How cities can stem the tide of pedestrian deaths from large cars and SUVs – Ars Technica
How cities can stem the tide of pedestrian deaths from large cars and SUVs – Ars Technica
All these children are invisible to the driver...
Fuck all those cars!!! Put them away to hell, not to earth. They are too big for all - except for small egos. But for small egos is therapy much better.
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Or, you know, change emissions regulations so that cars can be made smaller again.
Hate to tell you there's no singular villain trying to kill kids with cars.
Literally the only reason cars got this big is because minimum efficiency is the result of dividing mpg by square footage, and by law the number has to go down every year. I do not blame auto makers for simply making the same popular models a little bigger with each refresh so as not to have to redesign from scratch the things that took 100 years of engineering effort to get to the present level of function.
I mean there's electric trucks and SUVs that are full size so not sure how changing emission regulations would help
Other responder is on the money for established brands.
For new car makes, they are forced to play it safe.
For example Rivian, let's assume there is no technical constraint. They need to decide how much they are willing to risk before introducing a new product. When you invest billions before the first customer buys anything, your investors who are fronting all that capital want you to use the formula that is proven to work in every respect apart from whatever dimension you're innovating on.
Cars going on sale this year were designed multiple years ago. They were tested. Tooling and whole new production facilities needed to be designed and built and supply chain set up for all the new parts. Test batches evaluated. It's not like how you patch shit software almost on the fly in today's beta culture.
If someone like Rivian got the shape wrong because in the meantime everyone decided the porsche 356 was the prettiest car ever made and every new car was round and curvy, they'd lose what's called product market fit, which is the death sentence for every failed company. As a car maker they can recoup some money by slashing prices but this whole product cycle would be a huge cash loss they cannot afford to miss.
So everyone plays it safe. Everyone copies apple. Everyone emulates the design direction of Ford's F150, Toyota's Prius, etc.
Because why would you design it from the ground up? The beauty of buying a Ford etc, is the supply chain. If the bumper on "my" F150 or F150 Lightning breaks. I can get a new one from Ford in no time . I don't agree with it, but that's why electric trucks etc are the same as the ICE versions
Safety standards are also different in the US for "light trucks". So it's probably still cheaper to make pickups because they don't have to design it to not be a death machine.
We definitely should change emissions, yes, but I think a good "foot in the door" tactic would be to lobby your local city to make street parking require a permit that is priced based on the length of your car. It makes ZERO sense that minis and F350s pay the same for parking.
And/or make car registration costs scale reflect the true damage of additional vehicle weight.