[xwall]

Key Ideas: Heavier vehicles are safer for their occupants but more dangerous for others: The weight of a vehicle is a critical factor in car crashes, with heavier vehicles causing more fatalities in other cars, pedestrians, and cyclists.

The heaviest vehicles kill more people than they save: Analysis of crash data shows that for every life saved by the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks, more than a dozen lives are lost in other vehicles.

Weight advantages have changed little over time: Despite improvements in safety features, the weight advantage of heavier vehicles has remained relatively constant, with heavier vehicles still causing more fatalities in lighter vehicles.

Carmakers prioritize consumer preferences over safety: Manufacturers are producing increasingly heavier vehicles, driven by consumer demand for larger, more powerful cars, despite the safety risks to others.

Regulators are ill-equipped to address the issue: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's rating system focuses on occupant safety, not the safety of other road users, and tax policies subsidize heavier vehicles.

Public awareness and concern are growing: Surveys show increasing concern about the size and safety of SUVs and pickup trucks, with researchers and policymakers starting to take notice.

Electrification may exacerbate the problem: The shift towards electric vehicles, which tend to be heavier than their internal-combustion equivalents, may increase the weight of vehicles on the road, further amplifying the safety risks.

[thot_experiment]

Cars damage infrastructure in proportion to the fourth power of axle load. Not only are people in big cars killing people in little cars, they're also HEAVILY subsidized by the people they kill.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

[spacebanana7]

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.

[simongr3dal]

Those vehicles typically have many more axles and double-wide wheels to distribute the load.

[Retric]

It doesn’t help that much. Each tire of a fully loaded 18 wheeler carries 4.4x the weight of a typical car tire. 4.4 ^ 4 = 378x the damage per tire but there are also 4.5x the tires so your at 1,700x the damage.

That’s an oversimplification, but it doesn’t really matter if it’s 99.9% or 95% of the damage ware is still absolutely dominated by heavy vehicles.

[ncruces]

And how many more SUVs go through that road? If there's a few hundred SUVs for every 18 wheeler, it's no longer negligible: it's 10 or 30% of the damage.

And it could be a lot more negligible, if that mostly drive alone, drove a car with half the weight.

[Retric]

Most SUV’s aren’t that heavy.

I used 4,000lb for the car, a 2024 Chevrolet Suburban which is huge only clocks in at a 5,824 lbs. Load another 1,000lb for passengers etc and (6,824/4000) ^ 4 = 8.5x a car or 0.5% what I calculated for a full 18 wheeler.

Sure there’s more cars than 18 wheelers but 7,000lb is a rather extreme outlier in terms of SUV weight.

[gruez]

That statement is only true in aggregate. If you you're taxing individual vehicle owners SUVs will still get taxed way less than trucks.

[AnarchismIsCool]

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.

[AnthonyMouse]

> 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 miles, so this is diluted by a factor of 2000. Because of the 4th power law, this still causes nearly as much damage as the SUVs themselves, but they're both still negligible compared to all of the other commercial trucks transporting everything else.

Obviously this doesn't even apply to electric vehicles.

> They use more materials to make, require bigger places to store/maintain them and go through bigger consumables ie tires -> bigger lorries.

This is an even smaller effect than the fuel.

[AnarchismIsCool]

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

[AnthonyMouse]

> 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.

But you want to optimize the thing where you get the most bang for your buck.

The heavy side of the most popular SUVs aren't based on the F-350, they generally weigh around 4500 pounds vs. 3500 pounds for the lighter end, the latter being around the same as the average mid-sized sedan. Cutting 30% off of a one-time cost for something that will have a 20-year lifespan is generally not going to be the best place to optimize.

Compare this to, say, introducing mixed-use zoning so people can live closer to their jobs and drive fewer miles. This not only reduces fuel consumption on an ongoing basis, it makes cars last longer because they have fewer miles on them and then you don't need to manufacture as many, and it has direct human benefits because people spend less time stuck in traffic and drive fewer miles with risk of traffic fatalities.

[xyzzy_plugh]

Sure, but there are plenty of roads that don't see much, if any, traffic of that type.

[sarchertech]

There are very very few paved roads where the largest vehicles on them are large SUVs. I live on a mountain near a road where commercial vehicles are banned and we still get a few large commercial vehicles per day.

One of the roads up the mountain has switchbacks near the top that are so tight that nothing longer than 18 feet is allowed up, but at least 2x a week a box truck gets stuck.

Heavy cars have many negative impacts but road maintenance isn’t one worth worrying about.

[skhunted]

There are vehicles that do more damage to roads than large pickup trucks. It's still the case that large pickup trucks do more damage to the road than small cars. Owners of pickup trucks are being subsidized by pedestrians and small car owners. They do not pay enough for the privilege of driving their vehicles in relation to the damage they cause.

[sarchertech]

Road damage isn’t like hit points. If a road has regular large vehicle traffic, it doesn’t really matter how many smaller passenger vehicles are driving on it—even if they are pickup trucks. Passenger vehicles aren’t going to change how frequently the road needs to be repaved.

At the extreme end, imagine a railroad bridge. We don’t care about how fat the mice that regularly cross it are.

[rasz]

> lorries, buses and fuel trucks

None of those drive on small local roads, but mom trucks do.

[sarchertech]

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.

[dataflow]

I feel like this means taxes should be imposed on cars proportionally to the fourth power of axle load too.

[erikaww]

Car makers would adjust but road freight would fight this tooth and nail

[Groxx]

If only we had other technologies for moving heavy things without using concrete roads

[nradov]

The USA already moves a higher percentage of freight by rail than almost any other country. But rail could never work for time-sensitive loads or last mile delivery.

[AnimalMuppet]

You would be amazed at how much FedEx, UPS, and Amazon traffic moves by train. BNSF (at least) even has "guaranteed delivery" trains.

Last mile I will give you. Those shippers use trailers and containers on railroad cars, and trucks do the last mile delivery.

[Groxx]

Perhaps they could make the rail lines and machinery smaller. One might even consider such rail to be "light", in comparison.

I'm sure it's pure coincidence that many cities already have rail lines going down roads in city centers. They probably just built the city around a historical freight line, and haven't bothered to remove it.

[yyyk]

Horses? I don't see how you really solve last mile.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Huh? I've had horses in my basement. The last mile was solved centuries ago.

[gruez]

Drones? For last mile delivery roads are the only game in town.

[stefan_]

Technology that was infinitely more efficient and safer, even

[blibble]

the freight has more axles, and you could set the baseline weight by vehicle class

but maybe this would just incentivise the sort of person that buys an F150 to drive to the shops to simply to upgrade to a big rig (for the tax saving?!)

[bobbylarrybobby]

Segregating regulations by vehicle class is how the CAFE laws failed. Make your vehicle a “light truck” and now you can give it much worse mileage.

No, you just have to charge in proportion to damage done and let the economics work out how they will.

[dataflow]

Good point, but one could probably easily treat freight vehicles differently.

[coryrc]

No, they should be paying for their damage. Bring back local railroads if it's a problem. Add more axles, move less at once.

[lostlogin]

The US is a poster child for ‘user pays’, but I wouldn’t fancy the chance of success.

[Bloating]

I feel like many things too

[alamortsubite]

Also penalties for moving violations.

[jl6]

The unintended consequences of this would be:

Massive increase in the cost of public transport as buses pass their tax costs onto users.

Massive increase in the cost of freight shipping, which would be passed on to consumers, i.e. everybody, since virtually every part of the economy depends indirectly on freight transport.

It would amount to everybody paying, and thus being more or less equivalent to public funding of roads.

[gamepsys]

Freight -- Ideally this causes more investment into freight rail and more freight to be moved by rail/boat. This might cause short term price increases to expand the infrastructure, but long term it's much cheaper/greener/efficient to move this stuff on rail. Last mile (maybe last 100 miles) will always be by truck, but we have way too much long haul stuff.

Public Transport -- If tax payers are currently paying for the external costs of public transportation (via taxes to repair roads) then it won't cost anymore public money if taxpayers continue to cover that cost. For private busses this is a case of tax payers unfairly subsiding their external costs.

[dataflow]

> The unintended consequences of this would be: ... public transport ... freight

You could obviously tweak legislation to treat such vehicles differently if you wanted. I was just getting the core idea across, not suggesting my comment should be copy-pasted verbatim into the next bill Congress is passing.

[dwattttt]

It's worth noting that unless the roads are degrading and not being repaired, those costs are already being paid. It's just a question of who is paying it.

[AdrianB1]

Intended consequence would be: cars pay for the damages they do to the road. Even buses. What is wrong with that?

[AnthonyMouse]

It removes the implicit subsidy for buses, but we want to encourage people to use buses over cars and SUVs. Also, the damage from cars/SUVs is so small that the cost of collecting the fee would exceed the amount of the fee.

[enaaem]

The correct pricing of goods and services is essential for a well functioning market based economy.

[AdrianB1]

We do it different in Europe: pay disproportionate by engine displacement. My father's car has 10x the taxes as my mother's car just because the engine is 1.6 times larger (2.5 liters, nothing outrageous). At the same time my mother pays for that car quite close to what I pay for each of my bikes that are 8-10 times lighter and have way smaller engines (300cc and 600cc).

[closewith]

Where in Europe is that?

In Ireland, displacement-based taxes were replaced by emission taxes 14 years ago. I think most countries have followed suite.

[ncruces]

Which is a much better system. My country (Portugal) still does mostly displacement, and a turbo-charged 1 liter pays a lot less than a naturally aspirated 1.6 hybrid, despite the former consuming 50% more gas.

[AdrianB1]

Romania, but neighboring countries have similar systems.

[M95D]

> We do it different in Europe

> Romania

Oh, please stop using Romania as an example for Europe. We're the banana country here.

[nradov]

The notion of charging different fees or taxes by engine displacement is idiotic. It has nothing particularly to do with road wear, emissions, or safety hazards.

[heisenbit]

If you want a measure that can not be easily manipulated and can serve as an albeit imperfect proxy for wear, emissions, weight and last but not least ability to pay then displacement is an option for taxation.

[kwhitefoot]

Larger displacement engines are almost invariably in larger, heavier, vehicles. Axle weight determines road wear. I agree that using the axle weight would be better but displacement taxes were also a luxury tax.

Some of my cars over the years:

Mini: 600 kg, 850 cc

Rover 75: 1 700 kg, 2 500 cc

Chevy Van: 2500 kg, 5 000 cc

[AnthonyMouse]

> Larger displacement engines are almost invariably in larger, heavier, vehicles.

This isn't even a good approximation because turbochargers (which nearly all heavy, diesel vehicles have) significantly increase power at the same displacement. The 5 liter Mustang weighs less than 4000 pounds. Here's a >10,000 pound bus with a 3.2L diesel engine:

https://www.tescobus.com/bus-for-sale/collins/school/

[roughly]

> Key Ideas: Heavier vehicles are safer for their occupants but more dangerous for others: The weight of a vehicle is a critical factor in car crashes, with heavier vehicles causing more fatalities in other cars, pedestrians, and cyclists.

I'm actually curious how much of this danger is primarily to pedestrians and cyclists. On the margins, I'd expect in a crash a 6000lb vehicle with modern safety equipment to be safer than a 3000lb vehicle with modern safety equipment, but folks have crashed modern sports cars at triple-digit speeds and (literally) walked away.

For a pedestrian or cyclist, though, getting hit by a large truck or SUV is a different story, primarily because the shape and frontal area are so much larger, and the collision rates are higher because visibility and vehicle control are much worse than smaller cars.

I'm also curious how much of the perceived safety benefit of larger cars is offset by the reduced ability to control the vehicle - in other words, I'm curious what the per-capita crash rates are in SUVs compared to normal cars.

[Spooky23]

I think a lot of this is details lost in the stats. Every car is heavier due to safety standards. A 2024 Civic is bigger than a 1994 Accord.

The pickups are less safe for all stakeholders and are a dominant category. They have poor safety features, handle poorly and have comically bad visibility.

That plus the abandonment of speed enforcement drives death. 2000lb or 8000lb car, if you get hit at 45mph, you’re dead. Velocity is exponentially more important than mass.

[coredog64]

Even cars are getting comically bad visibility. While there might be a big piece of glass bonded to the rear quarter, it’s got a huge black painted border on the outside and frit on the inside. Then there’s fat plastic trim that obscures driver sight lines from what is left.

NHTSA would be better off at having a visibility requirement for 5th and 95th percentile men/women. I’d allow cameras to play a part, but if used, everything in the system has to be warrantied for 10 years/100k miles (similar to emissions equipment).

[seoulmetro]

Yeah it's gone under the radar pretty much, but going from an early 80s car in the 2010s to a new car, it was like I was driving blind for half the time but reversing cameras are great (too bad they also cause problems where we can't really see everything).

Driving in older cars is way easier apart from power steering. The rest are luxuries like air con, entertainment. Even cabin space in older cars was vastly larger than new cars and the exteriors of new cars are vastly larger now than before.. thanks (but no thanks) to safety measures.

[milch]

> That plus the abandonment of speed enforcement drives death

I don't think they need enforcement as much as traffic calming features. It simply shouldn't be possible to speed as much as people do... I live between a middle school, a special ed school and a bus stop, on a 30mph road which is 43ft wide. Basically this is what it looks like: https://streetmix.net/-/2685748 and this is probably what it should look like to reduce average speeds: https://streetmix.net/-/2685753. There are children walking and biking along this road all day. I frequently see people speeding, easily going 40, 50 even 60mph. Note that this isn't a very high traffic road either, I just looked up the average traffic counts and it gets 8-12k of vehicles in both directions PER DAY, so traffic calming would barely have an impact. If anything it might drive more people to take the highway or one of the other high-speed roads nearby instead, which would be a good thing too.

The other problem is people coming out of cross streets, and immediately pulling forward as much as possible without looking. You have a kid crossing the street who maybe doesn't know any better, or is distracted because they are on their phone or chatting with their friends, and you got a perfect recipe for an "accident" right there ... I've also watched close calls like that so many times in this area. You simply can't put a cop on every corner to do enforcement of that - maybe some automated camera systems would do it, but so does daylighting the intersections like they do in Hoboken.

And the other problem is that any time you do something that even vaguely could cause an increase in driving time, people will rage. I've seen public comment sessions where the planners literally showed the data that adding a bike lane wouldn't increase travel times during peak and actually decrease traffic and people were like "well, I don't believe it, my commute is going to slow down for sure". Same with even simpler things like speed cameras ("cash grab"), heck even increased police activity (also "cash grab"). You can show data that it will save people's lives, even children's lives, and people (even on HN) will say "but the economy... and efficiency...".

[hermitcrab]

>For a pedestrian or cyclist, though, getting hit by a large truck or SUV is a different story, primarily because the shape and frontal area are so much larger,

Especially if they have raised it, which seems very common in places like Florida.

[AdrianB1]

Honestly, I don't think the weight of the car matters too much in an accident with a bicycle or pedestrian. I was hit a few times by cars at low speed (10-20 km/h) while riding my motorcycle and the weight of the car did not matter, when I was rear ended if the car was 20% (300 kg) lighter it would still be 4 times the mass of (me + bike), so the impact would be similar. A car versus a pedestrian is almost identical if the car is 1000 kg or 2000 kg.

[berikv]

Not saying you are wrong, but this is anecdotal. I’d rather try to interpret crash statistics than use my own experience.

[roughly]

Yeah, I think the primary difference is the geometry - the SUVs and trucks present an almost flat surface and cause much more head and neck trauma - and in the visibility and controllability of the vehicle.

[loeg]

> Regulators are ill-equipped to address the issue: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's rating system focuses on occupant safety, not the safety of other road users, and tax policies subsidize heavier vehicles.

Ill-equipped, or asleep at the wheel? NHTSA could extend their rating system to incorporate the safety of people outside the tested vehicle, but have failed to.

[AnthonyMouse]

Who is the target audience? Insurance companies already have the statistics. Buyers care about occupant safety and would largely ignore a pedestrian safety rating.

If you tried to force it into a combined rating you'd probably make the problem worse because then people would know that large vehicles are being punished in safety ratings and refuse to buy small vehicles even more than they do now because they can't distinguish whether a good safety rating is from occupant or pedestrian safety.

[dwattttt]

We don't have to assume buyers would ignore a pedestrian safety rating. It might make people feel uncomfortable, and that's entirely ok.

[AnthonyMouse]

I suspect the people it would make feel uncomfortable and the people currently buying unnecessarily large vehicles wouldn't have a lot of overlap.

[consteval]

> people currently buying unnecessarily large vehicles wouldn't have a lot of overlap

Maybe I'm naive, but I think most people buying large vehicles aren't selfish, they're ill-informed and susceptible to social pressure and advertising.

The only reason I say this is because most people have big cars in the US now. But they're also objectively worse for most commuters. It doesn't add up.

[Modified3019]

Another thing when it comes to large heavy vehicles being more dangerous, is that our current guard rail design has become something that is increasingly likely to kill you. There’s a channel dedicated to the subject due to the creators personal tragedy with them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrR81g1ZkRQ

[tzs]

> The weight of a vehicle is a critical factor in car crashes, with heavier vehicles causing more fatalities in other cars, pedestrians, and cyclists.

In a high speed collision between two cars I can see how a weight difference could greatly increase the danger in the lighter vehicle.

In a collision between a car and a pedestrian I don't see how weight could make much of a difference.

Yes, I know that if car A weighs 50% more than car B then at a given speed A will have 1.5 times as much momentum and 2.5 times as much kinetic energy as car B, but when there is a large mass difference between the thing doing the hitting (the car in this case) and the thing being hit (a pedestrian) momentum and kinetic energy don't really matter.

Think of it this way. A large freight train moving at 1 km/hr will have way more momentum and kinetic energy than a Ford F-150 moving at 80 km/hr, but getting hit by the freight train probably wouldn't seriously hurt you (unless you happened to fall and it ran over you) whereas an 80 km/hr F-150 would very likely kill you on impact.

From what I've read the problem with these vehicles in pedestrian collisions is with the shape of the front of them. They tend to have high, fairly vertical, front ends which can sweep you up so you are rapidly accelerated to the velocity of that car. Damage would be similar to what you'd get if you fell at the velocity of the car onto a rigid surface. Cars with lower, most slanted, front ends toss you onto the hood and over the car, which is much less likely to kill you.

[dataflow]

> Carmakers prioritize consumer preferences over safety: Manufacturers are producing increasingly heavier vehicles, driven by consumer demand for larger, more powerful cars, despite the safety risks to others.

That is prioritizing safety - of the very customers themselves, whose preferences very much do include safety! Sounds like the market functioning exactly as designed. And sounds like we need regulation here.

[Groxx]

Is a near ideal example of why free markets can lead to a worse overall result, yeah. Everyone wants to be individually safer, this is all a reasonable trajectory brought on by incremental steps in that direction.

We desperately need regulation. The market won't turn itself around, it'll just ensure the ones that are helping are killed the quickest.

[AnthonyMouse]

The question is, what regulation? If you just try to ban or heavily tax larger vehicles, well, there are legitimate reasons to have those sometimes. Businesses need trucks and you don't want heavy taxes on innocent small businesses. Parents involved in school activities are regularly transporting entire sports teams etc. and putting a dozen kids in two vehicles is safer and more efficient than three or four vehicles.

So you need some way to distinguish the people buying large SUVs for these reasons from the people buying them out of schlong insufficiency, but nobody seems to have a good way to do that.

[consteval]

Off the top of my head - a large vehicle license, which comes with increased taxes or fees or something. Businesses that require those vehicles can pay it. And maybe we can even have waivers or something for small businesses, or non-profits, or households with 4+ kids.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Businesses that require those vehicles can pay it.

This is not distinguishing between them at all, it's just adding a new tax that makes everything cost more.

> And maybe we can even have waivers or something for small businesses, or non-profits, or households with 4+ kids.

At which point everyone claims to be a small business. Also, if someone has one child rather than four, that doesn't mean they aren't regularly transporting that child's entire sports/drama/music group to events.

[consteval]

> it's just adding a new tax that makes everything cost more.

Yeah, this is how you discourage people. The license on top is super inconvenient too. I mean, who wants to go to the DMV and take a special test just for their ego booster?

> At which point everyone claims to be a small business

I imagine you have hard requirements, it's not like anyone can just say so.

> Also, if someone has one child rather than four, that doesn't mean they aren't regularly transporting that child's entire sports/drama/music group to events.

Okay. But are they? Because the situation we're in right now, currently, that we're trying to solve is that the average number of passengers in a vehicle is 1.5 and the majority of vehicles are SUVs and trucks.

I don't know, I guess those people can just pay the tax. Or, better yet, don't buy a vehicle to optimize for 1% of your driving time.

If this discourages car pooling, I say "meh". Car pooling is already basically not a thing, and pretty much all trucks can only hold 5 people. You know... the same amount of people as a compact sedan.

[orwin]

Accident where two car ram into each other, where the weight is useful, are the minority, the vast majority is a single vehicle hitting a stationary obstacle.

US cars high clearance (and I don't want to be inflammatory, but poor average driver skills) do not help them stay on the road. I'm not sure safety is increased overall Tbf.

[berikv]

All of this. Plus the exhaust gasses and tire wear pollutants causing early deaths. The noise (bigger) cars make disrupting quiet places like parks and porches, balconies, bedrooms causing stress. The waste of used cars, often being transported to third world countries. Cars kill in so many ways, especially big cars.

[WheatMillington]

Is this a tragedy of the commons, or am I misapplying this term? At an individual level it makes complete sense to put your family into the safest car possible - your thoughts are with you and your family, not the strangers around you.

[brailsafe]

Personal automobile ownership is the source of more tragedies of the commons than anything else I can think of. The only personally incurred negative externality that comes to mind at the moment would be the decreased likelihood of having a healthy lifestyle based on decreased need to walk anywhere.

[brailsafe]

Personal automobile ownership is the source of more tragedies of the commons than anything else I can think of.

[t0bia_s]

You still increase death risk of your children simple by sitting them in car. Car accidents are leading cause of death of children in wealth countries.

[grecy]

> Regulators are ill-equipped to address the issue: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's rating system focuses on occupant safety, not the safety of other road users

In the US.

In Europe pedestrian crash safety is a BIG deal.

[nickmp]

Not a big enough deal. Pedestrian airbags are a thing that have been invented, but are scarecely on cars or trucks. Same with external cameras for better visibility. Lots of dragging feet from the industry.

[dusted]

This is my concern as well, it becomes a weapons race towards the most idiot-sized vehicle possible, since a reasonably sized vehicle will put you at a survival disadvantage.

I live in Denmark, where this problem is yet very much in its infancy, but it's a clear trend. I hope regulation catches up. Some kind of bounding-box volume and weight restriction would be nice.

[Ekaros]

There is weight restriction, 3500 kg albeit that is too much already. I would go just with strict limit on energy consumption, fuel specific one. Effectively stop too large EVs too.

[lofaszvanitt]

What about the internal organs of people in big cars? IIRC, a long time ago, after a serious collision, paramedics were at first puzzled as to why the seemingly unharmed person behind the wheel was dead. Later it turned out that their internal organs had been ripped out of their arteries because big cars have/have much worse impact zones than smaller cars.

[nradov]

You have that story confused or backwards. Occasionally vehicle crash victims will suffer such internal injuries, mainly the elderly who already have weak blood vessels. But big cars don't have worse crumple zones, rather the opposite.

[lofaszvanitt]

Well, it's according to paramedics....

[AnthonyMouse]

It's not "heavier vehicles", it's trucks. A lot of pickup trucks (and the SUVs based on them) were designed to prioritize load carrying capacity over occupant safety and have worse safety features than other passenger vehicles despite being heavier, and it turns out that matters.

[the_snooze]

Despite how large vehicles are getting, people don't seem to want to have other passengers in them. Single-occupant vehicles account for something like 75% of daily commuters. Between safety concerns, sedentary lifestyles, road congestion, and the loneliness epidemic, you'd think there would be a push to reduce that number.

https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/commuting/guidance/...

[ryndbfsrw]

"Heavier vehicles are safer for their occupants.."

Only if the other vehicle is smaller/lighter. SUVs were relatively uncommon when this perception of safety was established. Its now just something people like to tell themselves as justification for buying an even bigger car.

[tootie]

Any politician saying we should limit motor vehicle size would committing career suicide. That would be a slam dunk wedge issue for Republicans.

[PaulHoule]

Could be the opposite.

Part of the problem is that carmakers refuse to sell small cars. If you don’t believe me try to buy a small car at a car dealership in America.

Consumers are angry about rising costs, particularly for automobiles, and having a choice to buy an affordable vehicle could be surprisingly popular.

For instance I think electric vehicle adoption is stalled because there aren’t many people who can afford a $105k pickup truck with limited range while towing (e.g. you might really need a big-ass vehicle if you trailer your horse to Ocala, FL every year, but no way you are going to make your animals sit through 20-30 charging stops). A $20k electric with (say) a 60 mile range would get me to and from work and able to do shopping and would be a great second or third car for many households.

All it takes is asking BYD what they need to enter the market.

[gruez]

>Part of the problem is that carmakers refuse to sell small cars. If you don’t believe me try to buy a small car at a car dealership in America.

>Consumers are angry about rising costs, particularly for automobiles, and having a choice to buy an affordable vehicle could be surprisingly popular.

Consumers may claim they care about rising costs, but the fact that more expensive SUVs are outselling sedans makes me think it's the consumers who are refusing to buy small cars, rather than carmakers refusing to sell them.

[consteval]

> it's the consumers who are refusing to buy small cars

I think it's more complicated. Consumers are stupid, or rather, easily manipulated.

SUVs and Trucks have much higher margins than sedans and other small cars. It is advantage to any car manufacturer to sell mostly SUVs and Trucks because you get more money per unit of work. Essentially, you do 110% of the work of a sedan but charge 150%-200% as much. It's a no brainer.

So of course the advertisements primarily focus on SUVs and Trucks. I don't know how much free will consumers truly have in a system with such intense advertising.

[AnthonyMouse]

This is an aspect of the car market.

Poor people would like smaller cars, but they buy used cars, not new cars. Affluent people buy new cars and want big SUVs. Of course, then that's what ends up on the used market after a few years.

[PaulHoule]

Try buying a sedan. Most of them have been discontinued by the manufacturer as of 2024 or the dealer won’t have one in stock or if they do have one in stock it won’t have power windows or they’ll have some excuse why they can’t sell you one.

They did it to my dad when he tried to buy a small car in he 1970s and it was a policy of American car dealers except around a short period after he 2008 financial crisis. What is relatively new is that Japanese car dealers started doing the same after the 2008 crisis abated.

[gruez]

>Try buying a sedan. Most of them have been discontinued by the manufacturer as of 2024 or the dealer won’t have one in stock or if they do have one in stock it won’t have power windows or they’ll have some excuse why they can’t sell you one.

>They did it to my dad when he tried to buy a small car in he 1970s and it was a policy of American car dealers except around a short period after he 2008 financial crisis.

What you said about sedans being hard to procure might be true today, but there's no way it was an issue back in the 70s. Eyeballing the chart in the article[1], 3 in 4 cars produced were sedans. It strains credibility to claim that it was hard to buy a sedan. Even today, sedans account for 1 in 4 cars produced. That's a huge drop, but there's no way that the buying experience is as difficult as you make it out to be.

[1] https://www.economist.com/interactive/united-states/2024/08/...

[PaulHoule]

The problem in the 1970s were bloated FR sedans that had a huge engine compartment but a relatively cramped passenger compartment partitioned by the transmission and driveshaft. Got 12mpg under good conditions, the more you spent the more likely you blew the head gaskets at 20k miles or had intermittent problems with the automatic transmission that no amount of rebuilding would fix.

Japanese FF sedans and hatchbacks were a breath of fresh air because they fixed all those problems. Volkswagen also made RR vehicles like the bug that were radically simple, affordable and reliable but never made the investment to make the comply with new emissions regulation and instead they came out with the Rabbit which was initially OK but the price went up and quality went down and now you have the Golf which appeals to people hypnotized by the German nameplate.

Myself it’s not a sedan that I want but a hatchback. I currently drive a Fit, but since they quit making it I will think more than twice before getting another Honda.

[CRConrad]

> or the dealer won’t have one in stock or if they do have one in stock it won’t...

This bit of American instant-gratification-addiction has always felt weird to me, and I think most Europeans (at least those who even know of this difference). Like, a new car is a pretty huge purchase. Why would you ever buy one that isn't exactly the way you want it, when all you have to do is order it with the exact options you want and then wait a few weeks?

Weird. Again.

[nradov]

There are Nissan Leafs available for consumers who want a relatively cheap small BEV. But the average new car transaction price is now about $47K so it seems most buyers are willing to pay more for something larger and nicer.

There's no way that BYD will be allowed to sell many cars in the USA regardless of potential benefits to consumers. It's too risky to increase our economic dependence on a country which is at best a strategic competitor and at worst perhaps an adversary. Both of our main political parties are now generally aligned to that viewpoint and it won't change at least as long as Chairman Xi remains in power.

[hermitcrab]

>Part of the problem is that carmakers refuse to sell small cars. If you don’t believe me try to buy a small car at a car dealership in America.

Driving a small compact car on an American freeway would be terrifying. I have a small (by US standards) car at home, but I hired a big (by European standards) car when holidaying in the US.

It is notieable that there are more and more huge SUVs and pickups appearing in the UK, even though our roads and parking spaces are not designed for them.

[eyelidlessness]

You’re not wrong. But only because Democrats are terrible at messaging (and seem allergic to getting better at it). “We’ll get you needlessly dead for our own power” isn’t exactly a popular policy position if someone is willing to call it what it is.

[VieEnCode]

"tax policies subsidize heavier vehicles"

Interesting post. Can I ask you/somebody to expand a bit on the quote above please?

[seagullriffic]

> The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's rating system focuses on occupant safety, not the safety of other road users, and tax policies subsidize heavier vehicles.

Sociopathic. Regulations and safety standards should be updated to consider both occupants' and others' safety.

The auto manufacturers won't like this, because they are cheap and greedy.

[dham]

Yeah, there is. It's called everyone having an automated driving system like FSD. The NHTSA is too concerned with me taking my eyes off the road for 2 seconds while FSD is enabled versus getting manufacturers to actually implement this stuff.

Why can I take my eyes off the road with FSD off and not with it on? They should mandate driver monitoring in every car when you're not driving with an autonomous system. As a motorcycle rider also, I'm telling you that everyone is literally on their phone when driving. I can see it all because I sit higher than everyone else. That's what the NHTSA should focus on.

[dionian]

Sounds like a heavier car is actually safer to put me and my loved ones inside, at least for now.

[baq]

Upvoting because that’s literally the point.

c.f. The Onion in 2020: https://theonion.com/conscientious-suv-shopper-just-wants-so...

[taway1874]

And this kind of thinking is how we end up with a society shown in the move Idiocracy. While you and your loved ones might survive at the cost of other more considerate people BUT the human race will become slightly dumber.

[rzz3]

I can’t really understand where you’re coming from. Self preservation is at the absolute core of us all. You can’t honestly expect the average human to put the lives of unknown strangers before the lives of their own, as you say, loved ones.

[juliushuijnk]

This assumes life is a zero sum game. If you put the lives of strangers above your own, your life might improve.

[blibble]

preventing this sort of arms race is the job of the government

otherwise in 50 years everyone will be driving around an ex-army abrams

[giraffe_lady]

Sounds like it's safest for me and my family to physically prevent you from doing that.

See how deranged this line of escalation is? How sick in the soul I would have to be to choose to harm your family to increase the safety of mine? Can you see what kind of world you're building when you advocate this?

[niemandhier]

Well put. The extrem version is a world where everybody is expected to kill the people in the other car that killed a loved one, nullifying every advantage that choosing your own safety over another’s might have.

[dataflow]

> Well put. The extreme version is a world where everybody is expected to kill

This is a pretty bad argument, the extreme doesn't necessarily define the middle. The extreme version of free speech is a world where fraud is legal. The extreme version of fire safety is a building with openings everywhere so there's no need for doors. The extreme version of policing is having cops follow you everywhere, including into your house. You can't just reason like that.

[rzz3]

It sounds like the safest thing for you and your family is to buy a heavier car also. You’re also not literally making that choice between someone else’s family and your own. How many people have you killed while driving? Me, zero, after decades of driving. My parents are well into their old age, have driven heavy cars their whole lives, and still haven’t killed anyone. In fact, out of many people I’ve known, with all shapes and sizes of car, the only one (as far as I’m aware) who killed someone was drunk, and drove a small sports car very fast and killed someone.

To be fair to your argument, you _are_ talking about a “line of escalation” and an issue with a lot of moral complexity. I’m not even saying you’re wrong, rather just that I think you can’t view it so simply. Do you have kids or a husband or a wife? Could you _really_ put their own lives before strangers, or do you just want to see a world where people give more compassion to their fellow human? Because I want that too; I’m just not willing to sacrifice my loved ones for it.

[dataflow]

> Sounds like it's safest for me and my family to physically prevent you from doing that. See how deranged this line of escalation is? How sick in the soul I would have to be to choose to harm your family to increase the safety of mine?

I wouldn't throw stones, we all live in glass houses. Pedestrians (and cyclists, etc.) could say the exact same thing about car drivers - they're putting their lives at much higher risk by not biking (or using a motorcycle, or public transportation, etc.). Heck, drivers are also endangering pedestrians' children through global warming. If you really tried you could probably name a dozen more examples of ordinary people like yourself putting others at risk for their own benefits.

This isn't to say the parent's decision is great, but that this sort of counterargument isn't all that strong, either.

[Eumenes]

> How sick in the soul I would have to be to choose to harm your family to increase the safety of mine?

First of all, this is human nature 101. Secondly, simply owning a large vehicle does not equate to 'harming your family'. Bad/impaired drivers are responsible for that. Any other inanimate objects people shouldn't own because you don't like them? People aren't going to simply put their families in Fiat's with Escalade's on the road to show solidarity with the "we need smaller cars" movement.

[taway1874]

This! +1MM

[CalRobert]

Indeed, the same way a heavier car is safer for me and my kids to ensure that your family is the one that dies, and not mine.

[the__alchemist]

Consider increasing the size of your tribe.

[hermitcrab]

Check out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

[brendoelfrendo]

So you've never been a pedestrian before ever? What do you want driving down the street when your kid chases a ball into the road?

Or do you not allow your kids outside either, because you bought a big house with a small yard because that is optimally safe?

[xscott]

"Think of the children" or not, it really doesn't matter the size of the vehicle. A SmartCar, or even a motorcycle, at 30 mph is likely to kill your kid too.

[brendoelfrendo]

Assuming weight doesn't matter, it's also a question of visibility. Large SUVs and trucks have such high waistlines and poor front and side visibility that I could easily see a child running out thinking they were visible when they weren't.

[unethical_ban]

The comment ignores the discussion points around broader public safety, comments in a fashion criticized by the points made, and makes no effort to address any issue.

I think it's worth flagging, but also worth noting the issues in case it wasn't intentional.

[t0bia_s]

Basic arguments for hypocrisy about actual care about environment. Trend of making cars bigger and "safer" proofs, that consumers and car manufacturers dont care about fuel consumption and increasing pollution.

[WheatMillington]

You're being downvoted for understanding the issue perfectly. Classic HN.

[erikaww]

“Got mine!”

[Eumenes]

You must drive a smaller car so others around you are safer. Just like how you have to vaccinated to protect others. Its part of the social contract that you signed, duh.

[tialaramex]

Actually medical ethics rejects herd immunity as the purpose of vaccination. All the recommended vaccinations are because the benefit to the individual vaccinated significantly outweighs the cost to them. Herd immunity is a public health benefit but ethically it wouldn't be enough to justify the intervention.

For HPV for example, the reason there's a period when it was given to girls not boys is that the evidence wasn't available to show a benefit for the boys. Obviously vaccinating boys means they're less likely to give the disease to anybody they have sex with, but that's not a personal benefit and so it's not an ethical reason to recommend vaccinating boys. The evidence that they wouldn't get a bunch of other rarer cancers caused by HPV was enough reason to vaccinate boys, and that arrived later.

That ethical dilemma about sacrificing one patient to save more? That's not a thing.

[orwin]

I caught the bad HPV variant early in my sex life (the one with buttons on the thighs, I think it's HPV 9 but my memory is fuzzy) and still have scars, as well as a long period of shame and shyness, so get vaccinated young guys, especially if you go in a hippy squat :D