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Comment by strict9 | Hacker News Reader

Yet the massive trucks that obstruct the driver's vision to pedestrians, kids on bikes, and everything else are experiencing YoY growth.

The Challenger and Charger are terrible in terms of fuel efficiency but safer to people as drivers can see more of what's in front of them:

>Researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) analyzed the details of 14,000 fatal pedestrian crashes, and they found that SUVs were twice as likely as cars to be making a left turn when the crash happened.

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/suv-and-pickup-tr...

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I ride my bike a fair bit and can you called it. Any time i am passed dangerously close it is ALWAYS a short-box pickup.

One road I frequent is used by large commercial trucks (dump trucks). These guys are professional, and move way over giving me a LOT of space. oddly enough, the pickup drivers watch the dump trucks do this, and yet refuse to move over even slightly?

i'm not sure what it is about people in pickups, but they need to do a better job educating the drivers as well.

Like seriously, if you watched a dump truck move, why were you unable to do this as well?

it isn't just about "visibility" but there seems to be some attitude problems around pickup truck drivers.

If you see a pickup with some company logo, 90% chance they will be decent and give you space. You see someone in their "pavement princess" all washed and polished, no F'ing way they will move over.

I can't agree with this enough, and I think it has to do with dueling cultural values. Especially because I live in a very purple area. My interpretation is that the pickup drivers endanger my life to "own the libs" (people who ride bicycles).

What's more is that most of the trucks that act in this way have dealership license plate frames or stickers from the outlying rural communities, so they're coming into the community where I live and endangering my safety out of what I assume is some misguided hatred of environmentally friendly transportation.

Those short-box pickups and their drivers are terrible (and it is almost always a short-box truck with its micro 4-foot box?)

My dad was in the trades and so he owned a pickup (needed for its towing capacity). It was a "proper" pickup with an 8 foot box as well. He built kitchens and needed a large trailer to bring the cabinets to the customers house and install them. The 8 foot box allowed him to load 4x8's into the back without the trailer if needed.

I was forced to drive a pickup as well given I lived there and at the time it was the only car he had (later he got a compact car).

I don't have any issues with pickups, they are a valuable tool for many in the trades. when i drove his pickup i moved over, it was a very simple thing to do and was basic human decency.

The problem is the weekend-warrior types. I will never understand why they feel a need to do the things they do. Even buying these 4-foot box trucks makes little sense. I see them at Lowes/HomeDepot from time to time struggling to get 2x4x8's into the back while i can easily load 2x10x12's into my compact Hyundai Elantra and still close the trunk? like what did you get the truck for?

There was a time you were looked down upon for driving a pickup (blue collar worker) now they seem to be some sort of status symbol?

now they seem to be some sort of status symbol?

Part of it is marketing. You have a ton of commercials featuring trucks, treating them as glamourous. You even have Chevy sponsoring musicians to showcase Chevy trucks on their shows [0].

Plus, the price on some of these trucks (not just MSRP, but of course, including gas) outpace their utility, so yeah, some really are just a show of wealth.

0 - https://media.chevrolet.com/media/us/en/chevrolet/home.detai...

One major advantage of a pickup truck is carrying dirty stuff without getting the inside of an suv dirty. Even a small bed can carry things. Small bed pickup trucks make them easier to park and drive, they must be more efficient too. I would have probably chosen an suv version of the rivian if it was available, but only the pickup truck version was. The SUV style of the Rivian should be more fuel efficient than the truck version. The suv is almost available.

Just wait until those trucks are electric too and can accelerate as fast or faster than current electric cars.

But for some reason we don't care about car crashes and people getting run over and we keep designing highways and roads specifically to accelerate vehicles next to regular people and slower moving modes of transit and we keep locking people in their homes unless they drive 70 mph with near-instant acceleration to go half a mile to the grocery store to get a loaf of bread.

There's a terrifying race between cars getting bigger/heavier/faster while being piloted by every-more distracted drivers, and autonomous driving technology. I'm hoping that those at Waymo are making the right tradeoffs between their own product's safety and the danger of not having a better-than-human driving system like theirs more widely deployed.

The EV hummer is already supercar acceleration that the Charger and Challenger couldn't beat. And it's 9000 lbs

The Challenger is in 10s in 1/4 mile times, the EV Hummer is in 11s.

0-60 is 3.4s for challenger, 3s or less for the hummer.

1/4 mile became the standard measure for a good reason. 0-60 is just as much a measure of traction as it is of acceleration and you can go to a drag strip and test your car against others legally in 1/4 mile.

I don't hate on the acceleration. Being able to quickly get up to speed and slot yourself safely into traffic is important. EVs have taken quite a while to shake off the slowpoke penalty box. If we can make EVs sexy by making them quick, so much the better.

Visibility is an issue, but it's always been an issue (camaro, I'm looking at you!). We need better sensors to help protect people. We also need separated bike lanes and safer pedestrian infrastructure.

The cars have never been the issue here, it's the single minded focus on car centric infrastructure that's killing people.

So far this seems to be the only reasonable reply in this thread. There's a lot of "big truck bad" energy here. Like I said elsewhere - it's the driver. The vehicle doesn't move without the driver.

EV trucks are here now and they are fast. Both the F150-EV and the Rivian R1T are very fast because of their electric drive trains. I'm hoping not to see an increase in pedestrian accidents but time will tell.

> I'm hoping not to see an increase in pedestrian accidents but time will tell.

You will because we're putting supercars into the hands of people who simply cannot handle them and we obscure their line of sight and we design roads and highways for speed and to not have to pay attention to anything except the car in front of you also moving at a high rate of speed.

Also let's call this what it is, which is an increase in people being ran over, and cars crashing into each other and disfiguring people for life for no good reason. Calling it an "accident" like spilling milk instead of running over someone and their intestines spilling into the street really downplays how serious of a problem car crashes and running over people is.

So what should we do to prevent these needless injuries? I was thinking maybe rules about visibility? There's no reason in modern evs to have such giant front trunks blocking vision, as the engine isn't there. You could have a high clearance vehicle lowered front trunk I think.

Part of the solution would be designing and retrofitting roads so that they naturally slow traffic down. Smaller lanes, more frequent stops, more density (not skyscrapers but neighborhoods you love) where people frequently walk and bike so that vehicles just have to slow down. It’s not just the vehicle, that’s only part of the problem. Driving a truck should be uncomfortable in a city due to its size (like it would be in Europe), but not necessarily on the highway or rural roads.

It's not the vehicle at all. It's the driver not knowing how to handle it.

Yes, but....

It's the driver. It's not the vehicle. Some of us have driven large trucks our entire lives without incident. You put a small person in a large Tahoe and there's an exponential decrease in visibility, coupled with never having driven such a large vehicle before and you get some bad statistics.

For proof go to any grocery store during peak hours and you're very likely to see two large vehicles side by side where one is parked nicely between the lines and the other is hanging over.

It's both.

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