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Comment by Judgmentality | Hacker News Reader

As someone who hates how ugly modern cars have become, I can also acknowledge the extraordinary leap in safety they've achieved since then. Many of the rules are designed around safety.

Although a counterpoint to this is the giant A pillars limit visibility so much as to be dangerous themselves.

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I almost got t-bones a few weeks ago due to my pillars. It was a rural intersection that’s at an angle and I looked both ways. I didn’t notice the road was at an angle where an approaching car would be hidden. I pulled out, and if I had been .2 seconds faster I might’ve been dead. A van zoomed by going 60 and I braked all of a few inches from getting hit.

Stupid of me, of course. But it’s easy to miss a bad combination of factors.

There's a website out there somewhere about the issue of not seeing cross traffic because it's approaching the intersection at just the right speed to stay hidden behind the A pillar of your car. Ah, it looks like it involved cyclists [1].

OTOH there's also a fairly simply fix invented by an 8th grader... [2]

[1] https://www.core77.com/posts/71732/

[2] https://www.core77.com/posts/91054/

The giant A pillars are a nuisance for sure, but you're supposed to bob and weave your head with any size A-pillar. Even with the smaller old A-pillars you can hide plenty of things behind it.

If you're ever in the Netherlands you should book a driving lesson for shits and giggles. Not claiming we're all amazing drivers, but we sure do have hard driving exams when compared to the USA.

In the USA, if you have a pulse, you'll pass the driving exam.

That's what I here. Meanwhile over here you can get an instant fail for opening the door the wrong way.

In America, in most states, Driver's Ed is optional, which I think is beyond ridiculous. People expect your parents to teach you to drive, which leads to gaps in knowledge (A significant percentage of people in the USA don't think you should keep right except when passing), and in some cases, flat-out wrong teachings.

Even when there IS a Driver's Ed class, there's not enough behind-the-wheel time. They need to include hands-on lessons on emergency maneuvers, especially in the rain, so people can get an understanding for how the car will handle, rather than a trial-by-fire the first time they have to slam their brakes in the rain.

I wonder if you could somehow selectively lens the windshield glass near the edges to provide a "fisheye" effect for greater visibility around the pillars... like bifocals or something, not an entirely fisheyed windshield, just a small zone on each side.

Yep. I’m constantly leaning around in my Yaris trying to see what is in front of me. Great car to drive though!

I rented a Toyota recently. The A-pillars were so huge that I thought I'd better drive around near the rental company for a while to get used to it. So I did that, concentrating on driving safely instead of concentrating on navigating. I ended up on a hospital campus, in a lane intended only for ambulances. There was no visibility for cars shorter than ambulances, and I crashed on the way out. (At about 10 km/h, so no-one was hurt - sorry for the anticlimax.)

That was not anticlimactic.

ty!

I've got a Kia Proceed and I think it looks pretty damn nice, only downside is the rear window - kinda tiny - still doable though

Yeah but that's mostly a risk for the people outside of the vehicle so that's okay.

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