A 7k-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That's Bad News for All of Us | Hacker News Reader

A 7k-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That's Bad News for All of Us

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39 pointspulisse81 comments

The solution seems obvious enough to me: tax these vehicles to recover associated costs.

Relatedly, I think the government should evaluate vehicles for pedestrian safety and impose appropriate liability insurance minimums on failing vehicles. The same goes for vehicles with aftermarket modifications that reduce pedestrian safety.

(Nearly?) all states already have liability insurance requirements, and they already scale with real-world injury probabilities.

Those events just aren't as common as HN believes, so the driver of a KillMax HighBumper 9000 doesn't pay much more in insurance than the driver of a Civic.

Why the downvotes? Insurance is one of very few industries that truly has incentives to price their product correctly. If I can get liability insurance on my Civic for $30/mo, or an F250 for $35/mo, there is a _clear_ incompatibility with the risk level assessed by HN vs. the risk level assessed by professional insurance actuaries with many decades of data.

Not quite. The statutorily required minimum liability coverage is quite low, so when an oversized car kills a pedestrian, the insurer is likely pay out $100k, which rather understates the true cost to society and to the dead person and their family.

You can kill someone and pay a max of $50k. That doesn't even cover 1 years salary for the person you killed in most cases. The insurance is mispriced because the liability is artificially low.

The disconnect here is that insurance companies don't price in the full risk to kill or injure someone. The price in the risk up to the policy limits, which by law, are only required to be a paltry sum.

There aren't any insurance companies that will even write you a car insurance policy that will cover the potential costs for a very serious injury. It is too risky for them. Heck, the maximum coverage you can even voluntarily buy in the US is lower than the minimum requirements in some other countries. Some countries require millions or tens of millions in coverage, some require unlimited liability. In most of the US many insurers won't even let you voluntarily buy more than $250k/person, and are only required a tenth of that.

Every US insurer I've every spoke to will do it if you say the magic word "umbrella".

(Seriously, it's quite magical. A high-limit umbrella policy plus a minimum-limit homeowners' or renters' policy and minimul-limit auto policy is generally less expensive than moderate-limit policies without the umbrella.)

Even many umbrella policies max out at $5m, which is still below the car insurance minimums required in much of the EU.

The reality is, in many parts of the US, half or more of drivers have minimum coverage or zero coverage.

Is that a case of missing externalities? The person who pays in this case is the pedestrian, and the courts do not seem to value pedestrian lives the same way that they value someone's ability to legally drive - that must drive down premiums because what is lost is not repaid.

No, liability insurance pays out your _liability_ for pedestrian's medical bills and/or death caused by you. That's the point.

.....? Liability insurance to offset the costs done to others. You hit a fence or a pedestrian, the liability insurance is meant to cover the costs of repair or medical costs.

Damages to the car and driver are either covered under separate provisions of insurance or come out of pocket.

I do think insurance is probably the right tool if you want people with more dangerous vehicles to have to pay more. However, the limits are too low. I live in New York, which requires insurance of up to $50,000[1] for the death of a person involved in an incident. However, most lives are worth more than $50k. If the requirement was insurance up to $10 million here instead, you would find the safety of cars constraining the market a lot more, and people wouldn't be able to get away with the kinds of externalities they do now.

[1] https://dmv.ny.gov/insurance/insurance-requirements

The problem is that the country is dug too deep in a hole where driving is cheap, communities are sprawling, and public transport is a luxury. If a state actually mandated $10m liability, we'd probably see skyrocketing rates of uninsured drivers as a result. Or at least, skyrocketing more than they already are.

Worse, public transportation is seen as poor people's transportation.

>> If the requirement was insurance up to $10 million

Hardly anyone has assets of $10 million, so they do not have the assets to insure. Many people do not even have assets of $50k, so again, why would they need insurance? If they get a judgement against them for $50k, they are bankrupt. That's what bankruptcy laws are for.

If your life is worth $10 million, you need to be the one to insure it for $10 million. Not the working class person who has no assets.

I see forced purchases of insurance for people with nothing to insure as similar to debtor's prison. Obviously not as extreme, but the same concept.

> I see forced purchases of insurance for people with nothing to insure as similar to debtor's prison

That's probably because you're looking at it entirely wrong.

The third-party cover in insurance is not for you (the driver), it's for the poor sod that you turn into a pavement stain.

If you kill them, their family has had someone taken away from them - would you be happy with $50K for the loss of a spouse?

If you don't kill them, but inflict life-changing injuries, the resulting lifetime healthcare costs could easily be more than $50K.

When you take to the road, you do incur some risk, but on average you pose more of a risk to others, particularly if you've chosen to drive a car that you can't see in front of properly.

The UK introduced compulsory third-party cover in 1988. Even back then, the cap was £250,000 - it's not led to any societal problems (although, the accident rate in the UK is far, far lower than in the US so policies probably are going to be cheaper).

I do agree, though, that 10 mil is definitely pushing it a bit far.

>> would you be happy with $50K for the loss of a spouse?

If that was an issue for me, I would make sure that I had the appropriate level of insurance for that event, rather than relying on the hope that some random driver on the streets where I live would have the appropriate level of insurance. Many of the drivers where I live have no license, the cars they are driving aren't registered, and they have no insurance.

That's a law enforcement issue (they don't enforce laws here either), not an civil one. The insurance thing is my responsibility.

But they really don't. The liability limit requirements in all states are way too low to cover even a single pedestrian injury of moderate severity. Michigan has some of the highest requirements with a $50,000/person liability and this has resulted in more than a quarter of drivers simply driving without insurance because it is so expensive.

If you get run over by a car in California and you're lucky enough to get hit by one of the 83% of drivers that has car insurance, and one of the ~90% of drivers who stop for an accident, the insurance company is required by law to provide you $15k in coverage for your injuries.

110% agreed.

There should be a tax applied to excessively large consumer vehicles. They have an outsized affect on the roads, on the safety of others, and cause stupid things like not being able to see past them when they are in front of you.

They should also pay much more for insurance, since they, again, will consume an outsized portion of it, compared to others not driving a penis replacement.

For pedestrians, I suspect it's no different. Whether you're hit by a Kia Soul or one of these Canyoneros, you're still quite likely to die, assuming the vehicle is going faster than 5mph.

You actually are much less likely to die if a small car hits you. If a big car hits you, you're kind of screwed.

Speed is a factor. If you're a pedestrian, and the vehicle traveling at 35mph, the size matters much, much less. You're going for a ride, regardless.

Yes, but the small car will bounce you over the hood and dump you back down again, worse for wear, but presumably alive.

The bigger vehicles slam you down and then drive over you, for a much less pleasant experience.

Or you accelerate to 35 mph basically instantaneously. That's a lot of Gs.

according to the prior poster, they just walk away from all those Gs, unharmed. lol

Getting hit by a Fiat 500 at 35mpg will just have me roll onto the hood, slow my speed, and allow me to either roll over the car or roll off the front again. With most of the initial impact affect my legs and thighs. Getting hit by a Hummer EV will have my head and torso (y'know, the juicy, sensitive bits) getting hit first, with no ability to slow my speed by rolling onto anything, I just get thrown forward into more traffic, or end up underneath the vehicle where my juicy sensitive bits are now able to get run over by a comparative weight of a small elephant.

at 35mph?!?!

You'll be sent into the air. Not 400feet or anything, but you will not simply be rolling gently over the vehicle, then hop off and continue your day.

How high do you think someone can fly without cracking your skull when you land on pavement?

Where did I say I'd hop off and continue my day?

Where did I say I'd be rolling gently over the vehicle?

I'd much rather have the chance of rolling, flying, or at least something that will allow my body the chance to lose momentum. Rather than within 1 second find my skull under the wheel of a 9,000 lb vehicle.

The pedestrian mortality rate for a 35mph collision is 10%.

With my (admittedly anecdotal) data point of having been hit by a small car while crossing at a crosswalk, this is definitely true. Car drove around 35 mph upon impact. Bounced my posterior right off the front of the car and landed on the windshield - not even a concussion.

The big difference is height of the front of the car. For pedestrian safety you want them to end up on the hood or at worst go over the top of the car. Trucks and SUVs have pedestrians end under the car, which is more likely to be immediately fatal.

That makes perfect sense. Thanks!

Not only that, it would take only a minor change to have a huge impact and reduce deaths and injuries: https://youtu.be/YpuX-5E7xoU

Even at 23mph, a pedestrian's chance of death in a collision, in the US over the years 1994-1998, was only 10%: https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-seve...

I don't mean to imply that that is a low risk, only that speed is quite a crucial factor.

Oh, I agree 100%. Speed kills.

Most states used to have per-axle weight tests and taxes that reflected that. Most of the carve outs for "light truck" that consumer vehicles were able to sneak through were often implemented as carve outs meaning that the weight taxes are still on the books, the states could reduce or eliminate the carve outs and actually try enforcing those taxes again.

I'm still surprised California hasn't tried enforcing weight taxes again given many residential streets even still have weight limits posted but not enforced. I'm not surprised that so far no other state currently has the political willpower to upset consumers like that (or to deal with federal complications against a congressional atmosphere and regulatory capture that thinks such taxes are unfair to inter-state commerce).

Your suggestion is discussed in the article and the conclusion is that several European countries are moving in this direction while the US is not.

Aren't they already paying more by buying a more expensive car and hence more in taxes? And they are less fuel efficient so they're buying more gas which is the primary source of funding for road maintenance?

Not every problem requires a new layer of bureaucracy. I could imagine companies gaming the tax by being just a pound shy and just all the unnecessary red tape seems very wasteful without actually fixing the problem

"fixing the problem" would mean banning these vehicles, which is politically impossible.

I think the most practical solution will be to take all of the externalized costs of these vehicles, and charge them to their owners. I would argue that this is, in fact, less bureaucratic than creating more regulation.

What are the externalized costs? We need to fund a committee to research and create a study to get the costs. And these are constantly changing especially with climate change so we'll need to fund it indefinitely to propose new regulations and rules about max car weight, shape, wheel distribution, center of gravity, among other things.

Don't worry, this won't be new regulation, just a sweeping ban of certain vehicles based on a number of factors

Do you ever think what the externalized costs for having thousands of regulations are to businesses and consumers? Attitudes like yours is the reason I can't buy a kinder egg in US or European eggs have exactly opposite regulatory requirements in US vs Europe.

We eschew this kind of complexity in engineering. It's the most obvious thing in the world. Anybody that works on complex systems will tell you the same. But we view regulation and government as immune from these kinds of tradeoffs. We hear things like "this bad thing should be banned" and never stop to think what that means in practice and what fragility and distortions it adds to the system

Not necessarily, you could just tax based on weight thresholds, established in legislation, in the same way you could ban vehicles based on the same factors.

The fuel NHSTA has over 1200 pages on just the new fuel economy rules. And there are dozens of agencies car manufacturers have to contend with to design a vehicle.

In unrelated news, average new car prices in the US climb to 48k while China has a new car under 10k

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a39617404/nhtsa-fuel-econo...

They're paying more than they would have paid for a cheaper/lighter car. The fuel thing is made complicated by EVs with heavy batteries. But the fact that they've paid _something_ greater than they otherwise might have doesn't mean that they've paid their fair share. Road maintenance in most places is _not_ fully covered by gas taxes; other tax payers also contribute. If a subset of vehicles are driving a large cost in updated guard rails, it's not enough for them to pay somewhat more than other drivers -- they should pay enough that the rest of society isn't subsidizing them.

Tax the hell out of them to pay for upgrading. There's zero reason why a 2500lbs vehicle should pay the same tax as a 7000+lbs one.

Giant SUVs and Trucks for non commercial use should have been effectively regulated/taxed out of existence a decade ago.

> Tax the hell out of them to pay for upgrading

We should but we won't.

At the end of the day, people really like their big cars, and local dealerships tend to be the largest small businesses (along with local real estate agencies) in most Congressional and State Assembly Districts.

You can argue that walking and biking are better or something like Strongtowns, but at the end of the day, it is what it is.

> At the end of the day, people really like their big cars

That doesn’t apply to the entire planet so surely this could be different in the US as well.

Here in America, bigger is better. We love big, whether it's cars, CPU core counts, burgers, or tits and ass.

> doesn’t apply to the entire planet

Even in Asia, MENA, and South America as well, if you can afford a big car you will buy one.

There's a reason pickups like the Hilux, D-Max, Ford F150, and Vigo are a luxury in ASEAN and the MENA, SUVs like Scorpio or Fortuner in India+Nepal, and pickups like Tacoma and Toro in Cental+South America

The EU isn't representative for the rest of the world either.

Eh, even Europeans appear to getting larger vehicles. SUV's hit 51% of all new European car sales in 2023. Granted though it's mostly compact and sub compact CUV's.

https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/suvs-surge-new-milest...

Yep. People just like big cars.

I love biking and walking, but it just isn't popular.

>At the end of the day, people really like their big cars

No one's stopping them from liking and buying them. They'll just cost more.

> They'll just cost more

And that's why no one will do anything.

Something popular that cost $35,000 in 2024 suddenly costing $45,000 in 2025 is a political suicide.

Rising new car prices are already a major political crisis. Taxing and making it even more pricy is just a self own

> At the end of the day, people really like their big cars

People like big cars because they want the other guy to die in a crash.

For some people yes, for others (like me if I buy a car) they're just fun to drive (that said, I can afford the tax)

Small businesses can literally get $25,000 as a reward for buying a vehicle over a certain weight.

It's an easily justifiable tax as well. Road wear scales to the 4th power of axle weight! Incentivise smaller cars, it means less road wear, higher fuel efficiency, and it's safer for pedestrians.

Many states had such taxes for decades for exactly that reason. Some of those laws are even still on the books, just not enforced.

Interestingly, Rhode Island tried something like that. They had toll roads where only semis had to pay.

I thought the solution was a great idea. The cost is centered on the vehicles causing 95-99% of road wear in the state, by only charging a small fraction of drivers it reduces the overhead of the system from RI's perspective, and by only charging people who would have large bills it reduces the overhead from the perspective of the drivers being charged as well (if you pay a $3 toll and spend 5min handling the broken online billing portal after a billing letter was sent via a $0.63 stamp then that's a bit wasteful, but if you have a $100 toll the billing doesn't magically cost more, allowing the aggregate tolls across the state to be lower since they have a higher take rate). Plus, if it makes shipping more expensive, it transitively affects the people causing the most shipping instead of externalizing that to the other citizens, ideally causing a small downward pressure in aggregate shipping volume.

Anywho, it was struck down as unconstitutional. We'll see what happens in other places and times, but I don't have high hopes. At best we'll get a patchwork of special cases and exemptions that protect incumbants, don't fix the problem, and _hopefully_ don't inadvertently encourage even bigger vehicles.

This is not entirely true for consumer passenger vehicles, even ones weighing 7k pounds. There are many other reasons to tax but road wear is not as easily justifiable until you hit semi-truck weights. In general roads are made based on laden truck weights, the difference between a 4klb car and 7klb car does not make much if any difference.

Ironically, they were regulated into existence (in the US, at least) thanks to the CAFE standards, which require vehicles to obtain a given milage per area. Large cars therefore have less stringent pollution standards than small cars.

Yikes, these car weights are INSANE!

Cadillac Escalade = 6,200 Lbs

Ford F-150 = 5,700 Lbs

2022 Rivian R1T 7,000 Lbs

Chevrolet Silverado 1500 = 6,700 Lbs

Chevrolet Silverado EV = 8,500 Lbs

It was 1995 before the Honda Civic topped 1000kg

1995 Honda Civic = 2,222 Lbs

2002 Cadillac Escalade = 5797 Lbs

1995 Ford F150 = 3886 Lbs

Increased weight not only increases energy consumption but also massively reduces performance and increases wear on parts from brakes, tires, suspension components, drivetrain, etc. And it makes it more hazardous for everyone outside the vehicle.

And of course, as TFA points out, these massive vehicles overmatch the guardrails. Making all guardrails obsolete and incurring massive replacement costs is a huge societal problem, but it personally makes me want to avoid such heavy beasts just to not be the guy that goes through the guardrail and over the cliff in an accident.

A huge policy move would be to just start taxing vehicles based on weight to reward lightweight vehicles. And yes, lightweight vehicles can be made incredibly safe with decent and well-known engineering.

Unfortunately the horse is already out of the barn on vehicle weights. Yes, there is good engineering that can make light vehicles safe in single vehicle accidents, but when it comes to multi-vehicle accidents, it's a bit of an arms race.

You want to talk insane?

2022 gmc hummer ev, 9,063 lbs

7k cars are a problem, but we have much worse problems with guardrails that are much simpler to fix, and they are not fixed

Guardrail Guy goes into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrR81g1ZkRQ

We know that road damage increases with the fourth power of vehicle mass. So why not tax the same way? If a 7000lb car cost 16x the taxes of a 3500lb car, we’d hope to see more of the latter than the former.

Why not simply legislate weight? A vehicle must be 5000 lbs or less to qualify as a passenger vehicle. Anything more is commercial.

I don't know if that's a huge disincentive. Many taxes for commercial vehicles don't come into play until the vehicle weight is much higher than 10k lbs.

You would also need some revamp of the existing tax structure for commercial vehicles.

Individual passenger cars weighing 3-4 tons is pure insanity. We had light army trucks below 3 tons even (ICE of course). Hell, there are full sized 6 wheeled real trucks with a mass around 6 tons. These monstrosities which carry a single owner to a market or kids to the school, are actually closer to a truck which can carry a complete small artillery gun inside. Mindboggling.

Discussed a month ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39215662

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39219371

Multiple people saying taxes should be proportional to vehicle weight. So should registration/inspection fees, insurance rates, and most of all fines. You need it for your business? Cool, then the business should cover the cost just like it should any other, or else the business doesn't deserve to continue. Nobody should get to dump their costs on other people, and that's what the vast majority of huge-vehicle drivers are doing.

While I agree with most of the ideas here, the statement of "...than a gas-guzzling H3" is just sensational.

Sure the Hummer line in general was not good on gas, but most folks, including these folks don't know that most H3 units were sold with 5 cylinder engines (GM's inline-5 Vortec), and get reasonable fuel economy _for a truck_.

About a year ago my 2006 Tacoma ran out of gas (the gas gauge doesn't work so reliably anymore and I didn't pay attention to the mileage, oops). Of course it was in an inconvenient spot in the middle of a mildly trafficed road so I was forced to hop out and pushed it out of the road, thankfully only about 200ft. I just checked and this truck weighs about 4k pounds. I sure am glad it didn't weight more! It was hard enough at this weight.

Granted this shouldn't be a problem for these newer EVs for a long time but I could see having to push one at some point or another in the vehicles lifetime, assuming they last as long as a standard ICE.

Ahem... Guard rails aren't designed for ALL vehicles on the road? Because cars have grown big, yes, but trucks have not. SO or guard rails was not designed to help keep skidding trucks back on track as well or there is something wrong in the article...

Of course I know deflecting the mass of a mean loaded truck is not something we can reasonably do on most roads but the point is simple: there are less trucks than cars of course, but not that less and they go in all weather conditions and for long trips, so while there are many reasons to criticize cars evolution do not use such safety excuses, they are evidently false.

> a guardrail will “deflect a vehicle back to the roadway [or] slow the vehicle down to a complete stop.” Your car will probably be damaged, but guardrails can prevent something much worse.

Unless that vehicle is a motorcycle in which case the guard rail turns survivable crashes into fatal ones.

Unless the thing that guard-rail prevents is heading directly into on-coming traffic.

Or driving down the side of a mountain.

Weird hill, bro.

It's a motorcycle. Almost any crash on a motorcycle is going to cause serious injuries/death. Guardrails contribute, but let's be real. Lay down a bike while driving at a good clip, or hit anything, guardrail or not, and you're going to have a bad time.

> Almost any crash on a motorcycle is going to cause serious injuries/death.

Protective gear will usually leave the rider uninjured if they don't hit something.

Do you know how many motorcycle riders I see without anything on more than a t-shirt and jeans?

They all wear a helmet, and I get riding leathers are hot, but a t-shirt?

toss1's comment [1] says

Ford F-150 = 5,700 Lbs 1995 Ford F150 = 3886 Lbs

Which makes me wonder: why are these (non-electric) vehicles getting heavier? Is this from engine/parts needed for emissions compliance? Is it perceived safety? Are we getting worse at manufacturing?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39642641

Did anyone else get an ad for an SUV on the article?

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