Large trucks are safer in intra-vehicle collisions. Imagine RAM vs sedan or average SUV. It’s completely rational to purchase the largest car you can afford, as long as you’re concerned about the safety of your family and yourself
Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds
331–340 of 358 posts
Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is another reason. But the smallest trucks were put in the car efficiency standards. There used to be a Ford F100. Full size truck but lighter load capacity. RIP. Tax gas if you want people to burn less of it.
> But the smallest trucks were put in the car efficiency standards. I don't think that's exactly true. It's just that fuel standards for light trucks are now defined in terms of the footprint of the vehicle -- the smaller the truck, the higher the fuel standard. Which is, of course, exactly what the automakers wanted: They make more money selling bigger trucks. I found the light truck CAFE standards online. Notice ho…
That is quite a complicated way to calculate the CAFE standard. I wonder what the definition of "light truck" is?
CAFE doesn't help day to day either. When you buy the car is when you are thinking most about gas prices and fuel efficiency. When gas prices are high people buy fuel efficient cars. The Prius, Teslas, etc. already exists so people can already show preference for fuel efficiency and manufactures can follow.
Edit: I was just thinking, if you force high fuel efficiency on the fleet and people want cars/trucks on average that get worse fuel efficiency than the stated goal, the market is going to always make the gas guzzlers more profitable and the fuel efficient cars loss leaders. We should either tax the gas or have a sliding scale tax on cars depending on the fuel efficiency. And taxing gas is better. I'm sure fuel efficiency standard can be gamed like diesel gate more easliy than the volume of a gallon of gas.
Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds
#333Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the one time I always pull out my “Thanks Obama!” without being ironic.
Could you elaborate here?
Sure. I covered it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39112591
Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cars in the 80s and 90s definitely had more of a "greenhouse" feel to them, with mostly transparent glass and small framing. Due to a mixture of standards, this has changed. The roof cap and pillars have thickened and curved for roll-over protection, and front pillars are also thicker to hold air bags that didn't exist in those older cars. The windows sills are higher up relative to the driver, to improve side-impact…
> Due to a mixture of standards, this has changed. The roof cap and pillars have thickened and curved for roll-over protection, and front pillars are also thicker to hold air bags that didn't exist in those older cars. The windows sills are higher up relative to the driver, to improve side-impact protection. I've heard this argument before, but I'm simply not buying it. Cars like the Honda Civic or Volkswagen Golf ha…
> Cars like the Honda Civic or Volkswagen Golf have an excellent safety record, outclassing many giant SUVs while still having relatively small A-pillars and large windows on all sides.
The A pillar (and B and C pillars too) on a modern Golf or Civic is humongous compared to the first-generation Golf and Civic. You either just forgot what those looked like, or you're too young to even have seen particularly many of them.
Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just require a class A/B license to drive anything above...I don't know, 4000lbs? Exclude batteries from the weight if that becomes a problem for electric cars.
> Exclude batteries from the weight if that becomes a problem for electric cars. Mass is mass, whether in the form of battery or frame metal. While encouraging lighter cars would be a huge win, carving a massive exception to heavy EVs completely defeats the point.
Somewhat, but not completely: Visibility and center of gravity are also safety aspects, and a big battery doesn't per se make the former worse and actually (usually) makes the latter better, being mounted under the floor. So if an ICE model has one rating (or demands one kind of license), it makes some sense not to penalise an electric version but have the same limitations for that: It is worse than its fuel-driven counterpart only in the "F = ma" sense, but not otherwise. (To take a somewhat contrived example, an Audi E-Tron is probably less likely to flip over on top of a pdestrian than an A7. Or, recent talk about battery fires notwithstanding, to catch fire in doing so.)
Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the spirit, but don't like the unintended consequence that it would create a stigma around sedans -- "oh, those are the cars for the bad drivers". We need to do something that makes SUV drivers feel ridiculous and humiliated. Or, failing that, just make it expensive: Weight and size dependent tolls, say (using the fourth power of weight, possibly, to match road wear equations?). Or just fewer lanes in which th…
> I like the spirit, but don't like the unintended consequence that it would create a stigma around sedans It doesn't need to be anything punitive, just make it that more training is required. You start off with a basic license that allows for something like a 1.0 liter engine car (I know, also need to change regulations to encourage the manufacturing of small cars). Then with more experience and more training you ca…
Stepped license for heavier and more powerful vehicles is how it works for motorcycles in at least several European countries. (And of course for heavy lorries pretty much everywhere, AFAIK. But, as you say, that needs to split up into far more categories on the lower end.)
Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the spirit, but don't like the unintended consequence that it would create a stigma around sedans -- "oh, those are the cars for the bad drivers". We need to do something that makes SUV drivers feel ridiculous and humiliated. Or, failing that, just make it expensive: Weight and size dependent tolls, say (using the fourth power of weight, possibly, to match road wear equations?). Or just fewer lanes in which th…
If we're going to try to "punish" SUV drivers for driving those vehicles, then I think we need to both recognize and do some things: 1) We need to recognize that there's a wide variety of vehicles in the SUV category. Many of them have replaced (not supplemented, replaced , because they sell better and car companies are hyperoptimizing their profits like everyone else) old standards like station wagons and minivans i…
Change regulations now, legislation usually works like "From [date a few years in the future], only vehicles with [list of proerties] will be allowed to be..." Manufacturers managed to switch to building only trucks and SUVs in a few years, so of course they can switch back in a few years too.
Also: Funny how people used to be able to get around in sedans and station wagons even in Canada and the northern states of the USA only a few decades ago, isn't it?
ETA: The Subaru Outback doesn't only look like a station wagon, AFAICT it pretty much is a station wagon. A 4WD station wagon, set slightly higher and with a somewhat boxier design to look "like a SUV" -- just like 98.4% of "crossovers" and "SUVs" sold nowadays. Get rid of the silly regulations that have many of them taxed like "trucks" (as if they were farm work vehicles in the 1950s) and allow some aspects of unsafe design (high square bonnets etc), and we'll probably see fashion too swing away from the current faux-macho bullbar aestethic after a while.
Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds
#339Earlier 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.
OTOH, perhaps thinking of the Subaru Outback as a SUV just shows you have let a couple of decades of SUV propaganda make up the definition of "SUV" you have in your head for you. It's not like it's anywhere near a Dodge Ram in looks and design, is it?
(OTGH, if it is, then maybe I'm mixing up the Outback with other Subaru models we have more of over here.)
Re: Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Full disclosure: I drive a Subaru Outback. [...T]he Outback's [gas mileage] is actually shockingly good for an SUV). Funny, I call the Outback an AWD station wagon, not an SUV at all. I've got no problem with that; I'd be much happier if people bought those. Indeed, the very existence of Subarus seems to make most SUVs unnecessary. The only SUV Subaru makes (that I am aware of) is the Forester (and while that's a l…
> Funny, I call the Outback an AWD station wagon, not an SUV at all. Then you're going to need to come up with some better way of defining what a Bad Vehicle is if you want to change policy/culture, because your definition of an SUV doesn't match with reality. When you say something like "we need to make SUV drivers feel ridiculous and humiliated", but you're using a definition of "SUV" that you made up in your head,…
Easy: Bad Vehicles are over-heavy, fuel-guzzling, dangerous-to-others (body-on-frame, high bonnet, bull bars...) things that are sold as "trucks" or "SUVs" -- you know, the original trucks and SUVs, which definition many people who know shit about cars and trucks remember and still use. Most things that are sold as "trucks" or "SUVs" nowadays aren't necessarily Bad Vehicles, seeing how they're just station wagons on stilts with faux-macho design plastered over the outside. They only lean towards the Bad Vehicles side of things when that silly design goes too far towards dangerous-to-others (high square bonnets, shooting-slit visibility etc) in the name of faux-macho buyer appeal. Detach the bull bars from your Outback and you'll probably be OK.