Right now the NCAP has pedestrian avoidance but nothing on impact. It would be fairly trivial to test the impact of hitting a crash dummy at 30mph.
However the US regulator is already floating a proposal to include similar pedestrian testing in its requirements.
We are trully living in the future. :) I heard that cars are getting smarter but you are the first i have the pleasure to chat with.
Joking asside, i don’t know if I have ever seen a more succint example of how people identify with their cars.
Plus, larger vehicles are known to be safer so every soccer mom in America wants an Escalade so that lil Timmy survives and the other families kid dies when she hits a car she couldn’t even see due to the height differential.
Some of the price differences are due to emissions as you mention, but the lion share of the price difference is due to economics of scale which kick in for the huge amounts of giant trucks and SUVs that Americans buy, showing that we fking love our gas guzzlers and bro-dozers.
The only real downsides to larger vehicles are cost and exterior size, but with subsidy, wide lanes, and big parking spots those pains are removed. Small cars mostly are mostly popular where lanes are narrow, parking spots are tiny, costs are high, and so forth.
Happily, this is mostly orthogonal to safe road design (aside from the towering height of today’s truck grilles)
The “big vehicle = more features” thing is also an independent reason for the success and popularity of big vehicles in America.
I think the emission standards are dumb, but this narrative around customer choice is really getting distorted in weird ways. The bottom line is that people in the US want to drive pickups. Maybe for good reasons, maybe for bad reasons, but they go out of their way to do this. And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
Yes, a newspaper can always post a photo of a lifted 2024 RAM 3500 next to a 1975 Chevy C10 pickup to get some internet outrage points, but if you post an apples-to-apples comparison, the changes aren't really all that dramatic.
Disingenuous as heck. I've literally never seen a modern non-commercial regular cab, standard bed F-150. Far more likely the people in question are driving massive SuperCrew cabs. And those SuperCrews start at $43,000 which means more like $50,000 for a realistic spec.
Regular Cab/6.5-Foot Bed: Length – 209.1 inches / Wheelbase – 122.8 inches
Regular Cab/8.0-Foot Bed: Length – 227.7 inches / Wheelbase – 141.5 inches
SuperCab/6.5-Foot Bed: Length – 231.7 inches / Wheelbase – 145.4 inches
SuperCab/8.0-Foot Bed: Length – 250.3 inches / Wheelbase – 164.1 inches
SuperCrew/5.5-Foot Bed: Length – 231.7 inches / Wheelbase – 145.4 inches
SuperCrew/6.5-Foot Bed: Length – 243.5 inches / Wheelbase – 157.2 inches
Nope, as you can see above bed may be shrinking, cab growing and growing.
These start at about $44,000. I was responding to the parent's claim that you can have a normal sedan or a pickup for "$15,000", so consumers choose the larger car sort of by default.
In reality, they pay a lot more for pickups because they want pickups, not because of some lopsided pricing incentives.
That’s more a function of crew cabs and using a pickup as a family vehicle. The bed has to shorten as the cab lengthens, else the truck gets unmanageablely long.
Which could also reasonably be called a pretty big car.
A lot of people like bigger vehicles. For ages, big cars drove poorly, absolutely guzzled gas, and lacked features. Over the past 20 years, auto makers basically solved all of these issues.
A lot of big vehicles drive much better for what most people do - straight driving on highway. Fuel economy is “good enough”. Large trucks and SUVs have great feature sets. On top of all of that, large vehicles seat more, hold more, and generally still fit in most parking spaces and garages.
People just want big cars
It comes down to: "I want to drive big, loud, smelly, dangerous car free of any consequences for fraction of the cost". We don't tolerate such desires in other areas but cars somehow get free pass still.
It's really not that black and white. There's a line between the government deciding the optimal allocation of all resources and you retaining some degree of personal freedom. Techies in the SF Bay Area are very quick to draw that line in a way that affects other people's lifestyles, but doesn't affect their own. Guess what - pickup drivers in Texas have critical opinions about your consumer choices too.
If you think the math for cars is uniquely bad, I think that's a reasonable position, although I suspect it's pretty myopic. The externalities of cheap consumer goods from China, or of a clothes dryer or an AC unit, are pretty terrible too.
The math aside, there is a huge risk to this sort of hyper-rational accounting. It's probably not cost-effective for the society to medically prolong the lives of people over the age of 50. There are many squishy, hard-to-parametrize overriding considerations for policy decisions, and if we accept it for our lifestyles, we should probably at least try to understand what they are for other lifestyles too.
Do you also have a problem with commercial trucks or just the people that chose personal trucks because they don't agree with your ideology?
They still guzzle insane amounts of gas and generally drive poorly. That hasn't changed in decades. They may handle better than they did in the past, but they still handle poorly. Similarly they may get better gas milage, but not by much, and not in comparison to other vehicles.
For non-Americans: While literally writing truck bed lengths being 8 inches (8") and 5.5 inches (5.5"), the text means 8 feet (8', 2.44m) and 5.5 feet (5.5', 1.68m). Americans don't always remember which of the " and ' is which, so they use these interchangeably (and according to the movie This is Spinal Tap, so do the English).
Yeah…
* https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/honda-civic-2021-se...
The F-150 is +1216mm (48") longer, +228mm wider, +546mm taller than a Civic.
> It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
What is the front-end height of all of these vehicles?
> Pedestrian deaths in the US have risen in recent years. Concurrently, US vehicles have increased in size, which may pose a safety risk for pedestrians. In particular, the increased height of vehicle front-ends may present a danger for pedestrians in a crash, as the point of vehicle contact is more likely to occur at the pedestrian’s chest or head. I merge US crash data with a public data set on vehicle dimensions to test for the impact of vehicle height on the likelihood that a struck pedestrian dies. After controlling for crash characteristics, I estimate a 10 cm increase in the vehicle’s front-end height is associated with a 22% increase in fatality risk. I estimate that a cap on front-end vehicle heights of 1.25 m would reduce annual US pedestrian deaths by 509.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221201222...
Based on what? Anecdotal I know, but my biggest frustration is I can't convince friends and family they should buy a small car instead of an SUV because they always say "I might need to move a couch/dresser/friends/etc one day". I'm convinced they would come out way ahead buying a small car and renting a truck the once or twice a year they need it but again, I've yet to convince anyone that's the case
So I'd rather spend a few thousand more for a midsize or large car/suv than a mini or compact car. It has nothing to do with neighbors, or signaling. Larger cars are usually just better.
This article is clearly on the money.
You get the utility of a truck and van with the MPG of a car, I see why they took over the world. If it weren't for pickup trucks being a cultural icon they would probably have replaced the "workman" vehicle too.
At some point i had a Fit and a slightly larger Suzuki SX4. I got to carry 30 folding chairs in the Fit once. I could maybe have fit 20 of them in the Suzuki.
It's a real shame they don't make the Fit anymore here in the US. Instead we get that shitty crossover HRC in it's place that doesn't have nearly the storage space in it, because it has to look like it's higher off the ground to satisfy buyers.
Just a preposterously useful car without being conspicuous at all.
The SUV protectionism of import tariffs, safety exclusions, and pollution carve-outs must end because they're killing us on the roads, killing our health through more pollution, and killing the planet.
Makes a pretty convincing case.
How much does it cost to execute this whole plan? You end up taking a large percentage just to run the program with little to show for. It does make for great political campaigns.
That's patently false.
Americans by and large want SUVs at a minimum the size of CRV or RAV4, or else a pickup. At any rate with hybrid vehicles getting 40mpg is very attainable. I have a three row SUV that gets this. And I bought it because I really wanted a much more comfortable vehicle I could fit more humans and stuff in.
Other comments addressed this, but it’s also absolutely bananas to claim trucks are as cheap as small cars in the US. Even the F-150 quoted in the comments which is already more than 10k more than the car is quoted as the base model that basically doesn’t exist outside of work fleets. You’d be lucky to find a truck with 100k miles for 15k.
The bright shining hope: Most Americans do not want these big cars. Legislation is making small vehicles less competitive, when it should be the other way.
AKA - we have good, cheap(ish) electric trucks now. Legislation doesn't need to worry about farmers who can't afford electric anymore.