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Comment by siquick | Hacker News Reader

One reason to introduce self driving cars is to hopefully remove the number of SUVs from city roads, which are only driven by people because they’re “safer and protect me”. At best they’re an absolute nuisance to every other car and pedestrian, and at worse they’re absolute death traps that clog up roads.

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> are only driven by people because they’re “safer and protect me”.

That's a lovely straw man you built. I've not met anyone who bought an SUV for that reason. 99 times out of 100 it's for the utility, especially the third row. Which, if you ask me, isn't as useful as people think when they buy it, but still, it's a big factor when you expect to be regularly driving the kids around along with their friends.

Yeah a lot of HN forgets that people have families, and the kids typically are at school while the parent is driving downtown to the job in the morning. So in the moment it looks like a waste, but alas people are quick to judge.

I can think of 4 people off the top of my head who have no kids but have an SUV. Maybe it’s an Australian issue more than other countries.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/07/a-deadly-prob...

There's a lot of people who buy them because they're the majority of what dealers are selling.

Want a minivan? Good luck.

Station wagon? You need a time machine.

The self driving cars will be SUV or CUV at a minimum and there will be more of them, not less.

Exactly. Just like we saw with Uber & Lyft, but it will be exponentially worse. When I can easily just tell the car to go be available somewhere, or take my kid somewhere, or this package, etc, then guess what -- I'm gonna do it.

We need personal car size limits on city streets, stricter regulation about viewing angles and heights for personally licensed cars, and car mass taxes in general. Some of these SUVs should not be drivable with normal consumer vehicle licences. They should require a higher license level and training on driving large vehicles.

There is a very, very long list of things that should change to turn society away from car dependence.

Free highways being a huge issue. Not having car registration be based on weight. Far higher requirements to be allowed to drive. There is a long list.

I don’t think OP is necessarily asking for less cars, just less big, dangerous cars.

The same logic that gets you from bigger cars to smaller cars. Also will lead to cars to no cars.

If you reason is safety, cars are the issues, not bigger cars.

You could also just make SUVs illegal.

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