Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhaway84773 | Hacker News Reader

> “We typically find that smaller vehicles have high driver death rates because they don’t provide as much protection, especially in crashes with larger, heavier SUVs and pickups,” said IIHS President David Harkey.

So basically, unsurprisingly, the problem is too many SUVs and pickups. Unfortunately, the American response has been to buy more SUVs and pickups rather than fewer.

View on HN

Unfortunately that's the logical choice for an individual, and it's not unique to America (the percentage of SUVs is increasing in Europe too). Probably needs some type of legislative action to curb the arms race.

My subjective guess is that the problem is starting to spill into adjacent domains, for example I've noticed that most of the decorative hedgerows in shopping center parking lots are now cut to a height that is consistently above the eye level and in some cases even the roofline of passenger cars. This makes it extremely difficult to safely turn into traffic flows inside the parking lot, unless of course you're in a vehicle that's lifted up above these hedgerows.

I wondered how people who inspected the work of the folks who cut these hedgerows didn't notice that it blocks sight lines for everyone who isn't in a pickup truck or large SUV. Then it became obvious, that both the people who do this kind of work as well as the sort of people who inspect it are both very likely themselves to be completely habituated to truck level sight lines and forget what it looks like for passenger cars.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com