Hacker News Reader

Comment by pharmakom | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

If we could finally ditch the light-duty trucks loophole [1], that would probably help when it comes to the incentives to build certain kinds of vehicle.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-wants-to-close-the-suv-lo...

Dead on arrival. Not enough room for the kids and dogs.

Europeans do just fine with multipurpose vehicles and regular small cars. You dont need a Straßenpanzer to bring two wee kids and a few grocery bags around.

My parents did just fine with a 94 Saturn and an 88 Toyota Corolla for two kids and a dog.

People haul kids and dogs in the beds of their trucks?

Many new trucks can fit three car seats. What was once the truck bed is now a smaller truck bed and a second row of seats. Aka a "full size cab".

More like open air hatch back, I don't understand why people want such short truck beds. You can't even sleep in the truck bed anymore on a lot these trucks.

it's easy to throw rocks when you personally don't have 3-4 kids.

So what did people do when they had 3-4 kids in the 80s? I see families of 4 with huge SUVs these days.

If anything they want a kei van right? It maximises the size of the vehicle, cuboid on wheels, and minimises the cost for that volume.

Like you can't fit 3-4 kids in a sedan. Hell most people have 2 cars per family nowadays should still fit easily. Or if you really have a large family a minivan works even better and is less dangerous to other travellers and yourselfs and has a lower gas usage. SUV's and trucks are stupid for 99,99% of the use cases.

We didn't use seatbelts or booster seats. We rode in the bed of the pickup, we rode sitting backwards in the trunk of a hatchback, we crammed in 5-wide in the bench seat in the back of a sedan.

Also, there were proto-SUVs like the Chevy Suburban.

I never had a pickup truck, but I did have seat belts and booster seats. We just didn’t use them as much. But that’s not really relevant to having enough space in a vehicle. We had plenty of space in cars. There was nothing wrong with the size.

It absolutely is relevant. If you don't have to wear seatbelts you can fit four or five kids in the back seat of a sedan. If each kid needs a seatbelt then you have to buy a bigger vehicle.

They drove big station wagons.

And the station wagons got killed off by CAFE standards because they were treated as cars instead of as their own category. Taking a sedan and turning it into a station wagon is going to inherently make it heavier and less fuel efficient.

So if the auto makers are already struggling to make their sedans hit MPG goals, suddenly those station wagons have to be phased out.

Though to be fair, minivans start in the mid 80s and were very popular in the 90s instead of SUVs. Comparable MPGs to the wagons but felt a lot more roomy inside.

The big problem came in the 2000s when the auto makers started subtly turning their minivans into SUVs. Even the last wagon hold outs like Volvo took this road eventually.

But interestingly enough, a lot of new vehicles are SUVs that look like lifted station wagons...

So we like the form factor of station wagon

Station wagons are big and you could throw a couple kids in the back no seat belts no problem

Please buy a minivan if this is your situation.

I kinda want to take a picture of the parking lot at a local (Salt Lake County, UT) Costco. It's almost exclusively "light truck"-classified pickups and similarly sized SUVs. I'm sure a similar image has already been captured for posterity but damn if it wouldn't be useful for pointing to a problem.

You can buy Kei vans too. I've seen them, in the USA. Same import rules as the Kei trucks. When I lived in Chicago, a neighbor had one. It was 4x4 too, so great in the winter.

I have kids, we drive a Kei minivan. They only seat 4, so it wouldn't work for a family of 5-6 as in the example.

While I largely agree with you, AWD/4WD minivans seem to be harder to find than AWD/4WD SUVs - so if you live in a place with both snow and hills, you're probably going to be gravitating toward an SUV.

AWS/4WD drive can't be pulled off with a minivan while maintaining the flat floor that people expect. There's not enough clearance for a rear drive shaft.

I mean, it clearly can be, since AWD (and RWD, for that matter) minivans do exist. It's just less common for minivans than it is for SUVs, likely for the reason you mention.

Sorry, yes. It's technically feasible.

However, practically, it's not. Within the modern minivan sector, it'd be a non-starter to have a transmission tunnel when all of your competitors don't have that.

> when all of your competitors don't have that

Aside from the Chrysler Pacifica, which does offer a traditional AWD (to this day AFAIK), presumably with the requisite transmission tunnel.

There's also the Toyota Sienna, which gets away with AWD by using an electric motor for the rear wheels. Hopefully this continues to catch on.

Why? What do you care what he drives?

Cars much bigger, heavier, and with worse visibility than necessary, make the roads more dangerous for everyone else—motorists, bicyclists, pedestrians, everyone.

The whole thing's turning into an expensive, dangerous game of prisoner's dilemma. It's best if everyone buys exactly as much car as they need, but anyone who "defects" and buys a bigger, heavier car is safer than everyone else, while making everyone else a little less-safe. Iterate for a few decades and you get the current situation.

However, begging individuals to behave differently isn't going to fix the problem. Certainly not in the US.

You need to rethink the incentives. Big, wasteful cars have no business being as cheap as a small family car. This was not accidental.

Oh, for sure. The old-school conservative solution, from back before "conservative" meant "simply don't try to do good things, at all" (at least, in the US) would have been to try to price in the added risk to others (and other externalities, like extra road-wear) to discourage having too-large vehicles. I think that could work.

Never gonna happen, because too many people think discouraging choices that make public roads more dangerous, or simply paying for costs they impose on others through their choices, is outright tyranny, but hey, it's a nice idea.

Please don't go back to posting ideological flamewar comments. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and you've mostly been doing a pretty good job of avoiding it (thank you!)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2020-traffic-crash-data...

> The estimated number of police-reported crashes in 2020 decreased by 22% as compared to 2019, and the estimated number of people injured declined by 17%.

> While the number of crashes and traffic injuries declined overall, fatal crashes increased by 6.8%.

It's at least a somewhat common belief that the 6.8% increase of fatal crashes despite a decrease in total crashes is caused by a perceived increase of the average size of vehicles on the road. A minivan is not an American-sized pickup truck which are commonly seen as unsafe for other drivers.

The American car market is flooded with shitty crossovers because people don't have the balls to just rock the minivan when they hit that point in their life. The entire SUV segment up until you reach 9-seaters doesn't have a great reason to exist at the market share it does, and the situation will continue until people grow out of the delusion that they're not uncool yet because they bought a specific class of bad vehicle.

Because we have to share the road with other people's vehicles, and bad drivers in giant pickups are a hazard to others' health.

You probably won’t fit more than 2 kids in a gigantic pickup truck either. And you’ll mostly see them empty apart from the driver anyway.

A lot of the popular models have full-size back seats. They've got more room back there, and are easier to get at (to, say, strap a kid into a car seat, or to add/remove a car seat) than many sedans.

SUV market share is ~50%, families with >2 children are ~5%.

why do you want suburban moms to drive their kids around in a small flatbed?

Pretty sure the commenter is referring to what, in London, are called Chelsea Tractors.

sure, when I was growing up my mom drove myself and my four siblings around in a Suburban. I understand the baseline desire to signal virtue with regards to large motor vehicles, but even a brief glance at the photo in the article should be enough for any sane person to see that driving more than a single child around in such a vehicle is blatantly untenable.

downvoters might also be surprised at how safe large motor vehicles are for transporting children, especially in areas with spontaneous, often-unavoidable wildlife crossing. try hitting a mule deer crossing the road in the dark in one of those little trucks and see how many kids riding (on the flatbed??) survive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com