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Comment by thephyber | Hacker News Reader

There are some notable value judgements that are different between US and EU regulations.

I remember reading that the US car safety rules generally assume that the people in the car do not follow the rules, whereas EU regulations assume they follow the law and use seatbelts.

US crash safety tests don’t care about the damage the car does to pedestrians, but EU regulations do factor that in.

https://www.npr.org/2015/10/16/449090584/why-arent-auto-safe...

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> US car safety rules generally assume that the people in the car do not follow the rules > US crash safety tests don’t care about the damage the car does to pedestrians

As a EU citizen living in the US, this makes perfect sense.

The quality of driving here is far lower, I often see vehicles without plates or temp tags and it's not unusual to hear about uninsured drivers hitting people.

It's ironic that such a car centric country naturally ends up with terrible drivers because of the low barrier to entry.

IMHO, there’s diminishing returns in regulations that try to protect someone who actively doesn’t want to protect themselves. It just adds extra cost (R&D, complexity of design/manufacturing, different parts for different jurisdictions, different parts SKUs to stock, etc).

The upside? It probably saves the lives of some people so reckless they shouldn’t be driving.

And the pedestrians?

Pedestrians are uncommon in most of the US, and where they are common people are supposed to be driving slow anyway. If somebody is flaunting the speed limit and hits a pedestrian and sends them flying fifty feet down the road, the value of their car being ostensibly built for pedestrian safety is very dubious.

Fewer people will walk when infrastructure prioritizes drivers and makes it uncomfortable and unsafe to walk. This isn’t the only option.

Cars being built for pedestrian safety is one piece of that picture. As you note, impact safety falls into this category and provides limited benefits for collisions at speed. There’s a lot more to that story though, as we can see in societies that value pedestrian lives. Automatic braking and avoidance, driver attention monitoring, and speed limiters are all options. Add in safe infrastructure, safety enforcement, etc.

There’s a broad range of tools available to reduce pedestrian deaths. None are perfect, none apply universally, but we should consider all of them.

For various reasons, Americans broadly opted to live in suburbs with car-centric lifestyles instead of dense urban areas where walking is viable. Where I live now I'm about 100x more likely to encounter a deer than a pedestrian. This is the context needed to understand why Americans generally aren't interested in prioritizing pedestrian safety. Making pedestrians safer so people can give up their cars is just a bizarre proposal to most Americans. The American anti-car niche is very small, comprising mostly of terminally online people with anxiety problems.

For what it's worth, I did personally live in a city and had a pedestrian lifestyle for about 15 years. I never felt particularly imperiled; the national statistic for pedestrian deaths may seem spooky but some very basic precautions, like making a habit of looking both ways even when you have the right of way, eliminates almost all of the risk.

The cost of car accidents is extremely high so I doubt that you would ever reach diminishing returns.

There's a reason that driving safety is the #1 public policy when a country develops.

The US driving experience varies by state to roughly the same degree that the EU varies by country.

The parts of the US that are within about an 8hr drive of Mexico are like the US's poor eastern europe, at least as far as driving goes.

You might make it an hour in the northeast or southeast without a plate. The cops would see dollar signs like Mr Krabs.

Pacific Northwest also does not enforce any vehicle identification or registration laws. No license plates, different license plates, only one license plates, fake plates, expired car tax sticker, none of it is enforced.

Nor are moving violations.

Pedestrian safety is one of the reasons it will be hard to ever sell the Cybertruck in Europe without significant modification. People who have imported them themselves have had to fit rubber strips on all the sharp edges, and I'd imagine that if they were to sell them locally the rules would be even more strict. The shape is inherently dangerous to pedestrians, particularly children.

US car “safety” rules are basically the the bigger/higher the vehicle you can afford, the safer you deserve to be.

Conservation of Momentum applies in every country.

And it turns into an arms race, with everyone buying increasingly larger cars to feel safer.

That is the point, zero restrictions on car size/weight/height and zero standards on driving licenses mean whoever can afford the more dangerous vehicle deserves more safety.

>> whereas EU regulations assume they follow the law

That isn't generally true as the EU favors driver assist technologies such as automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, and speed limiter features.

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