6 ms·

I know no one's ever going to change their ways cause of the increasingly evident ravages of climate change but I swear I feel like throwing rocks at the big SU

by codyb 1y ago

I know no one's ever going to change their ways cause of the increasingly evident ravages of climate change but I swear I feel like throwing rocks at the big SUVs rolling by with exactly one person in them during the heat domes here in NYC. Just, so, gross. And it truly is the _vast majority_ of cars going by with exactly one person in them. So wasteful, so much pollution, so hot... frustrating.

RajT88 1y ago
I get it. My wife drives a big SUV. She is a small lady, and says the car let's her see the road better and overall feel more safe. Back when SUV's started to get popular, this was a trend they noticed as well. Back then, it was met with a lot of guffaws about yuppie housewives and all that. (This was before the term Karen had been coined)
- QuercusMax 1y ago
  But she's making everyone else less safe by driving in her tank-mobile. Those are much more deadly to pedestrians, cyclists, and those in smaller vehicles.
  - kccqzy 1y ago
    Some people are selfish. It's not illegal to be selfish.
    - QuercusMax 1y ago
      It can be morally wrong, however.
      - kccqzy 1y ago
        That's a problem of the legislators: identifying which immoral activities should be made illegal.
        QuercusMax 1y ago
        You don't think that we as individuals have any moral choices to make, and we should defer to legislation? That's certainly a view, but I don't think it's the majority view.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    And for every comment screeching about pedestrians and rollover safety there's another one screeching about occupant safety. You can't really fault people for picking the one that benefits them when confronted with roughly equal screeching in both directions.
    - RajT88 1y ago
      Exactly what I was getting at. There are several ways to view the story. Another commenter mentioned failing to design cars for women (totally fair! Volvo famously had a botched attempt at this) What I have come to appreciate is how vulnerable women feel in the world. It is hard to appreciate how that plays into car choice if you are a man. Most men will never be able to understand, imo.
      - asdff 1y ago
        Only 20 years ago used to be the "hairdresser car" meant a tiny little sporty coupe or convertible like a miata. I guess the marketing changed and cultivated a new generation with a new mindset.
        potato3732842 1y ago
        20yr ago was 2005 and the "hairdresser and nurse" demographic were all driving Jeep Libertys.
      - QuercusMax 1y ago
        Why does designing cars for women mean we need to turn them into main battle tanks? That's a false dichotomy. Women in cars are just as vulnerable as men in cars, just as female pedestrians are just as vulnerable as male pedestrians.
        uzj100 1y ago
        For a while, women in cars were more vulnerable than men in cars, in part because crash test dummies were sized to typical male proportions, and cars are built to pass crash tests rather than be as safe as possible for all occupants while still passing crash tests. This sometimes led to things like airbags being placed in locations that worked great for average height men but not as well for average height women. I don't know if it's fair to say that women in cars are just as vulnerable as men in cars, the same goes for the pedestrian argument.
  - autoexec 1y ago
    It's also an arms race where everyone buys bigger cars to see over all the other giant cars on the road. SUVs have been shown many times to be less safe, even for their drivers, but they give a feeling of safety which matters more than actual safety to buyers.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > She is a small lady So, yet another case of cars not being designed for women (for those that don't get what I'm going on about - crash test dummies are modeled after men, leading to significantly worse crash outcomes for women [1])... it's infuriating. Even a "small" BMW i3, a car one might think to be suitable for people of lower height - my wife tried out one at carsharing, and even despite the seat being all up front, she was barely able to drive the thing. The Mercedes Sprinter we rented for our last moves? Once she understood how the dimensions of that thing worked, absolutely easy going. [1] https://apnews.com/article/nhtsa-female-crash-dummies-vehicle-safety-tests-ff29ea47e58f2325ddbe6c7930748d63 https://apnews.com/article/nhtsa-female-crash-dummies-vehicl...
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    I'm curious about what the peak potential is and how close (or far) we are from there, because even if all things were 100% equal somehow, in a serious crash women will always fair significantly worse due to less musculature, lower bone density, thinner bones, and so on.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Well at the moment we don't even try, so any improvement will have massive impact.
- jajko 1y ago
  I don't think you get it. And also this is an universal response from all women I ever talked about exactly this topic (and several guys too who had no idea about cars in general but knew about those famous football players or other celebrities who had suvs so they also needed one). The root cause is plain and simple - your wife just needs to learn to drive better, then she wouldn't be scared regardless of her seating position. No amount of high position can compensate for overall crappy driving style and corresponding fear of driving and thus the 'need' for high SUVs. To keep her distance from car in front of her (which is basically why she feels the need to be sitting so high so she can anticipate braking earlier), and quick reflexes on the brake while 100% focusing on situation around her (which she should have anyway since there are other bad situations where higher positions doesn't give any advantage, in contrary). I went the other way - very low-positioned bmws, with correspondingly much better and quicker handling, of course much lower consumption and much more rolling resistance. Its wagon so trunk space is massive and if not enough I can put on biggest Thule roof rack and still fit in our garage and low entry points like store garages (1.9m is the limit with it, never saw entry limiter lower than that). My wife learned to drive properly over time and has exactly same opinion, aka suv never ever because why. Suvs and variants, at least those who don't go offroad (so most of them) should be reserved for physically challenged people due to easier entry/exit to/from vehicle. And that's about it for real objective advantages, the rest are just emotions which adults should manage to their advantage, not the opposite.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    It doesn't matter how good a driver I, or your wife, or any woman, or any man is. That drunk driver who's also texting and just had a stroke and passed out from fentanyl could plow into you while you're innocently stopped at a stop light and you're being as defensive as possible. I don't see any way to change that calculus for the paranoid, unfortunately.
    - Mawr 1y ago
      True, but false. Accidents that you can do nothing about are vanishingly rare. Even the situation you bring up is not one of them. When stopped/stopping you should be checking your mirrors to make sure the car behind you is at least slowing down. On the other hand, the parent brings up a great example - following distance from the car in front. One of the most basic concepts of operating any vehicle and his wife is apparently incapable of applying it. The overall point holds - people are irrationally worried about the 0.0000001% edge cases they can do nothing about anyway instead of trying to improve their chances in the 99.999999% of cases where it's their actions that matter.
doubled112 1y ago
We really like our station wagon. Well, in principle at least. We won't get into the details of keeping a 12 year old German car going. It's fuel efficient. It's not big. It's a decent people mover. It has more cargo space than many SUVs that are larger. Is low enough the roof racks are easily accessible. Added a hitch, mostly for more cargo space. I'm starting to wonder if I've done more "truck things" than many of the people with trucks in the neighbourhood at this point. If I ever need to haul more, I'll just rent a truck/van for that moment in time. I'm not going to buy one to drive to the office.
- QuercusMax 1y ago
  When I had a Honda Fit I hauled a TON of cargo in it. A friend borrowed it to pick up a full-sized pinball machine from the next state over. I moved half of a 5-bedroom house (except for big furniture) across town in my Fit. You don't need a gigantic beast. A kei truck is more than adequate for the vast majority of what people use pickup trucks for.
  - asdff 1y ago
    Even my old Integra had a ton of trunk space when you fold down the seats. It was almost like a small pickup truck. I think a lot of people would get by with a sedan but it seems like the seats no longer fold down on a lot of smaller cars like that.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    Fits are pretty famous for their TARDIS-like nature. It’s a shame they’re not sold in the US any more.
  - uzj100 1y ago
    I love when people bring up the kei truck argument. If all you do is haul mulch around town from Home Depot, by yourself, and you already have another car, sure, go for it. But pretty much nobody owns a key truck as their only car. There's little crash safety, your knees are the crumple zone, they're not designed to go on 70 mile interstate highways, you usually can't transport many people. I would feel uncomfortable transporting friends/relatives more than a few miles on low speed roads in a kei truck, because they're 25+ year old designs focused on size rather than safety. A kei truck is a supplementary vehicle at best... so you'd still want a car, and then you have two vehicles. Lots of people don't want two vehicles when a single vehicle that covers both use cases exists. Sure, nobody needs a gigantic beast, but for people in lots of parts of the country, the downsides to owning a larger vehicle aren't that big. Why buy a smaller pickup truck when a full size truck is just a few thousand dollars more (in a country where the average new vehicle sells for $50k), gets similar fuel economy figures, and has more room in general?
tbrownaw 1y ago
> big SUVs rolling by with exactly one person in them My mini-suv seems to be getting about double the gas milage my old normal car did.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
Now imagine the massive global polluting supply chain to put that SUV together for a single person.
- codyb 1y ago
  I think you got downvoted for this but unsure why cause that's a great point that making one subway car that gets used daily to transport thousands of people vs creating a car per individual driven only for an hour a day is absolutely huge in terms of carbon and resource cost
bamboozled 1y ago
But they are so tough though...
skeezyboy 1y ago
yet they live in a wooden house... boggles the mind

by codyb 1y ago

RajT88 1y ago

I get it. My wife drives a big SUV. She is a small lady, and says the car let's her see the road better and overall feel more safe. Back when SUV's started to get popular, this was a trend they noticed as well. Back then, it was met with a lot of guffaws about yuppie housewives and all that. (This was before the term Karen had been coined)

QuercusMax 1y ago
But she's making everyone else less safe by driving in her tank-mobile. Those are much more deadly to pedestrians, cyclists, and those in smaller vehicles.
- kccqzy 1y ago
  Some people are selfish. It's not illegal to be selfish.
  - QuercusMax 1y ago
    It can be morally wrong, however.
    - kccqzy 1y ago
      That's a problem of the legislators: identifying which immoral activities should be made illegal.
      - QuercusMax 1y ago
        You don't think that we as individuals have any moral choices to make, and we should defer to legislation? That's certainly a view, but I don't think it's the majority view.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  And for every comment screeching about pedestrians and rollover safety there's another one screeching about occupant safety. You can't really fault people for picking the one that benefits them when confronted with roughly equal screeching in both directions.
  - RajT88 1y ago
    Exactly what I was getting at. There are several ways to view the story. Another commenter mentioned failing to design cars for women (totally fair! Volvo famously had a botched attempt at this) What I have come to appreciate is how vulnerable women feel in the world. It is hard to appreciate how that plays into car choice if you are a man. Most men will never be able to understand, imo.
    - asdff 1y ago
      Only 20 years ago used to be the "hairdresser car" meant a tiny little sporty coupe or convertible like a miata. I guess the marketing changed and cultivated a new generation with a new mindset.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        20yr ago was 2005 and the "hairdresser and nurse" demographic were all driving Jeep Libertys.
    - QuercusMax 1y ago
      Why does designing cars for women mean we need to turn them into main battle tanks? That's a false dichotomy. Women in cars are just as vulnerable as men in cars, just as female pedestrians are just as vulnerable as male pedestrians.
      - uzj100 1y ago
        For a while, women in cars were more vulnerable than men in cars, in part because crash test dummies were sized to typical male proportions, and cars are built to pass crash tests rather than be as safe as possible for all occupants while still passing crash tests. This sometimes led to things like airbags being placed in locations that worked great for average height men but not as well for average height women. I don't know if it's fair to say that women in cars are just as vulnerable as men in cars, the same goes for the pedestrian argument.
- autoexec 1y ago
  It's also an arms race where everyone buys bigger cars to see over all the other giant cars on the road. SUVs have been shown many times to be less safe, even for their drivers, but they give a feeling of safety which matters more than actual safety to buyers.
mschuster91 1y ago
> She is a small lady So, yet another case of cars not being designed for women (for those that don't get what I'm going on about - crash test dummies are modeled after men, leading to significantly worse crash outcomes for women [1])... it's infuriating. Even a "small" BMW i3, a car one might think to be suitable for people of lower height - my wife tried out one at carsharing, and even despite the seat being all up front, she was barely able to drive the thing. The Mercedes Sprinter we rented for our last moves? Once she understood how the dimensions of that thing worked, absolutely easy going. [1] https://apnews.com/article/nhtsa-female-crash-dummies-vehicle-safety-tests-ff29ea47e58f2325ddbe6c7930748d63 https://apnews.com/article/nhtsa-female-crash-dummies-vehicl...
- somenameforme 1y ago
  I'm curious about what the peak potential is and how close (or far) we are from there, because even if all things were 100% equal somehow, in a serious crash women will always fair significantly worse due to less musculature, lower bone density, thinner bones, and so on.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    Well at the moment we don't even try, so any improvement will have massive impact.
jajko 1y ago
I don't think you get it. And also this is an universal response from all women I ever talked about exactly this topic (and several guys too who had no idea about cars in general but knew about those famous football players or other celebrities who had suvs so they also needed one). The root cause is plain and simple - your wife just needs to learn to drive better, then she wouldn't be scared regardless of her seating position. No amount of high position can compensate for overall crappy driving style and corresponding fear of driving and thus the 'need' for high SUVs. To keep her distance from car in front of her (which is basically why she feels the need to be sitting so high so she can anticipate braking earlier), and quick reflexes on the brake while 100% focusing on situation around her (which she should have anyway since there are other bad situations where higher positions doesn't give any advantage, in contrary). I went the other way - very low-positioned bmws, with correspondingly much better and quicker handling, of course much lower consumption and much more rolling resistance. Its wagon so trunk space is massive and if not enough I can put on biggest Thule roof rack and still fit in our garage and low entry points like store garages (1.9m is the limit with it, never saw entry limiter lower than that). My wife learned to drive properly over time and has exactly same opinion, aka suv never ever because why. Suvs and variants, at least those who don't go offroad (so most of them) should be reserved for physically challenged people due to easier entry/exit to/from vehicle. And that's about it for real objective advantages, the rest are just emotions which adults should manage to their advantage, not the opposite.
- fragmede 1y ago
  It doesn't matter how good a driver I, or your wife, or any woman, or any man is. That drunk driver who's also texting and just had a stroke and passed out from fentanyl could plow into you while you're innocently stopped at a stop light and you're being as defensive as possible. I don't see any way to change that calculus for the paranoid, unfortunately.
  - Mawr 1y ago
    True, but false. Accidents that you can do nothing about are vanishingly rare. Even the situation you bring up is not one of them. When stopped/stopping you should be checking your mirrors to make sure the car behind you is at least slowing down. On the other hand, the parent brings up a great example - following distance from the car in front. One of the most basic concepts of operating any vehicle and his wife is apparently incapable of applying it. The overall point holds - people are irrationally worried about the 0.0000001% edge cases they can do nothing about anyway instead of trying to improve their chances in the 99.999999% of cases where it's their actions that matter.

doubled112 1y ago

We really like our station wagon. Well, in principle at least. We won't get into the details of keeping a 12 year old German car going. It's fuel efficient. It's not big. It's a decent people mover. It has more cargo space than many SUVs that are larger. Is low enough the roof racks are easily accessible. Added a hitch, mostly for more cargo space. I'm starting to wonder if I've done more "truck things" than many of the people with trucks in the neighbourhood at this point. If I ever need to haul more, I'll just rent a truck/van for that moment in time. I'm not going to buy one to drive to the office.

QuercusMax 1y ago
When I had a Honda Fit I hauled a TON of cargo in it. A friend borrowed it to pick up a full-sized pinball machine from the next state over. I moved half of a 5-bedroom house (except for big furniture) across town in my Fit. You don't need a gigantic beast. A kei truck is more than adequate for the vast majority of what people use pickup trucks for.
- asdff 1y ago
  Even my old Integra had a ton of trunk space when you fold down the seats. It was almost like a small pickup truck. I think a lot of people would get by with a sedan but it seems like the seats no longer fold down on a lot of smaller cars like that.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Fits are pretty famous for their TARDIS-like nature. It’s a shame they’re not sold in the US any more.
- uzj100 1y ago
  I love when people bring up the kei truck argument. If all you do is haul mulch around town from Home Depot, by yourself, and you already have another car, sure, go for it. But pretty much nobody owns a key truck as their only car. There's little crash safety, your knees are the crumple zone, they're not designed to go on 70 mile interstate highways, you usually can't transport many people. I would feel uncomfortable transporting friends/relatives more than a few miles on low speed roads in a kei truck, because they're 25+ year old designs focused on size rather than safety. A kei truck is a supplementary vehicle at best... so you'd still want a car, and then you have two vehicles. Lots of people don't want two vehicles when a single vehicle that covers both use cases exists. Sure, nobody needs a gigantic beast, but for people in lots of parts of the country, the downsides to owning a larger vehicle aren't that big. Why buy a smaller pickup truck when a full size truck is just a few thousand dollars more (in a country where the average new vehicle sells for $50k), gets similar fuel economy figures, and has more room in general?

tbrownaw 1y ago

> big SUVs rolling by with exactly one person in them My mini-suv seems to be getting about double the gas milage my old normal car did.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

Now imagine the massive global polluting supply chain to put that SUV together for a single person.

codyb 1y ago
I think you got downvoted for this but unsure why cause that's a great point that making one subway car that gets used daily to transport thousands of people vs creating a car per individual driven only for an hour a day is absolutely huge in terms of carbon and resource cost

bamboozled 1y ago

But they are so tough though...

skeezyboy 1y ago

yet they live in a wooden house... boggles the mind