My particular bugbear here is the absolutely insanity of truck and SUV heights, to the point that even full-grown adults are no longer clearly visible from inside new vehicles (https://i.imgur.com/1dHWVxn.png).
She was walking right behind her parents, but the driver could not see her because the vehicle was too high, so thought the road was free when the parents had passed through.
The court decided that the driver was at no fault as it was impossible to see the girl from his position.
I hope that means that the vehicle manufacturer is on a murder trial then. But I do not have illusions that this will lead to actual change.
Edit: Basically any car from Suzuki would be a hit in the US: https://www.suzukiauto.co.za/new-cars
This is blatantly false. See: the Mitsubishi Mirage as just one example.
(I don't know about erikw's claims about small cars being illegal in the US. So I don't want to express an opinion on that.)
They are perfectly legal to sell. There's just little demand and most manufacturers have discontinued sales.
I own a not-quite-that small car and the manufacturer discontinued US sales for the same reason - the lack thereof. That's why the Smart Fortwo discontinued sales in the US in 2019. The US market for good or for bad just does not want small cars. Many manufacturers are even dropping their sedans for sales reasons; e.g., Ford dropped the Fusion and Focus.
I didn't much care either way, but I do still consider this when comparing new vehicles.
WTF !
Pedestrian mirrors (allowing lorry drivers to see any pedestrians immediately in front and to the side) have been a legal requirement for years in Blighty.
https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/images/safer-lorries-schem...
I hate them.
I dream of the day, when proper night vision gear with the result displayed to the front window will be standard in cars, so all the cars can have no, or very soft lights to drive around savely at night.
Also, why not heat vision to better spot humans (and animals)? For the AI as well as the humans.
Is the tech military restricted?
Probably partly.
digital is controlled but more widely made, but also barely worth it.
the real issue is how to display it. for head-mounted setups it's essentially full field of view, and in monocular use combination is subconscious, but it's still rather awkward and requires practice. you can't achieve the same effect on a windshield, even with HUD.
cadillac had this feature in the 90s, though.
https://hudway.co/blog/history-of-automotive-heads-up-displa...
Unfortunately, yes. I know that there are various sci-fi solutions in the labs already, of projecting the image directly into the eye, or correctly on the windshield while taking the head position of the driver into account, but it probably takes a long time till they are a) reliable b) affordable c) standard in every car
If it was ~20 years ago it wasn't even that big compared to today!
And I don't mean the driver was an asshole, it simply wouldn't have fit in otherwise.
Ridiculous vehicle.
Well...
In the former soviet block, you don't "find somewhere else" to park your car. You grab the first spot where you fit because you don't know if there is another free anywhere else.
Incidentally, that's why i like 4 meter cars. On streets with parallel parking, they fit in more places than the 4.5 m or more.
> Well...
Okay he could have been an asshole for other reasons, including for importing the F-150 here.
But the parking spots were at 45 degree angle and while it was narrow enough to fit in two if parked at 45, it was too long and it would have blocked the access lane with the tip. So it was parallel parked on 3 which was the only way to not block anyone.
So, bad driving skills and realizing it via lack of self-trust, being compensated with degradation of roads and parking for everybody else, or just throwing money at the problem (without fixing underlying issue, but feeling less shitty about it).
All could be easily solved by proportional taxation. Swiss folks figured it like many other things already, each canton has their own car tax rules but most are some formula with horse powers and car weight combined. No chance this decade for anything similar in the US I believe.
In the 1990s, I had a sweet little Honda Civic hatchback that got great mileage and handled beautifully.
But towards the end of the decade, the roads in my area were filled with aggressive drivers in Ford and Jeep SUVs who just were obnoxious. I felt forced to switch to a larger car just to feel safe on the road.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
Which makes importing smaller trucks like you see in other countries cost prohibitive
We've got the Maverick hybird which does 99% of the farm stuff.
And we also have a tow equipped expedition that we use when we need to haul horses or the big trailer. The expedition also comes in handy when we regularly haul 6+ people.
I've had the need for a gooseneck trailer maybe once in the last decade.
Weird that the more unsafe (to everyone else) and wasteful and polluting but also more profitable to industry modern trucks and SUVs are legal in their place!
Bam, SUVs are really unattractive.
As you can see, those requirements just get gamed.
Instead of complicated rules, just tax fuel (or emissions etc), and consumers will institute their own personal fuel efficiency requirements.
No, because that harm small fun sports cars. The problem is big cars. Just ban big cars.
More fuel you consume more emissions you produce, more distance you go, more road your wear occurs.
Do you want to get 8l V8 engine? Fine, just pay your fuel taxes.
Pinning fuel use seems to be the way to go, rather than penalizing engine geometry, for this reason.
It's important to remember, though, that semi-trucks get 5-8 miles to the gallon due to their weight/purpose. Perhaps these new fuel taxes should only affect classes other than A, B, and C to avoid knock-on effects.
What's interesting here is that semi-trucks cause exponentially more wear and tear on the roads than consumer vehicles, while not paying the corresponding fuel tax — they're being subsidized by everyday drivers.
Also the knock on effects may not be completely negative, it could mean that it isn't economical to drive a truck door-to-door filled with low value merchandise (And give retail a fighting chance).
What I was worried about was trucks used to transport groceries, not delivery trucks.
Last thing the poor need right now is the cost of food going even higher. They're already struggling to get by as it is.
Basically, tax fuel and tax the car.
But no need for outright bans. Almost any externality you can think of from (big) cars is finite, and thus a finite tax is appropriate.
That's not likely to succeed, because:
1. People — individuals and companies — try to game the tax system at least as much as they do pollution regulations, and probably much more so because tax obligations are largely self-reported with only sporadic auditing to catch cheaters and gamers.
2. Certain political elements are always trying to defund the tax auditors (e.g., the IRS). We might well ask why that is.
3. Politically, tax hikes are always harder to get through Congress — and to keep in force — than sensible standards for products and behaviors that voters can see are beneficial to them (e.g., pollution prohibitions).
> 2. Certain political elements are always trying to defund the tax auditors (e.g., the IRS). We might well ask why that is.
Tax the petrol itself. That works reasonably well in most of the world. No need for complicated individual audits etc.
> 3. Politically, tax hikes are always harder to get through Congress — and to keep in force — than sensible standards for products and behaviors that voters can see are beneficial to them (e.g., pollution prohibitions).
I don't know. We kicked off the whole discussion because the standards you have are NOT sensible.
True — but see my #3 above (political problems), and then add 3.1: Special-interest groups, which donate heavily to politicians' campaigns, always lobby for tax breaks of various kinds, e.g., tax deductions (at the federal level) for state- and local sales- and property taxes.
At a high enough tax rate, the would-be gas guzzlers' contribution to the fisc outweighs their probabilistic homicide.
My Subaru has almost zero free space under the hood and there are all kinds of repairs I wouldn't attempt because you have to disassemble half the engine to get to anything.
"I remember wanting it to feel very locomotive - like a massive fist moving through the air"
I suppose it appeals to a kind of selfish stupidity.
I always wonder if cars that are particularly top heavy could be flipped over while parked by particularly strong pedestrians