If safety was a primary concern for U.S. regulators, large consumer SUVs and trucks would not exist in their current form. As of ~2019 (the last such study I know of) trucks killed occupants of other vehicles at 2.5x the rate of cars and "SUVs" (an increasingly useless category as it includes everything from small unibody crossovers to enormous body-on-frame Canyonero-style monstrosities). I am not aware of any comparable headline figure for how pedestrians fare against them but I would put money on their pedestrian safety performance also being atrocious.
They are quite literally an atrocity against the American people, a public health hazard of the first order, and our regulators evidently do not give one single shit.
Through that lens the opinion you've expressed here—that people should not be allowed to drive cars that make them more unsafe—is extremely ironic, because the semiliterate chuds who support the unrestrained escalation of larger and deadlier and larger and deadlier vehicles on public roads make the exact opposite "argument" as a justification of why they should be allowed: freedom, personal responsibility, etcetera. I elide the details because it's mad-libs anyway, not any kind of coherent position unless one discards the notion of a social contract entirely.
I'm not suggesting you yourself hold an opinion like that, but it seems a uniquely American dichotomy that one is not allowed to drive a car that makes oneself more likely to die, but there is absolutely no problem with driving a car that's several times more likely to kill somebody else.
(I don’t actually drive a gtk boxer but it’s the logical conclusion of this dumb trend).
Open source in IT area is one of the possible exist. Carbon tax is also market solution. …
How about producing one using e in USA. Or …
Regulation meant what and how … it may be necessary. It may need to over-regulate. And who regulate the regulator. Abd how about agency problem.
Mix solution … if it is an easy situation you may not know there is a problem usually.
Where the 2023 Honda Accord has a rating of "good"* from IIHS on the updated side impact test, and NHTSA's rating for the 2022 model for side crash is 5 stars** (2023 data not yet available), it seems entirely likely that your friend would also still be alive today if they were also in a Honda Accord. The arms race for bigger and bigger vehicles is just that - an arms race. I don't want to walk or drive in the world of Mad Max, where everyone drives semi-trucks and have spikes all over them to protect the inhabitants of a vehicle.
It should also be noted that bigger isn't automatically better. For the 2022 side impact test by IIHS, the Honda Passport, Honda Pilot, Hyundai Palisade, Jeep Wrangler 4-door, Kia Telluride and Nissan Murano SUVs all received "marginal" ratings***.
Prior to 2011, SUVs weren't even tested for side impact ratings.
* https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/honda/accord-4-door-sed...
** https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2022/HONDA/ACCORD/4%252520DR/F...
*** https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/most-midsize-suvs-perform-w...
IIHS says:
“Frontal crash test results can't be used to compare vehicle performance across weight classes.… Given equivalent frontal ratings, the heavier of two vehicles usually offers better protection in real-world crashes.”
Bigger cars are safer, for better or worse. Those Ford F-350s will, in general, survive crashes and protect the occupants better than something like a Toyota Camry.
IOW, it's a market failure (externality).
If you hit a bridge pillar or drive off a cliff, it doesn't matter how heavy your vehicle is.
I'd for these types of crashes it's much better to have a small, nimble vehicle that is more stable and doesn't crash in the first place rather than a huge truck with poor grip that tips over if you corner too fast.
I've seen the aftermath of a Renault Megane hitting a Ford Explorer, and it wasn't pretty. The Megane was a writeoff, with significant intrusion into the passenger area. The Explorer looked like it had been de-orbited rather than centre-punched by a small hatchback, with the bodywork in four pieces and parts scattered for about 100m. The occupants did not fare well, and indeed none of the small pieces of the occupants spread around fared well either.
The most important safety feature in a vehicle is performance, and SUVs (especially mid and full size) are outright worse, regardless of what your average American thinks.
Do you have a source for this? I'm honestly curious. In every near-miss I've had in traffic, the only performance that would have helped is braking performance. And I drive a Kei car as a sole family car. On long highway road trips.
Good handling is also very important for safety. SUVs before stability control are a perfect example of this.
What if your friend was still alive today because he was driving his lifted Dodge Ram 2500 when he ran a red light twelve beers deep and T-boned an Accord, his aftermarket steel bumper severing the B-pillar and decapitating all four occupants (mother, father, two daughters)? Would you still imply that his choice of vehicle was defensible because it increased his chances of surviving that collision?
Ideally humans would simply not drive, but that's not feasible in the world we currently live in, so everybody should be on a level playing field designed not only to evenly distribute risk but also to minimize it. Like I said in my original post, consumer pickups as they exist in America today are measurably incompatible with the public good.
USA is world no1 at killing pedestrians. Most pedestrian deaths per mile driven of any country. 7000 pedestrians die in traffic collisions annually.
Freakonomics just started a 3-part series on this.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-the-u-s-so-good-at-k...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...
> Most pedestrian deaths per mile driven of any country
You said
> If I look at the numbers [1] I highly doubt the US is even in the top 50
The table in the link [1] you shared, when sorted by deaths per mile driven, ranks the USA (2021 data) 5th in the world, with Mexico (2013 data) being 1st.
Also the fact US statistic per mile are so high, despise it being a big country where I'd imagine most miles were highway ones probably hides even higher rate of accidents in cities.
You know what vehicle I see all the time that doesn’t require a license or minimum age, doesn’t have any safety features and can go 15-20 mph alongside traffic and often on a city sidewalk amongst pedestrians? A bicycle ;)
It's dumb to mandate helmets or any other specific technology because it removes the possibility for something better or for context-based decisionmaking.
Suppose you ride your motorcycle into the desert and then lose your helmet into a canyon. Your phone is dead. Your choices are a thirty hour walk out of the desert which might cause you to die of dehydration, or riding your motorcycle without a helmet. Should you get a ticket for making the obvious choice?
This doesn't contribute to the upkeep of roads in the same manner as a yearly tax on those that use them.
So no, not the same benefit at all.
But also, the value of roads scales poorly with any of these things. The ability to have a package delivered to your front door is valuable regardless of whether or not you even have a car, and the value of it depends on what's in it rather than how much the truck cost. The most sensible way to fund any kind of basic infrastructure is from general revenues.
I'm stating that a number of charges go towards the upkeep of roads and related services (at least in the country I'm present in) these charges include driver and vehicle licences, fuel taxes, etc.
> So the most sensible way to ..
Proposing an alternative doesn't negate the present practices, moreover it makes sense that as much of the public cost associated with roads should come from those that use the roads the most.
It's the fact that the driver license fee is paid at renewal, which isn't yearly in any US state for anyone under the age of 79. Moreover, the amount of the fee is such that it's essentially paying for the licensing bureaucracy, which you wouldn't need if you didn't have licensing.
> Proposing an alternative doesn't negate the present practices
Present practices have to be meritorious to justify preserving them.
> it makes sense that as much of the public cost associated with roads should come from those that use the roads the most.
But what does that mean?
If it's contribution to the cost of road maintenance then the cost should be paid almost entirely by a per-mile tax on large trucks, because road damage is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power and passenger vehicles are a rounding error.
If it's value of the roads then we're back to general revenues because the value is proportional to economic activity enabled by basic infrastructure which has no real relationship to number of miles traveled. One truckload of electronics is worth more than ten truckloads of scrap iron. One life-saving ride in an ambulance is worth more than a thousand days of commuting.
That's your quibble?
When doing the bookkeeping on revenue flowing in against cost going out it's a simple matter to look at licence fees per annum, axle taxes per annumn, fuel taxes per annum Vs road program costs per annum.
These can be broken down to monthly or per quarter, etc.
Here we have licences that can be paid for three months, or six months, or twelve months or for three years, even so the public data from the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development (the federal department that oversees all the road related revenue (multiple sources), plans and funds road upkeep and extensions) talks about licence numbers per year.
The median license renewal cost in the US is around $30, for an interval of typically 6-8 years. Which is to say, less than $5/year. Subtract the overhead of the licensing bureaucracy. If the result is nonzero there's a decent chance it's because it's a negative number. In neither case is it paying for a material amount of road maintenance.
> axle taxes per annumn, fuel taxes per annum Vs road program costs per annum.
Car tax and fuel tax?
But put that to the side for a moment. Even if you had a country that collected a significant amount of revenue from driver licensing, and you inadvisably wanted to continue to collect that amount of money from that population (note: this is a regressive tax anywhere that most people drive cars), why would you need driver licensing for that instead of adding the same amount to the car tax?
But yes, truck used to haul building materials for a building site is the vehicle fulfilling its purpose and any replacement for that purpose being suboptimal.
Truck bought to haul 2 bags of groceries is not. Tax the second one.
How do you do this without taxing the first one?
If someone buys a truck to haul building materials to a building site, they are understandably not going to buy a separate vehicle just to haul 2 bags of groceries. But then how do you know what anybody is using it for the rest of the time? The list of legitimate purposes is unlimited. You're a homeowner who is into gardening and always bringing home mulch and saplings and renting landscaping equipment for projects. You're a retrocomputing enthusiast whose hobby requires you to be constantly transporting old mainframes. You're a parent who has to transport an entire junior varsity soccer team to practice every night.
How do you propose to distinguish any of these from someone who only buys a tank to carry home groceries?
Given the chance of the story being fabricated close to 100% catering for it is unreasonable.
Meanwhile, there is a general necessity defense to violating all traffic laws for your motorcycle example. We don't list every possible emergency or every possible rule we would allow an exception to.
They argued against mandating helmets in cars. Your point was that we could do something better than helmets and less inconvenient, namely airbags. But that is an argument for not mandating helmets. And the same argument generalizes to any specific technology. What happens when someone comes up with something better than an airbag but then it doesn't satisfy the rule "is an airbag" and is therefore prohibited?
> Meanwhile, there is a general necessity defense to violating all traffic laws for your motorcycle example.
In practice this kind of general exception either consumes the rule or isn't available when it legitimately applies. If you can say you lost your helmet and would have been stranded then everyone says this and you can't enforce the law. But if you can't claim that when it's true then the necessity defense isn't meaningful.
Also the person that ties down loads with multiple ropes | straps truckies hitches and stoppers. Not to mention sopping every few hundred miles to check tensions and reset as required.
Loose loads are a pain in the arse and often dangerous.
A soup can rolling loose and jamming up under a brake or accelerator pedal is something that really happens .. and it's no fun when it does.
I care for a basic and selfish reason beyond the "human missile" one: if I'm in a car crash with you and there's only one bed available in the ER, I don't want your lack of a seatbelt to be the source of a hard choice by the doctors operating on us.
Also, you know who dies in much greater numbers than pedestrians due to vehicle crashes? The pedestrians walking by the bicyclists.
So should pedestrians be forced to wear massive armors of steel when they walk around?
Oh wait, that’s how so many awful American cities are designed. With absolutely no space for pedestrians who have to drive everywhere.
In reality there’s only 1 source of danger on streets. Massive 2 ton vehicles that endanger their own occupants and everyone around them. Take away the 2 tons of metal usually carrying 1 person and everyone is safe.
But yeah, without cars motorcycles and scooters suddenly become much safer way of transport
Also, the other argument goes that "people don't know how to actually get what they want for themselves, and will act against their own true self-interests". Which is definitely true to an extend but the devil is in how far you're willing to stretch that.
The solution to this is to replace safety nets with transfer payments. Don't provide people with healthcare, provide them with money with which they can buy healthcare or insurance. This also stops the subsidy from ratcheting up the cost of the thing, because if you can drive 30 minutes out of your way to save a thousand dollars you do it, but if the government is paying either way then you don't.
And then if people want to buy less safe cars, insurance carriers will charge them higher premiums.
> Also, the other argument goes that "people don't know how to actually get what they want for themselves, and will act against their own true self-interests".
This is nothing more than paternalism and has proved wrong time and again. It turns out that on average people understand their own situation better than far away generalist policymakers, even before you add in lobbyist influence.
Which isn't to say that an individual will never make a mistake. But legislators make mistakes at scale. Whereas if you want to get individuals to change their behavior in a way that genuinely benefits them, all you have to do is tell them about it, not punish them if they hear you out and still want to do something else.
If the government is paying, why would it be cheaper 30 minutes away? One of the main features of single payer systems is that the single payer can impose a price list, and control any “ratcheting of prices” as you put it
If they set the price too low, you get shortages or long queues or sacrifice quality and no one can do better because that would require charging more which isn't allowed.
If they set the price too high they're overpaying, which is what happens in any system where the providers have political influence, as is manifestly the case in the US. Then new competitors can't lower the price because it's set by corrupt politicians and more efficient providers can't return the difference to patients who choose them.
We're talking about a single purchaser using its power to impose prices on suppliers. It's hardly unique - how do you think Walmart keeps its prices as low as possible? By leveraging their power.
And all your aguments seem a bit moot when you look at countries with single-payer systems - they just work, at a per-person cost that is far lower than the US
Walmart is subject to competitive pressure. If they squeeze suppliers too hard and quality suffers or some suppliers refuse to meet their demands, consumers can go buy products from a different retailer.
In cases where you actually do have a private monopolist, is is terrible.
> And all your aguments seem a bit moot when you look at countries with single-payer systems - they just work, at a per-person cost that is far lower than the US
In the US the medical providers have significant political influence which results in a regulatory environment that favors high prices and there is no reason to expect a single payer system in the same environment to change that.
In some systems the providers have less political influence, but many of those systems have long queues or refuse care on the basis of cost or have other deficiencies with no recourse.
It's also entirely possible to have a socialized system which is more efficient than the status quo in the US but less efficient than a system that actually exposed providers to competitive pressure. The cost efficiency of the existing US healthcare system is a bar level with the ground.
But on a road people don't just hurt themselves by reckless conduct. A collision usually has a second participation vehicle, and sometimes many more if a pile-up occurs on a busy road. The other participants did not sign up for hurting themselves, and can be hurt more than the original reckless driver.
So you should be cheering for people to get them as if they crash into you, you're safer
They also put huge amounts of effort into maintaining them, learn new skills and keep themselves busy.
So while vintage cars and the culture around them do obviously cause deaths due to accidents, I'd suspect they also perform a huge amount of social good in terms of reducing social isolation, depression/despair, Alzheimer's and a whole lot of other subtle things I didn't even consider.
However, re: "crumple zones":
The streets of the USA are basically an arms race. Bigger and bigger and bigger because "it's safer". Safer for you, maybe. This is how we ended up with pickup trucks that have hoods as high as your shoulders.
Kei trucks and cars are great, and in Japan they're quite safe (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24499113/) but the context is completely different. Cars weigh half as much, the drivers are twice as careful and traveling at half the speed.
Kei cars are popular because they’re cheap to run and small, but they are a tin can on wheels.
How about the giant trucks with huge blindspots known to roll over kids in driveways, where's the outrage there?
> But there's no good reason we need to allow people to import old, unsafe vehicles like this.
Sure there is, there's a gap in the market for small efficient light trucks/vans for around town and in urban environments, things that don't need to go on interstates. Light vehicles that don't mess up the roads like 6000lb+ vehicles. But we aren't allowed to have nice things like this due to the tariff situation, so the 25yr loophole is currently the only way.
"we should ban participating in traffic without the safety features of a new car." No we shouldn't for the same reason we don't ban bicycles, motorbikes, scooters,... which are at least as dangerous to drive as an old tiny car.
Riding a motorcycle without helmets, kids on their laps, cars without seatbelts, makeshift trucks with cargo randomly stacked and not strapped down.
They are completely oblivious to the safety risks. But you know what? 99% of the time it doesn't matter. They live long and healthy lives.
I get the sense the West has progressively improved safety to the point that even small incremental improvements are viewed as "you'll be dead without them".
Like I said, in the West, people are so concerned about safety they loose all sense of relativeness. Saying that "wow, your car doesn't have airbags, you're as good as dead" is a ridiculous statement.
A million to one? Less?
It's not that airbags aren't more safe, it's that they protect you from a risk with a very low probability.
Yet people act like you're reckless for driving a vehicle without them. It's a lack of understanding of probabilities. Humans routinely focus on a small risk while ignoring larger risks.
>But there's no good reason we need to allow people to import old, unsafe vehicles like this.
If this is your argument, motorcycles seems like a much better target.
Motorcycles are much less safe when compared to this truck. Would you also ban them, or do they receive an arbitrary exception?
https://electrek.co/2021/10/25/i-actually-bought-a-cheap-ele...
I had to look it up myself, not being sure, but "the Navi isn’t freeway-legal in many states" [0]
So probably allowing them on city streets but not highways is what I would propose, to answer your question. I don't think banning them altogether is right (for the Kei truck or Navi) since micromobility has all sorts of benefits where it fits.
[0] https://ultimatemotorcycling.com/2022/07/28/2022-honda-navi-...
They could care less about the 25-year-old cars-- it's the new ones, the ones that probably meet or exceed the spirit of US safety standards but have some marginal differences from US norms or lack a formal certification, that they're after.
They probably offered the 25 year carveout to make sure they could get the restriction on the important commercial market without creating a dispute with a niche community (the vintage-car enthusiasts) that could derail the whole regulatory process.
To me, the equally weird part is the car-of-Thesus situation. We have a regulatory environment that says basically "here's a block of rust that was demolished in an accident and sat for 25 years in the rain in a scrapyard, but because it has the VIN plate from an ancient Mustang/Defender/Porsche/etc. on it, you can build basically an entirely new car around it and not have to honour modern rules about safety or emissions." There isn't an obvious way to incentivize the classic-car people to think in terms of those standards when they retrofit.
A 30mph collision in the average American SUV will kill all the occupants too, because they have absolutely no safety features.
"Look at how strong this truck is, it survived an accident with barely a scratch!" just means it transferred all the energy to the wet squashy piles of mixed meat inside.
In each of the PDFs, you can find the occupant data summary on page 6 and the photos starting around page 42.
[1] https://nrd-static.nhtsa.dot.gov/reports/vehdb/v10000/v11300...
[2] https://nrd-static.nhtsa.dot.gov/reports/vehdb/v10000/v11000...
[3] https://nrd-static.nhtsa.dot.gov/reports/vehdb/v10000/v10600...
I'm not getting one because of reasons you mentioned (litte kei tipper would be perfect size vehicle for my needs) but I don't see why other people should be stopped from.
If you want safety ban anything bigger than 2 ton for non-commercial use first, the SUVs and trucks sizing gonna kill more people than some random buying a kei truck for themselves.
> You'll need to find a truck that is at least 25 years old. In the US, cars more youthful than that must comply with FMVSS (safety standards).
> No air bags, [...] power steering, or crumple zones.
I feel like this sort of thing is a fantastic illustration of the irresponsible level which most drivers (in the US at least; can't speak to other countries) feel that they are just so so good at driving that they believe all these safety features are fine to go without.
Sure, this is presumably not your sole vehicle or daily driver. And sure, you're not going to be taking one of these on a 65mph highway. But a 30mph head-on collision with another vehicle will almost certainly kill you in one of these trucks. And I know if I was the driver of the other vehicle, and survived, even if I wasn't the one at fault, I'd probably need years of expensive therapy to get past it all.
The thing that boggles my mind his how this 25-year-old grandfathering thing works. I think it's totally fair to allow old vehicles on the road that may not comply with today's standards, but did comply when they were originally made and titled (in the US). But there's no good reason we need to allow people to import old, unsafe vehicles like this.