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Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds

arstechnica.com

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Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds

#321

Post by ChoGGi »

fennecbutt wrote: post #304
stefan_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Streets haven't gotten wider since then either. Maybe less of a problem in the US where everything is planned around humongous fire trucks, but in the EU if you had a street that could easily accommodate two moving lanes with parking on either side, that has basically narrowed down to one moving lane. Also reminds me of all the regulation around car lights - you literally specified the beam pattern light intensity co…

Yeah I hate that narrow UK streets are dominated by idiot box SUVs parked on both fucking sides of the road, making it fully single lane. I come from New Zealand; I know when you need a ute or an SUV and you do NOT need one in London.

How else do you expect me to drive though puddles?

Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds

#322

Post by kube-system »

alan-hn wrote: post #251
kube-system wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agricultural tractors aren't made with any consideration for pedestrian safety. The reason they have good visibility is because that makes them easier to use, and there is no other competing reason not to surround the driver with a lot of glass. Passenger vehicles have other requirements that complicate this: 1. They must be attractive enough to sell in volume to the end buyer 2. They require large A-pillars to absor…

I'm sure you could achieve safety targets with a vehicle that was safe for those outside of it as well, perhaps safety for your children crossing the road should be attractive to consumers?

Sedans, hatchbacks, and wagons are those vehicles. They are slipping in sales compared to SUVs despite having better pedestrian safety. People have many priorities when buying a vehicle, and most people simply don't think they're at risk of running over their own kid, until they do.

Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds

#323

Post by jiveturkey »

jiveturkey wrote: post #13

Article is current but the data is from 2021. I can easily find a deep journal-esque writeup dating to aug 1 2022. (JPHSC). https://doi.org/10.15586/jphsc . v1i1.47 > Currently, it seems unlikely that NHTSA will move to regulate hood heights on new vehicles. That's quite interesting statement. Hood (or is it bumper? -- which implies hood) heights are already regulated. Too low of a height has been determined to resul…

can't understand the downvote but i found the reg.

FMVSS (not sure if this is written by NTHSA or what) requires bumper to be 16-20in for passenger cars and max 28in for light trucks. This then effectively dictates the minimum hood height.

I additionally found a voluntary program in Eu called EEVC around bumper, hood and windshield design factors to reduce ped injury. NHTSA also has pubs around it but in the time I'm willing to invest I couldn't find if these are required or even voluntary or what in the US. Nice, brief summary article with diagrams from 2002: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1123098/

Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds

#324

Post by pants2 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #246

They're also do not seem aerodynamic. Note that many cars now have features meant to protect pedestrians a bit if there's an impact: the bonnet shall rise with springs, instantly (not unlike an airbag) and then the springs shall absorb the impact a bit. Some bonnet even have airbag outside the car that are supposed to protect pedestrians. But, yup, these huge, tall, flat hoods don't seem that great. Drive a Porsche g…

Americans love to buy 6,000lb tanks with the aerodynamics of a brick and then complain about high gas prices. It's the American way.

Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds

#325

Post by shiroiuma »

filoleg wrote: post #320
alan-hn wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Does the US not have any kind of auto regulations governing visibility at all? Apparently not, considering the topic of TFA

They do. Just because those regulations might not be good enough, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have any at all. For a specific example, I am pretty sure that backup cameras have been mandatory on all new cars since at least 2018.

Right, so the US now has some regulation to make sure people can see behind them. However, there seems to be basically no regulation to make sure they can see in front of the vehicle.

Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds

#326

Post by jjav »

danaris wrote: post #286
jjav wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to recognize that, at least for some SUVs, there are genuine, non-overcompensating use cases. For the things I think of as SUVs, I don't think there is any legitimate use case to be honest. Big SUVs often have less interior room than a sedan or station wagon so interior room is not a use case. They have way less cargo capacity than a pickup so that's not a use case either. They fit less people than a van, s…

> You say Subaru Outback though. I would have never called that a SUV. It's a wagon. Well, that makes your definition of an SUV pretty useless for trying to actually change policy or culture, then. We have to work with the definitions of things that actually exist in the world, not the ones we make up in our heads.

> We have to work with the definitions of things that actually exist in the world, not the ones we make up in our heads.

Yes we should, ideally. The word station wagon has meant that form factor in a car for over a hundred years (apparently around 1910, from some light searching).

It's annoying that some marketing person suddently decided to call a station wagon a SUV now that SUV is the hip thing.

Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds

#327

Post by alan-hn »

kube-system wrote: post #322
alan-hn wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you could achieve safety targets with a vehicle that was safe for those outside of it as well, perhaps safety for your children crossing the road should be attractive to consumers?

Sedans, hatchbacks, and wagons are those vehicles. They are slipping in sales compared to SUVs despite having better pedestrian safety. People have many priorities when buying a vehicle, and most people simply don't think they're at risk of running over their own kid, until they do.

People are really good at being wrong about things, especially as evidenced by how many people do run over theirs and other peoples kids

Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds

#328

Post by filoleg »

shiroiuma wrote: post #325
filoleg wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. Just because those regulations might not be good enough, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have any at all. For a specific example, I am pretty sure that backup cameras have been mandatory on all new cars since at least 2018.

Right, so the US now has some regulation to make sure people can see behind them. However, there seems to be basically no regulation to make sure they can see in front of the vehicle.

To be fair, that same Chevy Camaro I am complaining about above was sold in EU and UK as well, so I wouldn’t throw stones at the US regulation being behind in this case.

It only stopped being sold in 2019 in EU+UK, only the SS version, and not due to the front visibility. Sadly, seems like Chevy announced last year the end of production of Camaros in 2024 in general.

Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds

#329

Post by s1artibartfast »

acdha wrote: post #302
s1artibartfast wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But contributory negligence should never depend on the relative damage level. If an accident had 10 or 1 million in damages, and was 80-20% why would the total ever matter? I think your points about insurance are worth thinking about, minimum liability is lower than most expected earnings.

> But contributory negligence should never depend on the relative damage level. The angle I’m thinking about is that the person operating heavy equipment should be expected to exercise greater caution. If a pedestrian sets foot out of a painted crosswalk, it seems harsh to say that means the SUV driver who plowed into them is off the hook for 30% of the damages when the situation would almost certainly have avoided a…

>The angle I’m thinking about is that the person operating heavy equipment should be expected to exercise greater caution.

I think that is already baked in to contributory negligence. Its not just "you were speeding, and you stepped over a line, so 50/50%".

Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds

#330

Post by shiroiuma »

filoleg wrote: post #328
shiroiuma wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so the US now has some regulation to make sure people can see behind them. However, there seems to be basically no regulation to make sure they can see in front of the vehicle.

To be fair, that same Chevy Camaro I am complaining about above was sold in EU and UK as well, so I wouldn’t throw stones at the US regulation being behind in this case. It only stopped being sold in 2019 in EU+UK, only the SS version, and not due to the front visibility. Sadly, seems like Chevy announced last year the end of production of Camaros in 2024 in general.

Good point. It looks like all the regulators need to create some new regulations requiring decent forward-looking visibility, which means no more humongous hoodlines.
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