Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmnwski | Hacker News Reader

Also, the more SUVs are driven, the less safe people feel (and arguably are), accelerating the need to buy an SUV for safety reasons.

View on HN

On the other hand, if you kill someone in a traffic accident, you feel shit the rest of your life.

This is true. On the other hand, if you get killed in a car accident... You also feel shit the rest of your life.

But at least you didn't waste $ on a big car.

If you had spent it, you might still be alive, and if you aren't, it's hardly wasted, since you no longer need it.

Jokes aside, I live in the UK, and occasionality I see vehicles here that are entirely too big and unnecessary for our roads.

There was a lady driving what I think was a Defender 130 (I don't know modern LRs too well), it was far too big for the parking spaces in the tiny car park we were in, she could only just see over the steering wheel, and she had no chance of seeing my 5yo child I was walking back to my car with; who's quite tall for 5 but didn't reach over the height of the bonnet.

> If you had spent it, you might still be alive, and if you aren't, it's hardly wasted, since you no longer need it.

Only if you crash right after you bought the car ...

I’m not sure, a lot of people seem quick to blame children for “darting” in to the road instead of accepting responsibility for operating a dangerous machine.

People lay the blame on children and their parents because if they choose to do their best bipedal impression of a deer there's really nothing a driver can do. One could be going 10mph and if a child darts out from parked cars at the right time you're gonna hit them. Heck, adults get hit by forklifts and other heavy equipment going single digit speeds all the time and even workplaces that separate traffic nearly completely don't eliminate them at scale.

Ignoring extremists is easier than preventing (or reducing to a point that you stop complaining) these accidents at the limit, so that's what society does. Tough luck.

Reducing speed limits to 30 kph where there might be kids running out from between vehicles is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, yet drivers oppose this.

The average car driver is NOT putting enough active attention into their driving and could in many cases break fast enough to prevent the accidents that do happen. Furthermore, the average car driver has not been trained on how to actually handle extremely rapid braking situations. A lot of people are downright wusses about dealing with the "whiplash" of actually hard braking their cars. I'd even claim that over half of all drivers have not seriously applied their brakes at 100% at a speed above 20mph EVER!

Slow reaction times, of the kind that could be easily corrected by more strict laws around who and how licenses are given, are easily the #1 reason for preventable pedestrian deaths from cars.

This is a solvable problem and the Euros have far less of these stupid kinds of situations for a reason. I WILL blame most drivers who "kill children" for their laxidazy assumption that they can reduce their idle concentration just because "it hasn't happened to them".

Also all of this discourse is really arguments for requiring all cars to have active automatic emergency braking for pedestrians and other cars.

SUVs parked on the side of the street make it difficult to see even adults as they try to cross the street. It’s not the humans doing a reindeer impression, it’s the cars doing a forest impression

If the child darts into the road without space for you to stop, not even you driving a subcompact can save them...

If nothing else, they'll roll up and off the hood of a typical subcompact instead of be pancaked by the 60" vertical wall that is the front of most modern trucks and SUVs.

The main point here is that it sounds a lot like a zero sum game, people are struggling to catch a bigger share of a limited "safety" pie while manufacturers instigating the mass war are watching their profits increase.

It's not clear at all to me how a crash involving two SUVs is much safer than, say, a 2 bike crash, and in fact there is a particular type of accident (front-overs of children) than trucks are strongly susceptible to and would never happen with lower mass / shorter vehicles. This all points towards a runaway tragedy of the commons that can be solved by limiting vehicle mass.

The situation reminds of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Except they're not though. Buyers are juggling many more criteria and safety is only a "nice to have" after fitness for purpose is achieved. Like no amount of internet fanboys screeching about Volvo's safety record will make someone who wants a roadster buy one over a Miata.

While I'm sure there is some amount of the affect you're describing the lion's share of it is likely CAFE rules favoring larger footprint vehicles effectively discounting SUVs causing them to be a better bang for your buck.

>It's not clear at all to me how a crash involving two SUVs is much safer than,

It is by the simple physics of having more distance to dissipate force over and less distance between the occupants and stuff in the cabin.

> This all points towards a runaway tragedy of the commons that can be solved by limiting vehicle mass.

Which will never happen because the same exact upper middle class demographics that screech all over the internet about safety are the exact same people who would see their buying choices degrade as a result of such.

> It is by the simple physics

Is this a personal theory, a hunch, or do you have data or citations?

> of having more distance to dissipate force over and less distance between the occupants and stuff in the cabin.

So what we need are bigger vehicles made out of lighter materials, to increase the distance and reduce the forces, perhaps some comically large Styrofoam bumpers protecting our bikes? Now, I can get behind that.

> safety is only a "nice to have"

Buyers are a diverse group, you know. There is a substantial segment that rates safety as a the top priority, and there is very little doubt the SUV mass race is strongly related to the "perception of safety" larger vehicles provide, of course not to the actual safety reality and externalities they incur to the rest of society.

Another substantial segment is driven by the "perception of masculinity" their large vehicles provides. You couldn't make up this level of lameness.

>Is this a personal theory, a hunch, or do you have data or citations?

Find any "professional" talking on record about small car safety and they will lament the reduced space for crumple zones, reduced distance from head to structure, etc.

>Another substantial segment is driven by the "perception of masculinity" their large vehicles provides. You couldn't make up this level of lameness.

I suspect the number of people who see a big truck as projecting masculinity is in fact smaller than the people who enjoy that other people will assume they bought the truck for that reason and dislike or be offended by it.

If you would have to pay for mass (taxes etc) that would most probably influence people to go lighter. It also makes sense because heavier cars cause more road damage.

You are making assumptions about empathy levels in other people, using your own as a basis. On a meta level, this isn't surprising!

I suspect there is a correlation between people who choose big cars, and empathy levels below yours.

You're giving people way too much credit here. People and, more specifically, Americans (who I know) will do some incredible feats of mental gymnastics to avoid taking personal responsibility -- despite what their bumper stickers and favorite politicians say. It's always someone else's fault and they're always (somehow ...) the victim.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com