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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

Let's say we magically got rid of all SUV's. Then Douglas would find the next largest car and say the same thing.

You need to have some kind of line that distinguishes moral from immoral, if you can't do that, then your calculation is risk based, not morality.

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Minimizing harm by not maximizing self interest is a moral decision. It's not defined by the ability to make it binary.

How low is low enough? Don't drive? Don't bike? Don't eat?

For that matter, is it immoral for a pedestrian walk down the street because they have some low probability of harming an SUV driver when they splatter off the front end?

How high is too high? Can you have headlights so bright they blind other drivers? Can you drive an armoured vehicle with tracks that could crush other vehicles? Can you have circular saws on the sides of your car to deter careless fender benders?

SUV problem is mostly a grill size problem. They are designed to be aggressive and kill, you could drop them lower increase visibility and improve pedestrian impact like they do in Europe

They're designed to kill?

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some perhaps unconscious trend of buyers picking more aggressive looking cars that are more likely to kill on impact.

There is and car marketers have known it for a while.

I choose my Jeep Renegade for the interior space.

And I drive in order to reach my destination, in peace and relaxed, not to impact anybody, and certainly not to kill.

Just look at dodge marketing. They know they're making killing machines.

Yeah it’s a design trade off. Buyers prefer the aggressive look of large grills but that shape decreases visibility and is more likely to kill pedestrians on impact. That trade off is pretty well known. Without government regulations there is little value to car manufacturers to design vehicles that don’t kill pedestrians on impact so they choose designs optimized to sell that also kill more.

There was a recent case where a vehicle designed for the European market actually had the pedestrians protection hood design stripped off and replaced with more aggressive and deadly styling for the US market.

A good estate car will provide much the same room, while providing greater safety to pedestrians and better fuel economy / battery range.

There is little justification in the modern world for driving a SUV.

There's a huge justification: comfort.

I think a solid case can be made that almost all car driving is immoral. The solution isn’t individual like “buy a smaller car” is, but driving is objectively bad.

> calculation is risk based, not morality

Unfortunately it can't be a bright line. Exposing people to "excessive" risk is wrong, that's the basis of things like drink-driving laws. And that ends up turning it into an arbitrary but important line: you break the law if you exceed a blood alcohol content, but the risk you impose on other people increases seamlessly as the BAC goes up.

Trucks over a certain weight require extra licensing. I wonder if this threshold should be brought down to reflect the extra harm of larger vehicles?

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