U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high

> The rest I have never seen carrying anything other than groceries or the occasional new TV in the bed. They are entirely unnecessary.

I have an older pickup that my in-laws sold us years ago. It's not in the best shape, and most of the time we use it for typical second-car usage: picking up kids, getting groceries, etc. However, it's been useful _so many times_ in the past five years that the convenience of having it outweighs having some other smaller car and then renting a pickup when necessary.

- holiday travel, packages and luggage fill the back. (I'd prefer a minivan, but we don't have one.) - Some local farmer donates a bunch of stumps for the school garden, we can use the pickup - trash / e-waste delivery to the dump - get / deliver furniture - bring school projects to/from school - buy a bunk bed at IKEA, it's in half a dozen six foot boxes of wood

Most of these are occasions where there's significant disruption if we were to go try to rent a vehicle from Uhaul or Home Depot, which makes it less likely that we actually do these things, or suffer through trying to shoehorn things into a tiny car. Being able to throw things in the back of the truck makes life occasionally a lot more convenient.

With the pickup being mostly useless, but occasionally Extremely Useful, it is not surprising to me that many keep them, and even consider buying higher trim levels to have a nicer+bigger cab, especially as their kids get older and larger. :)

> There is a stop sign in front of my house and probably around 95% of cars stop

There was some discussion amongst my neighbors about a sign near us and we found that the key variable is the speed at which one considers a vehicle to be "stopped". Some folks felt that a 6 mph (10 kph) rolling stop at an empty intersection counted as a stop while others felt that anything more than 1 mph (1.6 kph) meant that the driver was running the stop sign. Since the majority of drivers fell somewhere in that range the estimates for how many people stopped were wildly different.

So, fun stuff!

There are light trucks. The ranger, Tacoma, Colorado, gladiator, etc. They make money, but not like the bigger trucks.

They’re also larger than 1/4 ton trucks of decades ago.

There is a side game with CAFE. Things like the 2DR Wrangler exist - so Jeep could sell more 4DR wranglers and Gladiators. You balance what you have to make with what makes money.

A LOT of Tesla’s financial history is wrapped up in them selling California “carbon credits” (not sure the actual process) to GM, Stellanis, Ford so they then are allowed to sell more trucks in California.

All the mfgs take a small to medium loss on their small cars so they can average their line out. Dodge small cars haven’t made money so long as I have been working in automotive.

If you want an example of nonsense, find a new Tacoma and look between the grill and the front of the radiator. There is more than a FOOT of empty internal space in there.

Being in this industry taught me a lot out government regulation and how it’s almost never what it seems. Regulations exist entirely to be worked-around and not built to. If we built cars to regulations they would all look identical and be pretty poor at everything.

In other countries, vehicles are organzied and taxed by class. Where light trucks can emit more than SUVs the idea being they are needed for work instead of for comfort. This system is gamed too. For example, let’s say Indonesia, it’s far cheaper to get a 4DR Jeep Gladiator than a smaller 2DR Jeep Wrangler. The tax on the latter is high. Both are premium vehicles there.

Regulations exist to be worked around or to be expensive for anyone but your friends to manage. Once you accept that, it makes a lot of decisions make more sense.

I'll just say, it's hard for me not to read something into it.

The wealthiest town I lived in (in college), a group of classmates and I almost got run down by a minivan, while we were crossing during a red light and walk signal. The driver rolled down the window to yell at us that we were in the wrong, "Because we didn't pay taxes in this town". Is that normal/common? Because that sort of experience was normal for that town - I knew a few people who actually had been hit while walking with a similar experience, being yelled at by the driver while they are lying on the ground.

This is also one of my favorite papers. It's utterly ridiculous how the "normal"/"average" vehicle in the US is now a huge crossover that drives like a beached whale, most of which have 4 occupants or less from manufacture to when they end up in a junkyard. It's utterly ridiculous. Nearly anything a crossover or SUV can do, an AWD hatchback can do better while being safer for pedestrians, other drivers, better for the environment, and generally less of a nuisance.

Americans have become pathologically selfish when it comes to driving.