[bobince]

It needn't have been this tall. With the internal combustion engine out, Ford could have designed a lower, more curved, less deadly front end.

Instead, they kept the high nose and used the space as a trunk. After all, injuring fewer pedestrians sells no cars. Indeed, the market prefers an enormous, deliberately threatening-looking chariot that makes you feel big and virile.

Ford are behind this game in that they haven't given their truck an explicitly hostile name like “People Mulcher”.

[chrisseaton]

> an enormous, deliberately threatening-looking chariot that makes you feel big and virile

Most people with a truck are just trying to get their job done. They aren’t trying to look or feel anything.

[BitwiseFool]

I bet that the people criticizing trucks for being high off the ground has never driven a truck through a jobsite or a non-paved road.

[chrisseaton]

Their thinking is literally 'I don't understand why anyone needs a truck when the Google employee car park is so well surfaced and my laptop fits on the front seat'.

[CalRobert]

I live on a sheep farm (though the sheep are gone these days). I recognize how incredibly useful tractors and high-clearance pickup trucks are. I also think helicopters are useful too. Neither are safe in the city.

[hannasanarion]

The problem is not that the truck is off the ground, the problem is that the top of the hood is higher than a pedestrian's head.

Trucks designed for work have low frontends for maximum visibility. I drove a 1999 Silverado for 10 years, went offroading often, it had just as much horsepower as last year's F-150, but with a front-end that was basically indistinguishable from a sedan's, instead of the new ones that are so tall they have to put cameras in the cab so that you can see what's in front of you.

The frontends of modern trucks are for intimidation, not work.

[stfp]

I bet the people excited about oversized trucks have never walked in a city for more than 5 minutes.

[BitwiseFool]

I doubt this very much.

[isoskeles]

As someone who doesn't own a truck, I always find it funny when people bring up "big and virile" type lines about truck owners. "They're compensating for something..." These people need to get their minds out of the gutter, stop thinking everything is about penis. Trucks are functional vehicles, like a giant tool for transporting bulky stuff, and I remember this every time I think about asking a friend if I can use his truck for anything.

No insult intended here: I assume people who have never had this thought have also never done things like replacing their kitchen cabinets or some other simple home improvement project. That's fine, but it's also quite relatable to many people, and it has nothing to do with penis.

[ryneandal]

Yes, those insults are so incredibly nonsensical.

I bought a truck for two reasons. Hauling the occasional thing around (having a home makes this happen more than I had initially thought) and it fits 6 (we just had our last child in January).

I WFH so it's lower fuel economy is a non-issue to us.

It has literally _nothing_ to do with "feeling big" or any compensation thing. I had no idea how much I'd use the utility until I bit the bullet and purchased one.

I'm incredibly excited for the F-150 Lightning because I am a perfect candidate for it.

[chrisseaton]

I picture a gardener turning up to work on a tech person's yard, unpacking his mower and tools and soil and plants, and the tech person shaking their head from their window and saying to themselves 'wow he's clearly just got that truck as a substitute penis...'

[munificent]

> I always find it funny when people bring up "big and virile" type lines about truck owners. "They're compensating for something..." These people need to get their minds out of the gutter, stop thinking everything is about penis.

I used to work at a horse racing track and every single jockey (really small dudes) had the hugest truck you have ever seen. We're talking Ford F-350 with a lift kit and bigger tires. The works. You needed to use a ladder to get in them.

There is definitely a thing that some people want bigger, taller vehicles because it makes them feel bigger and stronger. And there is definitely a thing that truck size becomes a pissing contest for some men where it's not just enough to have a big truck, you need to have the biggest one among your peers.

(And if you think nerds are immune to this phenomenon, perhaps take a more critical look at your gaming PC, boardgame collection, etc. We're a tribal species competing for mates using status symbols. Few of us are totally immune to this effect.)

At the same time, many truck owners are not motivated by that and painting them all with the same brush is uncharitable and unkind. I drive a pick-up. I absolutely love it. I have yet to kill any children, destroy the ozone layer, crush another car in a parking lot, or any of the other many moral crimes this thread seems to accuse most truck owners of.

Paraphrasing Freud, sometimes a truck is just a truck.

[stfp]

Incorrect based on 50% of trucks on the road today being absolutely pristine, and simply looking at commercials and their wording ("commanding the road")

[tenpoundhammer]

Have you been around people who actually use trucks for work or leisure? They aren't just hitting the side of their trucks with 2x4's or dropping gravel from ten feet in the air like commercials. Lots of people use their trucks for pulling trailers that carry thousands of pounds of their stuff. They use the bed of their truck for carrying things that are long, heavy, grain, sawdust, smaller animals, there is a wide variety of use cases for a truck and a lot of them don't affect the aesthetic of the truck.

[stfp]

I submit to you that a lot of folks buy things they don't really need or end up using \_(ツ)_/¯

[Rebelgecko]

IMO it's a mistake to judge how a product is used in real life based on how it's marketed. There's a pretty big gap, especially for car commercials.

[stfp]

Advertising/marketing/PR persuades people to want buy certain things, not by telling them these things exist at a certain price, but by influencing them psychologically in deeper ways. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

This in turn has actual effects on their behavior, including but not limited to making certain purchases more likely. Obsessing about power and speed and commanding the road definitely has an impact on how people drive - especially younger folks.

[chrisseaton]

Commercials for my tax software tells me it makes people using it feel ecstatic. It doesn't really - it's used by people just trying to get their taxes done and they don't feel anything about it.

[stfp]

These couldn't be more different. Tax software choice is a private choice with no effect on the public space. Tax commercials happen for a couple months.

Car choice influence an incredible array of things up to how cities are built. Car commercial are omnipresent and include product placement in movies as well as, apparently, US presidents gunning it in a new truck, which is the topic of this whole thread.

[ben7799]

Blame for killing falls on the driver of the vehicle, not on the company designing it or the shape of the front of the vehicle.

Don't hit anyone with your vehicle and you won't kill anyone. I've been hit by a truck bicycling, thankfully not too hard. But I don't really think it would have been better to have been hit by a low slung sleek car. It would have put all the force through my legs.

[ajross]

"Blame" is something you argue in a civil suit.

Vehicle safety regulations aren't about "blame", ever. They're designed to save lives. If you can do that with better driver behavior, great. If you can do it with assistive technology, great. If you can do it with different vehicle designs, great. You do what you can, based on the techniques available and the costs involved.

To wit: if you start your safety analysis with "fuck the pedestrians, that's the driver's fault, not Ford's", then you're doing it wrong.

[syshum]

How about we start with banning Cyclist and Pedestrians, that would save the most lives?

[xxpor]

The problem is the high front makes it such that there's a huge blind spot.

[codyswann]

A blind spot that wasn't a blind spot five feet back. Like, when does this come into play? Describe a scenario.

[hannasanarion]

Ever heard of crosswalks? They're these things that people use to travel in front of cars while they're standing still.

Ford trucks are the #1 killer of children and adults at crosswalks because drivers can't see what they're about to run over, vehicles of that front-end design account for 40% of all pedestrian traffic deaths.

[codyswann]

So, you're trying to tell me, it's the truck's fault that a driver doesn't know they're at a crosswalk?

Do you own a truck? I do. I've owned a truck for 15 years. Some of them lifted, and unless you are pretty much parked on top of a crosswalk, there is no problem seeing the crosswalk. Especially 3-4 foot objects in said crosswalk.

Edit: F150 is the most popular vehicle in the US. So, yeah, it stands to reason it will kill more people than any other vehicle, too

[hannasanarion]

I'm telling you it's the truck's fault that the driver can't see the crosswalk.

There is a such thing as good and bad design. If I sell a hammer that shoots a bullet whenever you swing it for no good reason, I'm responsible for people getting shot.

[Der_Einzige]

My lexus has a 360 camera that turns on when the car is moving at low speeds (e.g. when stopped at a crosswalk). I assume new ford trucks at even a few trim levels up will have this feature. You can prevent these kind of fuck-ups with cameras easily.

[hannasanarion]

You shouldn't need to take your eyes off the road to look at a camera screen just to see what's on the road in front of you. It's a car, not an armored fighting vehicle.

[jbay808]

You get into your parked vehicle, check your phone for directions, find a route, confirm your arrival time, then put the key in the ignition and immediately run over a kid who stepped in front of your truck to grab their ball.

[codyswann]

So you run into the kid at 1 mph? Are we thinking people hammer down on the accelerator when leaving Walmart? And if so, we then blame the vehicle?

[xxpor]

Children playing in front of a stationary car, people walking in front of cars at gas stations/charging spots/parking lots in general.

https://youtu.be/NDH3FDfVQl0?t=68

[codyswann]

And you don't see those children there when you get into the vehicle?

[xxpor]

Sure, you do 99.9% of the time. But all it takes is once, you're distracted, someone's yelling at you from the house, whatever, and then that's it.

[buzzy_hacker]

That’s why I wish car manufacturers would affix big metal spikes to the front of cars for the aesthetic value. After all, they’d be blameless for any casualties.

[arwhatever]

Judging the appearance of some late model vehicles, I'll joke that we might as well skip a few small steps and go straight to mounting Hellfire missiles on the front. :-)

[zip1234]

Blame for killing almost never falls on drivers. Look at news headlines--"Car runs over person" and not "Driver runs over person" and you can see how this is viewed. There is a term to describe this--"windshield bias." Auto safety takes multiple approaches and not just saying the drivers are responsible because they are currently not, at least in the US. Does the person that hit you with a truck still have their driving license?

[pm90]

Please no more of the personal responsibility bullcrap. “Don’t make a mistake and you won’t make a mistake” is a pretty useless statement.

When designing mass manufactured items, it is a responsibility of manufacturers to ensure that their products are as safe as they can be.

[aeharding]

Indeed.

Even HN cannot see past the perverse dangers and flaws of modern auto design responsible for the current vulnerable road user epidemic in America. [1] When it comes to cars - it's "personal responsibility". When it comes to treadmills - it's a "manufacturing flaw" [2]

[1] https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2018/06/28/suvs-killi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26846641

[nradov]

Should manufacturers also install governors that limit maximum speed to 55 mph? That would make them as safe as they can be, right?

[DHPersonal]

You're actually really on to something there.

[Tiktaalik]

yes

[piyh]

I'm sure there's some societal tradeoff between global electrification and pedestrian deaths. Until the government adds pedestrian safety to US crash standards, Ford will make what the image conscious truck market wants.

[stfp]

The market can go nuts, and regarding vehicle size, it is. It's basically an arms race.

[dls2016]

Smells like a steak and seats 35!

https://youtu.be/PI_Jl5WFQkA

[jtdev]

Roads are made for large dangerous machines that move fast and can hurt you.

[chubot]

Cities are made for people; the number people outside of cars greatly exceeds the number inside cars in every city.

If what you say is true, then cities should not have roads.

[theodric]

Just because you live in a city, does not mean the city was "made for" you. Cities are a side effect of many people clustering around key resource points. Resources are almost always much more valuable in trade than they are remaining at a stationary point, which requires transport infrastructure and vehicles. The fact that you don't want to live in a city in which people drive vehicles is your problem, not society's.

[pm90]

Cities are no longer resource points as most economic activity in cities is generated by services and knowledge work. Even if you go by your logic of economic supremacy, society would want to protect the most valued economic assets in its cities: the people. The death machines are also noisy as fuck and generate pollution, take up valuable and scarce urban space … there is absolutely no need to have huge roads with unrestricted traffic going right up to dense urban centers.

[chubot]

What resources?

[jtdev]

Almost every major American city is also a shipping port, freight train depot, major freight airport hub, etc., etc., manufacturing is still a thing (in fact domestic manufacturing is on the rise in the last decade). Good luck feeding, clothing, sheltering, etc. the millions of inhabitants in American cities without roads that accommodate large trucks and people who do real work.

[hrktb]

That's so sad this sarcasm basically became fact after so many decades of going the wrong way.

It's also why cities are taking back whole roads from cars when they can, as it's so hard to preserve a middle ground in a lot of areas.

[chrisseaton]

Roads predate cars. Cars took them over from people and far slower horses.

[JoeAltmaier]

So what? Its a fact today. Nobody going back to horses.

[chrisseaton]

The ‘so what’ is maybe they should be given back to the people they were originally built for.

[jtdev]

Elitist cyclists??

[chrisseaton]

We had roads before cycles.

[woah]

That’s why they should only have one lane for cars with a 25mph speed limit.