the brakes. But none of this is relevant to street cars.
> The brake pads in most installations can easily lock up the tires
> In the United States, the NHTSA has mandated ABS in conjunction with Electronic Stability Control under the provisions of FMVSS 126 as of September 1, 2012.
Even race cars running on slicks and weighing 700 kg get better braking by avoiding lockups and using the pads instead. So unless your pads are trash, you better get a proper ABS instead of imagining some magical tire with grip comparable to brake pads.
The above comment seems to be making a distinction that braking force comes from the tires or the brakes. That is not how it works.
The brakes provide friction to resist the spinning of the wheel, but of course only to the point that the tire can provide grip (friction) against the road surface.
Picture trying to brake with slick tires on wet ice. Nearly zero tire grip equals nearly zero braking force. Doesn't matter what kind of brake components are on the car. No grip = no grip.
If you want to be able to stop quickly to avoid accidents you need to maximize grip a the tire-road contact patch and you need to have a braking system powerful enough to fully take advantage of that grip.
Every car sold for decades now already has the latter (unless something is broken, obviously), so the variable you need to control is tire grip.
Thus: Buy the grippiest tires you can afford to run (if you want optimal braking to avoid accidents, that is).
Why would taxes be needed to internalize the increased risk to others? It seems to me that liability insurance is the appropriate place to factor those risks in.
Drastically higher minimums for liability insurance would be better, but politically unpopular for the same reason that higher taxes would be unpopular.
Except they operate in a competitive and fairly transparent market, so it’s actually not like that at all. Insurance rates are very tuned for a variety of risk profiles to capture the specific risk segments the insurer wants to take on and they compete for price in that space. If you don’t like what it costs from A you might be able to find it cheaper with B, and B has incentive to do that.
But if it costs a lot, people would rather just take the risk and then be on the hook for way more money than they can pay. Which is why paying for insurance is legally mandated in some cases.
Michigan's unlimited PIP is lifetime (so no out of pocket maximum to cover in year 2 of your catastrophe). There's rules about what is covered of course, but the financial side of it is a bit simpler.
My premium for the year is less than 1 month of health insurance, it's pretty cheap.
Insurance rates should be set with actuarial data and not with political agendas. It's not insurance companies duties to set our action for societal purposes. You really do not want to give them any more power than they already have in our lives. See healthcare in the USA. That's why we have governments.
The government requiring people to purchase higher liability coverage does not mean the government is setting the prices for the liability insurance. Actuaries would still be doing the same job.
Increased liability insurance, if mandatory, is effectively just a tax collected by an independent entity. At least on first blush, it makes sense (to me) to just cut out that middleman and levy it directly.
We're talking about an incentive structure. Whether that's liability insurance or a direct tax, the goal is the same: to disincentivize unnecessarily dangerous road vehicles.
In a competitive market for insurance the goal is to optimize the actuarial outcomes such that you make a margin after losses are paid out on average. Making the tables optimal and margins small bring you volume of business. Taxes have no such incentive structure at all.
They don't apply the same technique, but they absolutely do establish the same incentive structure: taxing "vices" leads to decreased consumption[1], especially when the target isn't something you can easily sell on the black market (like cigarettes can be).
If Car B costs $X,XXX more than Car A for the sole reason that it's more deadly to everyone else outside of the car, then the purchasing envelope shifts for a large number of people.
But when you talk about incentive structures you have to consider both sides to understand the final price. Taking a one sided view doesn’t explain the final price at all.
Which side am I missing? When people buy cigarettes at the store, it's generally understood that the tax they're paying is used, in part, to offset the social ills of smoking. I would expect a similar understanding when purchasing large cars.
The insurance company doesn’t care about your safety, just how risky you are and the expected payout for insurance over your lifetime subtracted from the income produced from the policy. They don’t increase it to change behavior as you imply. This is different than the government taxation which is less about revenue and costs than about public health incentive creation.
> Okay. In that case, I think I strongly prefer the tax!
I'm reading this as you preferring a moral solution rather than a technical one? You must feel pretty confident that the folks in charge of governing will always have priorities that align with your own.
These are both moral solutions, in my book; the GP has convinced me that one is more effective than the other.
I don't think any such law will ever come into effect. So I don't feel the need to be confident (or the opposite) with respect to my elected officials. It's all wishing.
One thing to note is that, not only can taxes be made progressive, liability insurance is likely regressive considering higher paying jobs are more likely to be remote.
I'd agree with this in a vacuum, but unfortunately the state of infrastructure in the United States[1] is such that most people--especially lower-income folks--need to drive to work, the grocery store, to ferry kids to/from school, &c. This isn't a good situation, but it's the reality at the moment. Moral "oughts" like you're providing really only hold weight if a person has a realistic alternative, imo.
[1] I'm not sure the situation in other countries.
The infrastructure problem would get figured out more quickly if people were jailed for driving without sufficient funds to compensate people in case of an accident.
The status quo is to require all other road users to take the losses from impoverished drivers which is as equally “unfair” as your sob story.
Drivers are often not found liable for hitting pedestrians in the US even when it is clear that an error on the part of the driver caused the accident, so liability insurance is not actually capturing those externalities.
However, laws automatically holding drivers liable by default for accidents with pedestrians unless there were clear extenuating circumstances, as some other countries, might be another way to change this situation so that this risk could be better captured by liability insurance.
> Drivers are often not found liable for hitting pedestrians in the US even when it is clear that an error on the part of the driver caused the accident, so liability insurance is not actually capturing those externalities.
Do you have a source for this?
> However, laws automatically holding drivers liable by default for accidents with pedestrians unless there were clear extenuating circumstances, as some other countries, might be another way to change this situation so that this risk could be better captured by liability insurance.
What countries have those laws, and how have they worked out? Why not just do something sane like treating it like any other civil case where people who cause damage to others are liable for it?
I think you're being a little disingenuous. Most police are shooting people in self-defense (https://www.statista.com/statistics/585140/people-shot-to-de...). A minority of victims are actually innocent, and justice still does tend to occur in those specific situations. For instance, George Floyd's killer received a (presumably) just punishment.
there are several problems with these figures. first of all, the unknown category. this data comes from police departments. if they "don't know", it means the person was unarmed. otherwise they would have said. secondly, the vehicle category includes anyone who was in a car. while a car theoretically can be used as a weapon, that also is a category the police can put anyone they shoot after pulling over because "I was afraid they were doing to drive at me". thirdly, caring a weapon isn't illegal. this chart doesn't break down by whether the person with the weapon was actually threatening the officers with it, just whether there was a weapon on them when they were killed. in the most egregious cases like George Floyd, the police sometimes get charged but it's rare. Floyd's case was exceptional because it room place over 9 minutes in broad daylight with dozens of witnesses and multiple camera angles. there are hundreds of unarmed people killed by the police every year, and the vast majority see no charges.
Also, anecdotally, I hear quite a lot about family of deceased in wrongful police shootings suing police. Although I don't think the difficulty that a private citizen has getting justice after being wronged by a police department is really at all the same as most road accident situations.
Japan has percentage-based liability, and generally speaking there is a large onus on the driver of cars to do the safe thing when close to smaller groups.
For example, you have to slow down to under 10km/h in theory if there are small children on the sidewalk next to you. Up until recently, a bike collision with a driver was considered 100% the driver's fault even if the bike was riding against traffic (That was changed so that the liability is 100% if the bike is riding on the right side of the road).
The point of all this is that there is such a thing as mixed liability, and the idea that it's either one or the other person's fault is just completely unworkable. And because there's this percentage-based system, you can ratchet up the liability based on who is more likely to cause major damage, without having binary results for really tough things.
I know there is such a thing as mixed liability, that's pretty common in civil court systems isn't it? I don't see what point you're trying to make with it.
You didn't really answer the questions I was asking OP for either. Japan puts a large onus on drivers but appears to have backed off from some of it? That is actually interesting though, why did they change?
Well my point is that there's a lot of mixed liability things baked in, so there are many many many many things that can make a driver liable, because there's not this fear of "what about in this extenuating circumstance X???"
The change is mostly around making rules more strict for cyclists, as cyclists... well, they also pose a danger to pedestrians! There is a pretty famous case of a cyclist hitting an old lady and killing her.
Some people moving here get annoyed because a lot of times the liability split ends up being 90% driver/10% victim, because there are technicalities, but generally speaking even for pretty "egregious" behavior from pedestrians the driver is ultimately expected to be doing their best. Things like "but there was a blind corner, how could I know somebody was going to ride from that corner" hold no water because drivers are supposed to slow down in those cases, for example. I don't know the state of liability in the US but I imagine it's a bit less victim-friendly.
> What countries have those laws, and how have they worked out?
Here in Norway the driver is assumed to be at fault, mainly due to the following paragraph:
§ 3. Basic rules for traffic.
Everyone must travel with consideration and be alert and careful so that no danger can arise or damage be caused and so that other traffic is not unnecessarily obstructed or disturbed.
In case there's a major accident, the driver at presumed fault will have their license temporarily revoked right away. However if the investigation showed the driver drove with reasonable care and caution, the driver will usually be exonerated (and thus get their license back).
There's been a few notable cases regarding this, for example one case where a pedestrian crossed the road at night during winter in a poorly lit area, got hit by a a car and died. The driver was found not guilty as the pedestrian had not worn a retroreflectors or similar, thus the driver had no chance to see the pedestrian until it was too late.
However, due to the above, the driver will often get some blame. There's been cases where the driver does not get an involuntary manslaughter charge, but does get punished due to paragraph 3 above. A recent one I recall is this one[2].
That's criminal liability, but we were talking about civil.
Still, that seems even crazier. A pedestrian can step out right in front of you even deliberately and if it happens to be broad daylight when they do, you have to somehow prove you were not negligent otherwise you can be convicted of manslaughter.
Is that really so crazy? Driving a vehicle means constantly putting others' life at risk. Being a pedestrian does not. Holding people driving vehicles up to (significantly) higher standards seems like the sane thing to do, considering the immense damage they can cause to others.
Having to prove yourself innocent of criminal accusation? Yes I think that is a pretty bad system. That has nothing to do with the standards you have for negligence or competence of operation, it is about a private citizen being compelled by the state to provide proof of their innocence of a criminal accusation.
Having to prove yourself innocent of criminal accusation after killing someone else seems like a pretty reasonable system. The idea that killing other human beings using a car is "expected" and "the norm" seems to me like the bad system.
> Having to prove yourself innocent of criminal accusation after killing someone else seems like a pretty reasonable system.
I think you have it backward. You are being asked to prove yourself innocent after being accused of being the guilty party in an incident in which somebody died.
> The idea that killing other human beings using a car is "expected" and "the norm" seems to me like the bad system.
I don't know where you got that idea from. Seems pretty deluded.
It's a variant of "with great power comes great responsibility". The driver has taken non-trivial training to get their drives license[1], as they're in command of a vehicle which can inflict great damage to others easily. Thus there is a significant asymmetry between the driver and the pedestrian.
If a pedestrian suddenly steps out right in front of your car in broad daylight, in an area where it's not reasonable to expect them to (ie no crosswalk, not next to a school etc), then, as long as you weren't speeding or using your mobile phone, you'd most likely be fine.
However if the pedestrian had for example been acting erratically just before, then the police might argue you should have taken more care.
Note that the paragraph I quoted applies to anyone venturing in traffic, including pedestrians. However, given the mentioned asymmetry, it usually falls down to the driver to be the more responsible party.
> It's a variant of "with great power comes great responsibility".
It's not. The idea that being innocent until proven guilty frees you of responsibility is wrong. They are on separate axis. People get tried and convicted of criminal negligence causing damage, injury, death / manslaughter etc and for that matter all sorts of other criminal acts quite regularly.
Would you say somewhere like the USA where people are usually quite strongly innocent until proven guilty has a problem incarcerating enough people?
Maybe I explained myself poorly. Of course the driver is innocent until proven/found[1] guilty. That's separate from the potential charges and punishment. It's the latter where the greater responsibility of the driver comes in.
[1]: If you're "just" fined, you can accept or take it to court to get the police to prove it there.
> In case there's a major accident, the driver at presumed fault will have their license temporarily revoked right away.
> Of course the driver is innocent until proven/found[1] guilty.
those two statements read as incompatible to me, possibly that's where the confusion in this thread is coming from. having your license revoked is itself a serious penalty in the US.
> having your license revoked is itself a serious penalty in the US.
Unless you're relying on the license for work, I'd agree it's probably a more severe action in the US than here in Norway, where most people live in areas with well-functioning public transport.
There's one important detail that I had forgotten, as I have never been exposed to this thankfully. If the police wants to temporarily revoke your license, you have to agree. If you do not agree, it will go to the courts within three weeks[1]. The police, and courts, should weigh the impact of revoking your license against the severity of the incident.
Perhaps because this is just one of the external costs, and these costs are absorbed through taxes (for instance, road wear is higher for heavier vehicles, so lighter car effectively pay for the SUVs and trucks)
There's many instances of direct subsidy going through SUV [0]. I don't remember the exact framing, but basically tariffs and other rules carve out a SUV shaped bubble for US makers to operate with extra low competition, and subsidies will often go there too when they don't want to make it explicit it's only for US makers.
The recent EV plan would be one exception to this, where it's worded straight as a middle finger towards foreign makers.
> instance, road wear is higher for heavier vehicles, so lighter car effectively pay for the SUVs and trucks
The correct answer in that case is to quit wasting time & effort creating taxes for personal vehicles, and just make commercial truckers pay it all. It spreads the cost of the roads around to everyone who benefits (even if you don't have a car, you benefit from the roads existing). And since the damage to roads scales to the fourth power of the axle weight, the difference between a car and SUV isn't too dramatic, compared to the difference between an SUV and a big rig.
> even if you don't have a car, you benefit from the roads existing
That's the most interesting part to me. Trucks using the road is really important to our society, and if everyone benefits from it I'm not sure it makes much sense either to make commercial entities pay in full for it.
The same way railroads where heavily subsidized and water ways are also usually state/government projects, road maintenance could be (and probably is up to a point?) handled at the same level.
My ideal would be to get rid of SUV preferential policies so there is no need to counterbalance their use on other aspects. In a balanced setting, SUVs are rarely a rational choice (cf. the cars that get chosen everywhere else in the world).
> Perhaps because this is just one of the external costs, and these costs are absorbed through taxes (for instance, road wear is higher for heavier vehicles, so lighter car effectively pay for the SUVs and trucks)
The externality we are specifically talking about is the safety risk to others that comes from having a larger vehicle. Other externalities can be solved different ways, but doe this specific one this seems like precisely the scenario addressed by liability insurance.
Yep, classic fallacy of judging actions on intentions rather than results (i.e. ignoring unintended consequences).
A. Cars get bigger because of safety standards.
B. Bigger cars cause safety issues.
C. Rather than unrolling A to adjust the original incentives, we stick a punishment (taxes) to offset some of the incentive we are placing in other areas
Something like a honda fit or a similar subcompact car. Lightweight, around 2500 lbs for these cars give or take between makes, plus they all generally have a sloping front end that will just shed pedestrians off of it like a cow catcher on a train. Many SUV and truck front ends are pretty flat otoh.
Actually yes. Buses are driven by professional drivers who have to pass through a much more aggressive filter than your average SUV drive does.
When I'm out driving, walking or biking in Seattle I worry much much less about bus drivers doing something unpredictable than I do about light vehicle drivers.
There's another factor here and it's large animal collisions. You're safer in a high driving position with a heavier vehicle. Here in Australia SUVs with "roo bars" are popular with people who do a lot of bush driving. There are a lot of collisions with kangaroos and other animals unfortunately and they can more easily come over the bonnet and through the windscreen of small cars.
Many residential neighborhoods have around a 3-ton vehicle weight limit (some go by axle count.) This was designed to stop semi-truck towing trailers from parking in neighborhoods. I lived in one and got chewed out when my OTR cousin stopped in for a night with his whole rig.
I would expect such a low limit to be relatively rare. It precludes a lot of regular vehicles -- everything from a basic UPS delivery truck to almost any regular pickup bigger than a Toyota Tacoma. A Hummer EV has a similar GVWR to an F250, and considerably lower than a typical F350, which are common residential vehicles (for better or worse).
An F250 generally has a GVWR of 9900, which is essentially 5T. It could be spec'd with a 12400 limit, but most are not. Far more common on an F350, though, to see 13000+.
I expect you're talking about curb weight. 6500 pounds for a gasser F250 is pretty typical, a bit north of 7000 for a diesel (which is 3.5T). But it's impractical to go by curb weight, the real number is GVWR. Can't tell what someone might be carrying and it all goes to the road.
> It precludes a lot of regular vehicles -- everything from a basic UPS delivery truck to almost any regular pickup bigger than a Toyota Tacoma
For someone from Europe this sentence is insane. Calling a truck heavier than 3 tones a regular vehicle is just mindboggling. In most (all?) of Europe you need a special license to drive a vehicle that is over 3.5 tonnes.
I'm not worried about those as much as the midsize and up SUV's, there will be very few Hummer EV's on the road statistically but mid size SUV's have become almost the standard American car.
Well, I live in the burbs and have a kid in his carseat in the back, plus stroller and groceries. Not to mention I'm a rather large man and when we last looked for cars I literally couldn't fit into a lot of them, I need more space. Even more, great gas mileage and reliability, and very safe. "Compact SUVs" or whatever they call the Subaru Forester now and it's ilk are exactly perfect for my family, especially with another kid on the way.
I don’t know what kind of van you have in mind but there are plenty of vans in the US that are actually more powerful and heavy than a SUV. A Chrysler Voyager has 100 more hp and weighs about 900 lbs more than a Forester.
The vans don't pretend to be built for off-road, so they have better steering and lower gas mileage (both due to lower suspention and to lower weight).
Is this true? The van mentioned, the Chrysler Voyager, gets about 22mpg. The Subaru Forester (mentioned elsewhere as an example SUV) gets about 28mpg. The Forrester is about 3600 pounds, vs. 4300 pounds for the Voyager.
The vans made by US companies for US markets are gas guzzlers, but the ones made for other markets are better. For example, Ford S-Max sold in Poland gets 37 mpg, and is larger than the Forester.
Looked into this a bit. S-Max is a hybrid minivan, so gas mileage won't compare with Forester, but otherwise, they seem oddly identical.
S-Max vs. Forester
Curb weight: 3626 lbs vs. 3620
Mileage: 44 mpg vs. 30 mpg
Cargo: 77.69 cubic feet vs. 74.2 cubic feet
So about 6 pounds heavier and 4 cubic feet more space than the Forester. It would be interesting if we had a hybrid Forester to compare with, but that doesn't seem to exist (yet).
Also looked into U.S. vans being gas guzzlers. A comparable vehicle in the U.S. is the Toyota Sienna, since it's a hybrid minivan. It's 4700 pounds, gets 36 mpg (vs. 44 for S-Max), but has 101 cubic feet of cargo space, which is 1/3 more than the S-Max. Seems to correlate well with weight, which makes sense.
Based on this, my (current) take is that mid-size SUVs in the U.S. are equivalent to these smaller minivans elsewhere, and U.S. minivans are a bit larger and heavier than that.
> 10 years ago you would have bought a family van.
Fellow European here, we don't have kids but we were thinking at maybe getting a second dog, which made me look for a possible car replacement (we now have a 15+ year-old small hatchback). After some searching and calculating I found out that the "usefulness" of cars for my purported task (to transport two dogs in the back) can be summarized like this (in decreasing order): vans -> station wagons/estates -> SUVs/CUVs.
Unfortunately vans are on their out, I can't really understand the reason why (the VW Sharan will cease production this year, Ford C-Max ceased production back in 2019 etc), station wagons are also not feeling good, almost every car company is betting the house on SUVs/CUVs, which is a trend I don't like at all, because you get to pay more money for less utility.
My wife, kid in a car seat, and I recently went on a two weeks vacation in our VW Polo, baby stroller, disassembled om
changing table and two weeks worth of luggage included. Granted, the car was jam-packed, but it makes me think you could get the things you listed to fit in a smaller car.
On the outside, cars like the berlingo offer so much more room on the inside than even large SUVs it's not even funny. Goes to show that many of the "I need a large car because I have a family" arguments, are really more about looking big from the outside, not so much about internal practicalities.
The older Berlin OS were much more trade/transport cars, but the newer Berlingo comes in a family version which is pretty cool (and received reviews at least in the German press).
My mom got one mainly because it was convenient for transporting my grandma. Not many cars you can exit from sitting height. Of course it also fits a lot of crap when e.g. going on holiday. It's an odd in-between between a sedan and a van.
NZ has different vehicles available to other countries. This was about 15 years ago or so. And a family of 6 plus several dogs and luggage capability.
I'm sure they could have maybe picked a smaller vehicle as well but economics also come into it - it was a secondhand Japanese import (NZ gets a lot of those, in fact when I was a kid we found yen coins still hidden underneath the seats) so it was gotten on the cheap as well.
You can't legally drive the hummer EV in Switzerland on your standard license (B permit) . The max weight allowed is 3500 kg. I doubt we will see this vehicle Europe for sale.
We have had big cars for a really long time. Look back to the 70s, the cars then were called "boats" because they were huge and they had a lot more steel than current cars.
Yes, I agree, more people are favoring SUVs and trucks than prior generations, but huge cars have been around for decades.
I recently purchased a 79 Lincoln Continental Mark V and it is that same length as my 2020 F150 - 40 year spread, same size vehicle.
People need to drive safe and not be stupid behind the wheel. I would guess that cell phone use while driving kills way more people than "big vehicles" do (most of us are guilty of this). I feel it is a technology+cultural issue.
We've had large cars for a long time, but the macro trend is still there: cars are getting larger over time.
There are plenty of other things we can do to increase driver safety, as you've said. But large cars simply do kill and maim people more frequently, and there are many more of them now.
Sedans and coupes have gotten larger as SUV’s and 18 wheelers have become more and more common on the roads. They get bigger in part to fit safety features into the areas you can’t see. These cars get heavier because of government required (in the US and EU, anyways) safety systems like airbags, backup cameras and all of the wiring and other parts such systems require.
I don't believe for one moment that the HUD on a modern SUV requires all that space for its wires. It's a commodity computer connected to a commodity touchscreen. The airbag hasn't meaningfully changed in the last 25 years, either.
Cars have gotten larger for two primary reasons: larger crumple zones (a legitimate safety change!), and to circumvent emissions regulations. Of those, the latter has been a much stronger pressure.
Side air bags have increased in popularity in the last 25 years. Although it looks like they reached 100% in 2012, so presence of side air bags doesn't explain changes in the last 10 years.
Commodity computers and touchscreens weren’t in many cars 15-20 years ago. Cars with features like seat cooling and heating were premium trim level versions, now those are more widespread. Wiring for cameras? Wiring for lidar, radar, and all sorts of other sensors? The sensors (and presumably their required computer system) themselves? All add weight. Also, using steel as opposed to advanced, lighter and more expensive materials, the larger crumple zones (safety features) weigh more.
My Dad owned a "boat" without any shame. I don't think it was entirely derogatory. Or even if it were, that social pressure obviously wasn't very effective.
Among young people there does seem to be such pressure - I hear plenty of folks around my age (late teens, early 20s) talking about a car being a boat as a downside.
It was called boat because they didn't handle very well, and were tricky in tight situations. It was derogatory, though it was said in that tone of voice for sarcastic reasons.
Both of those cars weigh about 3,500lbs. Now swap in a 5,000lbs Tesla, or that new 9,000lbs Hummer EV. That big old car will be nothing but a pile of twisted metal. In short, I don't think you can compare large cars of the past to ones that exist today.
>People just need to drive safe and not be stupid behind the wheel.
Hmm, let's see how that's going
>2 million people are killed on roads yearly, and many more are injured
Not so well.
Jokes aside, we need to move to safer and more efficient forms of transportation, rather than wishing that everybody operates their 2 ton death machine in a safe way.
More anti-car rhetoric from the globalist academics... No thanks, I'd rather live a life I enjoy than what they think, even if it's more dangerous. Large-scale personal autonomy is precisely what they are most afraid of.
I can't mind-read the motivations of the academics here, but I do think the concept of the plebs having great personal mobility has been strangely under disfavor in recent years. As just one example, we saw during the biggest hysteria periods during Covid that people weren't allowed to leave too far from their homes.
The personal mobility and freedom for all you claim to love looks like a Renault Twizy or a 5kW electric motorbike or a velomobile with a 500W motor as well as walking, bikes and a functional transit system.
SUVs and 'Trucks' are just a danger and direct harm to your neighbors and subsidizing them imposes a massive burden on the people paying for the vast swathes of asphalt, inflation of infrastructure costs and medical care they entail. They limit mobility rather than enabling it because they require any spaces which they dominate to be made impassible without a giant protective metal shell They're so destructive and awful to be near that entire neighborhoods need to be redesigned to get them away from the residents as quickly as possible when in use. This results in requiring any worthwhile destination to be removed so that cars do not come towards residences.
The personal mobility and freedom for all you claim to love looks like a Renault Twizy or a 5kW electric motorbike or a velomobile with a 500W motor as well as walking, bikes and a functional transit system.
A cross country trip in a velo with 500W for the hills and no cars to run me over would be great. There are some rather indirect trails around me that are really nice out to about 300km, but they stop just short of the most interesting destinations.
If the extra 40% or so vs a velo or 25% vs a LEV of time on a very long trip matters then it sounds like a high speed train would save significantly more. Either option sounds better than a car which might travel slower than a velo's average unassisted speed due to traffic so you have to budget the time anyway and then be stressed the whole way.
I'd invite clarification, if you care to respond. I'm not sure if you're making an argument against the concept of car ownership in general, or instead advocating to deemphasize their importance in peoples' lives and redesigning transit and neighborhoods to be better and more pleasant without cars (a general goal which I think most people would aspire towards).
The end goal should be allowing people to not have cars if they wish to live that lifestyle, and not taxing (either directly or via things like parking minimums and other externalities) non car owners for cars that make their lives worse.
It is impossible for everyone in an urban environment to drive (you wind up with the katy freeway if you try and it still doesn't work), so just make the bare minimum concessions of space and priority to allow those people who don't want to be in a car to get out of your way, and pay the whole costs of your driving (which are presently on the order of a dollar a mile, but would also go down with more equal use).
Just my 2 cents, but with some of the posts in this thread you're actually advocating a position that I think many/most people would largely agree with you on and then snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by making it sound awful with your overall tone and persuasion.
For instance, you might not love them, but there's good roles that SUVs and trucks can fulfill to enrich peoples' lives. They're tools that can help you do good things like build a garden or deck, move or pull the supplies needed to enjoy an extended camping trip, or many other nice things that cannot be done on a scooter or moped.
To your last paragraph, you can actually rent a substantial work truck from Home Depot.
I think a lot of the argument comes down to the idea of using the right tool for the job. Look around at the people sitting in traffic with you. Some are filling their truck beds with stuff, sure, but plenty of others are not, and are driving with one occupant. Suddently you don't need all those seats or that towing capacity to pick up a bag of coffee, like you don't need an octocore processor to run your hello world script. Maybe you can get away with an ebike and a cargo rack, and orders of magnitude less energy spent to do the same work of you getting that bag of coffee.
You'd put even less wear on your other vehicles, like that work truck you really need once or twice a month by not using them every day for all other tasks you do in life. Maybe that work truck you own can now last 10x as long in your hands with the lightened use it now sees. That means you can now own a work truck while consuming 1/10th the resources it takes to keep up a steady supply of work trucks for yourself from the environment. That's huge.
The response is the same no matter how polite you are, so I'd rather normalise ridiculing ridiculous positions like the apparent absolute necessity of being able to move a piece of plywood no matter when and no matter where you are at any cost including trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives each year.
Personal autonomy? The car is your ball and chain. It's pretty common to hear about people wholly avoiding parts of town because the parking is annoying for example. Now everywhere you go in live you have to find a spot to legally keep this huge hunk of metal. Meanwhile, with a bike, I'm finding its often the fastest vehicle in town when there's any surface street gridlocking going on. I can filter past all the traffic to the front of the intersection, I'm always going the same speed no matter traffic and don't have to plan for it at all. I can park wherever for free and sometimes can even just bring the bike inside.
Perhaps an interesting, related anecdote to this is that the song "Red Barchetta" by Rush is based on a speculative short story related to this article's premise. In the story, Modern Safety Vehicles are by design massive and heavy, and through their design (and either carelessness or aggression by those who drive them), are a danger to older, smaller cars.
Somewhat off topic, I was curious to read the lyrics, and Google confidently pointed me to the lyrics to Presto instead. I was so confused until I realized those weren’t lyrics to Red Barchetta.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] threadPDF -> https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17170/w171...
* Per capita and per mile, buses are far safer than personal automobiles.
* When buses do get in accidents, seatbelts are more of a hazard than a safety feature (e.g. by preventing impaired riders from fleeing the vehicle on their own).
The latter doesn't apply to personal vehicles to the same degree, since they're preventing fatalities in different types of crashes for the latter (e.g. being flung out of the front window).
I suppose they don't tend to go into high speed highways.
I'm not sure a good data source, but I'd expect that the serious injury rate per person-mile of buses is much lower than that of private cars.
Rail is 1/2 the bus fatality rate.
<https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...>
I've been in a bus-automobile accident, at low speed (< 25 kph). The experience from within the bus was an abrupt stop, I've experienced similar from normal braking.
The auto involved suffered major rear-end damage. The bus's front bumper was somewhat scuffed.
High-speed rollover accidents, collisions with fixed structures adjacent to a high-speed roadway, or plunging from a bridge or cliff might benefit from additional restraints. Those circumstances are seldom encountered.
With movable/deformable obstacles, heavier car = obstacle gets moved/deformed more = higher stopping distance.
A heavier car doesn't reduce stopping distance with heavier obstacles (a bigger car increases it though).
- Cars get larger and larger forever until cars get abolished for some other reason.
- There's some natural limit on how large a car can get and all cars will eventually converge on that limit.
- Something happens (what?) that changes the trend and suddenly they become smaller again.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
When everyone is driving a Hummer H1, with a mounted .50 M60, we’ll finally solve road rage too.
Second, the M60 fires a 7.62x51 round, not .50 BMG. You're thinking of the M2 or "Ma Duece".
I think that something is electrification and the limits on energy that comes with that. Aerodynamics makes for smaller is better. However the weight of the car is up significantly.
Which definition of "bigger" are we concerned about?
Recently disappointed with the Chevy Equinox EV announcement, it takes the name of their small SUV but makes it 11” longer. Still at least impressed by the target price, but wish it were smaller.
And you’d say “Oh well they have to put the batteries somewhere,” meanwhile on the same day Jeep announced their Avenger EV. It’s a proper subcompact with 250 mile range, but it won’t come to the US because apparently no one here wants small cars.
Also waiting for more info on Mazda’s plug-in hybrid models. The CX-60 was announced for Europe, but we have to wait for a special fat version (CX-70) for the USA.
Overall disappointed with the car manufacturers lately, and with the consumer spending habits that have pushed things this way. Would greatly increased taxes on large vehicles reduce it? Maybe, but then you’re basically saying “it’s OK to kill pedestrians as long as you’re rich.”
Interestingly, the Equinox has previously been an exception to the "Cars always get bigger" rule. First gen was 188.8", second gen shaved off an inch to 187.8", third gen moved it from midsize to compact at 183.1.
EV version will put that back up around 190, back into the midsize segment and larger than the original gas version.
Terrifying.
"Large" American people probably won't be comfortable crammed into a 90s Chevy Geo. I think such people deserve to be comfortable, is it not a basic human right / dignity?
https://cdn.carbuzz.com/gallery-images/840x560/80000/200/802...
My point with the plane example was that we could fit larger seats in planes, without any particular trouble. The reason airlines don't is because it cuts into their profitability: requiring an obese person to purchase higher-classed tickets to accommodate themselves is much better for business than actually having to accommodate them with a wider seat.
I always felt that was a reasonable accommodation.
If Americans don't like this, maybe they should try losing weight so they aren't so much larger than everyone else in the world.
I might not go full Ayn Rand but making things more expensive for everyone to accommodate fat people is a line I am comfortable defending.
Being not/being able to fly commercial airlines is certainly not "freedom of mobility". If that were the case, then no one had freedom of mobility before the Wright brothers, which is absurd.
France, Germany……..England
They also bike and spend time outside a lot, when the weather is amenable.
Maybe part of our problem in the USA comes down to availability of cost effective, convenient, semi-healthy options on average- Way too much preservative-heavy calorie festivals day in and day out?
I'm not a dietician, but the state of affairs stateside is without a doubted tragic and sad.
That's their culinary culture, not their daily diet lol.
Growing up American, we have a looser food regulations, but also our education system probably doesn't help. I ate a lot of weird rectangle pizzas in elementary school. In High School Health class, we learned about healthy eating, watched Food Inc and Supersize Me, but I don't think we were consistently introduced to healthy eating habits. They made it look really uncool, fuck that, I want gushers and gatorade.
You don't lose weight by always sitting in a car drinking giant soft drinks, eating drive-thru and never walking anywhere.
I'm Australian though so feel free to correct me. Also when I was there I found the portion sizes pretty ridiculous.
2 modern cars, especially a mid-sized SUV or minivan, aren't going to work well with 20' of width. Even the length is problematic for clearance and being able to open the back liftgate with the garage door(s) down. A large SUV or pickup, forget it.
Sadly Subaru seems to have abandoned the practical small/sport SUV. The WRX wagon ... killed off. The crosstrek, nowhere close to sporty. The Forester nowhere close to small.
There is a hybrid version, but it has even less storage space. Wanted to like it, but we couldn’t do it.
Also there is the concept of "safe enough". If you are on an expressway, what are the chances of a head-on accident? And although getting t-boned at an intersection may often be the other driver's fault, being hyper-vigilant can help there too (although it gets exhausting constantly looking out for the other driver).
What I'm really hoping for is that some minimal level of driver automation features become standard -- things like emergency braking, lane assist that yells at you when your driving deteriorates (so drivers realize they are getting to sleepy to drive), etc. The automatic braking alone would have prevented the last three accidents I witnessed in this past year (the most recent was a 5-car chain reaction that was most likely caused by a driver staring at a cell phone instead of the long line of stopped traffic in front of them).
But when the stock truck next to you at a light has a higher hood that your roof it makes an impression on you.
A quick google shows a stock F150 at ~51” and it’s hardly the tallest. A RAM seems to be 58”. I know they’re adding pedestrian cams to the front of some trucks just so drivers can see if they’re about to hit someone at a light.
Sedans seem to be in the 55-57” range. They feel flat out unsafe at times.
Stupid trucks.
Edit: Wow a whole reply chain spawned from this comment got nuked! Stay safe out there Americans, you've got some wild divisions amongst yourselves and its only getting worse. For the record, I love trains, subways, buses and biking but I also own a crossover sized vehicle and recognize that everyone has their own personal preferences and requirements and that no one transit solution will meet everyone's needs, I hope you all can see that too without violence.
More realistically, it's smaller cars on slower city streets.
Edit: you are right it's about 3% die at 30kpmh, vs ~35% at 50kpmh. My bad. Still lower speeds dramatically improve the safety of cars.
https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/2011PedestrianR...
Also, residential roads in the US are usually 40km/h
I personally know someone who was hit at about 10-15hm/h and they were hospitalized and broke their spine.
The distinction is professional drivers and safety standards.
Is that still true after you adjust for the number of buses on the road vs. the number of cars? If not, then this is like saying driving drunk is less dangerous than driving sober since only 30% of car crash fatalities involve drunk drivers.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/19/heres-how-much-safer-...
That data could be representitive of buses being big and heavy or it could be representitive of them sharing space with pedestrians.
Compare the same dataset for busses on a grade separated RBT with well paid/trained drivers and platform doors and you get a very different story.
But there's nowhere that buses share space with pedestrians and cars don't, so that can't account for why buses are more dangerous than cars.
For a lot of people I talk to about getting around when it comes up, the major stopping point with biking is just the lack of infrastructure and feeling afraid of cars. Most people aren't comfortable taking the lane while biking so it becomes a dangerous experience when they don't. As the saying goes, though, if you build it, they will come. Any city I've been in that has built out a gridlike network of bike lanes seems to have a lot of people riding around. Once you build them that network you enable a lot of trips for those people uncomfortable with the existing road network.
A nearby neighborhood did something similar but with physical medians. Much better, but still people just use less busy streets mostly.
My main issue getting to work is not those streets, but post ww2 neighborhoods that have one entance and exit forcing me on to highways with glass covered shoulders and speedlimits over 55. That is what I want them to fix. But that would actually involve earth moving and eminent domain, not just a bit of paint or concrete.
These trucks also contribute to the rise in vehicle size. I did not like driving when I was in a sedan sized car sharing the high speed highways hours from cities on those highways
If they're going extremely long distances you could even have some kind of dedicated hard wearing road surface. And if lots of them are going to the same place you could get them to move in a convoy. And once they're in a convoy you could hook them together...
The interstate system and truck delivery seems to be pretty fantastic at servicing the continental US when paired with freight trains, cargo planes, etc. And it is similarly effective for delivery of all other kinds of things including people.
These systems would be good to implement in many cities, but interstate shipping and travel is another thing altogether.
The US rail system is very well established and has been well built out since before the rise of the automobile. But goods need to get from the rail depot to the end destination and right now the best we have is enormous 18-wheelers and as long as those are on the road, it's too dangerous for me to want to take a smaller car
So to answer your snarky question with snark in kind, mostly from the other 4/5 of emissions.
For my commute to work, its something like my choice of a 35 minute drive (not counting the circling I will have to do finding a parking spot at the other end) or a 45 minute bike ride. I probably save time on the whole even without counting the parking fiasco, considering now I don't need to find time in my schedule to work in my cardio.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA
If we add congestion into the mix since everyone is bicycling, I imagine a higher number of accidents would occur. Right now an estimated 67 million people in the USA ride a bicycle for an estimated 15 billion hours combined per year. 228 million licensed drivers times 290 average hours on the road equals 66 billion hours per year. Let us assume the bicyclists will have to spend three times more travel time due to lower speed of bicycles. That equals roughly 200 billion hours of bicycling per year. 200 billion hours divided by 15 billion equals 13.3. 900 257 deaths per 15 billion hours equals 3,341 deaths per year. The average number of deaths per year from automobile crashes for the last few years is about 36,000.
Even if this is a conservative estimate. I think it is safe to say you are essentially correct.
Half are elderly.
About a third are on ebikes
87% involve a car.
That's around 0.8 deaths per hundred thousand people worth of bike modeshare not invovling a car. 1/15th of the USA and a quarter of netherlands road deaths.
This is with drunk cycling penalties being almost completely unenforced (although not sure how it compares to US drunk driving prevalence).
Granted cars are used for the longer trips so it's not completely sound, but bikes are used for congested trips. Small vehicle modeshare also shortens all trips.
My guess is the safest vehicle would look like a train followed by lightweight velo no heavier than a dutch bike (and not optimized for aero) or a recumbent trike with a roll cage and a lap belt. Also we can conclude that either current ebikes are too fast and heavy, or they result in people cycling who would be too frail otherwise.
Are you drink?
Are you American?
Walkable, rideable, and a plentitude of public transport is infinitely more sustainable and humane than vast expanses of parking lots.
Neither of those apply to race in the slightest.
. . . and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though . . .
https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
Such a high percentage of cars are SUVs that it wouldn't even be sending a coherent message.
They claim only to have damaged 40 cars one time. There's no evidence they did that, no public outcry in New York, and no corroborating evidence at all.
Again, there is no movement like this. There has not been a spike in vandalism against SUVs. I work with auto insurance data in my day job, and changes in damage to parked SUVs hasn't notably changed.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/19/the-lionization-of-...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/21/kyle-rittenh...
Now I don't think he was guilty, but the fact the media and population put him on a stage with confetti and a cheering crowd shows the state of society when the guys only public action was shooting some people in self defense.
A healthy society admits that sometimes people do die in ways that are unpreventable or not at fault without celebrating when it happens or what we see where people are itching to get in these situations so they can kill legally and be a hero.
Only 32% of Americans thought he should be found not guilty[1], and only a fraction of that group would want to celebrate him.
1. https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
If you look at all the recordings it’s very clearly within the law. That doesn’t make him a hero and he shouldn’t be a public figure or celebrated. But it’s also pretty telling that the majority of the population has a gut reaction that’s illogical if you view the recordings.
No more juicing your safety rating by adding more mass.
The issue is that the US still hasn’t done it.
https://www.fatherly.com/news/vehicle-safety-ratings-will-so...
I will say that people seem to put up with emissions standards, so it wouldn't be unthinkable to add some standards that improve the safety of other road users. But as the other comments mention, it's a hard sell; most Americans think the people on the sidewalk or on bikes should be driving instead.
That's what the original article is about; people buy heavy cars so that they are more likely to survive the accident than whoever they hit.
If even one car model gets changed as a result of this, that would already represent a possible decrease in deaths. It doesn't have to be a total, dominating success to be a net positive.
I wouldn’t even really call it a backdoor. The equivalent European and Australian tests already have this, and they have not seen our recent uptick in deaths.
Basically, the industry puts 0 thought into protecting other road users, and it's a really big problem. We should start mandating safety features for those outside of the car.
The big problem is that driving isn't just for rich people. It's a lifeline for the poorest Americans that have no choice but to trade free time for commuting time to be able to afford to live. So if we mandate expensive safety features, it's just a tax on the poor. People might be willing to pay the tax to save their own bacon, but they certainly aren't going to do it to save some random person riding their bike to work. That's why we have to dramatically rethink how we build our cities and suburbs. Things like electric cars to combat climate change are a distraction from the real issues. Fossil fuels aren't smashing pedestrians, dividing our cities into unliveable neighborhoods with 20 lane freeways, or mandating 1 parking space for every person in a 10,000 person office building. That's just cars, and electric cars fix none of it.
The good news is, it looks like all the suburbs built in the 50s are due for things like water main replacement, street replacement, sewer replacement, etc. and nobody can afford it. So we'll have a chance to densify and cut cars out of our culture for good. Until then, hide your children and hide your wives, so that people can freely rampage through your neighborhood on their way to a meeting they're already 20 minutes late for. In a carbon-sensitive way, of course.
The Euro NCAP rating has been evaluating pedestrian safety for some 20 years now. That’s why all modern cars have tall fat noses – it distributes load across more of a person’s body and reduces injury rates. Fifth Gear did a great segment about this in the early 2000’s where they found it’s better to be hit by a 4x4 (term SUV didnt’ exist yet) than by a sedan.
https://www.euroncap.com/en/for-engineers/protocols/vulnerab...
The American NHTSA is starting to add pedestrian safety ratings as well.
https://www.fatherly.com/news/vehicle-safety-ratings-will-so...
My favorite pie-in-the-sky-impossible-in-practice thing: force cars to be ugly as sin. Would help with the huge cars, but also has a nice side effect of getting rid of sports car drivers as well.
My favorite “pie-in-the-sky-impossible-in-practice thing”: force anyone advocating for this kind of petty authoritarianism (my sardonic comment included) to wear a neon pink t-shirt in public, labeled, front and back, with “I tried to be a little dictator on the internet and all I got was this stupid t-shirt”
Everyone can act like piloting a multi-ton machine through city centers is their god given right, but I like thinking about the alternate universe (and hell, the _actually existing universe_ in many places in the world) where people can feel safe, even if it means that city driving is a slog.
Remember that the average speed in Manhattan is less than 5 mph. There is little to be gained in travel time by careening down neighborhood streets.
If you live 10m from a freeway, then at 35mph just over 15m is ok. At 5mph 2 hours seems less than acceptable. I can be math-dumb, so it wouldn't be surprising if I'm way off.
Even at just 2m away the difference in commute is substantial.Out in the suburbs, the distances are long and speed does matter. That makes the situation very tough; 15mph speed limits are going to severely devalue your real estate investment. I really have no answer for a sane transition here, and that's a big problem American society faces.
(On the other hand, the ocean consuming New York City is going to severely devalue real estate investments, too.)
We could ensure collision avoidance by banning cars from cities! But that's presumably not what you meant.
Yes, it is much better (although certainly not good) to be hit by a small VW than it is to be hit by a pickup truck. European safety standards reflect this fact; the US's standards should as well.
And now we all live in monster truck land.
https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/ford/crown-victoria-4-d...
"So, what's good for me but who cares about everyone else?"
Go ask retirement/nursing-home workers how many times they went to work sick and then count how many residents died there.
Good luck undo-ing SUVs (and massive 4x4s) I distinctly remember the year they started becoming popular and you could no longer see down the road anymore.
Everyone has their excuses because there's no penalty for killing someone like that.
Your coworkers are doing it do, they won't tell you they tested positive last night or this morning, frack it they are going into work, your problem, not theirs "no choice". Every hourly wage person is doing it to you, every delivery, restaurant, cashier, pharmacist, everyone. Their comfort is their priority, not yours.
When the SUV rolls over a pedestrian or cyclist, or punts a car down the road like a soccer ball, that's exactly what they are saying "Sorry, no choice".
At least the behavior is predictable now, was hidden before 2020, now obvious.
The thing is, people don't just die quick from covid. They die slow and painful. Then there is the millions who will have long-covid maybe for the rest of their lives until they kill themselves from the chronic suffering.
So many excuses, so many murderers. Society is just bizarre.
Doesn't have to be this way but it's what everyone keeps doing.
>delivery, restaurant, cashier, pharmacist, everyone
One of these is not like the others. Pharmacists did the majority of COVID-19 shots.
In the same way, it isn't necessary to assume that he will cause harm, only that it increases the likelihood of causing harm. With a larger car, a driver is less able to see pedestrians, and children/shorter adults may be blocked from view entirely. Pedestrian injuries and deaths are on the rise in the US, opposite the general trend elsewhere. The primary difference is the prevalence of unnecessarily large cars in the US.
Signed, A Miata driver. If I ever get in a wreck, I'm guaranteed to lose, but at least I'll go out in style.
While this isn't a complete substitute for regulations that systematically fix issues causes by negative externalities, I'd rather live in a society where a lot of problems are avoided because my fellow citizens generally care about my well being, rather than one in which the government needs to intervene left and right.
As long as SUVs exist on the road I feel like it’s a safety benefit for my family to have a similarly sized vehicle to protect my wife and child. I can’t control what others do but I can control what I do to keep my family safe.
Larger cars also make roads more dangerous for all users, because the lost visibility means attentive drivers cannot see and plan further down the road with a huge suv in front of them.
Reading the road is a key skill for safe driving, large cars hamper everyone’s ability to do this.
This is the history of the US from its foundation.
And isn’t it selfish for people to insist on riding their bicycles on the roads? Why is their willingness to increase their own risk my problem? I’m not asking them to ride bikes. They make that choice.
By the way, there is about 12k drunk driving deaths each year about about 850 cycling-auto deaths each year. Let ban alcohol if we really cared about safety.
It’s called antisocial behaviour.
And what about Kia vs Semi? Or Kia vs delivery truck? Or Kia vs city bus?
If we really cared about fatalities, then banning alcohol should be on the table, statistically speaking. 30% of all traffic deaths involve alcohol.
There is also hardly any accommodations for people to go out drinking outside of walking distance from you home (especially in rural areas; it might actually be safer for you to drive in a protected vehicle then risk being hit by a drunk driver on your bicycle). And to top it off, the police it self is really dangerous, so it is hard for friends or bartenders to justify calling the police on a drunk driver.
All this makes a perfect environment for people to rather “risk” drunk driving, which as we know is a disaster. I think banning alcohol is a terrible idea, providing accommodations, better enforcement, friendlier law environment, etc. will go a long way.
Taken to the extreme would my family be safest in a motorized siege tower? What about all the moments near home when the kids are playing on the driveway or near the street? Or those pesky unrelated kids who can only afford a bicycle or small car?
Or perhaps you prefer the return of rugged individualized health systems where you can choose between death or family bankruptcy. (Not if just when, more money just means later.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
EDIT: Said another way, your analysis appears reductive to the point of absurdity. Modern societal advances require a lot of collective action and self sacrifice.
In the end, speed and alertness are the most important things. Drive responsibly and pay attention and your vehicle size isn’t causing nearly as much harm as a person in a small car that’s speeding whine texting.
And when accidents do happen lower bumpers and hoods are less likely to cause harm.
John Neighbor follows the market and has bought an even larger car. Now you are in the position of needing to buy a larger car as well in order to maintain your relative safety standards.
The only way to have a global metric would be via underlying objective data. The only data I've found for that is "vehicle death rates per 10 billion miles," which is here. [1]
The data is a few years old (and was a bit difficult to find!), but I relied on it a lot when I was car-shopping recently.
[1]: https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/status-report/pdf...
https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...
I thought the car was just monitoring if any wheel is about to stop rolling and then it would ease-up the brake on that specific wheel.
My recollection is that SUVs have longer stopping distances because the ABS has to pause braking more frequently to avoid instability or rollover. It's possible, as another commenter suggested, that I'm recalling ESC, but that wasn't very common in the early 2000s. I think it might have something to do with the fact that the nose of a vehicle dives when braking, and a high CoG exacerbates this. But it's been 20 years, and I've scarcely thought about the course since then!
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
[1] https://www.section179.org/section_179_vehicle_deductions/ [2] https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1102305_will-tighter-ca... (Both links are admittedly lazy, but think of them as entering arguments for further research if you care.)
There's that famous Ford Explorer tire issue in 2001 or so that makes for some (dated) examples of SUV rollover accidents.
Also you have it backwards. Banked corners actually reduce the chance of rollover. It's why NASCAR tracks have a large slope. It allows the drivers to brake farther out and longer into the turn before beginning to transition back onto the throttle.
Now of course this is combined with stability control (since that is required by law) and both of them are controlled by the same code.
(On a related note, I've spent way too much time reverse engineering the calibration for the ABS for a Silverado truck. Ridiculously huge program, ridiculously complicated, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the source code is a mess.)
Checkout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_test
I should say this is true for the physics of sliding friction forces, which aren't super precise.
In short while you are not wrong, in practice even the worst numbers are still more than good enough that brake performance isn't an issue.
Scaling for static friction between rubber and asphalt does not follow the friction equation you are taught in high school physics class. Generally, for a given weight of vehicle, a larger tire surface area is able to produce more maximum braking friction. In other terms, minimizing the surface pressure and maximizing the surface area at the contact patch increases maximum braking friction.
The limiting factor for braking isn't the friction between your wheels and the ground, which is weight-dependent, but the friction between your brake pads and rotors, which is not weight-dependent.
I suggest taking your bike out and practice breaking on various surfaces. You will quickly get what the limiting factor is. It's the same with a car just the tires are much wider and brakes more powerful.
I have no expertise in this, but seems prima facie plausible.
ABS is a feedback loop: brake faster until just before the wheels start slipping. That doesn’t need calibration.
There may be additional logic in ABS systems for corner cases that requires calibration, though (for example, if your front left wheel has lots more grip than the other ones, can you brake full on it and keep the car going in a straight(ish) line?), but I don’t see how higher CoG would be a factor there.
> I don’t see how higher CoG would be a factor there.
Could be that the "additional logic" (whether we call it ABS or something else) aims to keep certain values (such as longitudinal or lateral acceleration) within bounds (thus releasing brake pressure when approaching those bounds), and those bounds are tighter with higher CoG.
I remember the Mercedes A-Class (with pretty high CoG) rolled over in the Swedish Moose test initially, until that was fixed with Electronic Stability Control (how?).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_test#1997_Mercedes_A-Cla...
“When ESC detects loss of steering control, it automatically applies the brakes to help steer the vehicle where the driver intends to go. Braking is automatically applied to wheels individually, such as the outer front wheel to counter oversteer, or the inner rear wheel to counter understeer”
So, ESC activates the brakes harder than the driver indicates through the controls, while ABS activates the brakes less hard than the driver indicates through the controls.
Both systems use the same sensors and have to agree on who’s in control when, though, so I can see people lumping them together. Wikipedia also says (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#C...)
“ESC is built on top of an anti-lock brake system”
and (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control...):
“Just as ESC is founded on the anti-lock braking system (ABS), ESC is the foundation for new advances such as Roll Stability Control or active rollover protection that works in the vertical plane much like ESC works in the horizontal plane. When RSC detects impending rollover (usually on transport trucks or SUVs), RSC applies brakes, reduces throttle, induces understeer, and/or slows down the vehicle.”
In the end, there can be only one set of commands that get sent to the brakes, throttle, etc, so these systems must be interconnected, making the terms more marketing than indicators of specific systems in the car.
By the way, I was surprised to read how old ABS is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-lock_braking_system#Early...:
“The concept for ABS predates the modern systems that were introduced in the 1950s. In 1908, for example, J.E. Francis introduced his 'Slip Prevention Regulator for Rail Vehicles'.
In 1920 the French automobile and aircraft pioneer Gabriel Voisin experimented with systems that modulated the hydraulic braking pressure on his aircraft brakes to reduce the risk of tire slippage”
yes, in the spherical cow sense, but this isn't at all true for real life vehicles and tires. the weight of the vehicle does have a significant impact on traction, here's a quick video explaining tire load sensitivity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa2gZNqmT8
related to the above issue (and as GP mentioned), the high CoG of an SUV also poses challenges for braking performance. you want all four wheels of the vehicle to have roughly similar braking force. obviously the front wheels are going to contribute more to braking than the rear, but you don't want a huge disparity. this doesn't matter so much for the abstract question of "how quickly can a vehicle stop?", but it matters a lot for the practical question of "which direction is the vehicle facing?" if the rear wheels are contributing much less of the total braking force, the car is likely to end up sideways. this is bad if you want to do something like "remain in control of the vehicle" while braking.
(Just answering the question, I’m a firm believer in everyone switching into 90s-era-sized fiats and smaller)
The tires are the only thing in contact with the ground. All deceleration force can only come from the grip between tires and the ground[1]. The brake pads in most installations can easily lock up the tires (which means now you only have sliding coefficient of friction instead of rolling friction). In other words, what matters is tire grip.
Buy the grippiest tires you can afford to run.
[1] Well, cars with aero downforce also get a lot of deceleration from that. A Formula 1 car will decelerate at more than 1G merely by lifting off the throttle, without touching the brakes. But none of this is relevant to street cars.
> In the United States, the NHTSA has mandated ABS in conjunction with Electronic Stability Control under the provisions of FMVSS 126 as of September 1, 2012.
> Buy the grippiest tires you can afford to run
Even race cars running on slicks and weighing 700 kg get better braking by avoiding lockups and using the pads instead. So unless your pads are trash, you better get a proper ABS instead of imagining some magical tire with grip comparable to brake pads.
The brakes provide friction to resist the spinning of the wheel, but of course only to the point that the tire can provide grip (friction) against the road surface.
Picture trying to brake with slick tires on wet ice. Nearly zero tire grip equals nearly zero braking force. Doesn't matter what kind of brake components are on the car. No grip = no grip.
If you want to be able to stop quickly to avoid accidents you need to maximize grip a the tire-road contact patch and you need to have a braking system powerful enough to fully take advantage of that grip.
Every car sold for decades now already has the latter (unless something is broken, obviously), so the variable you need to control is tire grip.
Thus: Buy the grippiest tires you can afford to run (if you want optimal braking to avoid accidents, that is).
(I live in Michigan and continue to carry unlimited PIP FWIW)
Although, I think states should require quite a bit of PIP as well so that non drivers are not subsidizing drivers.
My premium for the year is less than 1 month of health insurance, it's pretty cheap.
Sin taxes, e.g. alcohol or tobacco tax, in part help pay for the social cost of those activities.
1) Smokers pay more in taxes through tobacco purchases.
2) Smokers die way earlier, so there are less social security payments and fewer medical expenses.
If Car B costs $X,XXX more than Car A for the sole reason that it's more deadly to everyone else outside of the car, then the purchasing envelope shifts for a large number of people.
[1]: https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/press-releases/2012_09_20_ny
I'm reading this as you preferring a moral solution rather than a technical one? You must feel pretty confident that the folks in charge of governing will always have priorities that align with your own.
I don't think any such law will ever come into effect. So I don't feel the need to be confident (or the opposite) with respect to my elected officials. It's all wishing.
[1] I'm not sure the situation in other countries.
The status quo is to require all other road users to take the losses from impoverished drivers which is as equally “unfair” as your sob story.
No regulatory agency will be as effective for accurately pricing risky behavior as an insurance market.
> At least on first blush, it makes sense (to me) to just cut out that middleman and levy it directly.
The whole point of liability insurance is restitution in the case where the insured caused harm.
Adding a government tax would be adding a middleman.
However, laws automatically holding drivers liable by default for accidents with pedestrians unless there were clear extenuating circumstances, as some other countries, might be another way to change this situation so that this risk could be better captured by liability insurance.
Do you have a source for this?
> However, laws automatically holding drivers liable by default for accidents with pedestrians unless there were clear extenuating circumstances, as some other countries, might be another way to change this situation so that this risk could be better captured by liability insurance.
What countries have those laws, and how have they worked out? Why not just do something sane like treating it like any other civil case where people who cause damage to others are liable for it?
I think you're being a little disingenuous. Most police are shooting people in self-defense (https://www.statista.com/statistics/585140/people-shot-to-de...). A minority of victims are actually innocent, and justice still does tend to occur in those specific situations. For instance, George Floyd's killer received a (presumably) just punishment.
Also, anecdotally, I hear quite a lot about family of deceased in wrongful police shootings suing police. Although I don't think the difficulty that a private citizen has getting justice after being wronged by a police department is really at all the same as most road accident situations.
For example, you have to slow down to under 10km/h in theory if there are small children on the sidewalk next to you. Up until recently, a bike collision with a driver was considered 100% the driver's fault even if the bike was riding against traffic (That was changed so that the liability is 100% if the bike is riding on the right side of the road).
The point of all this is that there is such a thing as mixed liability, and the idea that it's either one or the other person's fault is just completely unworkable. And because there's this percentage-based system, you can ratchet up the liability based on who is more likely to cause major damage, without having binary results for really tough things.
You didn't really answer the questions I was asking OP for either. Japan puts a large onus on drivers but appears to have backed off from some of it? That is actually interesting though, why did they change?
The change is mostly around making rules more strict for cyclists, as cyclists... well, they also pose a danger to pedestrians! There is a pretty famous case of a cyclist hitting an old lady and killing her.
Some people moving here get annoyed because a lot of times the liability split ends up being 90% driver/10% victim, because there are technicalities, but generally speaking even for pretty "egregious" behavior from pedestrians the driver is ultimately expected to be doing their best. Things like "but there was a blind corner, how could I know somebody was going to ride from that corner" hold no water because drivers are supposed to slow down in those cases, for example. I don't know the state of liability in the US but I imagine it's a bit less victim-friendly.
Here in Norway the driver is assumed to be at fault, mainly due to the following paragraph:
§ 3. Basic rules for traffic.
Everyone must travel with consideration and be alert and careful so that no danger can arise or damage be caused and so that other traffic is not unnecessarily obstructed or disturbed.
In case there's a major accident, the driver at presumed fault will have their license temporarily revoked right away. However if the investigation showed the driver drove with reasonable care and caution, the driver will usually be exonerated (and thus get their license back).
There's been a few notable cases regarding this, for example one case where a pedestrian crossed the road at night during winter in a poorly lit area, got hit by a a car and died. The driver was found not guilty as the pedestrian had not worn a retroreflectors or similar, thus the driver had no chance to see the pedestrian until it was too late.
However, due to the above, the driver will often get some blame. There's been cases where the driver does not get an involuntary manslaughter charge, but does get punished due to paragraph 3 above. A recent one I recall is this one[2].
[1]: https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/1965-06-18-4/KAPITTEL_2#%...
[2]: https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/broytesjafor-frikjent-for-uak...
Still, that seems even crazier. A pedestrian can step out right in front of you even deliberately and if it happens to be broad daylight when they do, you have to somehow prove you were not negligent otherwise you can be convicted of manslaughter.
I think you have it backward. You are being asked to prove yourself innocent after being accused of being the guilty party in an incident in which somebody died.
> The idea that killing other human beings using a car is "expected" and "the norm" seems to me like the bad system.
I don't know where you got that idea from. Seems pretty deluded.
If a pedestrian suddenly steps out right in front of your car in broad daylight, in an area where it's not reasonable to expect them to (ie no crosswalk, not next to a school etc), then, as long as you weren't speeding or using your mobile phone, you'd most likely be fine. However if the pedestrian had for example been acting erratically just before, then the police might argue you should have taken more care.
Note that the paragraph I quoted applies to anyone venturing in traffic, including pedestrians. However, given the mentioned asymmetry, it usually falls down to the driver to be the more responsible party.
[1]: https://www.vegvesen.no/en/driving-licences/driver-training/...
It's not. The idea that being innocent until proven guilty frees you of responsibility is wrong. They are on separate axis. People get tried and convicted of criminal negligence causing damage, injury, death / manslaughter etc and for that matter all sorts of other criminal acts quite regularly.
Would you say somewhere like the USA where people are usually quite strongly innocent until proven guilty has a problem incarcerating enough people?
Maybe I explained myself poorly. Of course the driver is innocent until proven/found[1] guilty. That's separate from the potential charges and punishment. It's the latter where the greater responsibility of the driver comes in.
[1]: If you're "just" fined, you can accept or take it to court to get the police to prove it there.
> Of course the driver is innocent until proven/found[1] guilty.
those two statements read as incompatible to me, possibly that's where the confusion in this thread is coming from. having your license revoked is itself a serious penalty in the US.
Unless you're relying on the license for work, I'd agree it's probably a more severe action in the US than here in Norway, where most people live in areas with well-functioning public transport.
There's one important detail that I had forgotten, as I have never been exposed to this thankfully. If the police wants to temporarily revoke your license, you have to agree. If you do not agree, it will go to the courts within three weeks[1]. The police, and courts, should weigh the impact of revoking your license against the severity of the incident.
[1]: https://nye.naf.no/trafikksikkerhet/lover-regler/tap-av-fore...
There's many instances of direct subsidy going through SUV [0]. I don't remember the exact framing, but basically tariffs and other rules carve out a SUV shaped bubble for US makers to operate with extra low competition, and subsidies will often go there too when they don't want to make it explicit it's only for US makers.
The recent EV plan would be one exception to this, where it's worded straight as a middle finger towards foreign makers.
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Hybrid/story?id=97505&page...
The correct answer in that case is to quit wasting time & effort creating taxes for personal vehicles, and just make commercial truckers pay it all. It spreads the cost of the roads around to everyone who benefits (even if you don't have a car, you benefit from the roads existing). And since the damage to roads scales to the fourth power of the axle weight, the difference between a car and SUV isn't too dramatic, compared to the difference between an SUV and a big rig.
That's the most interesting part to me. Trucks using the road is really important to our society, and if everyone benefits from it I'm not sure it makes much sense either to make commercial entities pay in full for it.
The same way railroads where heavily subsidized and water ways are also usually state/government projects, road maintenance could be (and probably is up to a point?) handled at the same level.
My ideal would be to get rid of SUV preferential policies so there is no need to counterbalance their use on other aspects. In a balanced setting, SUVs are rarely a rational choice (cf. the cars that get chosen everywhere else in the world).
The externality we are specifically talking about is the safety risk to others that comes from having a larger vehicle. Other externalities can be solved different ways, but doe this specific one this seems like precisely the scenario addressed by liability insurance.
The best course of action would be to correct our standards to make lightness and damage to other vehicles part of the safety requirements as well.
A. Cars get bigger because of safety standards.
B. Bigger cars cause safety issues.
C. Rather than unrolling A to adjust the original incentives, we stick a punishment (taxes) to offset some of the incentive we are placing in other areas
When I'm out driving, walking or biking in Seattle I worry much much less about bus drivers doing something unpredictable than I do about light vehicle drivers.
Between the obvious danger per the article, there’s also lots of extra wear on roads, particularly small residential ones.
Lots of external costs.
[1]https://www.ford.com/trucks/super-duty/models/f250-xlt/
I expect you're talking about curb weight. 6500 pounds for a gasser F250 is pretty typical, a bit north of 7000 for a diesel (which is 3.5T). But it's impractical to go by curb weight, the real number is GVWR. Can't tell what someone might be carrying and it all goes to the road.
For someone from Europe this sentence is insane. Calling a truck heavier than 3 tones a regular vehicle is just mindboggling. In most (all?) of Europe you need a special license to drive a vehicle that is over 3.5 tonnes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFdX6zL5h8Q&t=95s
S-Max vs. Forester Curb weight: 3626 lbs vs. 3620 Mileage: 44 mpg vs. 30 mpg Cargo: 77.69 cubic feet vs. 74.2 cubic feet
So about 6 pounds heavier and 4 cubic feet more space than the Forester. It would be interesting if we had a hybrid Forester to compare with, but that doesn't seem to exist (yet).
Also looked into U.S. vans being gas guzzlers. A comparable vehicle in the U.S. is the Toyota Sienna, since it's a hybrid minivan. It's 4700 pounds, gets 36 mpg (vs. 44 for S-Max), but has 101 cubic feet of cargo space, which is 1/3 more than the S-Max. Seems to correlate well with weight, which makes sense.
Based on this, my (current) take is that mid-size SUVs in the U.S. are equivalent to these smaller minivans elsewhere, and U.S. minivans are a bit larger and heavier than that.
Fellow European here, we don't have kids but we were thinking at maybe getting a second dog, which made me look for a possible car replacement (we now have a 15+ year-old small hatchback). After some searching and calculating I found out that the "usefulness" of cars for my purported task (to transport two dogs in the back) can be summarized like this (in decreasing order): vans -> station wagons/estates -> SUVs/CUVs.
Unfortunately vans are on their out, I can't really understand the reason why (the VW Sharan will cease production this year, Ford C-Max ceased production back in 2019 etc), station wagons are also not feeling good, almost every car company is betting the house on SUVs/CUVs, which is a trend I don't like at all, because you get to pay more money for less utility.
A quick review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51fyxgcVrKM
Hell, my whole family went around the South Island on holiday in it for a whole month and it was just fine.
Cultural differences I guess. If you're an American you _need_ an SUV, I get it.
I'm sure they could have maybe picked a smaller vehicle as well but economics also come into it - it was a secondhand Japanese import (NZ gets a lot of those, in fact when I was a kid we found yen coins still hidden underneath the seats) so it was gotten on the cheap as well.
I recently purchased a 79 Lincoln Continental Mark V and it is that same length as my 2020 F150 - 40 year spread, same size vehicle.
People need to drive safe and not be stupid behind the wheel. I would guess that cell phone use while driving kills way more people than "big vehicles" do (most of us are guilty of this). I feel it is a technology+cultural issue.
There are plenty of other things we can do to increase driver safety, as you've said. But large cars simply do kill and maim people more frequently, and there are many more of them now.
Cars have gotten larger for two primary reasons: larger crumple zones (a legitimate safety change!), and to circumvent emissions regulations. Of those, the latter has been a much stronger pressure.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/688636/penetration-rate-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_r5UJrxcck
Both of those cars weigh about 3,500lbs. Now swap in a 5,000lbs Tesla, or that new 9,000lbs Hummer EV. That big old car will be nothing but a pile of twisted metal. In short, I don't think you can compare large cars of the past to ones that exist today.
Hmm, let's see how that's going
>2 million people are killed on roads yearly, and many more are injured
Not so well.
Jokes aside, we need to move to safer and more efficient forms of transportation, rather than wishing that everybody operates their 2 ton death machine in a safe way.
SUVs and 'Trucks' are just a danger and direct harm to your neighbors and subsidizing them imposes a massive burden on the people paying for the vast swathes of asphalt, inflation of infrastructure costs and medical care they entail. They limit mobility rather than enabling it because they require any spaces which they dominate to be made impassible without a giant protective metal shell They're so destructive and awful to be near that entire neighborhoods need to be redesigned to get them away from the residents as quickly as possible when in use. This results in requiring any worthwhile destination to be removed so that cars do not come towards residences.
Try going across the country that way...
If the extra 40% or so vs a velo or 25% vs a LEV of time on a very long trip matters then it sounds like a high speed train would save significantly more. Either option sounds better than a car which might travel slower than a velo's average unassisted speed due to traffic so you have to budget the time anyway and then be stressed the whole way.
It is impossible for everyone in an urban environment to drive (you wind up with the katy freeway if you try and it still doesn't work), so just make the bare minimum concessions of space and priority to allow those people who don't want to be in a car to get out of your way, and pay the whole costs of your driving (which are presently on the order of a dollar a mile, but would also go down with more equal use).
For instance, you might not love them, but there's good roles that SUVs and trucks can fulfill to enrich peoples' lives. They're tools that can help you do good things like build a garden or deck, move or pull the supplies needed to enjoy an extended camping trip, or many other nice things that cannot be done on a scooter or moped.
I think a lot of the argument comes down to the idea of using the right tool for the job. Look around at the people sitting in traffic with you. Some are filling their truck beds with stuff, sure, but plenty of others are not, and are driving with one occupant. Suddently you don't need all those seats or that towing capacity to pick up a bag of coffee, like you don't need an octocore processor to run your hello world script. Maybe you can get away with an ebike and a cargo rack, and orders of magnitude less energy spent to do the same work of you getting that bag of coffee.
You'd put even less wear on your other vehicles, like that work truck you really need once or twice a month by not using them every day for all other tasks you do in life. Maybe that work truck you own can now last 10x as long in your hands with the lightened use it now sees. That means you can now own a work truck while consuming 1/10th the resources it takes to keep up a steady supply of work trucks for yourself from the environment. That's huge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barchetta
http://www.fiatbarchetta.com/links/nice.html
https://www.google.com/search?q=rush+red+barchetta