Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 429 posts

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#341

Post by sarchertech »

rasz wrote: post #335
spacebanana7 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that function is so convex, almost all of the cumulative damage to roads is done by lorries, buses and fuel trucks. Cars, even big ones, are negligible compared to the fourth power of bus weight.

> lorries, buses and fuel trucks None of those drive on small local roads, but mom trucks do.

Delivery trucks certainly do and very regularly at that. A delivery truck can easily cause about 300x the wear of a large SUV or full size pickup.

A full sized school bus will regularly drive on just about any road. Fully loaded they’ll do 1000x as much damage as a large SUV.

Fire trucks, septic tank pump trucks, big furniture delivery trucks, landscaping trucks, motor homes etc… will also drive on pretty much every small local road.

And much bigger commercial trucks drive on very small local roads enough to dwarf the damage of a large SUV. My neighbor just had a foundation for an addition poured. 3 cement trucks came out. 3 fully loaded cement trucks would cause something like 20,000 times as much damage as a large suv.

I’d need to drive on my street once a day for 50 years in an enormous suv cause as much damage.

Given normal weathering and damage caused by frequent or even infrequent large commercial vehicles, larger local passenger vehicles aren’t going to increase maintenance costs.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#342

Post by AnarchismIsCool »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #282
AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bigger cars need more fuel -> bigger fuel trucks They use more materials to make, require bigger places to store/maintain them and go through bigger consumables ie tires -> bigger lorries. It's not like they're the sum of all evil, they have a small impact on the size of these things, but bringing the sizes down will help on the pathway to lowering the size of everything.

> Bigger cars need more fuel -> bigger fuel trucks The fuel trucks aren't going to change in size, they're going to come more often. Also, oil is typically distributed in pipelines or on ships rather than trucks until the last mile. Meanwhile a fuel tanker holds some 10,000 gallons of fuel, i.e. enough for "large" 20 MPG SUVs to go 200,000 miles. Meanwhile the tanker is generally transporting the fuel less than 100 m…

Yeah, it's not a crazy influence, it's just to point out that the economy is a pyramid and if you make the stone on top smaller, there are thousands of other little places where you can shave weight. Cars account for a small but significant amount of our bulk material usage, think mining equipment -> iron ore -> sheet steel -> stamped parts -> car. If you can reduce the number of F350s we sell, we can reduce the amount of iron ore we're consuming, the size of the ships carrying it, the trucks that haul the mining equipment etc.

The US sells on the order of 4M domestically produced pickups and SUVs per year and produces 1.8MT of steel. If we, conservatively, reduced the weight of all of those cars by half or 1T ea (they're often 3x the weight of a sanely sized vehicle) we quickly eclipse US steel production, even if we exclude some parts as non-steel. That multiplies by 1.6x when you think in terms of iron ore (though most is recycled from scrap).

TLDR: go play factorio

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#343

Post by nothercastle »

AstralJaeger wrote: post #191
nothercastle wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep also bigger cars can do slightly more.

Considering there are europeans sedans that have more cargo volume and are sginificantly shortler than some of these american battering rams

That’s because the us has no pedestrian impact design requirements and people like grills.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#344

Post by nothercastle »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #195
nothercastle wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t realize that the RAV was so unsafely light. I thought it would be a more respectable 4500 lb at least.

> unsafely light Can't tell if this is nerd ragebait or just a confused person

Obviously you have never driven in Florida. It’s downright scary to drive anything under 5000lb there. Biggest trucks and suvs everywhere it’s an arms race you can’t opt out unless you want some 80year old in a expedition max to take you out.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#345

Post by amrocha »

dgfitz wrote: post #339
amrocha wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, you're exaggerating. There is no place on earth that averages 40C for 3 months. Second,I live in Tokyo, where the summer has been miserable with average temperatures of 32C, with regular highs of 36+ with 80% humidity. And yet I walked and biked everywhere and was just fine, and that's true for most of the 40M people that live here as well. Third, it sounds like you live in a place that's not suitable for…

> Second,I live in Tokyo And this is where you need to remember that the rest of the world is not Tokyo. I have faith you’ll get there.

Ok, so it's a city planning problem, not a weather problem. I'm glad we agree.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#346

Post by amrocha »

dgfitz wrote: post #340
amrocha wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "anecdote" is the fact that I live in Tokyo where we get extreme weather regularly and yet the vast majority of trips are taken by public transport, walking or biking.

Stop pretending the rest of the world is like Tokyo, it isn’t.

The rest of the world can be like Tokyo, that's the important part.

Weather is not a good enough reason for why we need cars in cities.

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#347

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

thallium205 wrote: post #280
creer wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Broken down by state, I’m sure there are states that are safer than Germany Based on fatalities per 100k persons (not a great statistic but the one quoted in this thread), and 2022 data, then nope. Every single state is worse than Germany. Even District of Columbia - basically a city with much less reason to drive - manages a worse score than Germany as a whole. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detai…

Pretty ridiculous to not measure deaths per some unit of distance traveled.

Eh, you really want per unit of economic productivity or similar, since driving is not in and of itself productive. For instance, you could get the numbers to look better simply by having people circle the block in their neighborhood (presumably a very safe form of driving).

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#348

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

tzs wrote: post #266
toddmorey wrote: post #57

Germany has a ratio of 3.9 deaths per 100,000 people, while America's ratio is 12.4 per 100,000—essentially 4x higher. And they have the autobahn. Not like they are driving slower.

Americans drive more, so if you want to compare the safety of the two systems it is better to look at deaths per vehicle-km. Germany has 4.2 deaths per billion vehicle-km. The United States has 6.9.

But driving is inherently dangerous, that's the whole point. America shouldn't be let off the hook for partaking in more of a dangerous activity, as if that makes it less dangerous. If Americans don't want to die in cars they should drive less. (Trains would help.)

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#349

Post by boojums »

AstralJaeger wrote: post #189
carabiner wrote: post #178

This was all caused by the CAFE emissions standards that allow cars with bigger footprints to emit more. Nobody wants bigger trucks, and in the Tacoma community it's a standard refrain to bemoan just how fucking big they've gotten. They aren't compact trucks anymore. They're midsize today. Compact trucks do not exist.

I miss the days where PickUps were the size of the Fiat Strada and didn't have a turning radius of an Abrams M1 battle tank.

If my math is right, the Abrams has a tighter turning radius than a Miata due to how its steering works. The Miata is around 15ft while an Abrams turning would inscribe a circle with a radius of 14ft.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEC9cCRwfkE

Re: Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

#350

Post by shiroiushi »

nothercastle wrote: post #101
abhay37 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All prices of all components are listed, thus I have no reason to hire salesmen. You pick the components as if you are building a PC. There is a huge demand for this, and the savings from fewer middlemen can go elsewhere. Of course there are several laws and policies on national and statewide levels enshrining the current anti-consumer model because it "creates jobs".

Nobody would buy all weather floor mats for 600$ or protective finish applications if you could remove them. That’s why they bundle features you want with those you don’t

You're confusing dealer-added options with factory option packages. Cars bundle features together because they get better economies of scale by making only a few different versions of a model ("trim levels"), instead of letting everyone mix-and-match parts. Factories don't work that well when all the units aren't the same.

Dealer-added options aren't added at a factory, they're added at the dealership, solely for the reason of inflating profit and convincing customers to roll the cost into their loan.

Post reply on HN