6 ms·

This is automakers responding to buyer demands and a lax enforcement of government regulations. Nearly every state has bumper height restrictions, yet it is co

This is automakers responding to buyer demands and a lax enforcement of government regulations. Nearly every state has bumper height restrictions, yet it is commonplace to see "brodozers" on the road built for decapitating motorcyclists and gassing EV drivers, not for off-roading. Most truck makers are now selling ready-made "brodozers" because trucks and CUV/SUVs are outselling cars. Not only are these vehicles massively more dangerous to pedestrians and people on two-wheel vehicles, but they're also more stressful and dangerous for anyone driving a normal car on the road, because you can't see through them, they block ahead. When multiple normal cars are in a line on a highway, you can usually see beyond the cars in front partially by seeing through their rear window and windshield, but when all you can see is a solid aluminum tailgate, the pumpkin for the rear differential, and a hanging pair of truck nuts, it means you cannot plan ahead and react as quickly as possible to changing road conditions ahead. Nothing is quite as disturbing to me as a conscientious driver as being behind a "brodozer" where I can't see anything ahead of me or having one with an unnecessary cattle/bull bar right behind me, essentially threatening me with certain death as their unnecessary monument to their small penis would roll right over the top of my normal car crushing me if we were to be in an "accident". These vehicles violate existing regulations in nearly every state in the US, yet seem to be epidemic on American highways and not disappearing any time soon.

klyrs 5y ago
You've got some good points to make here, but your language is dripping with derision, scorn, and personal judgement/attack. Please mind the site guidelines.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  - klyrs 5y ago
    I get that. But you're only convincing the people whose personal choices you disagree with that you're a jerk. You're only pouring gas on the fire.
    - fennecs 5y ago
      I don’t know, being nice to car drivers is a bit like appeasement, I think a bit of passion could be good. I think on HN at least you can try and empathise as to why they might feel so strongly. IRL of course you could use a bit of a more diplomatic tone.
      - klyrs 5y ago
        There's a broad gulf between "nice" and downright insulting. Somewhere in that gulf, one can find productive discussion. The internet is real life. It's probably where you spend most of your time. It is what you make of it.
  - loudtieblahblah 5y ago
    This is always the excuse for upper crust liberals to sneer down at working class culture. Always. It's always how everyone is in danger. Against mtf in female sports? You're causing violence to trans people. Use a gas powered blower to blow the leaves from the 400 trees on your property? You're killing the planet and everyone on it. Vote republican? You want fascism and the fall of democracy. Everything is always exaggerated to excuse a total lack of civility and then the lack of civility makes solving the problem impossible. bc no one can be the bigger person, the culture divide grows bigger and problems become harder to solve bc the solution requires consensus in our democracy.
    - antisthenes 5y ago
      Never doubt an american's ability to turn a neutral topic like road safety into some kind of twisted partisan issue. Just a reminder - even though you're probably right, in some sense, every time you do this, reasonable public debate gets another nail in the coffin.
    - antifa 5y ago
      Ah yes, the "poor working class" and their raised trucks with improperly angled headlights that cost at least 3x my vehicle...
      - loudtieblahblah 5y ago
        Yes bc poor people of all ethnic and racial persuasions don't spend irresponsible amounts of money on sweet rides.... Anyone can sign a dotted line and struggle to make payments.
    - aaomidi 5y ago
      You're mixing up so many random issues? First off, I'm not a liberal. Cut a liberal and a fascist bleeds. Second off, hot take but it's fine to have different policies for different parts of the country. Third, literally these are not problems anywhere else in the world. The "working class culture", which I suspect is your heavily American-bastardized version of it works fine in plenty of the rest of the world without cars the sizes of a building. Now, maybe focus on these issues one at a time and lead a proper discussion. Finally, as a believer in anarchism, I don't care about consensus. Don't fuck with my life and I won't fuck with yours. Ask me for help, and I will do literally anything I can to help. But don't try to legislate or regulate your way through controlling the behavior of others. This is something the "American both sides" do.
- tristor 5y ago
  > your language is dripping with derision, scorn, and personal judgement Absolutely, and every inch of it fully justified. I stand by my comments, in their entirety, without any desire to mitigate my spite for those who go out of their way to make the world a worse place and get off on threatening physical harm and intimidating other people. That is anti-social, nihilistic, and unacceptable behavior and I have every intent and desire to incur as much shame and derision in the direction of people who engage in such behavior as is possible. People who modify their trucks into "brodozers" are people who understand that a vehicle is a weapon, and then choose to make it /more dangerous/ and /more intimidating/, intentionally, at great expense, to appease their own ego and sociopathy. I have no respect whatsoever for that type of behavior and it has no place on public roadways or in polite society.
nathias 5y ago
It isn't just the brodozers, all cars have gotten into that height. I drive cars made in the 90s and even driving behind a tiny car feels like tailing a truck because of the height difference.
genocidicbunny 5y ago
Not to mention the headlights. I can deal with most of the rest of the stuff, but the headlights are downright dangerous to all other drivers around. They're rarely correctly angled, so due to the base height of the truck they'll frequently be right at eye level for smaller vehicles. On roads with short or no barriers, they also blind oncoming traffic in addition to whoever happens to be in front of them.
- antisthenes 5y ago
  That's not just manufacturers though. Plenty of people are replacing standard halogens with aftermarket LEDs in response to others doing the same. The end result is that night-driving is incredibly dangerous, because the brightness is spiraling out of control. Instead of increased visibility, you are forced to squint from the brightness of incoming traffic. I try to avoid night-time driving as a result of this like the plague. It is simply too dangerous for me (I've been in 3 near-accidents in 2021, despite driving the least I've ever driven in a year).
FredPret 5y ago
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. All your problems can be solved with a massive SUV. Now we just need them all to be winter-proof electric and recharged with nuclear power. By the way, they are crazy comfortable - as a tall guy, I’m never squatting and folding my ass into a little Eurocar again.
- milkytron 5y ago
  > If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. All your problems can be solved with a massive SUV. Is this sarcastic?
dqv 5y ago
A funny thing (not haha funny) I noticed about this article is that it mentions the demographics of the people being hit by the car, but just makes the "hyper-masculine" assumption about the drivers of the cars. You kind of do that here by using the term "brodozers". This is a kind of implicit bias I think a lot of people just accept as fact, but it could be a dangerous assumption to make. Ford did a survey of truck owners and (apparently) 46% of their respondents were women [0]. Now there are two things you can take from that 46% number depending on your beliefs. If you don't believe it, then you should be concerned: it means the companies that make these trucks are trying to get more people to buy trucks by "de-gendering" them. If you do believe it, then you should be concerned about going after only a subset of the demographic who uses these vehicles. It turns it into an identity issue where you're just targeting the safety of "men driving trucks" and not the overall safety of trucks. The result is ... men continuing to drive their trucks as an identity and just increasing the amount of women driving them as well. I write this wall of text to say "truck bad because (our conception of what is toxic) masculinity bad" isn't necessarily helpful. Maybe you only meant to mention the safety, but you could have said all the things you've said about safety without making any specific reference to gender (or at least doing so with a reminder to continue to check the demographics). When we talk about these things and genderize them without referencing the true demographics, we open things up for the wrong conversation. The narrative can shift to "less men are driving trucks" (when really it's less men are driving trucks as a percentage of total truck drivers) after Ford rebrands to a gender-inclusive image for trucks. I think it's just more important to focus on the safety aspect and try to turn it from "men driving trucks aggresively" to "less people driving unsafe trucks". Marketing would love for you to just make this an "irresponsible men" thing so they can keep selling unsafe vehicles. This is not to say that men aren't aggressive drivers or don't get into more accidents, just that I want to make that conclusion on my own and not have marketing departments deflect the true cause of these safety issues. [0]: https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America/US/2020/06/22/The-Great-American-Truck-Survey-2020.pdf https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America...
- tristor 5y ago
  I get your point, yet I think you are missing mine. "Brodozers" aren't just pickup trucks, they're specifically pickup trucks that are modified with a lift-kit and usually also larger wheels and tires so that they sit up higher off the ground. There are legitimate purposes for these modifications in off-roading applications, such as when going mudding, but the majority of these vehicles don't even have appropriate wheels and tires for going off-road after being modified. They're "pavement princesses" in the truck-community parlance. I live in Texas, in a working class community, and I don't denigrate "brodozers" because of the politics, gender, or other demographics of this community or typical truck owners. I denigrate them because I'm someone who loves cars (and trucks) and I understand when a modification is reasonable, safe, and necessary and when it is not. If you are modifying your truck specifically to get into off-roading hobbies, go for it, but if you are putting a lift-kit, 36" tires, oversized wheels, and a reinforced bumper on your truck to primarily go down the highway where you are massively endangering everyone else by doing so, that is not okay. The amount of badly done and unnecessary lifts where the owners don't even bother to re-aim their headlights afterwards are epidemic in Texas, but they're found all over the US. They're also generally illegal because they violate bumper height restrictions. This behavior is already against the law, but that law is not really enforced. At no point do I go "truck bad because toxic masculinity", you are assuming a lot of things about my personal philosophy that are not only not in evidence, but are false. This is a safety issue, I don't give a crap who the owner of the vehicle voted for, what is between their legs, their general temperament and character, or what color their hair is. When you drive a vehicle on public highways, you need to ensure that it is safe to operate. I despise "brodozers" for the same reason I despise stance cars. They're intentionally unsafe, anti-social, nihilistic shitboxes that get people killed needlessly. They're also a huge waste of money. There is no world in which it is reasonable or safe for people to be driving around monster trucks that can literally drive over a normal car on public roads. It's deranged. As to the point of demographics, the /majority/ of trucks purchased are used for work and are left unmodified as they rolled off the lot. Those who are modifying their trucks with lift kits are vastly predominantly men, and they're marketed to specifically on how these modifications enhance the appearance of their masculinity, with much of the same imagery and word choices you see in marketing of motorcycles. I don't care if 90% of truck owners are women, these are not the truck owners going out and putting an 8" lift on their 3/4 ton pickup, adding in stacks with clappers so they can roll coal "in style", a hoop with a lightbar, and a steel reinforced bumper guard on the front. The entire marketing and /point/ of these modifications is to make the vehicle appear more menacing and literally use its oversized physical presence to intimidate and dominate other people on the public roadways. If you spend more than a week driving in any major Texas city or on any interstate highways here you'll no doubt get tailgated by a brodozer with a huge lift, intentionally aiming their lights (and possibly turning their lightbar on) behind you at night while doing 20-30+ over the speed limit even when they have a clear lane to pass you, just because it makes these people smile to intimidate others on the roadway and threaten others with imminent physical harm and death.
ryandrake 5y ago
I’m not sure who should get to decide the definition of a “normal” car. You? I don’t really agree that there is some universal, canonical “normal” size of a car. In many places I’ve lived, pick up trucks and SUVs vastly (10:1) outnumbered coupes and sedans. In these places, an F-250 is the median, normal size for a car. What is special about (for example) a two-door coupe that makes it “normal”?
- tristor 5y ago
  > I’m not sure who should get to decide the definition of a “normal” car. You? The definition is something that comes from the NHTSA and the legal statutes of each state.
chrismcb 5y ago
What the freak is a "brodozer?" I've never seen that term used before and I can't tell what you are really talking about. Are you talking about large 4x4 trucks that are high of the ground (kind of the opposite of what a bulldozer is)? These 4x4s have been around for ages. Nothing new. What is new (in the last ten it so years) are the SUVs and cross overs. These are larger than a sedan, but I wouldn't call them a brodozer or anything else.

klyrs 5y ago

You've got some good points to make here, but your language is dripping with derision, scorn, and personal judgement/attack. Please mind the site guidelines.

aaomidi 5y ago
- klyrs 5y ago
  I get that. But you're only convincing the people whose personal choices you disagree with that you're a jerk. You're only pouring gas on the fire.
  - fennecs 5y ago
    I don’t know, being nice to car drivers is a bit like appeasement, I think a bit of passion could be good. I think on HN at least you can try and empathise as to why they might feel so strongly. IRL of course you could use a bit of a more diplomatic tone.
    - klyrs 5y ago
      There's a broad gulf between "nice" and downright insulting. Somewhere in that gulf, one can find productive discussion. The internet is real life. It's probably where you spend most of your time. It is what you make of it.
- loudtieblahblah 5y ago
  This is always the excuse for upper crust liberals to sneer down at working class culture. Always. It's always how everyone is in danger. Against mtf in female sports? You're causing violence to trans people. Use a gas powered blower to blow the leaves from the 400 trees on your property? You're killing the planet and everyone on it. Vote republican? You want fascism and the fall of democracy. Everything is always exaggerated to excuse a total lack of civility and then the lack of civility makes solving the problem impossible. bc no one can be the bigger person, the culture divide grows bigger and problems become harder to solve bc the solution requires consensus in our democracy.
  - antisthenes 5y ago
    Never doubt an american's ability to turn a neutral topic like road safety into some kind of twisted partisan issue. Just a reminder - even though you're probably right, in some sense, every time you do this, reasonable public debate gets another nail in the coffin.
  - antifa 5y ago
    Ah yes, the "poor working class" and their raised trucks with improperly angled headlights that cost at least 3x my vehicle...
    - loudtieblahblah 5y ago
      Yes bc poor people of all ethnic and racial persuasions don't spend irresponsible amounts of money on sweet rides.... Anyone can sign a dotted line and struggle to make payments.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    You're mixing up so many random issues? First off, I'm not a liberal. Cut a liberal and a fascist bleeds. Second off, hot take but it's fine to have different policies for different parts of the country. Third, literally these are not problems anywhere else in the world. The "working class culture", which I suspect is your heavily American-bastardized version of it works fine in plenty of the rest of the world without cars the sizes of a building. Now, maybe focus on these issues one at a time and lead a proper discussion. Finally, as a believer in anarchism, I don't care about consensus. Don't fuck with my life and I won't fuck with yours. Ask me for help, and I will do literally anything I can to help. But don't try to legislate or regulate your way through controlling the behavior of others. This is something the "American both sides" do.
tristor 5y ago
> your language is dripping with derision, scorn, and personal judgement Absolutely, and every inch of it fully justified. I stand by my comments, in their entirety, without any desire to mitigate my spite for those who go out of their way to make the world a worse place and get off on threatening physical harm and intimidating other people. That is anti-social, nihilistic, and unacceptable behavior and I have every intent and desire to incur as much shame and derision in the direction of people who engage in such behavior as is possible. People who modify their trucks into "brodozers" are people who understand that a vehicle is a weapon, and then choose to make it /more dangerous/ and /more intimidating/, intentionally, at great expense, to appease their own ego and sociopathy. I have no respect whatsoever for that type of behavior and it has no place on public roadways or in polite society.

nathias 5y ago

It isn't just the brodozers, all cars have gotten into that height. I drive cars made in the 90s and even driving behind a tiny car feels like tailing a truck because of the height difference.

genocidicbunny 5y ago

Not to mention the headlights. I can deal with most of the rest of the stuff, but the headlights are downright dangerous to all other drivers around. They're rarely correctly angled, so due to the base height of the truck they'll frequently be right at eye level for smaller vehicles. On roads with short or no barriers, they also blind oncoming traffic in addition to whoever happens to be in front of them.

antisthenes 5y ago
That's not just manufacturers though. Plenty of people are replacing standard halogens with aftermarket LEDs in response to others doing the same. The end result is that night-driving is incredibly dangerous, because the brightness is spiraling out of control. Instead of increased visibility, you are forced to squint from the brightness of incoming traffic. I try to avoid night-time driving as a result of this like the plague. It is simply too dangerous for me (I've been in 3 near-accidents in 2021, despite driving the least I've ever driven in a year).

FredPret 5y ago

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. All your problems can be solved with a massive SUV. Now we just need them all to be winter-proof electric and recharged with nuclear power. By the way, they are crazy comfortable - as a tall guy, I’m never squatting and folding my ass into a little Eurocar again.

milkytron 5y ago
> If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. All your problems can be solved with a massive SUV. Is this sarcastic?

dqv 5y ago

A funny thing (not haha funny) I noticed about this article is that it mentions the demographics of the people being hit by the car, but just makes the "hyper-masculine" assumption about the drivers of the cars. You kind of do that here by using the term "brodozers". This is a kind of implicit bias I think a lot of people just accept as fact, but it could be a dangerous assumption to make. Ford did a survey of truck owners and (apparently) 46% of their respondents were women [0]. Now there are two things you can take from that 46% number depending on your beliefs. If you don't believe it, then you should be concerned: it means the companies that make these trucks are trying to get more people to buy trucks by "de-gendering" them. If you do believe it, then you should be concerned about going after only a subset of the demographic who uses these vehicles. It turns it into an identity issue where you're just targeting the safety of "men driving trucks" and not the overall safety of trucks. The result is ... men continuing to drive their trucks as an identity and just increasing the amount of women driving them as well. I write this wall of text to say "truck bad because (our conception of what is toxic) masculinity bad" isn't necessarily helpful. Maybe you only meant to mention the safety, but you could have said all the things you've said about safety without making any specific reference to gender (or at least doing so with a reminder to continue to check the demographics). When we talk about these things and genderize them without referencing the true demographics, we open things up for the wrong conversation. The narrative can shift to "less men are driving trucks" (when really it's less men are driving trucks as a percentage of total truck drivers) after Ford rebrands to a gender-inclusive image for trucks. I think it's just more important to focus on the safety aspect and try to turn it from "men driving trucks aggresively" to "less people driving unsafe trucks". Marketing would love for you to just make this an "irresponsible men" thing so they can keep selling unsafe vehicles. This is not to say that men aren't aggressive drivers or don't get into more accidents, just that I want to make that conclusion on my own and not have marketing departments deflect the true cause of these safety issues. [0]: https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America/US/2020/06/22/The-Great-American-Truck-Survey-2020.pdf https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America...

tristor 5y ago
I get your point, yet I think you are missing mine. "Brodozers" aren't just pickup trucks, they're specifically pickup trucks that are modified with a lift-kit and usually also larger wheels and tires so that they sit up higher off the ground. There are legitimate purposes for these modifications in off-roading applications, such as when going mudding, but the majority of these vehicles don't even have appropriate wheels and tires for going off-road after being modified. They're "pavement princesses" in the truck-community parlance. I live in Texas, in a working class community, and I don't denigrate "brodozers" because of the politics, gender, or other demographics of this community or typical truck owners. I denigrate them because I'm someone who loves cars (and trucks) and I understand when a modification is reasonable, safe, and necessary and when it is not. If you are modifying your truck specifically to get into off-roading hobbies, go for it, but if you are putting a lift-kit, 36" tires, oversized wheels, and a reinforced bumper on your truck to primarily go down the highway where you are massively endangering everyone else by doing so, that is not okay. The amount of badly done and unnecessary lifts where the owners don't even bother to re-aim their headlights afterwards are epidemic in Texas, but they're found all over the US. They're also generally illegal because they violate bumper height restrictions. This behavior is already against the law, but that law is not really enforced. At no point do I go "truck bad because toxic masculinity", you are assuming a lot of things about my personal philosophy that are not only not in evidence, but are false. This is a safety issue, I don't give a crap who the owner of the vehicle voted for, what is between their legs, their general temperament and character, or what color their hair is. When you drive a vehicle on public highways, you need to ensure that it is safe to operate. I despise "brodozers" for the same reason I despise stance cars. They're intentionally unsafe, anti-social, nihilistic shitboxes that get people killed needlessly. They're also a huge waste of money. There is no world in which it is reasonable or safe for people to be driving around monster trucks that can literally drive over a normal car on public roads. It's deranged. As to the point of demographics, the /majority/ of trucks purchased are used for work and are left unmodified as they rolled off the lot. Those who are modifying their trucks with lift kits are vastly predominantly men, and they're marketed to specifically on how these modifications enhance the appearance of their masculinity, with much of the same imagery and word choices you see in marketing of motorcycles. I don't care if 90% of truck owners are women, these are not the truck owners going out and putting an 8" lift on their 3/4 ton pickup, adding in stacks with clappers so they can roll coal "in style", a hoop with a lightbar, and a steel reinforced bumper guard on the front. The entire marketing and /point/ of these modifications is to make the vehicle appear more menacing and literally use its oversized physical presence to intimidate and dominate other people on the public roadways. If you spend more than a week driving in any major Texas city or on any interstate highways here you'll no doubt get tailgated by a brodozer with a huge lift, intentionally aiming their lights (and possibly turning their lightbar on) behind you at night while doing 20-30+ over the speed limit even when they have a clear lane to pass you, just because it makes these people smile to intimidate others on the roadway and threaten others with imminent physical harm and death.

ryandrake 5y ago

I’m not sure who should get to decide the definition of a “normal” car. You? I don’t really agree that there is some universal, canonical “normal” size of a car. In many places I’ve lived, pick up trucks and SUVs vastly (10:1) outnumbered coupes and sedans. In these places, an F-250 is the median, normal size for a car. What is special about (for example) a two-door coupe that makes it “normal”?

tristor 5y ago
> I’m not sure who should get to decide the definition of a “normal” car. You? The definition is something that comes from the NHTSA and the legal statutes of each state.

chrismcb 5y ago

What the freak is a "brodozer?" I've never seen that term used before and I can't tell what you are really talking about. Are you talking about large 4x4 trucks that are high of the ground (kind of the opposite of what a bulldozer is)? These 4x4s have been around for ages. Nothing new. What is new (in the last ten it so years) are the SUVs and cross overs. These are larger than a sedan, but I wouldn't call them a brodozer or anything else.