SUVs more dangerous to cyclists than other cars, study suggests

Wow that is like three steps ahead of where we are at. I would be content with people not driving giant lifted trucks with modified exhausts and cars with huge subwoofers. People who just drive SUVs seem like angels in comparison.

> in the EU a _lot_ of people think that driving a SUV without needing the off-road capabilities is at least egoistic if not outright asocial.

In general I used to believe this (in the US) as well, but now everyone and their grandmother has one, so it's kinda hard to paint everyone with that broad a brush. (Attempting to do so is itself egoistic and asocial.)

> people insisting on driving a SUV without a need for it are using it like an armor they ware because they are afraid of the outside world.

It's an arms race. If everyone is driving an SUV except you, and you get into a crash, you're more likely to get more hurt than if you'd been driving an SUV as well. So more people drive SUVs, which encourages more people with a lean toward that mindset to drive them, and so on.

Another driver (heh) of the SUV surge was children. In the 80s and 90s, many US families turned to minivans when they'd have a couple kids. Easier to load and unload the children, more space to carry things. But minivans were uncool and became associated with the boring suburban soccer mom/dad (especially men hated this, of course; driving around in a minivan was emasculating). SUVs brought most of the same benefits: extra cargo space, sometimes an extra row of seats, and easier to load and unload the children. And they were cool! I mean, "SUV" has "sport" right there in the name! Sports are cool!

SUVs also handle a bit better than minivans, which are often just lumbering box-vehicles. Sure, an SUV usually doesn't handle as well as a sedan or coupe, but it's a decent middle ground for people who believe a sedan doesn't suit their needs.

Another reason -- possibly the primary initial reason -- is profit-driven marketing. I don't know if it's still the case, but there was a loophole in US vehicle emissions laws that would allow for less-stringent emissions standards past a certain vehicle size. So SUVs allowed manufacturers to spend less money on increasing fuel efficiency and reducing emissions, and, to boot, also sell the vehicles at a higher price. So they manufactured demand with marketing that glorified the high "command seating position" that you get with vehicles like SUVs, and of course everyone ate that up. This highlights why I'd love for all advertising to be illegal: it's just emotional manipulation to get people to buy things they don't need.

I don't personally like the proliferation of SUVs myself (and drive a 4-seater, AWD coupe, myself, and drive it in heavy snow just fine), but I perfectly understand why it's a thing, and have stopped bothering to begrudge people for their choices in this regard.

I was dropping my kids off at school and a 1st grader was riding her bike through the crosswalk and another driver didn’t see her. He bumped her at less-than walking speed so no one was seriously injured. I was amazed at how she bounced up and away from the car. If I would have hit her with my (old) truck, even at that super low speed, I’m sure she would have gotten caught on the bumper and pulled under the wheels. The new pedestrian safety designs are cool even though they do make all cars look the same and bulbous now.

Not just knocked forward; good chance they could also be pulled underneath and crushed under the tires.

Another from About Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYyutqP48ok "The Problem with SUVs"

Heavier, yes, but having the form factor of a very tall front end is not a requirement for EV design.

Electric vehicles are often heavier than comparable ICE vehicles, but not necessarily larger or even large. Chevy Bolt, VW ID.4, Smart Fortwo EQ etc are all perfectly small electric vehicles.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I believe even the NHTSA has made statements about the dangers the added weight and acceleration pose both to pedestrians and other vehicle occupants (and previously, their neat silent operation).

>That reason largely disappears for electric vehicles

It already mostly disappeared, or entered the realm of “completely reasonable trade-off”, with the rise of unibody low-displacement SUVs. The original SUVs were body-on-frame V8s that got 13 mpg. Gas price and uncomfortable ride were a huge factor. Now you can get a RAV4 hybrid that drives like a car and gets 40 mpg. And you get a tailgate. Why would anyone bother with a sedan and the limitations the trunk gives you? For 5-7 more mpg it’s not worth it.

Do EVs really have to be so tall though? If they need capacity can't they be made wider or longer?

> The old reason for driving a smaller car/truck

depending where you live the main reason was and still is fitting in the streets and finding parking spots.

I mean sure large parts of the US are designed not only car centric but also with not only focus on large cars but even wants to make driving them extra easy. But that's not at all the case in the EU. Like there are many places with streets where driving a large US cars is troublesome or outright impossible and parking spots are all the time at least slightly too small for many US cars. Similar there are many place with no or very limited dedicated parking ares, mainly at the side of the street and the larger your car the more spots you will not fit in or fit in but it's hard to enter them without touching surrounding cars or similar.

> largely disappears for electric vehicles

which many people still don't want, because if you don't have your own parking spot (very common in the EU) then charging gets much more complicated

> In fact, electric vehicles are larger/heavier than ic equivalents.

Heavier yes, but there are small and compact EVs, through often with quite limited reach and mainly advertised to/sold in countries with a lot of small streets.

The weight of the car only affects the fuel cost for accelerating to a given speed. Maintaining a speed is almost entirely the surface area * coefficient of drag * speed^2 some of which is used for cooling. Electric cars generally have better drag characteristics, the 3rd variable is largely the driver + speed limits, but yes bigger = worse.

Cars having high and large hoods has nothing to do with technology.

That's assuming EVs will become popular which is pretty ridiculous for most of the world. Most people want to stick with their smaller ICE cars, and that's really what we're going to continue to live with.

> If you disagree, the car companies must also be very wrong about what the customers want, because they keep making bigger and bigger cars and people keep buying them.

I know it’s controversial, but there’s a group of us who truly believe that yes, the car companies are wrong about what customers want, as those of us who want and desire subcompact vehicles keep being told we are wrong. Where I live, subcompacts are the most desired kind of vehicle and extremely hard to find because the car companies aren’t selling as many of them in the US as before. That is to say, they are refusing to sell them in the US market while still making and selling them overseas.

When I ask the dealer about this, they say they made the decision because consumers don’t want them. When I point out that I want to buy one and so do other people, and when used vehicles of that type come in, they sell right away, they just shrug. So here’s a case where it’s the consumers repeatedly being told they are wrong for wanting smaller vehicles. It’s pretty much a fact that the larger vehicles have been intentionally pushed on US consumers, so when you say people keep buying them, they are doing so because they have no choice.

With that said, there is and has been a bias against small cars in the US since the 1980s. There are two reasons for this. I think some of it can be traced to the original safety problems that small vehicles used to have, which have mostly been solved at this modern juncture. Second, I believe this bias against small cars might have started out as political and economic propaganda against foreign imports at a time when US car companies were still making large, oversize sedans.

I think that much of this bias is rooted in popular propaganda that has seeped its way into conventional wisdom. I have personally rarely experienced as much random visceral anger and hatred against small cars from strangers as I have regarding anything else. It’s like a form of sexism and racism that is unique to the US. If you dare to drive a small car in the US, you are treated like a second-class citizen. It’s bizarre, it’s weird, and it’s uniquely an American phenomenon.

SUVs are more dangerous to their drivers too, on average.

https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-2002/suvs-really-safer-c...

I don't really see the point of buying a bigger car for your own safety. What is the point of you not being injured if you just killed someone else. You might be physically okay, but you'll be mentally scarred for life.

> If it’s a reasonable option, most people end up choosing a large vehicle.

If opiates were as widely marketed as large vehicles are, most people would end up being opiate addicts. People make stupid choices informed by misleading marketing all the time.

In the nature of things it's less what customers want, but the relationship between what is on offer, materially available, affordable and so on... If Ford offers a mustang and an F150 you don't get to pick a small sedan, right? And if you want cyan, and all that's out there is black and white, you're getting black or white... And thus it becomes a question of choosing the least-worst, which is not an indicator of desire as it is one of preference.

I think we used to have a wider gamut of vehicle plans and sizes, but it has since contracted severely due to regulations (at least from my understanding). Like AMC and early Subaru were wild. VW busses are iconic but nobody is fabricating anything like it, except maybe Canoo, which has some atrocious leasing option.

Anyways all the safety talk is kind of a red herring. SUVs are very dangerous and prone to rolling, as are their kindred truck brethren. Rollovers are also the deadliest form of accident. I haven't checked the statistics beyond that, but I think there are definitely misconceptions about how protective a bigger vehicle is in actuality versus how they're perceived. But I have and will continue to opt for the more agile and better centered vehicle and adopting a driving habit suited to the abilities of my vehicles, including a long leading distance at all times.

And, same as gun marketing, it matters way more that the customer feels safe than is safe. I suspect that theres another common factor in some fraction of the population that gets an increased perception of safety from putting other people in danger

In my opinion, larger vehicles are just a product of car culture, and even those who buy small cars are contributing to a society that requires people to have cars, which inevitably leads to larger cars in the long run.

Companies told customers what they want, because they get to dodge regulations, thus more profit. Manufactured demand.

Don't need an outright ban - just negative incentives. It should cost an astronomical amount to drive a huge vehicle in a dense urban environment and dramatically less in a rural environment. Today, in USA, that cost difference is generally not that much in practice.

Secondly, infrastructure is another much better solution than policy. Even if large personal vehicles were outright banned there will always be large vehicles in urban environments - transit buses, garbage trucks, etc.

Thus, to prevent crashes, it is most effective to just separate the large vehicles from the small with separated/protected bike lanes.

Just getting rid of the "light truck" loophole in standards would immediately do a lot.

Don't need to ban, just make them more expensive in proportion to their danger to society. Activity that is economical at higher cost will continue to use the big trucks.

The sane solution: increase density lowering need for cars. But rich NIMBYies (who are often the cyclists) won't let that happen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/11/16/american-c...

yeah ive been riding bicycles 30 years. what we want is separate bike roads, bike crosses, bike parking, like the Netherlands, we do not want some giant police movement to regulate truck sizes.

this is like the definition of why liberals cannot win elections. the first instinct is never to solve problems, it is to find some 'wrongdoer' and punish them.

Give exemptions to people with true professional needs, as determined by the party

Does KE matter? I suspect that as long as the momentum is large enough that that that hitting the bicycle or pedestrian doesn't cause more than an insignificant change in the car's speed all that matters is speed and the shape of the front of the car.

Consider for example being hit be a large freight train moving at 1 km/hr. The mass, KE, and momentum of the train will be larger than a large car moving at 100 km/hr but being hit by the train probably wouldn't seriously injure you, unless you happened to fall under the train and get run over or fell to the side and happened to hit your head.

Looking at Wikipedia, Crossovers are a separately defined vehicle:

> [Crossover Utility Vehicle] is a type of automobile with an increased ride height that is built on unibody chassis construction shared with passenger cars, as opposed to traditional sport utility vehicles (SUV) which are built on a body-on-frame chassis construction similar to pickup trucks.

Crossovers are just lifted hatchbacks.

You have to ask how does anyone arrive at a "55% more trauma" figure? I can see from the study they just tallied up ICD codes. This is not a particularly rigorous examination of the facts.

Also from the page containing the study:

> Fatal bicycle crash rates have risen dramatically over the past decade. In 2020, 932 bicyclists were killed on U.S. roads, up from a low of 621 in 2010. One reason may be the dominance of pickups and SUVs in the U.S. vehicle fleet.

Another reason is that there are more bicycles on the road over the last 10 years. Not an unimaginable phenomenon. Giving per capita data here would be far more useful in the analysis.

New York's estimates[1] seem to suggest that more than twice the number of people are bicycling over this 10 year period. Yet, there's less than a doubling in the fatality rate.

I don't find much of this conclusive.

[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/cyclinginthecit...

SUVs are larger which make them more deadly. If it were electric, it would be heavier, and thus more deadly.

Except that electric trucks are much heavier than normal trucks. Computer controlled or not, the tires arent going to stop them any faster.

Is your comment serious or satire? Hard to tell these days

The big problem is the high, flat front rather than weight, visibility, etc. (which are problems too, just not as critical when striking a pedestrian or bicyclist). Electric SUVs don't fix that.

In a city, open space is scarce, so unnecessarily large vehicles make everyone else's life worse. They are also more dangerous to everyone who isn't inside the car. So the car owner is choosing to give themselves luxury while endangering others in order to do that. They also add more to the wear and tear of public roads, which costs the taxpayer, not them. It is therefore seen as a highly selfish trade that they've willingly decided to make without the permission of those who they are indirectly harming, and they do this in many cases for no good reason pertaining to their business or family size.

most of those vehicles have a single occupant and never haul anything heavier than a coke can. the usable area to store things on the back is often the same as much smaller models from years ago!