Most accidents only involve a single car.
There is less control in larger vehicles.
Everyone thinks they are a better driver than they are and the only way they'll end up in an accident is if someone else hits them.
Add all this up and many want to drive larger cars.
Smaller cars bear more of the risk in a multi-car accident from the more dangerous larger cars. The smaller cars themselves are safer.
It's like saying t-shirts are less safe than guns because they won't stop bullets.
Choosing a car to be in an accident, a bigger car is a solid choice. Of course, that skips over being in an accident at all. It also skips over any concern for others -- but so many people view that hypothetical accident as clearly the other person's fault, so may as well go with the big car.
Again, you're victim blaming here. The small car is not causing the danger. T-shirts are not more dangerous than guns just because someone firing a gun randomly into a crowd is less likely to get hurt than someone in the crowd wearing a t-shirt.
Which car is safer if you're choosing a car to be in? big or small? The bigger is safer and the smaller is more dangerous (to be in), in a multi-car accident.
My whole post was on the rationalization of the choice of size of car. Language matters, as you say. It is about people not choosing the smaller car and not being the victim due to driving a smaller car.
Yes, the escalation of size causes problems in aggregate, but not the point of what I wrote.
You are participating in the victim blaming and the arms race by conflating the externalisation of risk with safety. And there is no need to aggregate to see the effect. It is present in every individual case.
The person in the big car is not being safer, they are being more dangerous and more selfish. Just because they perceive that their selfishness is exceeding the added danger (something not borne out by the stats) does not justify it. Acknowledging the framing of the auto industry is making the problem worse.
And that’s to say nothing of what happens when the person being hit is a pedestrian or cyclist.
I hear this a lot and wonder how true it is because I personally think i am a horrible driver and can't wait until actually safe fully self driving cars take away my need to drive. on the other had a drive a small car and want a smaller one despite sharing the roads with behemoth raised 4x4 pickups that seem to be inexplicably popular.
Given the explanations I've been given for why demonstration videos of general purpose vision-based robots are still often sped up x4 or more (despite Tesla and Spot), I have to assume it's at least a few years away yet, but that's not never.
https://insideevs.com/news/575160/mercedes-accepts-legal-res...
I would favour this.
One thing I find genuinely surprising is that the Renault Zoes we have as pool cars at work have got far bigger blind spots and far worse visibility than my 25-year-old Range Rover.
And, in turn, although that Range Rover is described as an SUV (it's not especially sporty, it's a top-heavy three tonne army truck with nicer seats), it's the same length and width as most "normal" family saloons. It's got a much smaller footprint on the road than some large 5-seaters like a Tesla Model S.
My ‘60s Triumph 2000 had amazing visibility. If I’d rolled I’d have died for sure, but I’d have seen the thing that killed me.
It is appears that the driver of the large SUV or pickup believes they have right of way over smaller cars, pedestrians and cyclists.
A "get out of my way" attitude.
I love small cars, not to mention cycling and walking.
It concerns me that the shift of cars parked at the parking lot has dramatically changed over the past 20 years.
Walking from the car to the shop is like carpark gauntlet, you need to be increasingly ready to dodge giant vehicles reversing with disregard to their surroundings.
This didn't happen in a vacuum. Poorly written fuel efficiency regulations incentivized automakers to do this.
It would be very interesting to see more studies on this. Where I am, the car of choice is a lifted truck that I don’t think has been accounted for with regards to pedestrian safety.
You can argue that this is irrational based on handling or fuel economy or whatever. But for better or worse buyers prefer size and comfort.
It's still manageable, and fine for occasional trips, but I wouldn't choose that car to drive 4 adults daily.
Is this a typical thing that cars do? I'm not sure if I've seen 4 adults in a car in the last month.
I see two solutions. One is to use democracy and the State's supposed monopoly on violence to ban these weapons. The other is tit-for-tat: SUV drivers need to be killed at random until death rates reach statistical equality. Only then will the expected value to a safety-concious person of an SUV not exceed that of a sedan.
Right now, their thought process goes, "I will probably get into an accident, and when I do I want to dominate the other driver". That thought process needs to include counterbalancing considerations like, "yeah, but driving this will attract legal small-arms fire from Corolla drivers", or, "a knife-wielding spec-ops team of motorcyclists will be able to look up my license plate in the database and infiltrate my home while I sleep".
I'm joking but only kinda. This is literally life-and-death stuff. If people drive SUVs because they fear for their lives, then maybe they need to not drive SUVs because they fear for their lives.
While controversial because car companies in the US intentionally chose to market large SUVs to the public, there is some evidence that smaller vehicles are safer and that auto manufacturers have doubled down on unsafe vehicles. Why this is the case, isn’t exactly known, but one of the theories is that bad drivers will get behind bigger cars and take more risks.
I’ve driven both large SUVs and smaller subcompacts, and I can talk at length on the pros and cons. However, as a driver, I can tell you that smaller cars are often bullied by larger cars, and this gives weight to the idea that people driving larger vehicles take larger risks, resulting in greater danger to the driver and to other cars and pedestrians.
There’s also the mistaken perception by older generations that smaller cars are inherently more dangerous; this was once true, and everyone can point to disastrously unsafe compact cars in the 1970s and 1980s. But due to modern technology and safety enhancements, this probably hasn’t been true for the last two decades or more. This older, erroneous belief continues to underlie why people choose larger vehicles today.