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Comment by wharvle | Hacker News Reader

Windows and front/back windshields are way smaller now, too. It's like we're all driving around looking out of tank-viewport-slits. (I'm sure there are exceptions in some models—I drove a buddy's Jeep-truck the other day and the unusually-good-by-modern-standards visibility nearly turned me into a Jeep guy on the spot—but that's the trend)

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Cars in the 80s and 90s definitely had more of a "greenhouse" feel to them, with mostly transparent glass and small framing.

Due to a mixture of standards, this has changed. The roof cap and pillars have thickened and curved for roll-over protection, and front pillars are also thicker to hold air bags that didn't exist in those older cars. The windows sills are higher up relative to the driver, to improve side-impact protection.

There are other changes too, such as dark coatings around the edges of windshields and fat mounts behind the rear view mirror to hold sensors, cameras, etc. As a tall driver, I find these changes very frustrating. The rear view mirror is capable of hiding a crossing car at a 4-way stop, and I sometimes cannot even see overhead traffic lights when stopped in the first position at an intersection.

> Due to a mixture of standards, this has changed. The roof cap and pillars have thickened and curved for roll-over protection, and front pillars are also thicker to hold air bags that didn't exist in those older cars. The windows sills are higher up relative to the driver, to improve side-impact protection.

I've heard this argument before, but I'm simply not buying it. Cars like the Honda Civic or Volkswagen Golf have an excellent safety record, outclassing many giant SUVs while still having relatively small A-pillars and large windows on all sides. It is much more likely that it is simply a design choice, making them look "tough", "manly", and "aggressive" - just like that giant snowplow front which has become popular over the past few years.

If anything, giant SUVs are less safe, because they have to follow the less-strict safety standards for small trucks rather than passenger cars. They are especially prone to rollovers due to their high center of gravity. People feel safer in an SUV, because they are surrounded by similarly-sized vehicles rather than being surrounded by cars twice your size, but that doesn't actually make them safer.

Well... There are a few regulations I know exactly that contributed to this. One was the roof crush rollover standard. I believe it was passed in 2007 and stated that any vehicle must be able to hold up it's entire weight upon it's roof in the even of rolling over and being upside down. The other was the front small overlap test, which hit the vehicle directly in line with one of the front wheels. This shunted the wheel and suspension directly back against the firewall, often completely collapsing the A-pillar. In response A-pillars were thickened and given a much more convex shape at the bottom. Aerodynamics also meant that the windshields are also raked further back. Beyond a specific angle an acute triangle begins to weaken, and the acute angles of many A-pillars and C/D-pillars are well beyond that weakening point, necessitating complex inner structures that one again make them thicker. Since 1996 the IIHS and EuroNCAP have also become more and more stringent with the rear passenger side impact intrusion test, designed to protect children in the event of a side-on collision. One of the unintended consequences of this test was the head restriction height for seats, where cars with higher shoulders (the bottom edge of the greenhouse) in the rear did better in preventing a child's head from escaping the vehicle than cars with even shoulders. This is why only very tall cars seem to have flat shoulders and why small vehicles such as the Mazda3 look like someone canted the entire car forward fifteen degrees.

I don't disagree that some cars are worse than necessary, and this probably comes from styling/fashion trends. But across all makes and models, there is a trend driven by changing safety requirements.

The Hondas (and Toyotas) of the 80s had much thinner A-pillars than they do now. Barely enough to hold the weather gasket for the windshield and act as a frame for the front door.

I was in an early 80s Toyota Hi-Lux during a relatively gentle rollover and watched the roof and windshield cave in towards me. I think I was saved by the fiberglass camper shell on the bed, so it only collapsed until the weight of the car was transferred to the hood and the shell. The cab roof got smashed into a linear interpolation of those high points...

> Cars like the Honda Civic or Volkswagen Golf have an excellent safety record, outclassing many giant SUVs while still having relatively small A-pillars and large windows on all sides.

The A pillar (and B and C pillars too) on a modern Golf or Civic is humongous compared to the first-generation Golf and Civic. You either just forgot what those looked like, or you're too young to even have seen particularly many of them.

Yes. As you may know, recent safety regulations prompted by rollover incidents have meant that the "A" and "C" pillars connecting the body to the roof have been made wider. [See the first 2 paragraphs of the "Design" section of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillar_(car) ]

It seems like there's a second-order effect here on visibility that may not have been really appreciated.

With my previous car, I never remember having visibility issues. I then got a 2013. The pillars aie ierfect pedestian blockerr, especially when making turns. I don't see how me doing better in a roll over is better than me running someone over.

I've noticed this in the cars I've had over the past 15 years or so too. We hit a deer two years ago because it was moving perfectly in time with the side curtain airbag laden support column in my field of view. I barely saw it when I hit it even! I understand that rillover accidents have lead to these supports being thicker, but why was the solution not to lower the center of gravity on cars so they are less prone to rolling over?

FWIW that phenomenon is a geometry thing, not just a fluke. If you are on a collision course with an obstacle at constant speed, than the angle remains constant (as the configuration preserves congruent triangles until impact) and the obstacle can easily remain invisible for a long time, until impact, hiding behind the pillars or even just hidden by the blind spot in your eye if you haven’t moved your head

See https://youtu.be/SYeeTvitvFU for an example.

One of the advantages of raking the front windshield for aerodynamics is changing the geometry for the A pillar to be more sideways instead of vertical, allowing a bit more hope of seeing something.

Because changing the center of gravity is an expensive engineering solution. Crossovers came about as a loophole to CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) regulations, as CUVs are considered "light trucks" and are thus tested differently than pedestrian passenger vehicles. Since CUVs had to adhere to that "light truck" designation before the EPA just gave up and let them do whatever, often times that meant they had to have SUV like features such as taller bodies, higher ride heights, and thicker unibodies to enable towing. Lifting an existing sedan platform and creating a subframe for the rear was cheaper than engineering an entirely new platform with a lower center of gravity, and thus that's what they've been doing since 1999. Even as sedans drop like flies leaving only CUVs, SUVs, and trucks, they still engineer them as if they were just adding ride height to a sedan.

Within the last two weeks I almost collided with another car while leaving a parking lot, because that car was moving in perfect sync with my left A-pillar, such that I didn't see it until it was directly in front of me. It was like a car magically appeared from thin air.

Hmm. I'm not sure how true that is, but that might be a perception thing because hoods have gotten longer and windshields have gotten more slanted. Being farther from the front of the car/windshield makes your view angle smaller even if the height of the window hasn't changed.

Surprisingly, sloped windows are more of a safety thing than a fuel efficiency or aerodynamics thing. If the windshield is too sloped, it acts like a wedge that throws air up above the car and causes a ton of turbulence. It's more important that the airflow stays stuck to the top surface of the car, and a steeper windshield helps with that.

OK, the glass may or may not be smaller on the windshield and rear (I haven't measured, and yeah, a greater slant could be the mechanism, not less glass) but the viewable area is smaller.

Side windows are 100% for-sure smaller, because all the structures around them have gotten much thicker.

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