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A 7k-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That's Bad News for All of Us
- zardo 3y ago> a guardrail will “deflect a vehicle back to the roadway [or] slow the vehicle down to a complete stop.” Your car will probably be damaged, but guardrails can prevent something much worse. Unless that vehicle is a motorcycle in which case the guard rail turns survivable crashes into fatal ones.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoUnless the thing that guard-rail prevents is heading directly into on-coming traffic.
- selectodude 3y agoOr driving down the side of a mountain.
- ericfrazier 3y agoWeird hill, bro.
- sonicanatidae 3y agoIt's a motorcycle. Almost any crash on a motorcycle is going to cause serious injuries/death. Guardrails contribute, but let's be real. Lay down a bike while driving at a good clip, or hit anything, guardrail or not, and you're going to have a bad time.
- zardo 3y ago> Almost any crash on a motorcycle is going to cause serious injuries/death. Protective gear will usually leave the rider uninjured if they don't hit something.
- sonicanatidae 3y agoDo you know how many motorcycle riders I see without anything on more than a t-shirt and jeans? They all wear a helmet, and I get riding leathers are hot, but a t-shirt?
- sjcoles 3y agoTax the hell out of them to pay for upgrading. There's zero reason why a 2500lbs vehicle should pay the same tax as a 7000+lbs one. Giant SUVs and Trucks for non commercial use should have been effectively regulated/taxed out of existence a decade ago.
- alephnerd 3y ago> Tax the hell out of them to pay for upgrading We should but we won't. At the end of the day, people really like their big cars, and local dealerships tend to be the largest small businesses (along with local real estate agencies) in most Congressional and State Assembly Districts. You can argue that walking and biking are better or something like Strongtowns, but at the end of the day, it is what it is.
- rpastuszak 3y ago> At the end of the day, people really like their big cars That doesn’t apply to the entire planet so surely this could be different in the US as well.
- Dalewyn 3y agoHere in America, bigger is better. We love big, whether it's cars, CPU core counts, burgers, or tits and ass.
- alephnerd 3y ago> doesn’t apply to the entire planet Even in Asia, MENA, and South America as well, if you can afford a big car you will buy one. There's a reason pickups like the Hilux, D-Max, Ford F150, and Vigo are a luxury in ASEAN and the MENA, SUVs like Scorpio or Fortuner in India+Nepal, and pickups like Tacoma and Toro in Cental+South America The EU isn't representative for the rest of the world either.
- somerandomqaguy 3y agoEh, even Europeans appear to getting larger vehicles. SUV's hit 51% of all new European car sales in 2023. Granted though it's mostly compact and sub compact CUV's. https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/suvs-surge-new-milestone-helped-evs https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/suvs-surge-new-milest...
- amluto 3y agoThe solution seems obvious enough to me: tax these vehicles to recover associated costs. Relatedly, I think the government should evaluate vehicles for pedestrian safety and impose appropriate liability insurance minimums on failing vehicles. The same goes for vehicles with aftermarket modifications that reduce pedestrian safety.
- tnmom 3y ago(Nearly?) all states already have liability insurance requirements, and they already scale with real-world injury probabilities. Those events just aren't as common as HN believes, so the driver of a KillMax HighBumper 9000 doesn't pay much more in insurance than the driver of a Civic.
- tnmom 3y agoWhy the downvotes? Insurance is one of very few industries that truly has incentives to price their product correctly. If I can get liability insurance on my Civic for $30/mo, or an F250 for $35/mo, there is a _clear_ incompatibility with the risk level assessed by HN vs. the risk level assessed by professional insurance actuaries with many decades of data.
- amluto 3y agoNot quite. The statutorily required minimum liability coverage is quite low, so when an oversized car kills a pedestrian, the insurer is likely pay out $100k, which rather understates the true cost to society and to the dead person and their family.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TimPC 3y agoYou can kill someone and pay a max of $50k. That doesn't even cover 1 years salary for the person you killed in most cases. The insurance is mispriced because the liability is artificially low.
- 3y ago
- toss1 3y agoYikes, these car weights are INSANE! Cadillac Escalade = 6,200 Lbs Ford F-150 = 5,700 Lbs 2022 Rivian R1T 7,000 Lbs Chevrolet Silverado 1500 = 6,700 Lbs Chevrolet Silverado EV = 8,500 Lbs It was 1995 before the Honda Civic topped 1000kg 1995 Honda Civic = 2,222 Lbs 2002 Cadillac Escalade = 5797 Lbs 1995 Ford F150 = 3886 Lbs Increased weight not only increases energy consumption but also massively reduces performance and increases wear on parts from brakes, tires, suspension components, drivetrain, etc. And it makes it more hazardous for everyone outside the vehicle. And of course, as TFA points out, these massive vehicles overmatch the guardrails. Making all guardrails obsolete and incurring massive replacement costs is a huge societal problem, but it personally makes me want to avoid such heavy beasts just to not be the guy that goes through the guardrail and over the cliff in an accident. A huge policy move would be to just start taxing vehicles based on weight to reward lightweight vehicles. And yes, lightweight vehicles can be made incredibly safe with decent and well-known engineering.
- kube-system 3y agoUnfortunately the horse is already out of the barn on vehicle weights. Yes, there is good engineering that can make light vehicles safe in single vehicle accidents, but when it comes to multi-vehicle accidents, it's a bit of an arms race.
- TheAdamist 3y agoYou want to talk insane? 2022 gmc hummer ev, 9,063 lbs
- Yizahi 3y agoIndividual passenger cars weighing 3-4 tons is pure insanity. We had light army trucks below 3 tons even (ICE of course). Hell, there are full sized 6 wheeled real trucks with a mass around 6 tons. These monstrosities which carry a single owner to a market or kids to the school, are actually closer to a truck which can carry a complete small artillery gun inside. Mindboggling.
- gnicholas 3y agoDiscussed a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39215662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39215662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39219371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39219371
- glitchc 3y agoWhy not simply legislate weight? A vehicle must be 5000 lbs or less to qualify as a passenger vehicle. Anything more is commercial.
- tyingq 3y agoI don't know if that's a huge disincentive. Many taxes for commercial vehicles don't come into play until the vehicle weight is much higher than 10k lbs. You would also need some revamp of the existing tax structure for commercial vehicles.
- bombcar 3y ago7k cars are a problem, but we have much worse problems with guardrails that are much simpler to fix, and they are not fixed Guardrail Guy goes into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrR81g1ZkRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrR81g1ZkRQ
- bigmattystyles 3y agoDid anyone else get an ad for an SUV on the article?
- chongli 3y agoWe know that road damage increases with the fourth power of vehicle mass. So why not tax the same way? If a 7000lb car cost 16x the taxes of a 3500lb car, we’d hope to see more of the latter than the former.
- TrueSlacker0 3y agoAbout a year ago my 2006 Tacoma ran out of gas (the gas gauge doesn't work so reliably anymore and I didn't pay attention to the mileage, oops). Of course it was in an inconvenient spot in the middle of a mildly trafficed road so I was forced to hop out and pushed it out of the road, thankfully only about 200ft. I just checked and this truck weighs about 4k pounds. I sure am glad it didn't weight more! It was hard enough at this weight. Granted this shouldn't be a problem for these newer EVs for a long time but I could see having to push one at some point or another in the vehicles lifetime, assuming they last as long as a standard ICE.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vitiral 3y agotoss1's comment [1] says Ford F-150 = 5,700 Lbs 1995 Ford F150 = 3886 Lbs Which makes me wonder: why are these (non-electric) vehicles getting heavier? Is this from engine/parts needed for emissions compliance? Is it perceived safety? Are we getting worse at manufacturing? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39642641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39642641
- notacoward 3y agoMultiple people saying taxes should be proportional to vehicle weight. So should registration/inspection fees, insurance rates, and most of all fines. You need it for your business? Cool, then the business should cover the cost just like it should any other, or else the business doesn't deserve to continue. Nobody should get to dump their costs on other people, and that's what the vast majority of huge-vehicle drivers are doing.
- hanszarkov 3y agoWhile I agree with most of the ideas here, the statement of "...than a gas-guzzling H3" is just sensational. Sure the Hummer line in general was not good on gas, but most folks, including these folks don't know that most H3 units were sold with 5 cylinder engines (GM's inline-5 Vortec), and get reasonable fuel economy _for a truck_.
- kkfx 3y agoAhem... Guard rails aren't designed for ALL vehicles on the road? Because cars have grown big, yes, but trucks have not. SO or guard rails was not designed to help keep skidding trucks back on track as well or there is something wrong in the article... Of course I know deflecting the mass of a mean loaded truck is not something we can reasonably do on most roads but the point is simple: there are less trucks than cars of course, but not that less and they go in all weather conditions and for long trips, so while there are many reasons to criticize cars evolution do not use such safety excuses, they are evidently false.