(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.
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.