They are not tanks. They are suburban armoured personnel carriers.
A US local News did a segment on that recently, they lined up sitting children in front of a truck, I think only the 7th or 8th child in the row was visible and even then barely. You basically can’t see anything shorter than the hood for 10 feet in front of you, and that’s assuming you look at the road from over the driving wheel not between the dash and wheel arch.
Edit: turns out “recently” is optimistic (or more likely this is a recurring segment), found this from 3 years back: https://youtu.be/NDH3FDfVQl0
Tho it’s not the segment I was thinking of.
This shouldn't even be a problem; these massive vehicles literally don't fit in street parking spaces, where they're designated with paint or verge on a bike lane.
Don't get me started on cheap CDL training programs.
Driver's testing in the US is a joke.
Ah yes, the natural environment of the 4ft tall tired diesel monstrosity truck.
I understand that you want this vehicle for offroading. But in my opinion it should be treated like a dirt bike or a 4 wheeler: you should have to tow it to the trails. If you live in the wilderness, feel free to drive it right onto dirt roads and trails. But it just shouldn't be allowed at all in a suburban or urban environment. A truck like that cannot possibly fit in the parking space at the grocery store. Not being able to see over the hood is a danger to anyone walking or biking in your suburb, and probably contributes to the fact that nobody walks or bikes in your suburb.
I do at least ponder the moral implications of it. It was fun for a while, I will probably sell it soon, it is rather impractical :)
I also noticed when driving a certain Kei car in Japan with no a-pillar airbags and a so-called “split” or “double” a-pillar with a window between 2 skinny pillars, that the visibility is so much better. It feels great when you realize you don’t need to move your head around at all to see past them, the parallax affect of having 2 eyes makes them basically disappear. [2]
[1]https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/12/02/study-diagonal-inters...
[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daihatsu_Tanto#/media/File%3...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYeeTvitvFU
He shows off a rural (and thankfully now fixed) crossroads in the UK with seemingly great visibility and an unusually high rate of cyclist fatalities - the roads are at such an angle that any reckless driving speed can align with a reasonable cycling speed such that the driver's door pillar can block visibility of a cyclist with right of way right up to the point of impact - and it's compounded by the fact that the car is necessarily approaching from behind the cyclist, so a passing cyclist will be unaware of the danger possibly until they get hit.
Of course if drivers in the area actually followed the stop signs no one would get hit - but if you watch the video in a five minute period genuinely only about half of the cars passing through actually come to a complete stop at the stop sign. You need more than signage and quietly hoping that people to do the right thing.
Its sort of defensive driving - expect troubles, idiotic clueless drivers, people having heart attack or just turning head to yelling kid on backseat / nice lady walking nearby. Can't save it all but definitely helps.
Driving in country where people, when averaged, drive like crap is a good learning experience (albeit stressful). For me, whenever I enter France from Switzerland (on average 1x per week), its night and day and training (with cursing) resumes.
I've seen it action when a guy who I was riding motorcycles with got hit on the side by a car (his fault, low speed, he was fine). My car also has the feature.
Obviously impossible if the hood's too high like with an SUV or pickup.
The Prius is an abomination, because it is too low to be comfortable and because of its wrong, arcuate shape. The natural and right shape for a car includes only vertical walls and horizontal surfaces, apart from the windscreen which is allowed to be slanted, but not too much.
If you look at the formula for acceleration (a = ∆v/∆t) and acceleration force (F = a⋅m) the only two things we can truly influence here are speed (slower collisions are less dangerous) and time (collisions where the force transfer takes longer produce less force).
The latter is what makes the difference between getting hit with an cushion and an equally heavy rock. The same difference exists if you run against a brick wall and against an angled grassy hill (or: a bendy car hood). Not only will the elastic hood (and the roll) absorb part of the collision energy, the angle of the hood stretches the acceleration over longer time and reduces the force transfered on your body.
So if you get the choice as a cyclist, the choice is pretty clear.
Newton's 3rd law, implies the more mass you have the less recoil you feel.
For example hitting a massive box will hurt a lot more than a light box, because light box will get some acceleration of its own vs massive box.
One thing it would definitely affect tho is the time within which the car could brake, provided they react in time.
That claim right there is begging for a source. It's hard to imagine landing from a person's height is worse than hitting a brick wall moving 40 km/h, unless that brick wall also threw you more than 6 meters up into the air, which point at which you'd be moving faster than 40km/h when you hit the ground.
As another example, here's a locally-high-profile crash [0] (the driver, a city councilwoman and the daughter of the county commissioner, left the scene and didn't report the crash for hours). Red lights and sightlines aside, even though not much momentum is imparted to the cyclist, the crash was enough to flip him over and knock him into the air, which changes all of the calculus for landing damage from what normally happens when you fall off a bicycle. If you land straight down on your head, it might be worse for you than getting hit in the torso at a higher speed.
[0] Content warning: this is a video of someone getting hit by a car https://youtu.be/X7V_H9bADDM?t=54