I'd argue that almost nobody else wants all those bells and whistles, but most people want a couple of them. So you wind up with all of them, because people will walk away from a vehicle that doesn't have what they want more than walk away from a vehicle that has too many things they don't.
I could go on. :)
There might be an option to only add the two specific features but that means a custom order that will take months to arrive and probably won't end up saving you much money anyway.
In my circle I don't know anyone wanting "infotainmant" - just a regular car to which I can connect my mobile hassle-free without dumb TV screen smack in the middle of the car...
Same goes for mobile phones - most of the people I know want to have regular sized phones (~5-5,5") but now... it's easier to smack ~7" screen to the roof-tile (that they call "phone") and sell at a premium...
SUV's are very popular among women - 43% of buyers. The industry research says that women feel safer driving them - the size makes them feel more protected, and the ride height lets them see the road much better. (Lest it go unsaid, women are on average less tall than men)
These are the reasons my wife cites preferring her Honda Pilot to her previous cars.
The only advantage SUVs offer in safety is that they're likely to flatten the other car in a crash. The characteristics of an SUV make safety worse—they handle badly, tend to roll, and their design is unsafe to pedestrians or cyclists—so buying an SUV makes the roads as a whole less safe. It's a negative-sum arms race.
SUVs have atrocious visibility, and this has its cost in blood. They are so high off the ground it's impossible to see what is near to the vehicle. Thousands of children are injured every year from drivers not seeing them over the hood. Hundreds are killed. This kind of incident has a name: the frontover.
SUVs are a major cause of poor visibility. The need to see over other cars mainly exists because cars are so stupidly tall. Buying an SUV to see over other SUVs is another negative-sum arms race.
Driving is statistically one of the most dangerous things we do in life, and someone else being drunk/high/distracted/overly tired can end your life, or the life of a loved one, in an instant.
I don't feel bad driving a larger vehicle than other people. I will prioritize my safety.
But I don't think you can be let off that easy. You seem to have come up with some way to technically admit you are in the wrong without really confronting it. What is "totally cool" supposed to mean? Does being "totally cool" with something mean it is moral, or does it just mean you don't feel angry about it? Why would you defend a decision based on whether or not it makes you "feel bad"? These words are weaselly. They dismiss the moral element of your actions without really addressing it.
If you're in the right, prove it. If you're in the wrong, admit it.
All moral questions, like, "is it moral to drive an SUV?", are variants of the Trolley Problem. Whichever choice you make ends up hurting some people and helping some others. But different people have different moral axioms about how to calculate the balance of that equation.
For example, I could probably save 5 people right now by sacrificing myself and giving away my organs. The fact that I don't means that I value my own life more than those of 5 strangers.
In the same way, driving an SUV to reduce one's own risk is not surprising.
Your own morality may lead you to different choices. That's OK. My whole point is that there is no "correct" morality.
You can try to convince others to adopt your morality (which we call "proselytizing"); you can say that some beliefs are unpopular in this society (and thus demonized); you can even look down on people who don't share your morality (we all know people like that). But you can't say that they are objectively wrong. That's not how morality works.
You can ”legislature away” socially bad decisions, at least at scale, by sufficiently shifting incentives. You can also “legislature them in” the same way.
E.g., you can create a light truck loophole in safety and economy regulations nominally intended, but not carefully bounded, to exempt vehicles with commercial use, and thereby incentivize manufacturers to expend enormous resources on propaganda to create demand for a new class of personal vehicles that fit into that loophole, shifting the market so that even after the loopholes don’t work the same way, the demand remains.
My point was that jumping from some people have wrecks because they drive drunk/high/distracted/tired to we need more legislation doesn't make any sense. If we want to inform the public of the risks of driving impaired we absolutely can do that, it doesn't require laws and punishment to help educate people.
Assuming we can legislate away bad decisions is effectively agreeing that we'd prefer the state is powerful enough to take away any decision we may want to make but that they disagree with. Why not just expect the government to help research the risks and inform us, trusting us to make the best decision for ourselves?
Of course you can. Seatbelts and airbags don't sell cars nor make shareholders money, they're only there because they were forced by legislation.
My point was that you can't legislate away drivers' bad decisions. At best you can leverage the fact that many people would rather follow the rules, and that punishment will compel more to comply.
I'm kinda really fucking sick of this particular American mindset towards cars, school shootings, gerrymandering, corporate greed, and basically everything else that sucks about our society.
Research and education is a huge help, for example. What I can't get behind is the idea that we're all such helpless children than only government punishment can keep us from ruining everything. What happens when the authority given to that government lands in the hands of a person or pay with whom you fundamentally disagree?
First and foremost we need to educate or population better, but from there the government should rarely need to go beyond good faith research and trusting it's people to generally make the best decision for themselves.
By choosing to drive those in populated areas you're signalling a total disregard for lives of others.
Even if we go for the selfish perspective, rollover rates for SUVs are intrinsically higher, and it looks like the Hilux in particular hasn’t bothered fixing this design flaw in 9 years[2]. And that additional braking distance can be the difference between a massive headache from rear ending, or worse.
Driving defensively will increase your odds of survival per mile far more than any additional metal will.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00224...
FWIW you can always kill yourself after killing a child
The average number of death per km was decreasing until covid in Europe and countries that did not buy into the SUV trends, but started increasing in the US in the early 2010s and correlate with the percentage of SUVs.
It's very sad to see people being cool with that but I understand it's rational. You will likely not go to jail if you kill someone because of low visibility. The victim blaming culture will even try to convince you it's not your fault that you haven't seen a pedestrian or cyclist from the vehicle you have chosen to drive.
Unfortunately the way a lot of American culture works means that this is actually the desired outcome. Cars today are basically advertised on their pedestrian killing prowess and, unsurprisingly, have even been used as weapons of terror quite frequently recently.
I don’t know if you’d call my Subaru an SUV or not, but daily I’m transporting multiple kids, a cello, football gear, groceries, various things for work - there are lots of reasons why people need larger vehicles.
Also, the newest SUVs have lower rollover death rates than the newest cars.
Oh, and "pedestrian airbags" only help you avoid hitting the windshield. On most trucks and SUVs you don't even make it that far. You're just squashed like roadkill on their grills.
Something like this: https://goo.gl/maps/dmivYV7AzrDVmtBN6
Heavy marketing was done to make them popular, and once they reached a certain threshold, their size created an arms race, since they blocked visibility for everyone not also in an SUV.
Could survive with a Toyota Corolla? Definitely. Does the Highlander make life better? Yes.
Weird that heavy marketing would finally penetrate my brain the same year we had our first kid.
Nah, but that marketing, and the financial incentives which motivated it, and the arms race from a critical mass of larger vehicles affecting visibility because of it are why minivans and SUVs (the former popular first and then the latter later because of when each worked as a regulatory dodge) bevame the choice for those needs, which were once filled by station wagons.
I’m an SUV owner myself for very similar immediate reasons to the ones you cite. Nothing about that interferes with my ability to understand that the market context within which those preferences call for that result is a product of specific, well-documented interplay between regulation and profit-seeking business behavior over several decades.
1. The set of vehicles on the road and thus what your experience in different vehicles will be like, e.g., in terms of road visibility, and
2. The mix of specific vehicle models and features of each that are actually manufactured and available at the time you made thaf decision.
You know what is even easier for loading kind in a vehicle? Sliding doors.
I agree. I was "indifferent" between the Highlander and the Sienna which is its minivan counterpart.
The funny thing is for all the hate the SUVs get for being big and heavy, the Sienna is slightly bigger and heavier.
I have only seen this claim made by people who don't.
Ah... and then everyone will get a SUV with similar mentality and then we will get SUV-extra even higher and "sturdier" to feel even safer?
FFS... world is not hostile, riding in compact city-car is not harmful. At best it's the mentality that "everything outside wants to kill me" o_O Get a tank maybe?
This has to do with the power they're trying to cram into the phones. We've pretty much gotten transistors as small as we can, but manufacturers still need to sell new phones and the way they've done that for years is increase compute and camera power.
Why those big phones popular? Because CPU efficiency doesn't sell well but number do, so we have a race: more storage, more ram, more MP camera... and bigger screen. Those are the most visible and easiest to adjust things. And many people associate size with being "better"...
The only thing I like about this change is that there seems to be far less high pressure sales going on.
Given that everyone else wants those bells and whistles, ironically you get more by paying less which means logically more bells and whistles is the better deal.
A logical person would in turn want the cars with "too much stuff". That is unless you're willing to pay more for less stuff.