5 ms·

The US finally takes aim at truck bloat

54 points by mfiguiere 2y ago

aSithLord 2y ago
nanny state.
- marinmania 2y ago
  I think the nanny state charge is appropriate when people engage in dangerous behavior (like riding a motorcycle without a helmet) where almost all the risk of the potential harm is taken on by the user. With large cars its the opposite. The people who drive large cars take on no risk, while everyone else is subjected to their negative externalities.
- sickofparadox 2y ago
  Legislate a problem into existence, then blame automakers for the problem and legislate some more.
- rozap 2y ago
  Remember when they banned popup headlights because they were unsafe? Government agencies used to be able to do their jobs, but ever since the Reagan era, that has diminished. And as a result, since 2010 pedestrian deaths (and deaths for vehicle occupants) has actually increased, after falling for decades. If you want to do dangerous stuff, like riding a motorcycle, free climbing, etc, you should be able to. But when you're doing stuff where the risk is entirely placed on someone else, that's literally the point of regulation. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedestrians https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
  - aSithLord 2y ago
    large suvs are to protect the occupants. people jumping in front of it should not even factor in. I don't drive on sidewalks.
    - piva00 2y ago
      > people jumping in front of it should not even factor in What? People will eventually end up in front of a car, either by their own mistake or when a inattentive driver hits them, it will happen. Factoring that in those unfortunate occasions you want the human being to have higher chances to survive is fucking absolutely a factor. I'm sorry to ask this on HN but: are you a moron or a troll?
      - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
        > People will eventually end up in front of a car, either by their own mistake or when an inattentive driver hits them, it will happen. It seems like you’re implying that everyone eventually dies by getting hit by a car (sorry if I am reading this incorrectly)? But that is simply not true. There are approximately 7000 pedestrian deaths a year right now, compared to a population of about 340 million people. So the probability of dying in a given year is 0.00002. With a 79 year life expectancy on average, the chance of dying as a pedestrian over a lifetime is like 0.15%. By the way, MOST pedestrian deaths are at night, so it seems like an easy way to drive this even lower is just to improve lighting and ask pedestrians to make themselves more visible. > I'm sorry to ask this on HN but: are you a moron or a troll? I think this type of comment doesn’t belong here per the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        Oanid 2y ago
        Do you have a source for this "most pedestrian deaths are at night" claim?
        piva00 2y ago
        > It seems like you’re implying that everyone eventually dies by getting hit by a car (sorry if I am reading this incorrectly)? Yes, you interpreted my comment absolutely incorrectly. I meant that there's always going to be someone getting hit by a car, it's a fact of life when the road is shared between cars and people. Not considering this fact when designing a car is not possible. Hence my comment asking if GP was a moron or a troll after they stated this: > large suvs are to protect the occupants. people jumping in front of it should not even factor in. I don't drive on sidewalks. I simply cannot accept that a user on this forum really thinks this way, it's an absurdly moronic statement.
daft_pink 2y ago
someone at the government apparently hates the cybertruck
preciz 2y ago
In EU in some countries because of extra taxes it's really expensive to buy a bigger car so 3+ kids can fit in. But those rich people who sit alone in huge luxury SUVs they still sit alone. They have the money while families usually don't. I just hope this doesn't go in this wrong direction.
- ak217 2y ago
  What's wrong with taxing dangerously oversized/overweight/unsafe trucks out of existence?
  - frankharv 2y ago
    OK whats next. Regulate everything? Geez your computer looks to be using alot of power. We need people to register their computer to estimate your computer footprint. Then we can regulate it.
    - ak217 2y ago
      Your computer is not unsafely designed in a way that kills tens of thousands of people a year in accidents. Also, your computer's power consumption is in fact regulated on a semi-voluntary basis via a program called Energy Star. People are fine with it because Energy Star certification saves them money. By contrast, the problem with trucks is that their unsafe design is subsidized by the government, so smaller more efficient vehicles that would normally save people money end up being penalized.
    - piva00 2y ago
      Slippery slope is a fallacy for a reason...
    - chemeril 2y ago
      Last I checked my desktop doesn't slam into pedestrians/bicyclists trying to use what public infrastructure we have in the US. If unbounded vehicle bloat is systematically contributing to the deaths of citizens then yes, we have a collective responsibility to regulate it.
ApolloFortyNine 2y ago
My issue with this is it's never good to get hit by a car. It's putting a band aid on a symptom rather than fixing the source of the problem. Fixing it though would require government money redesigning infrastructure, new rules makes it where you can push off the costs to car companies.
- ak217 2y ago
  Getting hit by a car is much more survivable than getting hit by an oversized pickup truck/SUV whose designers deliberately chose a huge, blunt frontal cross-section with poor visibility over the hood. This deliberately unsafe design needs to be outlawed. Infrastructure improvements like traffic calming and dedicated grade-separated pedestrian/cyclist infrastructure are great too, but we need both.
- empath75 2y ago
  It's never good to be in a car accident but safety standards for cars have _dramatically_ reduced traffic fatalities for _passengers_ and I'm sure standards can improve pedestrian survivability, too. There's lots you can do with traffic engineering, too, to make high speed accidents less likely with pedestrians.
xnx 2y ago
I'm surprised there's no initiative around reducing blinds spots caused by A pillars. I try to be a carefully driver, but I am still caught off guard by pedestrians, cyclists, or entire vehicles hidden behind the a pillar.
- sickofparadox 2y ago
  A-pillars have been made thicker by law because every car now needs to be able to maintain cab integrity if it flips. https://www.nhtsa.gov/document/final-rule-federal-motor-vehicle-safety-standards-roof-crush-resistance-phase-reporting-0 https://www.nhtsa.gov/document/final-rule-federal-motor-vehi...
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    Chicken and egg. A-pillars are bigger, yes. But they have to be even bigger still when you have trucks weighing in at 6,000lb+, and have taller cabs (which also makes them more prone to rollover).
- abfan1127 2y ago
  those A pillar blind spots are a result of roll over requirements. A pillars used to be very small.
  - selectodude 2y ago
    Doesn’t help that cars weigh several tons now.
    - MBCook 2y ago
      Heavier car = bigger pillars, yep. Add in higher window lines (due to raised SUV hoods, I imagine) and it’s so much harder to see out modern cars.
  - ak217 2y ago
    I think it's a combination of that and curtain air bags which are often packaged on the pillars. And of course the rollover requirements are predominantly due to SUVs and trucks being so high off the ground (needlessly most of the time) they are more susceptible to rollover. Minimal visibility requirements around A pillars (and in front of the car/over the hood) sound like the logical next step.
shrubble 2y ago
“NHTSA says the changes could save up to 67 lives every year.“ But there’s 40k deaths per year from auto accidents; so this is not going to move the needle. If the problem is big trucks then maybe don’t penalize the sales of small trucks?
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  > maybe don’t penalize the sales of small trucks? This right here. If I lived almost anywhere else in the world I could get a 70 series land cruiser or Hilux or any number of others that are rated for 1+ ton capacity and 7700lb+ towing capacity, all while getting 20+mpg with a decent diesel engine. Instead, I'm stuck with some dystopian chicken tax + diesel phobic lunacy and end up burning twice as much fuel to tow or carry half as much. Idiotic.
  - rich_sasha 2y ago
    Wow... I don't live in the US, but a Hilux would never strike me (haha) as a small alternative.
    - loeg 2y ago
      In the US, the Hilux is called Tacoma instead.
      - jcgrillo 2y ago
        It's a similar vehicle, but there are actually many substantial differences.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 2y ago
    The same vehicle (same drivetrain etc.) will be rated for two very different towing capacities in the U.S. vs. Europe, with the European one being quite a bit higher. E.g., Volvo XC40 T5 is 1600 kg in the U.S. https://www.volvocars.com/en-ca/support/car/xc40/21w22/article/dcc4aa48b45de36ac0a801514bc9cca1?search=towing&page=0 https://www.volvocars.com/en-ca/support/car/xc40/21w22/artic... but 2100 kg in the UK https://www.volvocars.com/uk/support/car/xc40/21w46/article/0c10bf9ad4c7c90cc0a801510ad2549e https://www.volvocars.com/uk/support/car/xc40/21w46/article/... As I recall it has to do with standards for stability at speed... All to say you can probably tow more than you think with a U.S. car that's also sold in Europe, just maybe don't go above 55mph...?
dilap 2y ago
There's an interesting whack-a-mole dynamic at play here, since, from what I've read, the proliferation of huge trucks is partly driven by regulations in the first place -- fuel efficiency standards are less stringent for large trucks, the normal existing safety regs (which focus on the people insider the car) are easier to pass in large vehicles, and (tho this probably isn't a huge driver) there are business tax write-offs that only apply to vehicles above a certain weight.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > fuel efficiency standards are less stringent for large trucks Worth nothing that those standards were begged, pleaded, demanded, cried and shitted for on the part of every major US automaker before they were passed, and it was only after that/because of that that every major automaker began working like hell to sell the American public on SUVs and trucks. Simple fact is that full-size trucks are the only vehicle category that Detroit is able to compete on (less so now than then, but then this was extremely true) after they got their asses roundly handed to them by the various Asian ones that did cars, vans, and MPVs much better. US automakers bet the farm on building ever larger and more ridiculous vehicles for Americans because it was just easier than competing with the Japanese/Koreans on a fair field. I hope like hell this goes somewhere and we can get these stupid things under control. Feels like every Tom, Dick, and Harry around where I live is driving a 3-ton or greater truck that's never seen anything more strenuous than getting a load of fertilizer for mom's garden, and like, that's fine. But their choices in vehicles are putting negative externalities all over the community and risking everyone's safety, including their own children, and it's fucking ridiculous.
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    > Feels like every Tom, Dick, and Harry around where I live is driving a 3-ton or greater truck that's never seen anything more strenuous than getting a load of fertilizer for mom's garden, and like, that's fine. Yup. An Audi mid-size SUV has a towing capacity of nearly 8,000lb. Moving your horse from the top paddock to the bottom and back, every six months does not mean you need a dual-wheeled F350 as your daily driver.
colechristensen 2y ago
It's silly looking at modern trucks and trucks from the 80s with the exact same bed size and similar engine performance. New trucks are just huge, and it's just there because for the cool factor among their customer base. Actually using a F-150 sized truck to do work (almost nobody does) is considerably harder because of how high off the ground it is and more difficult to maneuver because if its size/height. And the cost is just absurd.
MBCook 2y ago
Too little. I don’t want it to be more survivable when someone is hit by a 6 foot tall hood 7500 pound truck someone is using to go grocery shopping. I don’t want 6’ tall hoods. I’m 6’ tall and sitting in my small SUV the hoods of new trucks are over my eyeline. That’s insane. Put limits on hood height. Put limits on weight. Or at least huge taxes. You want to pay an extra $149,000 in fees for your monstrosity? Go ahead. Either you’re ultra-rich or you’re really using it and it’s not a suburban vanity truck. Limit length. Limit footprint. Limit weight. Repeal the chicken tax. Things are crazy out there. GMC added cameras to the front of some of their trucks to be able to see pedestrians at crosswalks. How is that sane?
- OJFord 2y ago
  Kind of unfair if you are actually using it then though? I'm not in the US and don't have an SUV, but I sort of sympathise with that. You could have it not apply/be tax deductible for applicable businesses or something though, that would go some way. Or maybe better to charge a big daily tariff for driving it in metro areas? So if it's only being 'actually used' it will never hit the tariff, whoever you are, business or not, and however rich. But if you take it between school, Wholefoods, and the soccer field, bam. (I don't know if the infrastructure to do that is common in the US though, I'm imagining like London's U/LEZ & congestion charge.)
  - hnav 2y ago
    Yeah, because the country is so heterogeneous, this push has to come from major metros charging people for doing truck things. What makes sense in a dense city doesn't really apply in bumfuck nowhere which is 99% of the country. You can see in San Francisco when a new wave of migration occurs because suddenly the streets are littered with Lariats and Raptors.
  - MBCook 2y ago
    Why should driving a sedan only be safe in a city? Trucks worked fine 40 years ago. I don’t see why they need to be the insane size they are today. I’m not saying they all have to be the size of a Miata or something. The industry taught people to want giant monstrosities because it saved them money. I don’t think they’re inherently superior and trying to control the size is de facto making them worse. Where lines are drawn is for lawmakers. I can see business needing big trucks. Maybe put them behind a tougher license. I don’t know. The status who is insane. I moved up from an Accord because SUVs had hoods above my roofline. My little SUV isn’t much better. It’s an arms race and we need to do something.
chemeril 2y ago
Finally some action from the NHTSA on this. As a driver of tiny Japanese shitboxes my entire life the last ten years of new vehicle development has been terrifying to watch from the driver's seat. Not only are these new (last 10 years) trucks and SUVs absurdly large and growing bigger, the sightlines from their driver seats are so bad pedestrians and small cars are largely invisible. Here's to hoping the car bloat arms race gets damped a bit with legislation stemming from the NHTSA's push.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  > driver seats are so bad pedestrians and small cars are largely invisible This is the thing. The sightlines and pillars are so big it's literally difficult to see other cars on the road with you. That alone should warrant some safety regulation.
  - chemeril 2y ago
    If I pull up behind a modern pickup at a stoplight my car is completely occluded. If I pull up to the passenger's side of a modern pickup the driver has no idea: they cannot see down far enough from the driver's seat to know that there's another vehicle next to them. It's remarkable. I knew things were off the rails when I parked my beater 2nd-gen Ranger next to a then-new F-250 and couldn't see the top of the Ranger's cab when looking through the F-250's windows.
- hyperbovine 2y ago
  Recently did a one-day rental on a late model American pickup truck for a cross-town move. I absolutely could not believe the ground clearance and (lack of) view out the front of that thing. (My frame of reference is a bicycle and, occasionally, a Honda fit from the aughts.) You literally need a sort of ladder, which comes standard, to get in. Driving it was what I, previously, imagined getting behind the wheel of a semi-truck to be. It amazes me that auto mfrs can just ramp the size of these things up without any regard to how it might affect others on the road or sidewalk.
  - 2y ago
empath75 2y ago
What we really need to figure out, to fix pedestrian fatalities in the US, is to fix whatever perverse incentives there are that lead to the traffic engineering practices that make so much of America dangerous to walk in. Optimizing for the ease of driving through places at expense of almost everything else, has lead to a lot of bad outcomes, not just for pedestrian fatalities, but just general livability in the US.
paulpauper 2y ago
The cybertruck, despite being big, optically does not appear as big as many of these huge Ford pickup trucks
sneed_chucker 2y ago
The US and industry lobbyists created truck bloat in the first place by writing the CAFE standards in such a backwards way.
- jollyllama 2y ago
  Consumer demand is often cited as the reason for this but that ignores the role of advertising in creating consumer preferences.
- chemeril 2y ago
  Absolutely a contributing factor. A decade ago folks in the automotive community were speculating that vehicle bloat and a shift of the landscape to heavy truck/SUV representation would be an outcome and sure enough.
mey 2y ago
FortNine explored the data on frontal area and deaths in this excellent video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU
grahamgooch 2y ago
Former car designer here - big3. The root cause is tax policies. Any vehicle classified as a “truck” is protected from overseas competition by a 25 pc tariff (jfk era), and since Clinton/Bush there is a tax write off available to business owners if the weight was more than 5600# it’s now 6500#. I.E., there is a tax incentive to make trucks and buy them. The occupant safety regulations means we make the worlds safest vehicles (for occupants) - roll over regulations have made the an and bill pillars thicker. If we manage to remove the tariff protection and remove the tax incentives to buy trucks - we will save lives.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > If we manage to remove the tariff protection and remove the tax incentives to buy trucks - we will save lives. I do wonder if it's too late, though. Many people in the US are now used to large vehicles, and see the size itself as a safety feature. Sure, if SUVs and trucks got significantly more expensive to buy, some people might be priced out, but I'm not sure that's going to be enough.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] Proposal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41490941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41490941
- loeg 2y ago
  Related, but no interesting discussion in the other thread and not an exact duplicate.
  - ChrisArchitect 2y ago
    That's the proposal, there are multiple threads going, should all be merged
imglorp 2y ago
How reasonable is tuning automatic emergency braking to recognize pedestrians? "Don't hit anything. At all. Ever." seems like a reasonable default prime directive for new vehicles (with obvious exceptions for police etc).
- loeg 2y ago
  There are a lot of levers we can use to improve safety here and that might be another one. We can (and probably should) advance all levers we can in parallel.
loeg 2y ago
Recent / related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41418562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41418562 - Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41461138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41461138 - What to do about America's killer cars And see also AP's earlier reporting (yesterday): https://apnews.com/article/us-pedestrian-safety-rule-suvs-pickup-trucks-8ab66c3416dcb91484ec502d6e114ad1 https://apnews.com/article/us-pedestrian-safety-rule-suvs-pi...
themaninthedark 2y ago
A a driver of a smaller car, this is great! Oh, so instead of fixing the standards that caused the shift to large trucks and SUVs to begin with they are going to mandate more crash safety.... >The proposed rule would apply to passenger vehicles with a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,000 pounds or less, including multipurpose passenger vehicles (trucks, SUVs, crossovers and vans). >The proposed standard would establish test procedures simulating a head-to-hood impact and performance requirements to minimize the risk of head injury. NHTSA estimates the new standard would save 67 lives a year. https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-proposes-new-vehicle-safety-standard-protect-pedestrians https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-proposes-new-vehi... Basically nothing. How about making more rigorous standards for heavier vehicles and tighten the emission standards for the heavier vehicles as well?
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
The last thing I want is for the government to tell me what is ‘excessively large’. Everyone has different lifestyles and needs. I think it is totally fine for me to be happy with a Prius and another person to want a Ford Superduty. Sure that person driving the truck may have some externalities from their choice, but even if I have fewer externalities from my Prius, I have other externalities from choices I make in other parts of my life. It seems unfair to target one but not the other. I know this is an unpopular take here, but I also feel the search for safety on roads is going too far. Cars give us a benefit - we can get to places fast, on our own schedule unlike public transit, with all the people or cargo we want to take. Life is much better because of it. Chasing zero fatalities just seems illogical - when life inherently comes with risk. I am comfortable having some number of deaths for these benefits, and would like to see an accounting of how much benefit people derive from these targeted vehicles and weigh that against the costs. To me, NHTSA’s claim of saving 67 lives a year though this program isn’t really worth it. I’ll also note that The Verge is guilty of poor journalism on this topic. For example it makes a claim that vehicle design doesn’t address crash fatalities when all the safety features this article dismisses - like cameras, blind spot detection, and automatic braking - are part of that vehicle’s design in reducing fatalities. They also don’t talk about how cars are incredibly safe today, with only around 1 fatality per 100 million miles driven. We have about the same number of total road deaths as the year 2000 even though the population is 20% higher.
- timw4mail 2y ago
  My problem with your take is that the largest danger of driving a car comes from other drivers. Zero fatalities is a pipe dream, yes, but there is still room to prevent more collisions. I would like to see more consistent enforcement against reckless driving, personally. Drivers who weave at high speeds in small gaps to change lanes, for example. Speed in general is one of the biggest factors of collision fatalities.
topspin 2y ago
"Never in its 50-plus years in existence has the regulator issued new rules for automakers requiring them to change their vehicle designs to better prevent pedestrian fatalities." Vehicle designs today, particularly front ends, but also door mirrors and other features, are a direct result of regulatory requirements designed to reduce pedestrian injury and fatality. For coming up on 100 years now, fenders have been required on passenger vehicles, in part because they reduce pedestrian injury and fatality. Perhaps they're claiming that this particular regulator, the NHTSA, is doing this for the first time, but it is very misleading to insinuate that no regulatory requirements have appeared on behalf of pedestrian safety for 50 years. Regarding "truck bloat": the most outrageous bloat occurring now in production vehicles is electric trucks. The GM Chevrolet Silverado EV GVRW is 10,500 lbs. and has a curb weight of 8532 lbs. That is about 3000 lbs heavier than an ICE equivalent. These things are at the edge of requiring CDLs to drive, and when you get t-boned by something that heavy, even if you're in a large vehicle yourself, you're going to get annihilated.
game_the0ry 2y ago
There are get-rich-quick gurus who recommend buying very heavy SUVs (like a range rover) that weight over 6,000 lbs so you can claim it is a commercial vehicle for your business and use it as a tax write-off. SMH
jmclnx 2y ago
I am skeptical to this actually happening. But I would love to see this along with other rules: * headlights same height as all cars * bumpers all being the same height too
NoImmatureAdHom 2y ago
"NHTSA says the changes could save up to 67 lives every year." "Each year, cars kill roughly 40,000 Americans." Well that's dumb, skip it. Unless there are other reasons beyond safety, 67 lives is nothing.

54 points by mfiguiere 2y ago

aSithLord 2y ago

nanny state.

marinmania 2y ago
I think the nanny state charge is appropriate when people engage in dangerous behavior (like riding a motorcycle without a helmet) where almost all the risk of the potential harm is taken on by the user. With large cars its the opposite. The people who drive large cars take on no risk, while everyone else is subjected to their negative externalities.
sickofparadox 2y ago
Legislate a problem into existence, then blame automakers for the problem and legislate some more.
rozap 2y ago
Remember when they banned popup headlights because they were unsafe? Government agencies used to be able to do their jobs, but ever since the Reagan era, that has diminished. And as a result, since 2010 pedestrian deaths (and deaths for vehicle occupants) has actually increased, after falling for decades. If you want to do dangerous stuff, like riding a motorcycle, free climbing, etc, you should be able to. But when you're doing stuff where the risk is entirely placed on someone else, that's literally the point of regulation. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedestrians https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
- aSithLord 2y ago
  large suvs are to protect the occupants. people jumping in front of it should not even factor in. I don't drive on sidewalks.
  - piva00 2y ago
    > people jumping in front of it should not even factor in What? People will eventually end up in front of a car, either by their own mistake or when a inattentive driver hits them, it will happen. Factoring that in those unfortunate occasions you want the human being to have higher chances to survive is fucking absolutely a factor. I'm sorry to ask this on HN but: are you a moron or a troll?
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      > People will eventually end up in front of a car, either by their own mistake or when an inattentive driver hits them, it will happen. It seems like you’re implying that everyone eventually dies by getting hit by a car (sorry if I am reading this incorrectly)? But that is simply not true. There are approximately 7000 pedestrian deaths a year right now, compared to a population of about 340 million people. So the probability of dying in a given year is 0.00002. With a 79 year life expectancy on average, the chance of dying as a pedestrian over a lifetime is like 0.15%. By the way, MOST pedestrian deaths are at night, so it seems like an easy way to drive this even lower is just to improve lighting and ask pedestrians to make themselves more visible. > I'm sorry to ask this on HN but: are you a moron or a troll? I think this type of comment doesn’t belong here per the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - Oanid 2y ago
        Do you have a source for this "most pedestrian deaths are at night" claim?
      - piva00 2y ago
        > It seems like you’re implying that everyone eventually dies by getting hit by a car (sorry if I am reading this incorrectly)? Yes, you interpreted my comment absolutely incorrectly. I meant that there's always going to be someone getting hit by a car, it's a fact of life when the road is shared between cars and people. Not considering this fact when designing a car is not possible. Hence my comment asking if GP was a moron or a troll after they stated this: > large suvs are to protect the occupants. people jumping in front of it should not even factor in. I don't drive on sidewalks. I simply cannot accept that a user on this forum really thinks this way, it's an absurdly moronic statement.

daft_pink 2y ago

someone at the government apparently hates the cybertruck

preciz 2y ago

In EU in some countries because of extra taxes it's really expensive to buy a bigger car so 3+ kids can fit in. But those rich people who sit alone in huge luxury SUVs they still sit alone. They have the money while families usually don't. I just hope this doesn't go in this wrong direction.

ak217 2y ago
What's wrong with taxing dangerously oversized/overweight/unsafe trucks out of existence?
- frankharv 2y ago
  OK whats next. Regulate everything? Geez your computer looks to be using alot of power. We need people to register their computer to estimate your computer footprint. Then we can regulate it.
  - ak217 2y ago
    Your computer is not unsafely designed in a way that kills tens of thousands of people a year in accidents. Also, your computer's power consumption is in fact regulated on a semi-voluntary basis via a program called Energy Star. People are fine with it because Energy Star certification saves them money. By contrast, the problem with trucks is that their unsafe design is subsidized by the government, so smaller more efficient vehicles that would normally save people money end up being penalized.
  - piva00 2y ago
    Slippery slope is a fallacy for a reason...
  - chemeril 2y ago
    Last I checked my desktop doesn't slam into pedestrians/bicyclists trying to use what public infrastructure we have in the US. If unbounded vehicle bloat is systematically contributing to the deaths of citizens then yes, we have a collective responsibility to regulate it.

ApolloFortyNine 2y ago

My issue with this is it's never good to get hit by a car. It's putting a band aid on a symptom rather than fixing the source of the problem. Fixing it though would require government money redesigning infrastructure, new rules makes it where you can push off the costs to car companies.

ak217 2y ago
Getting hit by a car is much more survivable than getting hit by an oversized pickup truck/SUV whose designers deliberately chose a huge, blunt frontal cross-section with poor visibility over the hood. This deliberately unsafe design needs to be outlawed. Infrastructure improvements like traffic calming and dedicated grade-separated pedestrian/cyclist infrastructure are great too, but we need both.
empath75 2y ago
It's never good to be in a car accident but safety standards for cars have _dramatically_ reduced traffic fatalities for _passengers_ and I'm sure standards can improve pedestrian survivability, too. There's lots you can do with traffic engineering, too, to make high speed accidents less likely with pedestrians.

xnx 2y ago

I'm surprised there's no initiative around reducing blinds spots caused by A pillars. I try to be a carefully driver, but I am still caught off guard by pedestrians, cyclists, or entire vehicles hidden behind the a pillar.

sickofparadox 2y ago
A-pillars have been made thicker by law because every car now needs to be able to maintain cab integrity if it flips. https://www.nhtsa.gov/document/final-rule-federal-motor-vehicle-safety-standards-roof-crush-resistance-phase-reporting-0 https://www.nhtsa.gov/document/final-rule-federal-motor-vehi...
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  Chicken and egg. A-pillars are bigger, yes. But they have to be even bigger still when you have trucks weighing in at 6,000lb+, and have taller cabs (which also makes them more prone to rollover).
abfan1127 2y ago
those A pillar blind spots are a result of roll over requirements. A pillars used to be very small.
- selectodude 2y ago
  Doesn’t help that cars weigh several tons now.
  - MBCook 2y ago
    Heavier car = bigger pillars, yep. Add in higher window lines (due to raised SUV hoods, I imagine) and it’s so much harder to see out modern cars.
- ak217 2y ago
  I think it's a combination of that and curtain air bags which are often packaged on the pillars. And of course the rollover requirements are predominantly due to SUVs and trucks being so high off the ground (needlessly most of the time) they are more susceptible to rollover. Minimal visibility requirements around A pillars (and in front of the car/over the hood) sound like the logical next step.

shrubble 2y ago

“NHTSA says the changes could save up to 67 lives every year.“ But there’s 40k deaths per year from auto accidents; so this is not going to move the needle. If the problem is big trucks then maybe don’t penalize the sales of small trucks?

jcgrillo 2y ago
> maybe don’t penalize the sales of small trucks? This right here. If I lived almost anywhere else in the world I could get a 70 series land cruiser or Hilux or any number of others that are rated for 1+ ton capacity and 7700lb+ towing capacity, all while getting 20+mpg with a decent diesel engine. Instead, I'm stuck with some dystopian chicken tax + diesel phobic lunacy and end up burning twice as much fuel to tow or carry half as much. Idiotic.
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  Wow... I don't live in the US, but a Hilux would never strike me (haha) as a small alternative.
  - loeg 2y ago
    In the US, the Hilux is called Tacoma instead.
    - jcgrillo 2y ago
      It's a similar vehicle, but there are actually many substantial differences.
- NoImmatureAdHom 2y ago
  The same vehicle (same drivetrain etc.) will be rated for two very different towing capacities in the U.S. vs. Europe, with the European one being quite a bit higher. E.g., Volvo XC40 T5 is 1600 kg in the U.S. https://www.volvocars.com/en-ca/support/car/xc40/21w22/article/dcc4aa48b45de36ac0a801514bc9cca1?search=towing&page=0 https://www.volvocars.com/en-ca/support/car/xc40/21w22/artic... but 2100 kg in the UK https://www.volvocars.com/uk/support/car/xc40/21w46/article/0c10bf9ad4c7c90cc0a801510ad2549e https://www.volvocars.com/uk/support/car/xc40/21w46/article/... As I recall it has to do with standards for stability at speed... All to say you can probably tow more than you think with a U.S. car that's also sold in Europe, just maybe don't go above 55mph...?

dilap 2y ago

There's an interesting whack-a-mole dynamic at play here, since, from what I've read, the proliferation of huge trucks is partly driven by regulations in the first place -- fuel efficiency standards are less stringent for large trucks, the normal existing safety regs (which focus on the people insider the car) are easier to pass in large vehicles, and (tho this probably isn't a huge driver) there are business tax write-offs that only apply to vehicles above a certain weight.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> fuel efficiency standards are less stringent for large trucks Worth nothing that those standards were begged, pleaded, demanded, cried and shitted for on the part of every major US automaker before they were passed, and it was only after that/because of that that every major automaker began working like hell to sell the American public on SUVs and trucks. Simple fact is that full-size trucks are the only vehicle category that Detroit is able to compete on (less so now than then, but then this was extremely true) after they got their asses roundly handed to them by the various Asian ones that did cars, vans, and MPVs much better. US automakers bet the farm on building ever larger and more ridiculous vehicles for Americans because it was just easier than competing with the Japanese/Koreans on a fair field. I hope like hell this goes somewhere and we can get these stupid things under control. Feels like every Tom, Dick, and Harry around where I live is driving a 3-ton or greater truck that's never seen anything more strenuous than getting a load of fertilizer for mom's garden, and like, that's fine. But their choices in vehicles are putting negative externalities all over the community and risking everyone's safety, including their own children, and it's fucking ridiculous.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  > Feels like every Tom, Dick, and Harry around where I live is driving a 3-ton or greater truck that's never seen anything more strenuous than getting a load of fertilizer for mom's garden, and like, that's fine. Yup. An Audi mid-size SUV has a towing capacity of nearly 8,000lb. Moving your horse from the top paddock to the bottom and back, every six months does not mean you need a dual-wheeled F350 as your daily driver.

colechristensen 2y ago

It's silly looking at modern trucks and trucks from the 80s with the exact same bed size and similar engine performance. New trucks are just huge, and it's just there because for the cool factor among their customer base. Actually using a F-150 sized truck to do work (almost nobody does) is considerably harder because of how high off the ground it is and more difficult to maneuver because if its size/height. And the cost is just absurd.

MBCook 2y ago

Too little. I don’t want it to be more survivable when someone is hit by a 6 foot tall hood 7500 pound truck someone is using to go grocery shopping. I don’t want 6’ tall hoods. I’m 6’ tall and sitting in my small SUV the hoods of new trucks are over my eyeline. That’s insane. Put limits on hood height. Put limits on weight. Or at least huge taxes. You want to pay an extra $149,000 in fees for your monstrosity? Go ahead. Either you’re ultra-rich or you’re really using it and it’s not a suburban vanity truck. Limit length. Limit footprint. Limit weight. Repeal the chicken tax. Things are crazy out there. GMC added cameras to the front of some of their trucks to be able to see pedestrians at crosswalks. How is that sane?

OJFord 2y ago
Kind of unfair if you are actually using it then though? I'm not in the US and don't have an SUV, but I sort of sympathise with that. You could have it not apply/be tax deductible for applicable businesses or something though, that would go some way. Or maybe better to charge a big daily tariff for driving it in metro areas? So if it's only being 'actually used' it will never hit the tariff, whoever you are, business or not, and however rich. But if you take it between school, Wholefoods, and the soccer field, bam. (I don't know if the infrastructure to do that is common in the US though, I'm imagining like London's U/LEZ & congestion charge.)
- hnav 2y ago
  Yeah, because the country is so heterogeneous, this push has to come from major metros charging people for doing truck things. What makes sense in a dense city doesn't really apply in bumfuck nowhere which is 99% of the country. You can see in San Francisco when a new wave of migration occurs because suddenly the streets are littered with Lariats and Raptors.
- MBCook 2y ago
  Why should driving a sedan only be safe in a city? Trucks worked fine 40 years ago. I don’t see why they need to be the insane size they are today. I’m not saying they all have to be the size of a Miata or something. The industry taught people to want giant monstrosities because it saved them money. I don’t think they’re inherently superior and trying to control the size is de facto making them worse. Where lines are drawn is for lawmakers. I can see business needing big trucks. Maybe put them behind a tougher license. I don’t know. The status who is insane. I moved up from an Accord because SUVs had hoods above my roofline. My little SUV isn’t much better. It’s an arms race and we need to do something.

chemeril 2y ago

Finally some action from the NHTSA on this. As a driver of tiny Japanese shitboxes my entire life the last ten years of new vehicle development has been terrifying to watch from the driver's seat. Not only are these new (last 10 years) trucks and SUVs absurdly large and growing bigger, the sightlines from their driver seats are so bad pedestrians and small cars are largely invisible. Here's to hoping the car bloat arms race gets damped a bit with legislation stemming from the NHTSA's push.

FireBeyond 2y ago
> driver seats are so bad pedestrians and small cars are largely invisible This is the thing. The sightlines and pillars are so big it's literally difficult to see other cars on the road with you. That alone should warrant some safety regulation.
- chemeril 2y ago
  If I pull up behind a modern pickup at a stoplight my car is completely occluded. If I pull up to the passenger's side of a modern pickup the driver has no idea: they cannot see down far enough from the driver's seat to know that there's another vehicle next to them. It's remarkable. I knew things were off the rails when I parked my beater 2nd-gen Ranger next to a then-new F-250 and couldn't see the top of the Ranger's cab when looking through the F-250's windows.
hyperbovine 2y ago
Recently did a one-day rental on a late model American pickup truck for a cross-town move. I absolutely could not believe the ground clearance and (lack of) view out the front of that thing. (My frame of reference is a bicycle and, occasionally, a Honda fit from the aughts.) You literally need a sort of ladder, which comes standard, to get in. Driving it was what I, previously, imagined getting behind the wheel of a semi-truck to be. It amazes me that auto mfrs can just ramp the size of these things up without any regard to how it might affect others on the road or sidewalk.
- 2y ago

empath75 2y ago

What we really need to figure out, to fix pedestrian fatalities in the US, is to fix whatever perverse incentives there are that lead to the traffic engineering practices that make so much of America dangerous to walk in. Optimizing for the ease of driving through places at expense of almost everything else, has lead to a lot of bad outcomes, not just for pedestrian fatalities, but just general livability in the US.

paulpauper 2y ago

The cybertruck, despite being big, optically does not appear as big as many of these huge Ford pickup trucks

sneed_chucker 2y ago

The US and industry lobbyists created truck bloat in the first place by writing the CAFE standards in such a backwards way.

jollyllama 2y ago
Consumer demand is often cited as the reason for this but that ignores the role of advertising in creating consumer preferences.
chemeril 2y ago
Absolutely a contributing factor. A decade ago folks in the automotive community were speculating that vehicle bloat and a shift of the landscape to heavy truck/SUV representation would be an outcome and sure enough.

mey 2y ago

FortNine explored the data on frontal area and deaths in this excellent video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU

grahamgooch 2y ago

Former car designer here - big3. The root cause is tax policies. Any vehicle classified as a “truck” is protected from overseas competition by a 25 pc tariff (jfk era), and since Clinton/Bush there is a tax write off available to business owners if the weight was more than 5600# it’s now 6500#. I.E., there is a tax incentive to make trucks and buy them. The occupant safety regulations means we make the worlds safest vehicles (for occupants) - roll over regulations have made the an and bill pillars thicker. If we manage to remove the tariff protection and remove the tax incentives to buy trucks - we will save lives.

kelnos 2y ago
> If we manage to remove the tariff protection and remove the tax incentives to buy trucks - we will save lives. I do wonder if it's too late, though. Many people in the US are now used to large vehicles, and see the size itself as a safety feature. Sure, if SUVs and trucks got significantly more expensive to buy, some people might be priced out, but I'm not sure that's going to be enough.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] Proposal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41490941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41490941

loeg 2y ago
Related, but no interesting discussion in the other thread and not an exact duplicate.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  That's the proposal, there are multiple threads going, should all be merged

imglorp 2y ago

How reasonable is tuning automatic emergency braking to recognize pedestrians? "Don't hit anything. At all. Ever." seems like a reasonable default prime directive for new vehicles (with obvious exceptions for police etc).

loeg 2y ago
There are a lot of levers we can use to improve safety here and that might be another one. We can (and probably should) advance all levers we can in parallel.

loeg 2y ago

Recent / related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41418562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41418562 - Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41461138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41461138 - What to do about America's killer cars And see also AP's earlier reporting (yesterday): https://apnews.com/article/us-pedestrian-safety-rule-suvs-pickup-trucks-8ab66c3416dcb91484ec502d6e114ad1 https://apnews.com/article/us-pedestrian-safety-rule-suvs-pi...

themaninthedark 2y ago

A a driver of a smaller car, this is great! Oh, so instead of fixing the standards that caused the shift to large trucks and SUVs to begin with they are going to mandate more crash safety.... >The proposed rule would apply to passenger vehicles with a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,000 pounds or less, including multipurpose passenger vehicles (trucks, SUVs, crossovers and vans). >The proposed standard would establish test procedures simulating a head-to-hood impact and performance requirements to minimize the risk of head injury. NHTSA estimates the new standard would save 67 lives a year. https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-proposes-new-vehicle-safety-standard-protect-pedestrians https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-proposes-new-vehi... Basically nothing. How about making more rigorous standards for heavier vehicles and tighten the emission standards for the heavier vehicles as well?

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

The last thing I want is for the government to tell me what is ‘excessively large’. Everyone has different lifestyles and needs. I think it is totally fine for me to be happy with a Prius and another person to want a Ford Superduty. Sure that person driving the truck may have some externalities from their choice, but even if I have fewer externalities from my Prius, I have other externalities from choices I make in other parts of my life. It seems unfair to target one but not the other. I know this is an unpopular take here, but I also feel the search for safety on roads is going too far. Cars give us a benefit - we can get to places fast, on our own schedule unlike public transit, with all the people or cargo we want to take. Life is much better because of it. Chasing zero fatalities just seems illogical - when life inherently comes with risk. I am comfortable having some number of deaths for these benefits, and would like to see an accounting of how much benefit people derive from these targeted vehicles and weigh that against the costs. To me, NHTSA’s claim of saving 67 lives a year though this program isn’t really worth it. I’ll also note that The Verge is guilty of poor journalism on this topic. For example it makes a claim that vehicle design doesn’t address crash fatalities when all the safety features this article dismisses - like cameras, blind spot detection, and automatic braking - are part of that vehicle’s design in reducing fatalities. They also don’t talk about how cars are incredibly safe today, with only around 1 fatality per 100 million miles driven. We have about the same number of total road deaths as the year 2000 even though the population is 20% higher.

timw4mail 2y ago
My problem with your take is that the largest danger of driving a car comes from other drivers. Zero fatalities is a pipe dream, yes, but there is still room to prevent more collisions. I would like to see more consistent enforcement against reckless driving, personally. Drivers who weave at high speeds in small gaps to change lanes, for example. Speed in general is one of the biggest factors of collision fatalities.

topspin 2y ago

"Never in its 50-plus years in existence has the regulator issued new rules for automakers requiring them to change their vehicle designs to better prevent pedestrian fatalities." Vehicle designs today, particularly front ends, but also door mirrors and other features, are a direct result of regulatory requirements designed to reduce pedestrian injury and fatality. For coming up on 100 years now, fenders have been required on passenger vehicles, in part because they reduce pedestrian injury and fatality. Perhaps they're claiming that this particular regulator, the NHTSA, is doing this for the first time, but it is very misleading to insinuate that no regulatory requirements have appeared on behalf of pedestrian safety for 50 years. Regarding "truck bloat": the most outrageous bloat occurring now in production vehicles is electric trucks. The GM Chevrolet Silverado EV GVRW is 10,500 lbs. and has a curb weight of 8532 lbs. That is about 3000 lbs heavier than an ICE equivalent. These things are at the edge of requiring CDLs to drive, and when you get t-boned by something that heavy, even if you're in a large vehicle yourself, you're going to get annihilated.

game_the0ry 2y ago

There are get-rich-quick gurus who recommend buying very heavy SUVs (like a range rover) that weight over 6,000 lbs so you can claim it is a commercial vehicle for your business and use it as a tax write-off. SMH

jmclnx 2y ago

I am skeptical to this actually happening. But I would love to see this along with other rules: * headlights same height as all cars * bumpers all being the same height too

NoImmatureAdHom 2y ago

"NHTSA says the changes could save up to 67 lives every year." "Each year, cars kill roughly 40,000 Americans." Well that's dumb, skip it. Unless there are other reasons beyond safety, 67 lives is nothing.