Accepting US car standards would risk European lives
etsc.eu
etsc.eu
A couple years ago he also made a video about these trucks more broadly - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo
What's truly maddening is how many of these vehicles which _do not_ meet European safety standards are _already_ in Europe. Walk around Hilversum in the Netherlands and you will see plenty of Dodge Rams (mostly 1500's, but there's even a 2500 Dually usually parked on the sidewalk ("pavement "for Brits) where my kids used to go to school). They're imported under "Individual Vehicle Approval" rules, exempting them from type safety requirements, and on top of that are almost always registered as "business vehicles" (you can tell from the V plate) which means they pay an absolute pittance in tax.
I moved here to get away from American kindercrushers (among other reasons) and I am profoundly concerned that Europe is being invaded by these machines.
(Edit) Worth noting is that a lot of Dutch street design is based on the idea that people _can_ share space with cars in dense, low speed environments, but that assumption flies out the window when the vehicles are so large you can't even see a kid walking or biking to school.
Further edit - source - https://www.motorfinanceonline.com/news/dodge-ram-registrati... 5,000 Dodge Rams imported in to Europe in 2023 alone.
They are all business vehicles as the premiums would be so insane no person would pay it (which is a hint why they should not be in the road). The problem comes when the crash out costs the business and then you get nothing due to type of insurance (pretty much we pay nothing you pay everything yourself), or the ability of companies to fight endless court battles which your insurance likely does not cover.
My way of middle fingering them is reporting them every time they are either on the curb when there is a parking spot (not legal, blocking pedestrian access is only partially legal when there is no parking pace nearby and you leave enough space), or when they overextend onto the road which is a judgement call and up to the enforcing officer.
You also need to keep notice of people trying to get the municipality to widen parking spots and block that.
https://www.parkeerbord.nl/wetgeving/is-parkeren-op-de-stoep...
This spot used to drive me absolutely insane when walking to school with my kids - the gemeente even added marked parking spots and drivers just stole the footpath anyway, so we had to walk in the street, and the gemeente straight refused to issue tickets. The guy on the phone told me "it's not causing any trouble" because hey, it's not like _he's_ ever had to push a pram in the street.
For example, a Mercedes Sprinter in the standard long box configuration (as is used by local grocery delivery services, plumbers and the likes where I live) is 7.4 meters long , way longer than even the longest American pickup trucks (for some of them, several meters longer!), and is just as wide as them.
In custom box or pickup bed configuration (used by e.g., gardeners), these vehicles get wider (and sharper).
It's the norm in many businesses for employees to drive their work vehicle home and park it where they live, so they're everywhere. Not as many as regular passenger cars of course, but you'll see them on any residential road. Gardeners, plumbers, electricians, delivery services, this is the norm for all of them (a perk of sorts). Even big name-brand logistics companies, as it's common for the drivers to be independent contractors owning the van themselves so home is the only place to park.
They are also used for errands. They're legal for private use proportionate to the amount of VAT paid irrespective of registration type here, so you'll see them pick up/drop off kids, do groceries, recycle bottles, etc. in such vehicles too. Pretty sure that would be just as legal where you are given familiar EU rules.
As I said, I rarely see Sprinters, might be an Amsterdam thing due to how hard it is to drive and park them here. Ford Transit / VW Transporter / MB Vito / Renault Trafic are far more common. It doesn't seem like much, but an extra 20cm width + 1m length make a massive difference in overall size and driveability.
These are strictly professional cars. When they are not "in duty" they're probably parked at a garage.
On the other hand, an American open truck driving/parked in a residential area is almost certainly some show-off.
Source: I live here and see it every day. Family, friends and customers are doing it, plus many eons ago I too was a tradesman driving home every day in the company work van.
(Heck, many companies wouldn't even have a place to park all their company cars at once, many such smaller companies run out of regular residential buildings with no dedicated parking.)
Seems correct on relative length but not width; the F-450 Super Duty body is a bit wider without mirrors than a Sprinter with mirrors;
A standard mercedes sprinter in van configuration is 2020 mm wide without mirrors, which is as wide as the RAM and just 10mm narrower than the f150. I suspect the sprinter has wider mirrors, but I don't have the F-150 numbers to compare to so I'll leave that unanswered. Pickup configurations of the sprinter go much wider (and have extended mirrors to fit) - a common compact pickup bed configuration has a 2030mm internal bed width for example.
Note that the F-450 Super Duty is not applicable to the discussion as it won't work in the EU: A standard vehicle (class B) has an upper weight limit of 3500 kg. The F-450 Super Duty would have to be registered as an actual truck (class C), which requires a different drivers license and the use of a tachograph to track all driving and adherence to resting period rules. We don't use those vehicle classes unless strictly necessary.
For cars that can be sold without having to get special approval, the obnoxious drivers are a minority (well, maybe BMWs excluded ;-P).
But what driving/parking manners would you expect from someone who went out of their way and paid extra to get e.g. a Ram or an F-150? They're almost guaranteed to disregard any inconvenience they cause with their driving.
If you get injured because the municipality refused to act they are on the hook. Thell them you want it on paper they say they will do nothing to prevent this and you want them telling you specifically you have to walk on the street because they do not act on illegally parked cars.
Edit: where I live I have the option of specifically reporting a dangerous situation which in your case I would: near school zones with children involved it always is in my opinion but who am I to judge. It also helps if more people complain. We have a load of parking tourists here since the municipality mode the payed zones so more traffic and more annoyances. My first messages got impolitely unanswered but after a year of complaining by pretty much everyone they finally start doing things.
RIP Cor H., one of a kind. I'm pretty sure the fact that in that neighborhood even now people are religiously parking on the street and never on the sidewalk is a remnant of his presence in this world.
The government doesn't want to have it's agents doing "aha, gotcha" stuff on technicalities and the strict letter of the law except where doing so aligns with broader public support because doing so without that support will not endear the government to the people. Reporting a Superduty for parking like an ass in the same way that a bunch of other people are parked like an ass because you don't like the Superduty isn't gonna change the enforcement calculus.
Business automobile insurance doesn't work any differently than consumer automobile insurance. Liability payouts don't usually (ever?) have deductibles. I was recently sideswiped by a guy driving a massive pickup truck for work and their insurance paid me promptly and fairly without any fuss at all. At least the state liability insurance laws I am familiar with do not change just because you're a business.
On other hand the RAMs are not relevant for the average citizen. Crazy fuel consumption is a showstopper. And the ones with some extra cash will continue to import with German „Individual Vehicle Approval“ equivalent. In my eyes it’s another useless European regulation. Let poor people import cheap Toyotas from overseas.
A Ram was certainly relevant for this dead woman - https://www.rtl.nl/nieuws/binnenland/artikel/5521908/rouveen...
Edit: I am really curious why there is no real vehicle physical size tax in Germany. Let’s take reference as VW Golf. Smaller cars cost less, bigger more. I agree to pay more, but current insanity with RAMs and vans should be somehow regulated.
It’s so ridiculously bad that even an M1 Abrams tank has less blind spots: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/140dgn8/many_popu...
Weight also matters of course. Hopefully this relatively simple ruling will fix some of that too.
It's hard because the people pushing for new rules very transparently want rules far beyond what the public wants or considers sensible. If they were simply asking for that it'd probable be done already.
> there shall be no obstruction in the driver's 180° forward direct field of vision below a horizontal plane passing through V1, and above three planes through V2, one being perpendicular to the plane X-Z and declining forward 4° below the horizontal
> For vehicles with high driving positions (driver's eye points more than 1,650 mm above the ground), a 1,200 mm tall cylindrical object with a diameter of 300 mm must be visible when placed 2,000 mm in front of the vehicle
According to Claude a Dodge RAM fails both of these. At 80cm (2-year old, a dog, or someone crouching down), depending on driver position, an object might be obscured by the hood in a comically large 5-8 meter area ahead.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Speaking or fun over, whoever made that illustration should be run over by a tank. Fix the size of the goddamn kid or fix the distance and change the size of the kid. Having both variables move serves to only add confusion and annoyance.
Absolutely not. You can't even turn around in the driver position of a tank.
The monstrously large (5.8 meters) G63 6x6 is considerably rarer (i have never seen one in person).
Those kinds of exotic variants are for the Dubais of the world, for rich Arabs to power up and down sand dunes, not for the Autobahn and narrow medieval streets. I’ve only seen it at a motorshow.
https://cldnr.prod.webx.talpa.digital/talpa-network/image/fe...
For one, typical pickup trucks seems to have much worse forward visibility than most SUVs. To the point that even an M1 tank sees forward better:
* https://carbuzz.com/news/the-abrams-m1-tank-has-better-visib...
https://www.carsized.com/en-us/cars/compare/porsche-cayenne-...
But or course you are correct this is not only about American cars. Europeans can build big cars as well.
Cars are taxed by engine displacement in Germany. It's rather low compared to insurance and gas cost though. Indirectly larger cars are taxed through high gas tax.
If the US government wants to give its soldiers perks, they can rent or loan them a local car. Probably cheaper all round than flying/shipping in their financed Dodge RAM anyway.
Then again, American personnel being arseholes to the locals is well established from Okinawa to Croughton so it's probably endorsed as a power thing.
They’re clustered around areas of idiots with means. I’m nowhere near a us military base but there’s a bunch of these where I live, including two or three owned at houses I pass by on my way to work.
The tall grill means impact to pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcycles is basically instant death as their head - the only thing above the grill - gets whiplashed onto the rigid tip of the hood. On a normal vehicle you get your legs swiped and rotate your whole body onto an intentionally flexible area of the hood for a much gentler impact.
The visibility from the driver seat is not only much worse than our actual semis, but also worse than actual tanks. You could have half a kindergarten and a small vehicle in front of your car without knowing.
As for the tax, eh - tbf these vehicles are mostly used for business purposes by sole proprietors and the likes, and while they're stupid vehicles they do still do the job. A fully decked Iveco Daily or Mercedes Sprinter is also expensive with little registration tax. Registration tax is a weird (and arguably stupid) system, this isn't really an outlier in that regard.
I roll my eyes more when I see a sports car attempted registered as a van.
Yeah, mentioned in a comment, driving a Ford Expedition on holiday in the US I almost hit a hit walking down the sidewalk.
It literally had better visibility going backwards in the rear view camera than it did going forwards.
Even if the owner is using it as a rugged machine for hauling tools and supplies back and forth, they make for terrible work vehicles. A bed that's advertised as 6 foot actually measures about 5' 7" if you're lucky and the wheel wells eat into it so much that loading anything wider than maybe 4' just feels stupid. Nothing about it feels convenient or helpful when compared to a proper work van or a small flatbed. It's basically just a comfy exoskeleton for the driver to pickup groceries.
Meanwhile, I'm driving from site to site with a 4-cylinder hatchback full of tools in custom boxes I made getting twice the gas mileage. It gets some funny looks, but it gets the job done, which is more than I can say for most of the not-a-scratch-on-them trucks I see on the road, here.
As you say, they are absolutely terrible for work use as well - Japanese kei trucks famously have larger beds than some common US pickup trucks, and the size of the custom beds we use in the EU makes the US ones look like absolute kids toys - but that too I wouldn't mind too much if they were just forced to be safe and with decent emissions so the idiocy mainly affected the driver and their wallets.
I'm not too impressed with your vehicle only getting twice the gas mileage though. I'd expect more than that. :P
I'm going to blame the ham radio antennas and bike rack ;)
But in all seriousness, I was getting slightly better mileage when the car was new 6 years ago. It has declined a bit, despite my regular maintenance, but I'm still very pleased with it. It might be more than twice the mileage of the average truck on the road, to be honest, but I find it hard to get a clear number. I think some truck owners embellish the mileage they actually get, as does the dealer sticker on the new vehicles for sale since those numbers assume perfect terrain with no traffic, last I checked. Then I hop into a co-worker's 2020 truck and realize he's getting 12mpg on a good day and nearly have a heart attack.
My vehicle gets between 45 and 55mpg on average, depending if I'm on the highway a lot or more urban environments.
People spend insane amounts of money buying these monstrosities too. It seems as a society we've normalized spending a year's salary on a vehicle, or rather getting a 7-year loan and making crazy monthly payments. I don't understand it. My then normal-sized, now smallish, 13-year old car, that I paid off 11 years ago, still runs great and I can park it easily.
This is also another part of the whole truck-craze in the US that I do not understand. An F150, for example, starts around $40,000 USD for base models, not including taxes and hidden fees. I purchased my car (an HEV, mind you) back in 2019 for just over half that price, spend about $500 annually on regular maintenance that I'm not able to do myself to keep things tip top, and spend about half as much in fuel as my coworkers who travel about the same amount as me for our jobs. Accounting regularly double-checks that I turned in all my fuel receipts because they still don't quite grasp that my car gets far, far better gas mileage.
All that said, these guys make about the same money I do, some a little less since they're newbies, which is to say we are all very underpaid for what we do, wealthy by no standards. And yet, they made these massive purchases while struggling to pay bills or complaining that fuel is too expensive at the pump, etc. These are the same people who buy two paychecks worth of fireworks every July 4th just to watch it all burn in 15 minutes.
Makes me think part of our cultural identity includes regularly acting against our own interests.
An f150 can do none of these things.
> While there are very visible idiots in the USA that drive big trucks for aesthetic reasons
That is 95% of the market.
> there are also plenty of farmers, contractors, etc. that need them as a practical tool to haul heavy loads.
For the average contractor a panel van would be more capable and useful. You can put 3 metric tonnes in a man tge (and actually have the space for it) and tow a 3.5 tonnes trailer. And it’s available bare if you need an open bed, or a custom rear (e.g. for a lift).
So? I gave specs for a typical 1 ton truck. A 1/2 ton F150 is smaller, cheaper, and more efficient. It depends on what you need.
A panel van is more useful for some things, a truck for others- it depends on what you’re doing. You’re not going to fill your panel van with manure or gravel and then transport it across a muddy field without getting stuck. I grew up in a rural area of the USA where everyone owned trucks they needed and used for work, most were old and rusty and they all also owned a regular passenger car they used when they weren’t hauling something heavy… people were poor and did not waste fuel driving a truck except when it was essential- not a fashion statement, just a tool.
My family owned a 3/4 ton truck that we needed for hauling our boat and livestock, but we drove an old Volvo at other times. My dad built the home I grew up in, and he had to transport all of the materials to build it himself.
I think the hate on here is coming mostly from a place of ignorance about what life in rural America is like, which is what full sized American trucks are engineered and perfectly suited for. Where transporting thousands of pounds of materials across a muddy field in 4WD isn’t something you do once a year but often twice a day just to survive.
So that's a small fraction of the market, and literally none of what's already landed in europe.
> I grew up in a rural area of the USA where everyone owned trucks they needed and used for work, most were old and rusty and they all also owned a regular passenger car they used when they weren’t hauling something heavy… people were poor and did not waste fuel driving a truck except when it was essential- not a fashion statement, just a tool.
OK. Apparently you're waking up from a coma and missed the last 20 year of US car trends?
> My dad built the home I grew up in, and he had to transport all of the materials to build it himself.
Cool. My grandfather did the same for his family, using an R4. And the odd rental when that wasn't enough.
> I think the hate on here is coming mostly from a place of ignorance about what life in rural America is like
Or you could just read what people actually write, and see that your "thinking" could not be more wrong.
There's never been less farmers in the US, or more trucks sold. And full-size trucks are nowhere near sales leaders.
I very much appreciate the capabilities and utility of American pickup trucks, despite not owning one because I don’t need one. I also find it distasteful when people use them as urban passenger cars to project some sort of “personal brand” without having an actual need, but that in no way diminishes my appreciation for their practicality when used appropriately.
I suspect people are in part so aggressively hateful of American pickup trucks because they see it as a symbol for an opposing side in a culture war. However that perspective seems really silly to anyone that uses them properly to meet a practical need.
> my appreciation for their practicality when used appropriately.
You can do that and still acknowledge that pickups are a massive problem. These are not exclusive thoughts despite your refusal to see it. It might be easier if you substitute pickups for mine trucks, excavators, or rollers, which I assume you don’t have the same emotional attachment towards.
I never said they aren't, you seem to be trying to have an argument against a position that I have never stated or held. I was explaining how these vehicles can be practical when used for their intended and engineered purpose, and your rebuttals are targeted as some other assumed perspective or position that I simply don't have. Please drop the insults- that isn't how we discuss things on HN.
My acknowledgement of the practical utility of American pickups for their engineered purpose doesn't come from any kind of emotional attachment, or affinity for them, nor any delusion that most of their owners actually need or use them properly- that's all coming from you. I'm a European car nerd/snob and wouldn't personally be caught dead driving any American vehicle, I just really don't like them. I own a fuel efficient diesel German SUV that I tow a flatbed utility trailer behind, so I can do some of the things one would usually do with a pickup, without having to own one.
In the EU, neither would any American pickup truck: If registered as a normal class B vehicle, the total gross vehicle weight would be limited to 3500 kg (7700 lbs), and it would at most be permitted to tow 3500 kg (7700 lbs) with full independent trailer brakes, 750 kg (1650 lbs) without. You can add roughly 1000 kg if you tow a semitrailer, but getting the vehicle certified with a fifth wheel would probably be infeasible.
It doesn't make sense as a class C truck here (special driver's license, tachograph requirements for commercial use). It's way less nimble than our Scania/Volvo trucks (their turning radii are way tighter, and and have much smaller footprint for a given capacity), and is obviously a lot less capable than a vehicle that can be build from small utility up to the ~100k lbs range.
At the same time, if a farmer is outside the scope of a regular personal vehicle, they're most likely going to use their go-to tractor (e.g., Lamborghini, John Deere) which can haul anything anywhere, otherwise if they really need to haul they'll be reaching for a Scania/Volvo.
(It is common to register smaller, 7500 kg class C vehicles, but that's usually stuff like large Mercedes Sprinter vans, often built up as specialized service vehicles - think sewer inspection and repair.)
In the context of the US: It might seem like the best choice given the common options there, but I think the issue is with the options and perceived utility. It's the same with large trucks: The common ones in the EU are much more powerful, rated to haul more, are more comfortable, safer, have much smaller footprint for the given load and turns on a dime compared to US options.
This.
I'm living in EU, thinking about getting some pickup. Just want to try this kind of vehicle (and I would love to transport my motorcycle, building materials etc). But I want something small - it looks like almost non-existent market here (there are cars like older f150, s10, etc - but very, very limited offers). Everyone gets the big modern trucks, that are unusable in our tight spaces.
Just get a Renault Traffic or equivalent. I don't see any advantage pickup trucks would have against a white van when transporting anything.
I want it with all the pros and cons, just to try it.
Something like a Peugeot Partner (just to name something) + a trailer does all of that. With the added benefit that without the trailer attached it's a fairly normal size.
Even when I had a pickup truck, I ended up getting a trailer for my motorcycle. In the end, I've got tired of having my luggage getting wet (no such thing as a fail proof bed cover) and replaced the truck with a more sensible minivan.
There's plenty of variation as they're all custom, and as they are work vehicles there should be plenty of cheap used ones on the market. The bed is also just a plate bolted to a steel frame so you can do whatever you want with it easily - adding custom boxes underneath, built-in ramps, changing the floor, whatever. They're also available with tall roofs with openable soft cover.
But as others suggest, used closed vans are also cheap and quite spacious, and on the big end you have the usual choice of a long-body sprinter which could probably fit 3 motorcycles inside with space to spare, with a much lower ramp height needed to get them in/out. Look around - it might not be as sexy, but there's definitely something that fits your need.
What's infuriating is the EuroNCAP safety tests refuse to acknowledge this. SUVs get the same bonnet impact test as small cars do and end up scoring highly due to have a large bonnet surface area despite the fact that actual impacts with pedestrians does not happen like that with SUVs.
And then (wrong) smug wanks on the internet talk about how much safer their SUVs are for pedestrians than small cars based on quoting NCAP scores.
The pass side blind spot is massive, even in a day cab with no trailer attached. You can hide an entire minivan in there. Even something like a modern F550 is worlds better.
This isn't to say that modern pickups don't have huge blind spots, they very obviously do, only that your comparison is hyperbolic and unserious.
Here's one in Utrecht https://urbanists.social/@Fuzzbizz/109608802470660144
I love vans more than any vehicle, but they're garbage at offroad compared to trucks (even 4motion, etc can't compare). Most people don't use them for that, but in villa constructions sometimes you really want a pickup to get to the site. They're also better than vans in snow. Edge cases but they exist and they're not so obscure that I haven't experienced them.
That said, 95% of construction work in europe does not involve any off-road driving at all, and definitely not around the Amsterdam/Utrecht area.
They are, ultimately, made for different workloads.
I am quite tall, even for Dutch standards, but the hood reaches my shoulder easily. It also drives around quite a busy neighbourhood. So I expect this specific car to kill someone within the next 5 years or so.
I think “a couple of hundred” is an absolutely reasonable estimate. Even in big cities like London or Paris you’re not going to find more than a couple (counting all the Mercedes G 6x6s too)
The people driving these cars exist mostly outside of inner cities.
If you disagree, you can do so like an adult instead of spewing out completely unnecessary and unjustified insults.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/b2ad/live/a20a6d...
from: 'Carspreading' is on the rise - and not everyone is happy about it - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7vdvl2531o
Throws in the term "Chelsea Tractor", in Australia in the 1980's they were called Toorak Tractors or simply Yank Tanks.
You do get problems in rural areas with idiots in Chelsea Tractors though. Leave them in the city -- there's no room for you in rural areas.
(For those whining about having to do the school run, just got back in my 1.6m wide car with 2 kids, 6 bags, skateboard and guitar, no problems on the 8 miles of single track road even when the lorries come the other way)
It isn't the Rural Roads in the UK. Also the cars in the photo are kinda normal sized. The Volkwagen people carrier thing in the photo isn't that wide actually.
Honestly getting past people isn't that much of an issue. There are normally passing spots where you pull over to let people through.
"Chelsea Tractor" is more of a dig at people Range Rovers for the looks and it never been using off-road.
There is a brand in the UK that have decided to "own" the label. Not sure why you would want/need a Ineos Grenadier in London, but some people will buy one.
People in London bought 4x4s (in part) so they could still comfortably travel down roads covered in highly aggressive speed bumps. The joke is that we made London roads miserable to drive in a sensible small car (even at safe and legal speeds, I usually have to stop on approaching some of this stuff in a bog standard A1).
There are plenty of factors at play, but sometimes incentives are obvious
People are strange.
"Not my car" :)
These rules need to start discriminating between "safe for the passenger who bought it" and "safe for everyone else sharing the public space". Let people easily import some old Model T or a cute kei truck but not something that will kill someone else's kids who they can't see.
They'd quickly find out when they're not being subsidized by the general public and people actually have to pay their way to use their vehicles through tolls to people amortizing their road maintenance costs, that the smaller more pedestrian safe cars are the ones that make sense to operate.
("murder" is a bit an extreme reaction but the more realistic idea may be to make harsher judgements the more pointlessly large and dangerous the vehicle is)
If the average Dodge Ram causes X millimorts of deaths per year (per km? per km on suburban roads?) and every dollar spent on public healthcare (drug interventions? road safety? Fire departments?) saves Y lives, you can increase the tax by X/Y, trust the government to spend the extra revenue in the most effective way, and everyone comes out better off.
It sounds so enlightened to shuffle micromorts around. What good is it to the parents of a child killed by an unsafe vehicle that increased taxes going to healthcare will ensure that 320 elderly people can live 3 months longer?
If you want a silly huge car you should pay silly huge fees for it. You must compensate the public for your nuisance vehicle.
Because I read comments like that and I don't.
A murder charge for a crime without intent? In the rich west? There just isn't the political will for that. A policy like that is about as serious as luxury space communism.
One of the principles of Libertarianism is equivalent compensation for damages. What is a fair compensation if someone causes death? A life for a life? Code of Hammurabi? Such laws have existed before, but there is indeed no apatite for that in modern times.
So if the government is going to be arbiter of fair compensation, the best it can do is to prevent harm from happening as much as possible. Claim that as a society we did our best to prevent the death, and assign victims and token amount of money. But this also means that not doing everything you can to prevent deaths goes against Liberatarian principles, because you allow for more unfair compensation.
Also, it's very rarely an "accident" with a road traffic collision - that implies that there was no fault involved with the collision and "just one of those things that happens". (I would consider an accident more like a tree suddenly falling or an undiagnosed medical condition).
Usually what happens is smaller cars subsidize everyone else due to paying a disproportionate tax vs axle weight^~(2-4 depending on fatigue pathway). Depending on tax structure possibly pedestrians/cyclists too but they are usually parasitic on tax basis.
Side effects include: reduced pollution, and cheaper ways to clean up pollution
In the UK the most recent budget allocates £1.6 billion for maintenance. According to statista £13 billion was spent on roads last year.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/298675/united-kingdom-uk...
That’s who in industrial estates you’ll often find concrete roads, instead of tarmac, for lorries making 90 degree turns.
American style trucks might be big, but presumably they’re nowhere near 44 tonnes.
Of course, articulated lorries only drive on major roads; your average residential road gets no lorries, so all the wear is from smaller vehicles.
I believe the typical limit is 40 tons. I don't know if our tons are the same as your tonnes.
The EU countries have limits of 40 Mg or higher (except Albania). Netherlands allows vehicles up to 50 Mg.
Of course this is all for 5+ axle vehicles. A 5-axle 40 Mg big rig is putting a 8 Mg of load on each axle (if it was perfectly distributed).
A Dodge RAM 1500 loaded up has a gross vehicle weight of about 3.27 Mg - about 1.64 Mg/axle. Fourth power law means about 566 loaded RAMs would equal one about 40 Mg 5-axle big rig in terms of road damage.
That can be fixed. Starting with removing business tax exemptions for such cars.
Why on earth you would want a pickup truck instead of a van is beyond me. This ain't Oklahoma.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6781339100e3d...
There was an interesting court case where only giving tolls to 18 wheeler was problematic but the equivalent fee for cars would have literally worked out to under 1 cent.
The easiest way to decrease unnecessary oversized vehicles, frankly, is to require them be painted pink and flowery. Many men in America pick big vehicles as they're perceived as masculine, and a basic paint job to attack this psychological would probably work.
Less jokingly, add mechanical speed limits to them. Big heavy vehicles are extremely dangerous, but that danger is closely related to speed.
Other options include adding excessive cameras and radar equipment, so the front of the vehicle isn’t a blind spot. Cars have plenty of cameras and mirrors already, so it’s not novel to drivers. It’s a missed opportunity already since this could really be implemented by major manufacturers within a year.
As far as a speed limit… what governed speed are you proposing? Being in a pickup pulling a trailer already makes you a cop magnet, and I never go even 1 MPH over the limit. It’s already expensive enough fuel economy wise and they aren’t exactly vehicles with fast acceleration.
Incidentally of people I know who have died in vehicle accidents recently (last 5 years) all of them were because they got hit by a large commercial truck (typically 35 tonnes). One died when he crashed his motorcycle. That’s it.
Remove/modify the laws that caused such vehicles.
> pay whatever the market rate
would only work if there is a market. And infrastructures like roads are a natural monopoly[0], so there could be no market.
I've also connected my private roads to a couple other private roads so no one has a monopoly on my way to town.
As for the "barriers to entry" mentioned in that article, is absolutely wild. My road and most the ones in our grid network were made with little more than a dude and a tractor (I think you can get suitable one for $10k off craigslist). I initially made mine with an axe, a light truck, and a rope (to rip out small trees) and there's nothing stopping anyone adjacent from doing the same if I'd block the road.
The second that road gets defunded by the public coffers, guy with tractor would show back up.
They are unpopular since they effectively require a very small private association to maintain them. They really hurt property values (one reason I bought my place at a bargain price). Most jurisdictions try to prevent creating them because they lead to disputes between neighbours, or poorly maintained private roads become a problem when an emergency vehicle needs to get down one.
The budget for local roads is also quite small, since they don’t carry much truck traffic. My township of 5,000 people or so has 3 part time guys who maintain the roads and a few pickup trucks and a dump truck for hauling the asphalt. That’s it.
The most expensive part of road maintenance is replacing bridges.
You would have to basically subsidise everything.
What’s the total cost of all road maintenance vs amount spent on groceries? How about vs all groceries plus all home goods?
Which is another reason why freight should be delivered by rail. Yet haulage companies have no incentive to maintain an efficient rail network, when they could exploit a subsidised road network instead.
This is interesting, how is this accomplished?
Over here there was some proposal some years ago to move to a per-mile taxation, with higher tax in congested areas. All managed by some kind of GPS device in each car. There was much opposition as people didn't want the government spying on them via this GPS device, so the plan was eventually dropped.
A simpler approach would be to just record the mileage during annual inspections, but hey why make it simple when you can have some public-private grift making zillions on selling these GPS devices and running the infrastructure for them..
I was skeptical of this being true since fuel duty is notoriously high in the UK, so I did a quick fact check.
Based on the change in 1937 you are "technically" correct, in that none of the motoring taxes are ring fenced for road funds since 1937.
However the opposite is true of what you are implying... income from fuel duty alone is generally around 3 times larger than all road maintenance spending (a fairly steady +25bn/yr [0] Vs -8bn/yr [1] over the last decade).
In other words, although it's officially one big tax pot, motoring taxes pay for road network expenditure more than 3 times over.
This is why they are introducing the per mile EV tax, because fuel duty provided a proportional tax to road use, but EVs skip that and electricity can't be so easily taxed for road use specifically.
TLDR, UK road users pay for far more than the road network.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/284323/united-kingdom-hm...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/533171/annual-road-trans...
Right, but driving has far more externalities than just the cost of the roads. For example:
> Results suggest that each kilometer driven by car incurs an external cost of €0.11, while cycling and walking represent benefits of €0.18 and €0.37 per kilometer. Extrapolated to the total number of passenger kilometers driven, cycled or walked in the European Union, the cost of automobility is about €500 billion per year. Due to positive health effects, cycling is an external benefit worth €24 billion per year and walking €66 billion per year.
From "The Social Cost of Automobility, Cycling and Walking in the European Union", https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218... (which I heard about from a CityNerd video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp75-46PnMY )
The state also sends a certain amount of fuel taxes to local governments in accordance with how many miles are travelled in an area.
New construction must privately pay to build the roads and then transfer ownership to the government. So the cost really is private. By far the most expensive part of maintaining roads is replacing bridges. Hence why so many bridges have rules about weight limits for trucks.
I suppose if you really wanted a user fee on roads you could have a system of tolls on bridges, intersections and interchanges, but that would be really unpopular.
If there is only one thing you take away from this discussion I hope it is:
Roadbuilding is fantastically, stupefyinlgy expensive. One can hardly believe just how expensive a safe, standards-based, high quality, durable stretch of asphalt is.
You know how you drive somewhere and then there are some cones set up and a lane of traffic is blocked off while two or three machines and a handful of guys repave a short section and then 20 seconds later the cones end and you're back up to full speed ? You just drove past millions of dollars of budget.
2. How is this dependent on privatization? Every car is registered. So it seems pretty easy to enforce taxes on cars. And to do so based on model, weight, whatever you want.
In other words, from what I can tell, making people pay their fair share seems simpler in a public system, if anything. It certainly doesn't require privatization.
FWIW I have little skin in the game, as I said, not a driver, so I would probably benefit both by having to pay less tax and by reducing overall car usage.
Larger vehicles use more fuel; they’re more often diesels which attract a higher tax; and they pay increased registration fees and tolls.
Total tax on diesel fuel is about 71¢ a gallon (about .16€/L). When they fill up their F-350s, which get around 12mpg (20L/100km), they’re paying $21 in road tax, or about 6¢ per mile (.3€/km).
In larger cities, there are often even more tolls/fees like in NYC which are raised whenever they need more money to pay for public transit.
This is an incredibly niche product in Europe, so far I’ve seen no evidence that the current state of affairs isn’t perfectly fine.
No need to fix things that aren’t broken, or don’t even look to be trending in that direction.
You can’t probably blame 100% of that difference on the design standards of US vehicles. But probably a high proportion of them!
Add in the absolutely stupid design of larger passenger vehicles and you get the current trend.
Why not compare with the GMC sierra 2500 of whatever year?
Which has resulted in trucks become more useless as actual trucks, since they've evolved into SUVs with a tiny bed you can't fit a sheet of plywood into.
Approximately nobody wants these cars in Europe! Everyone who wants one and can afford one already owns one, there’s no lack of supply.
What you really care about is that we are able to tighten regulations for 99.9% of cars. That's what is going to make a difference. Not running after the 0.1%. It just isn't worth the effort.
And we do this for new cars. We constantly ratchet up the safety requirements. Ensuring we slowly make the overall fleet safer. Not only do the Euro NCAP rules get stricter over time (hence "ratchet"), but the "NCAP star rating" is being tilted towards what are now termed as "Vulnerable Road Users". (Note that the percentage weights haven't changed that much but the rules that decide the number of stars have).
(The reason we now have the concept of Vulnerable Road Users rather than just pedestrians is so we can broaden the scope to include cyclists)
Note that the 99.9% / 0.1% figures are _guesses_ and that they are most likely way too conservative. I was not able to find exact official figures on exactly how many excempted cars are have valid registration. But I could find some numbers on the specific class that large US pickup trucks belong to. And when you compare these to total automobile sales, these numbers are trivial. That's 0.076% of EU car sales that year, and 0.057% of European car sales.
It would be thoroughly pointless to focus on them.
Look at the numbers. What would you expect if Individual Vehicle Approvals represented an actual bridgehead for manufacturers? You’d expect noticeable growth over the past decades. But it is still a rounding error.
If this were a strategy to make Europe soften regulation, it hasn’t worked. Rather, the opposite is true. The ratcheting of regulation is actually so stringent manufacturers have to worry about cars sitting unsold for too long. Right now there are a lot of unsold cars in Europe that come 2026 will be unsellable. Because they won’t meet requirements. And these are cars that meet 2025 regulations. Not pickups from the US that have to be approved individually.
Having said that I think these American pick-ups (and large SUV's, they are part of the same problem) are a common sight here as well and should not be allowed on the road (unless maybe you can show you need one for work or business).
Pedal fatbikes for riding on snow and sand have existed for at least 20 years I’d say.
Easily modified to go as fast as 50 MPH on a chassis not designed for it. Drivers aren’t licenced and often are young kids. No registration. No insurance. No training. Very hazardous to pedestrians.
This is the appeal to worse problems fallacy. Both are problems, both need to be addressed.
My mom who is originally from Bergschenhoek claims her elder brother taught her to drive, in a Dodge truck, probably post WW2 in a model like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_T-,_V-,_W-Series
I don't know whether there are hordes of bejaarden buying Dodges for nostalgic reasons, but that would mean the Dodge brand has some insane staying power. My guess would be that is absurd and unlikely.
I really dig your deadpan sprinkling of Nederlands. Some words have that etymological acuity that makes them irresistible to just deploy. I was always amazed by how many Yiddish and French words there are in Hollands.
What would be the appropriate tax for them to pay? I suppose it’s based on weight?
- low visibility of little people directly in front of the car: huge tax
- low visibility in the rear: tax (yes, rear camera = no tax)
- too big to comfortably fit a standard parking space: tax
- too big to fit a standard parking space at all: huge tax
- too heavy: tax
- way too heavy: huge tax
- not fuel efficient: tax
- emits lots of dark/smelly/toxic smoke: tax/tax more/huge tax
etc.
Fuel consumption itself is already taxed at the pump.
And I think “too heavy” already means higher tax in NL.
The weird thing is that the EU is really not shy about banning things, and yet here we are in a thread about American Monster Trucks taking over Amsterdam.
> Fuel consumption itself is already taxed at the pump.
yes to both, but that doesn't mean that extra incentives for high efficiency and extra discouragement nudges for low efficiency shouldn't be present. they're orthogonal features of the economy.
> And I think “too heavy” already means higher tax in NL.
looks like not high enough, judging by this whole thread :)
> The weird thing is that the EU is really not shy about banning things
yes, but it's also known for not moving fast, as all large committees are - and when they finally move, the policy response can be deployed for a market which doesn't exist anymore.
We have now so many rules either they are not enforced or they are making everythingn slow or expensive.
Now to solve those issues, they will call for new legislations, but again they will be enforced only for the first 2 weeks. And then again a call for new rules will be made.
Take for instance FAT bikes in Netherlands, these are e-bikes with big wheel that young kids like. They drive like madman, harrass women in parks & everybody wants to ban them. But there is already enough legislation to take care of these kids, they are just not enforcing them. And probably rightly so, because they have bigger issues to deal with.
Not everything can be solved with a pill.
Honestly, banning these things seems sensible when the only thing going for them for most buyers is seemingly an appreciation of their style
There are a number of trendy aliexpress quality e-bikes that are also using fat tires and are ridden by idiots but the problem is not fat bikes per se. The problem is idiots on unrestricted/modded e-bikes. Ban fat bikes and they will use unrestricted e-bikes with different tires and the problem will be the same.
Something like a Trek Farely or Canyon Dude.
They may also be assisted e-bike but not exclusively.
What exactly is so slow or expensive that you're prevented to do because of some regulation or law?
- Bureaucracy around clinical trials The old Clinical Trials Directive (2001/20/EC) was meant to harmonise standards, but in practice it led to lots of extra admin and different interpretations in each country, which made multi-country trials slow and expensive. EUR-Lex You can see the effect in the numbers: Europe’s share of commercial clinical trials fell from ~22% in 2013 to about 12% in 2023, even while global trial numbers increased by ~38%.
- Medical Device Regulation (MDR & IVDR) bottleneck Meant for safety, but has meant delays and uncertainty for new devices and even risks of shortages of older ones, which clearly affects innovation. * https://www.meddeviceonline.com/doc/we-re-heading-toward-a-b...
- Data protection (GDPR) and health/science data Complexity and fragmentation of implementation can definitely slow things down, especially for big pan-European projects or AI/“big data” medicine. In theory it's good, but researcher or not being helped on how they can compete worldwide while being GDPR compliant, meaning EU will get behind & certain research is done elsewhere
Many more examples in other fields then medicine. And there are clearly a lot of good laws, but our idea of running a country is just adding lots of new rules every year is just faulty.
In Ontario, Canada, (AIUI) you have to get a commercial car plate for pickup trucks.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...
If you want personal / non-commercial plates you have to get inspections done:
Which confirms the old adage: "Money does not come with taste".
The common man hears your sort of rhetoric, knows he can't reasonably be an expert in the subject matter and the nuances of the statistics, but he can pattern match on how you're saying what you're saying and it matches up with a whole bunch of crap that's been bad for him.
Any car shape can be styled well and sold to the public. This ought to be a mundane technical issue. But you people have made this a political football and in doing so made the problem much harder.
I really hate the modern high hood truck styling. But I hate it a little less knowing it's followed the problem people to Europe.
I'm European and I'll go one step further: I'm profoundly concerned that the majority of people in Europe seem happy to imitate all the bad things that the US has, but fiercly reject all the good things that the US has.
Depends on the country. Here in the UK you can do it from a website, takes 20 minutes.
I responded to the person you're talking to, have a look at what I wrote.
So, understand that the things I'm about to mention are not universally true for all Americans, obviously. For any feature, there's a statistical distribution over the population of individuals. I'm not saying that "All Americans are more X than all Europeans". I'm saying that "The average American is more X than the average European, even if that difference is dwarfed by the standard deviation within which each of those populations".
Here's some that come to mind:
1- positivity. Americans seem to have more of a can do attitude, Europeans start out with the negative belief that attempts will fail and things don't change.
2- friendliness. I lived 1 year in Chicago and in that one year I was approached on the street 3 times by random people who just said "hi, how are you doing? Nice day". In the 10 years I lived in London that happened exactly zero times.
3- shared identity. In Europe there's endless "cultural bickering" between neighboring countries over their miniscule, irrelevant differences. I don't perceive this across American states. The one thing that all Europeans agree on is that we're happy we're not American. How pathetic is that.
4- emphasis of freedom and free speech.
5- work culture (partially). I'm not going to say that I want Europe to emulate American work culture whole sale, because in America there's more abuse from employers and that's a negative aspect. At the same time, one thing I think is great is that in the US it seems that some significant fraction of people actually believe in the jobs they do. In Europe people say that, but we all know it's fake, we're just here for the paycheck. This might just be American positivity spilling into work life.
These are all things I've heard Europeans explicitly point to as undesirable:
1- American positivity is fake
2- American friendliness is fake
3- American shared identity is actually lack of identity
4- The concept of Freedom is American propaganda
5- enjoying your job is Stockholm syndrome from being abused by your employer.
Is this even true with current models? Surely they have a plenty of cameras and will automatically detect children on the way.
Does there exist any evidence to suggest that these cars are particularly dangerous when driven on European roads? Just because traffic in the US is unsafe, does not inherently mean that these cars will be terribly dangerous in Europe.
I didn't know this, but it is absolutely crazy. Every EU politician who tries to subvert car safety should be dismissed and tried for endangering public safety.
Germany isn't the only economy dependent on the legacy auto sector. France, Italy, Romania, Czechia, Slovakia and Belgium also have a lot of jobs, or had, in the auto industry, before the mass layoff of the last 2-3 years.
But also, Merz is not alone in this, but a lot of Eastern Europe can't afford EVs at current EU prices so the EU has to make some concessions. People in Romania or Bulgaria can't afford to buy a Polestar like people in Netherlands can.
EU leaders needs to account for the massive disparities of purchasing power between places like Nordics and Romania/Bulgaria for example when they make sweeping legislation like that.
Sure it would be nice if all of EU was like Norway with only EVs everywhere, but this way you'd basically be bankrupting and turning against you the people in the poorer countries of the union who are already disproportionately affected by the CoL crisis of the EU, who are effectively paying German energy and grocery prices but at Eastern EU salaries and pensions. This is not sustainable.
Not to mention the disparity in public transportation infrastructure where a car is basically mandatory for commuting outside big cities in place like Romania.
Fossil fuels need to be eliminated. Europe is the fastest warming continent.
Like your idea sounds good in principle, especially if you're from a country with no automotive jobs, but then what do you do then with tens of thousands of unemployed people of the auto sector being displaced by the Chinese? Will you agree to pay more income taxes to fund the increased unemployment deficits of the others? How do you think those people will vote? What about maintaining some national sovereignty? Shall we just become a vassal state to China on automotive as well?
You can't throw such oversimplified solutions to such complex issues that have very deep ramifications.
If you haven't noticed, the EU economy and jobs market in general is already bad as it is, it won't be able to absorb tens of thousands of unemployed career switchers into to other domains that aren't hiring right now anyway, or if they are hiring, they're very picky due to the increased supply of talent with domain experience.
Currently, the defense sector is absorbing some of the slack of automotive layoffs on the production/manufacturing side in some countries like Germany, but that won't last forever. If peace happens in Ukraine, that will dry out as well as the glut of orders will be scaled back.
I don’t want those people to lose their jobs, which is one reason why their bosses need to be dragged in to the 21st century.
To get where you want, you need the venn diagram where what the automakers want, aligns with what consumers want, to align with what the government wants, which isn't happening right now, and it's not something the government can force without massive repercussions. China has had 10+ years of focus exclusively on the EV and battery sector domestically, during good economic times to get to where they are.
And Chinese government can subsidize their industry longer than you can stay solvent, as long as they know they'll bankrupt your industry in the long run and then make you dependent on them for manufacturing. Competing with China can't be done on equal footing because they don't play fair and never had.
And at the rate car prices are increasing for no good reason, I doubt the average EU citizen will be able to afford a car in the future.
The EU does need to find a middle ground between mandatory safety features that are unaffordable and free for all pedestrian killing machines.
And protectionism ain't it. It will only increase the prices for domestic cars until the likes of VW have to close up shop because no one can afford what they're peddling any more.
They can also be upgraded to increase their range using after market batteries.
So we’re already at 15 years and counting.
Maybe the batteries will wear out, but what will a replacement battery cost in 10 years? Presumably even less than now.
The comment by Lio beside this one also makes it hard for me to take a view like yours.
Still somewhat more expensive than petrol cars in the same category, though.
https://lae.mit.edu/2024/06/28/study-quantifies-premature-de...
EU regulators bent over to German companies allowing those cars on the road without additional restrictions. We all pay for that.
That's the biggest issue now differentiating them
Even an older American truck is less dangerous than the modern generation
That's the most American sentiment I've heard today
Taking my own kids back there this year, most of the normal cars were common, or at most variations of the ones from Europe. Even many of the vans and work vehicles are now common European shapes, occasionally with a different badge. Trucks and full size SUVs were the last hold outs of US specific models.
Which makes me wonder, are the pedestrian deaths really heavily weighted towards these models?
For what it's worth we hired a full sized SUV. There was one point where I was about to drive out of our Villa's driveway when my partner shouted "wait!" There was a 8ish year old kid walking down the sidewalk towards where I was about to cross it who was completely invisible from the driving position. It was actually safer to forward park that thing because the visibility in the reversing camera was much better than driving forward.
Fuel economy tends all vehicles to the same aerodynamic shape (similar to how all big planes look quite similar), and safety is requiring airbags (which protected unbuckled passengers) in the side pillars and elsewhere, making them larger and larger.
At a rough count a list of the best selling 25 cars in the US, 16 of them are available to buy in the UK that I know of (including cars like the Jeep Wrangler which are obviously American classics).
Most of the different is Trucks and full-size SUVs. And a couple of Chevy's which gave up on the UK market a few years ago. So either pedestrian fatalities are concentrated in those areas or there are other factors at play (road design, driver training, enforcement of rules etc).
In Europe, some stroads exist. The rest are streets or roads.
In the US, some streets exist. The rest are stroads or roads.
There might be certain number of deaths we can accept for increased cost but how is it so obvious that this tradeoff was worth it?
What if cars got 2x costlier in EU due to the regulations to give you a .01% increased chance in safety?
Edit: here are some back of envelope numbers from chatgpt
A single, ordinary car ride carries an extremely small chance of death:
USA: ~1 in 7.7 million
EU: ~1 in 20 million
Its not super clear that optimising these numbers is obviously worth the increased costs.
Edit2: people can make the choice to buy Volvo cars that are ~40% safer. Why isn't every car buyer buying only Volvo?
The assumption you have to make is that regulation would make it much cheaper to buy a safe car than just buying Volvo. It is somewhat true but not sure on the extent.
> EU officials must revisit the hastily agreed trade deal with the US, where the EU stated that it “intends to accept” lower US vehicle standards, say cities – including Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, and more than 75 civil society organisations. In a letter to European lawmakers, the signatories warn that aligning European standards with laxer rules in the US would undermine the EU’s global leadership in road safety, public health, climate policy and competitiveness.
They point to many things and not only the size of cars - like fewer approvals, lower pollution controls, fewer safety measures.
Some of them increase utility (like people might prefer bigger cars) and others decrease cost.
Death and suffering by other road users. It should be obvious to anyone with a working moral compass that nobody should die just because someone wants a larger car, or wants to go faster, or wants to drive under the influence – or simply has to drive because there are no better options.
Direct monetary costs to the society caused by said deaths and injuries inflicted.
CO2 emissions rapidly making the entire world a worse place to live for generations to come, with the death toll likely being in tens of millions as a conservative estimate. Climate refugees will number in hundreds of millions if not billions. Traffic emissions are dropping very slowly compared to other big sources, and that's almost entirely because of private cars and the political difficulty to regulate driving anywhere near enough even in less car-brained societies.
Particle emissions, including tire and brake dust. These affect the health of billions of people and cause countless premature deaths annually. Dust is flushed into water bodies, causing ecological damage. EVs are heavy and wear down tires and road surfaces much faster.
Noise emission, which is a real, recognized health hazard and a cause of stress. EVs still have wheel noise, which is a major noise component in urban areas.
Direct healthcare costs to the society caused by inactive sitting-based lifestyle. Car-friendly infrastructure is actively hostile, not just indifferent, to active modes of transport.
Direct costs to the society incurred by dark, paved surfaces and a lack of canopy coverage because cars need space. This can have an alarming effect on urban temperatures, increasing the need for cooling solutions and, in the absence of such, contributing to the hundreds of thousands of annual heat-related hospitalizations and deaths.
The costs of building expensive new car-centric infrastructure are externalized to everybody. Toll roads are rare. Taxes on gasoline are nowhere near high enough to cover all the externalities even in Europe. Driving is subsidized by the society, which is economically incredibly inefficient.
---
While we're at it, let's go over the main opportunity costs as well:
Indirect costs to the society by deaths and injuries in the shape of healthy work-years lost.
Indirect costs to the society caused by inactive lifestyle in the shape of healthy work-years lost. When you count both direct and indirect costs, spending money to encourage people to bike and walk, for example by building safe infrastructure, ends up saving money in the end.
There are vastly more economically sane uses for all the extra space that cars need in urban environments where land is valuable, including a wasteful number and width of lanes, streetside parking, parking lots, and parking garages.
Vast amounts of money have been, are being, and will be spent on road infrastructure that could be used on vastly more efficient modes of transport such as rail-based transit.
Obviously the lack of difference there wouldn't prove much (if I had to bet I'd bet cars in the US have gotten way more expensive faster than in the EU, just from labor costs), but the lack of a major difference would complicate the theory that new regulations in the past 15 years have massively improved costs, absent a theory that some other thing the EU is doing but the US is not doing is also kicking in to similarly counteract that.
The numbers exist, this isn't in the abstract. Just a question of doing the legwork
A comparison would be comparing a car that can ensure the survival of their passengers, proven with test crashes, vs e.g. Chinese-made cara for the local market that have terrible crumpling when crash-tested..
I'm really not sure what you mean, many of the most popular cars in the EU aren't even sold in the US (Renault, Dacia, Opel, Peugeot/Citroën although they have taken quite a hit in the last few years) and they are generally cheaper than US cars.
And quite a few US cars aren't available in the EU either (although they can sometimes be imported privately, which bypasses the regulations somewhat) which is the very topic we're discussing.
As for Chinese cars, the recent ones are performing adequately in crash-tests.
I really hate that everything has to be seen from the consumers' lens, especially the consumer of luxury goods (I'm talking SUVs and the like, cheap cars exist in Europe).
What if we didn't just look at it from the POV from people who buy or want cars? I don't own a car, nor do I plan to. I have to pay for roads, which I understand to an extent. But why should my life be at risk from people wanting to buy SUVs cheaper?
Edit: Also, looking at "cars" without distinction really just obfuscates the real issue. The most dangerous cars (for pedestrians) are the biggest (and sometimes the fastest) ones. Plus most pedestrians die in cities, not on a Highway. So yeah, if you want to drive an SUV in a dense city, then I'm all for making it 10x more expensive for you, because it makes no sense (to me) and puts me in danger :)
> But why should my life be at risk from people wanting to buy SUVs cheaper?
What if the risk is not that much greater? That's what I'm questioning.
So ok, I'll do it too: what if reducing the size of a ball point pen by half reduces the rate of death by ball point pens by 0.01%? (Answer: you don't do it, because the benefit to doing so is low, and that measured effect could be well within the margin of error anyway.)
(And my weird made-up number sounds a lot more likely than your weird made-up number.)
If only a few people die due to car accidents and one is much more likely to die of other causes than cars, is it worth making cars that much more expensive to decrease the deaths by a bit?
The regulations in my opinion add up to 20-30% of the car price. And likelihood of death due to a car at an individual level decreases by .01% (maybe).
Imagine you were given two options:
- Car A at $45k USD
- Car B at $35k USD
And you are less likely to die with Car A. Is it super obvious that you will buy Car A? If so why doesn't everyone flock to Volvo cars which lead to ~45% fewer fatalities?
Why is this so obvious to you that this regulation is a good thing? The sibling is implying that I'm trolling or whatever but this is a legitimate question.
This is made up out of thin air.
(And the answer is not to screech about how people are stupid because they don't share your values, prioritization or risk assessment. I shouldn't have to say this, but I feel like I do considering the subject matter)
Elaborate? Are you suggesting that car accidents are not that high to begin with relatively, so it is not worth as much to increase safety only in cars because it may not translate to overall safety to a person?
> and reducing its size by half did not meaningfully diminish its function as a pen for most users
(Apparently 30% of th fatalities involve alcohol but we already tried banning that once …)
https://www.carscoops.com/2024/12/suvs-and-pickup-trucks-2-3...
There is a vast number of reasons why we need and must reduce private car modality share as much as possible. Making cars more expensive is a feature, not a bug.
You can eliminate deaths by that cause by eliminating those types of vehicles, not by eliminating all cars.
Not saying that's feasible, but let's not argue against something that nobody said in the first place.
Sounds like a lovely place for sure.
Not a bad idea, actually. It might make cities more liveable compared to the European status quo of anti-human cities. A bit too extreme before we get self-driving cars.
In this case it is another country trying to impose their 'way of life' on the rest of the world, or in this case, the EU, which has a different set of values.
That doesn't really have anything to do with having buses or trains vs cyclists, it is not a personal decision and there are many alternatives compared to US vehicles that were never designed for European (or Asian, for that matter) traffic in the first place. The USA is very car centric to the point that walking is frowned upon (I got picked up by the police in North Dakota for walking). The EU is simply not like that, and that's fine. The USA should set their own standards for car safety and so should the EU, if that leads to incompatible products I think the mantra is 'let the market sort it out'. The Japanese seem to have figured out how to make vehicles for different markets, there is no reason the USA can not do the same thing.
Being from Sweden or America has no bearing on what I wrote.
> The point is it it is silly to claim the goal is zero acci[d]ents since the only way to achieve that is by removing cars.
That isn't true either. When you replace one form of transportation with another you will still have accidents. Maybe more, maybe less, maybe different. But they will be there.
> We all agree they are useful. The goal should be to have as few accidents as possible.
Indeed, and that is what TFA is all about. It is emphatically not about 'buses, trains, ambulances, fire trucks' because those do not normally appear in the guise of a 2500 Kg pickup truck with limited visibility for urban deployment. If you wanted to make a reasonable case I would suggest an alternative: a minivan.
The question works both ways. How can we quantify the penalty faced by consumers in the US due to lax regulation? How much is each toddler ran over worth, exactly?
I'm not going to argue the cost numbers are they are so far out of the ballpark it's not even funny.
There's this weird perception that Europe has excellent public transport, while in reality it only works, sort of, in a few larger cities. Everywhere else functioning in society really requires a car or assumes that you're living within biking distance of work and daycare.
If you need a car, then you need it for everything. You need to be able to fit the two kids you picked at school, the gear for the sport activity you'll drop them at, the mom you picked at the train station after work, and the weekly groceries you picked from the supermarket on your way back. From experience, you aren't doing all of that in a Hyundai i10.
Now I live in the Randstad. Groceries get delivered, mom rides the bus for 8 minutes to come back home, and I pick the kid by bike. The car is optional and pure convenience, so I can get away with a small one.
We have two cars, one 1.6m, one 1.7m, and handle all that. A Hyundai i10 is 1.68m wide.
A Range Rover is 2 metres wide. Ridiculous size and completely unnecessary in rural areas, I assume they are needed in towns.
But we’ve seen where that leads.
Things are a problem because we say they're a problem. But who's doing the saying? Not the low income folks, they have much more pressing problems they'd rather talk about.
Seems like eliminating the high income folks from the discourse would result in a redirection of focus toward more serious issues.
But modern liberal democracy kind of insists that those differences "don't really exist" and so we try to force everything together.
The fewer cars, the better.
At, say, 4 rides per day, that's about a 1 in 5300 chance of death over a single year. That's still small, but not that small. Someone in a decent-sized town or city could expect to lose someone they know once every few years with those odds.
Slightly less than the rate of suicide; and slightly more than half the number of fentanyl deaths. And a smaller fraction of medical mistake deaths. (Of course, none of the risk is evenly distributed.)
As a systemic problem, I’m not convinced that cars are the worst. Or outside what we accept in several areas.
If cars had a random chance to simply explode equivalent to the mortality rate in crashes, people would treat them Very Differently.
Ah, yes, the old "what if [totally absurd scenario]" argument. That's not what anyone is talking about.
It’s not just about how safe it is for the driver or passengers of the vehicle, it’s about the impact of those design choices on the safety of everyone else on the road.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC9a3GR1HJY&t=371s
> I said there was no way this truck would pass a pedestrian impact safety standard. Now, I wasn't wrong that the truck won't pass a pedestrian impact safety standard, it won't! And that's why they can't sell it in Europe. [...] But I didn't realise that America has no pedestrian impact standards. [...] America actually allows companies to self-certify a variety of aspects of safety.
Yeah, so that would be rampantly anti-Democratic authoritarianism... Peaceful transfer of power is pretty much at the core of why democracy works in the first place, and once you start engaging in political persecution because you don't like some trade-off involving safety ... yeah, that's no longer a democracy but something else.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-kilometers-0
[2] https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publications/efficiency-by-secto...
That probably is doing a lot of work here. A truck with a driver sitting so high above the street they can't physically see a child or bicycle in front of them is just an inherent risk to pedestrians and cyclists, no matter how you twist it. And don't even get me started on Cybertrucks, which are pretty much designed to cause accidents with casualties.
Even if the causal link is more complex than the numbers make it seem, acting like putting heavier and bigger vehicles with less restrictions on streets won't cause accidents is just plain dishonest.
Implying that I said it has no impact is plain dishonest
The problem is coming from the other side, the Americans are threatening to start a new trade war if the EU doesn't permit their murdermobiles on the European roads.
IMO pedestrian safety should still come above all else, but this is not an initiative coming from some EU representatives who want to own a Cybertruck. Blocking these cars can have impact on the war against Ukraine and the prices of fuel and other import products on the short term.
Have you even read the comment in full before responding? I'm talking about this part of it:
> Percentage of GDP to military spending has been criticized as a bad way to measure how much military spending is done and needed
But since you wouldn't get it anyways:
The "5% of GDP" is a number that US politicians came up with, seemingly out of nowhere, because they figured they want to boost their military industry.
EU countries are already spending that or even more - just look at Ukraine spending by EU countries - but since it's spent on their own domestic defense industry, US politicians don't like it. That's the point.
They don't want us spending 5% of the GDP on defense unless we buy their stuff. So here we are.
Most EU defense spending isn’t on US equipment (only ~35%); I don’t get where the European victim mentality is coming from here - Europe can and is building up its own defense industry.
There’s some Trump nonsense more recently about buy American, but the demands to take security seriously have been going on for nearly 20 years, and have been largely ignored until Ukraine round two.
It’s coming from the fact that we’re already in a difficult time with a slowdown in economy and then get bullied into spending the money we could be using to help our own people on new US weapons.
All for Trump to then sign half of Ukraine off to Russia.
I think you're really not qualified to say anything about Europe if you didn't know Ukraine existed until 4 years ago.
Anyway, "greed is good".
Ad hominem. I did not create it to disagree with you specifically, your stance is not that unique, as you can see I've replied to similar positions. However, when you admit the quiet part out loud I feel like you have no rebuttal and are fine with the exploitation in favor of money standpoint, which should bring your other standpoints in question if this is your guiding principle.
Poland spends 4.5% and that is the highest number, the rest are spending much much less.
Tell me again how they're spending more???
And the US is not one of them
There is still about a trillion dollars of NATO defense spending to replace if Europe does not want to be reliant on America. Doable, but spending a third of that on American equipment wouldn’t help matters.
Perhaps if Europeans got an earlier start, instead of ignoring nearly two decades of warnings and a clearly deteriorating security situation, they wouldn’t need to care so much about US policy. Better late than never.
https://economist.com/europe/2025/12/01/europe-is-going-on-a... from The Economist
The entire strategy for the last 80 years has been built around this edict.
The US has previously discouraged Europe from building out its own defense industry, the current situation is due to that a dovish view of Russia therefore less of a need to spend money on equipment and troops for a land war.
We spend multitudes of times more than our only realistic threat. And that threat can't even wage war with Ukraine, you expect Russia to be able to fight Poland, yet alone the rest of the European countries?
Also, just a reminder: US servicemen have not been sent to fight a war for European souls since almost a century. Whereas European soldiers are actively deployed even now in the middle East for wars that Washington started.
Please start looking more at facts and less about propaganda. Of course Europe should step up in being more independent defense-wise, but you'd be a fool if you think the US does not enjoy and leverage the current status provides.
> it's a lie to suggest that the EU does not spend enough for defense.
Which is it? Is Europe spending enough, or does American have influence because Europe is still cripplingly dependent on the US?
I wouldn’t argue that the US isn’t abusing that dependence at the moment.
What I would argue is that the US spent 20 years telling Europe to get its act together, and finally in the last 3 years that has started to change, but notably that was years after NATO was publicly declared braindead. So it was pretty irresponsible of the Europeans to leave themselves beholden to the US for so long.
They like to talk about the bad Russians influencing politics and people in Europe, but compared to the Americans they are flies in the wall. This people that is taking decisions now in Europe, finish later working in the Atlantic Council or something like that. That is the root of the European independence problem.
> Which is it?
The answer is complex.
Europe's dependence on US is not much on the military front (again, there are no realistic threats in a conventional war that European countries have) as it is on a political and diplomatic one.
Europe is made of 27+ countries that have different foreign policies, goals, and whose word in a war of real defence has never been tested.
Under that situation US is an absolutely critical reference as in times of difficulties even countries with different interests will still realistically rally around US guidance.
You can thus understand why the group of Baltics and Poland are absolutely much more leaning into playing friends with Washington than they are with Brussels.
Europe is absolutely dependent as of now, and likely will be forever for these very reasons, on US.
The answer is complex, but it should never read as "Europe does not have enough weapons or soldiers to defend itself", rather than "Europe is not taking their own defence under its own responsibility".
It is difficult to tell Italians: "stop producing your own rifles, tanks, mines, etc, let's all agree on a single design". It is hard to tell the Portuguese "look, you're gonna deploy two brigades in Estonia for the next 10 years". It is hard to tell the Belgians they have to follow the command of an Austrian in a war fought in Eastern Europe.
Europe is plagued by differences that the common alliance with the US flattens out. Without US, it's a borderline disaster. It's not a matter of money being spent.
You underestimate russia and clearly only glance over war news over past few years, if at all. They are not sending their maximum potential, nor sending their best equipment like tanks, Ukraine is rather a minor operation for them. Its true their conventional warfare capabilities have been damaged to certain extent, in some cases severely but China has stepped up and covered many holes, no reason to think they won't continue testing their equipment further (US did & does the same, its basic realpolitik).
Do you think they ran out of rather modern tanks and thus are sending 60-70 year old models? Far from it, they keep them aside and send on Ukraine the oldest tanks that can still move around, ~100mm cannon on wheels with HEAT rounds works fine even if old. They still didn't introduce mandatory draft because they didn't need to, folks dying in Ukraine now are all volunteers who get a massive signing bonus high enough to buy a flat or some smaller/older house. Their current drone capabilities would decimate any western Europe army in few weeks to the cinder, even Poland is not be completely up to the game, only Ukraine realistically is right now. These days, war is fought with 2 ingredients - drones and enough boots on the ground with nontrivial attrition.
Can they conquer all Europe? Nope, but they could easily take baltics for example. Thus they also subvert via bribes and corrupt exploitable politicians - look at Orban, Fico and failed attempt in Romania. Those countries would not fight them nato or not, they would roll on their back and invite them themselves, in (maybe not vain) hope that their corrupt highly criminal regimes can continue and thrive under new&old rulers in same vein as in Belarus.
Don't underestimate them, they are by far the biggest threat Europe as a whole has, it has been like that for past 100+ years. Their inferiority complex runs deep and western democracies are a direct threat to their typical corrupt dictatorship way of life. 2025 is really not the year to have such misguided & naive ideas.
Also as a proper mafia state they only understand power. Demonstrate you have enough and you will be left alone. Otherwise not so much.
I really struggle to see the logic where Russia could've won this earlier, but is holding back major resources, I don't see the evidence, yet we know that they've lost 1M people between deaths and severe injuries. Those aren't things you recover easily from.
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian...
I don't think Europe spends more on war machinery than the USA.
The trade wars go both ways. Certainly it can be a bit of a collective action problem when it comes to individual countries that are smaller than the US, but the EU as a whole should be able to negotiate on even-enough footing with the US on these kinds of issues.
The EU is trying to minimize the damage for its constituents, they're not interested in a stupid power play. Threats of reciprocating in trade wars are meaningless if the leadership you're threatening doesn't care if their people starve.
Playing tough doesn't matter anyway, the American voting public will just blame the EU for all the bad things that happen if the EU's actions do have an impact, laugh at the EU if a diplomatic solution is found, and the American leadership will repeat whatever the last guy to verbally jerk off Trump said for at least the coming three years.
In a way, it's kind of impressive. The EU was not ready for America to devolve into this level of clown politics this fast, and that left them unprepared.
I would suggest mandatory semi (or full) trailer truck drivers' license required for anyone who operates these. In addition, they should be indicated as a new category of "recreational trucks", with harsh penalties specific to them especially regarding road accidents.
For example, if found guilty of reckless driving, or causing accidents, the vehicle would be permanently confiscated. (On top of personal fines, loss of license etc as already sentenced by law.) Perhaps the law enforcement could then be given access to such confiscated vehicles, creating also some incentive to enforce the law.
That is… not how we do things around here. It sounds like a baked-in conflict of interest and a wonderful way of making them chase the money instead of doing their policing job.
But the EU commission will bend and sell us out, the same way it's selling european privacy to security and data companies lobbying it (just check how many times Thorn, Palantir et al have met with EU officials, lobbying is recorded and publicly accessible).
This is, essentially, how the US government survived Trump 1.0, and is why Trump 2.0 has been so concerned with gutting bureaucracy and placing vapid yes-men in the cabinet, but they can't really do that in Europe.
It's one of the few times where EU bureaucracy is a huge advantage.
Even when the EC actually _wants_ to do something, it typically struggles to get it done in under a decade.
The EC is not that slow when it comes to the American trade wars. The timeline suddenly shrinks to months instead of years because this stuff could majorly disrupt the economy (and safety) across the European continent.
The EC may not fear the (mostly disinterested) European citizen body, but it does fear immediate actions by world powers.
I dunno, like the last "deal" basically makes a load of promises that the EU has no legislative ability to enforce. So it's basically just performative.
And honestly, given that the US is gonna sell out Ukraine, then this (and most other) trade deals should be ripped up. This would hurt my country (and me) a lot, but it's probably still the right thing to do, as TACO is definitely a possibility if the US markets crash.
Honestly I suspect Trump _knows_ this, too; the point of the trade deals is not to be substantive but to give Trump something with impressive numbers to boast about, and both sides are fully aware of this.
>lobbying is recorded and publicly accessible
As in the meeting dates or the actual talks? Mind dropping a link?
For each lobbying company/group you can download a pdf listing all their activities.
Of course, we don't know what happens beyond the official encounters, as there is no legal requirement to report "I bumped into X lobbyist in a restaurant and we had a chat".
The strange part is that those car can be sold in the EU markets already. They just have to comply with the same pollution and safety standards as other cars. What would justify an exception?
Pressure from Americans - who have no say in how we live in Europe -, remote or suspected, transient consequences on costs and conflics, all have lower, much lower priorities than keeping the population safe and healthy. Dead people need no cheap fuel, need no prompt conflict resolution, need no short term tariff settlements, and do not care what Americans think. Dead people are just dead! EU polititians should let people stay alive foremost of all! The rest come aftre that.
And all because these stupid huge trucks. Not even close in importance! Does not worth it.
Any EU politician that bend over to those threats should never be elected to anything again.
Do you really want to block the import of arms and financial aid to Ukraine?
If Europeans were serious about their sovereignty they’d have made very different choices up until now.
It isn’t right that America has so much power in this circumstance, but going back decades the US has been asking for Europe to take defense seriously.
Umm... yes? Since this whole debacle started, the EU has been shooting itself in the foot with all the sanctions that hurts its industries.
On the other hand, the US did the smart thing and did not give out weapons for free, it charged for them.
In the end, the US will be the winner of this war and Europe will come out of it incredibly weak economically. And it will have to turn to the US for help. Again.
Funny because the last time I believe that it was the US that requested help in Iraq and Afghanistan and not the other way around.
It seems that the policy of the current US government is to split the world between themselves, Russia and China. And I guess that's a legitimate policy, even though I think it's both impossible and incredibly misguided.
Thank God the French have always been suspicious about it since the Suez crisis, hence we _do_ have at least some independent capabilities.
The US doesn't give one rats ass about Egypt. The US won and got their way in Suez and the international seas in general. Europe lost.
There is no right in geo politics - only might. It's completely machiavellian. This is because you don't get to elect your neighbors leaders, and so they aren't beholden to you. International politics fundamentally doesn't work like national politics because of this. You can't stop Putin, Trump, or Xi, from taking what is yours unless you have the steel and oil to stop them. You can't sue them or vote them out like in national politics.
I should also point out that some countries are much more bellicose than others, in direct contradiction with your nihilist view.
Nobody, but it seems a lot of people care if we sell less german cars.
Those whos relatives freeze when their country can no longer get LNG imports
Just as a starter for ten, is that 30% increase distributed around the US or concentrated in certain states? I can't imagine we've seen the same increase in New York than in rural Alabama (and if that's the case, how much of it is really attributable to car designs)?
"dismissing" a politician sounds like an easy fix but we probably don't want hyper-polarized dismissal wars where politicians are "shot down" immediately after being elected. That's why there are other mechanisms such as not re-electing, public shaming, transparency fora etc. ... we need to work on strengthening those, the accountability and transparency.
No. Every EU politician who doesn't support BANNING all cars should be dismissed and tried and executed! Look, I'm even tougher on pedestrian safety than you are!
It's crazy because the numbers don't line up with the theory. If you look at US traffic deaths by year, they were basically flat in terms of vehicle miles traveled between 2010 and 2019 and then took a big jump from COVID which is only now starting to come back down.
Meanwhile in Europe road fatalities were also fairly flat up until 2019, and then went down significantly from COVID.
Now we have to guess why the responses to COVID had the opposite effect in each place, but it's pretty obvious that the difference was a primarily result of COVID rather than differences in vehicle safety regulations, unless the vehicle safety regulations all changed in 2020 and everyone immediately replaced the installed base of cars everywhere overnight.
Also, the numbers for at least the US are apparently just wrong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
1.27 fatalities per 100M VMT in 2023 (the latest year with data), 1.11 in 2010, that's a difference of 14%, not 30%. Even the peak during COVID was only 24% above 2010. The only way I can see to get 30% is to use the during-COVID number for only the total number of motor vehicle fatalities without accounting for population growth or vehicle miles traveled, which is not a great metric for making comparisons.
Per this narrative, a significant antisocial tranche of the public has responded to the effective suspension of traffic law in the way that you would expect them to, and that is why road deaths are up.
The majority of traffic stops in the US are, cop parks on the side of the highway somewhere the speed limit is lower than the speed people drive there, every car on the highway is doing 70 in a 55, whoever drives past gets a ticket and the government fills their coffers but the speed everybody actually drives on that stretch of highway remains 70.
Now suppose the cops stop doing that for the stated reason. If you then drive past them at 110 instead of 70, are they still going to not pull you over? Good luck with that. Even if they're actually trying to minimize traffic stops, that one's the one that makes the cut.
So then what happens if they stop doing the usual ones? People are then going to drive 70 in a 55 because they can get away with it, but that's what they were doing to begin with. You could argue that the fatality rate would be higher at 70 than 55, but then why would that change relative to the baseline where that was what was already happening?
So the argument would have to be that idiots had the impression that they could do 110 without getting pulled over, even if that wasn't true, and then did that and managed to make contact with an overpass before driving past a cop. Which doesn't seem as plausible, because speeds like that on empty desert highways shouldn't have raised the fatality rate that much (e.g. it's not that high on the autobahn in Germany), and speeds like that in traffic where there are other cars traveling significantly slower will trigger a visceral feeling of danger in nearly all humans unless they're on drugs or have significant mental health issues, and in those cases they wouldn't have been deterred by the prospect of traffic enforcement anyway. Which is why people drive somewhat over the speed limit even when that could get them a ticket -- because it doesn't feel dangerous -- but also why they don't drive a lot faster than the other cars -- because that does. Traffic enforcement or not.
Moreover, regardless of how much of a contribution was made by that vs. COVID, the numbers still don't line up with it being vehicle safety regulations.
Europe on the other hand has a much higher level of intermingling between pedestrians and vehicles. This puts pedestrians more often in harms way, and likely will lead to out-sized dangers that aren't seen as frequently in the USA. Pedestrian safety is a key requirement for European car safety.
If the EU is politically forced into accepting the US standards: The slack will need to be picked up by European insurance companies, who should charge extreme premiums for unsafe designs, effectively blocking the sale of the vehicles from dangerous, young, or casual drivers and limiting those designs to those who truly need them (which I suspect is very few.)
This should also go a long way in addressing inexpensive Chinese vehicles that ape the American designs. Since that is more likely going to be what is on the roads.
That only works if there are big penalties for killing people with your car. As it is as long as you are not drunk and have your license you get away with a minor slap on the wrist. You pay if you damage someone's else car but if you kill them then there is usually no financial responsibility and thus no reason to rise insurance premiums.
I was stopped by police while taking a walk and shouted at and treated like a criminal when walking in to a Wendy's drive through (even though only the drive through was open at that hour!) But, other than that, the people were incredibly kind! The culture shock though... It is very hard to imagine if you've never been there. I think as someone from western Europe I have more in common with people from Thailand.
Cars are really a must-have in the US, biking is just a hobby. It's more the other way around here. Everybody is a "cyclist" (not even a word we use here) some of the time. It means "carists" have respect and understanding of how it is on a bike, and drive carefully around people on bikes (in general, there are always exceptions). Our infrastructure and law demands it (ie, a car-owner is always financially responsible in an accident with a pedestrian or person on a bike here, insurance for this is mandatory).
Here people in massive US sized cars are really seen as anti-social, in general I'd say. Hope it stays that way. For now I think some of those cars can't even fit into city-center parking garages here (ie [0], btw if you look around there you see separated bike lanes, crossings where pedestrians always have priority (ignoring that is instant fine), very narrow lanes for cars. Go forward in time and you see they added "statues" that look like they are about to cross the street to make drivers aware of this.)
I live in a very bike friendly country, so culturally closer to Europe in terms of transport, but if you walked into a drive through you may well be stopped by police.
Drive throughs have long since stopped serving pedestrians.
Generally anyone trying this is inebriated.
And since horse riders are legally equivalent to vehicles it's pretty much a "fine as long as you don't shit in the driveway" situation.
That's a social class and location based. The average overpaid techie on HN who lives in the kind of place where all the houses are a million bucks and everyone buys their trophy wife a 4Runner because that's what you need for one kid then yeah, the drive through won't serve you as a walk up.
The Popeyes in Camden NJ don't care if you ride an elephant through the drive through.
You quoted me but I was commenting on my country, an egalitarian country in the Pacific.
Local governments here try to encourage cycling by putting in as many dedicated bike lanes as they can, but they never seem to get much use (where I live they're used almost exclusively by bike delivery people and a few people like myself).
The roads can be lethal and many drivers have a great deal of animosity towards cyclists (probably helped to no good degree by the likes of people like Jeremy Clarkson / Top Gear which spent a decade joking about and belittling cyclists).
Everybody I see driving around me seems in a rush, act as if the roads are exclusively for cars (despite the Highway Code reiterating recently that the pecking order is most to least vulnerable), and get annoyed at some perceived hold up should they be unable to overtake (a minority of the time).
Sometimes I think it might even be as simple as an anti-fitness / jealousy thing. I'm abused more often when I'm running and cycling than any other point in my day. Anecdotally I've heard that the abuse and animosity is even worse for women doing both of these activities, than what I've experienced.
Might be a regional or urban/rural thing? In Ireland bike lanes in central and near-central Dublin are often very heavily used these days, especially since covid (to the point that I think they're going to have to rethink traffic control for some of them), but bike lanes in outer suburbs seem to be mostly empty.
In Leeds, not so much. Not many tourists, the bike lanes aren't universal enough to convince some people who don't want to ever be on the roads, and there's a very car-heavy culture, even in city centers.
Bike usage is relatively low, hardly comparable to the amount of cars. Maybe more popular than USA, but definitely far from it being bike-centric. Just a handful of cities (such as Amsterdam) have more people commuting via bicycles than cars.
Where I live in London, and in many other cities, cycling to get around is massively popular and growing fast.
But other towns and cities are much more like you describe.
Anecdotally this seems like somewhat of a demographic thing and places that skew younger, university educated[/ing], and dare I say left wing tend toward much higher rates of cycling vs other forms of transport.
I'm from Leeds, and while the council has been putting in (some decent, some bad) bike lanes across the city center, I rarely see other cyclists on them. Just the odd commuter and tons of delivery cyclists.
I'd agree on all your points.
Looking at cities like London or Paris there are two thresholds which need to be reached: 1. the infrastructure needs to be consistent and safe-feeling enough that the average resident doesn't feel like they're going to risk their lives at any point; and 2. the infrastructure needs to be widespread enough that they can do the things they need without having to think about it too much. "Surveys show that the lack of safe and contiguous infrastructure is a primary reason why most people don't ride more" (https://momentummag.com/biking-work-barrier-americans/)
That's pretty visible in Paris: there have been rental bikes since 2007, and they've been pretty popular and expanding, but it's as the infrastructure expansions of the bike plans started connecting properly that cycling really exploded.
A hodge-podge of disconnected bits is never going to succeed, because it fails on both safety and utility.
As someone with experience in the US, Europe and Thailand, I feel qualified to say: nope, you most definitely do not, at least not on that basis.
Actually, truck culture is one of the points on which Thailand and the USA share a lot of values. That notwithstanding, I’m afraid you’re stuck with your New World cousins just as they are stuck with you, there’s nobody closer.
To be fair, you can really lay that particular one at the feet of the demographics in this comment section far more justifiably than you can blame the obese people you saw in the deep south for it.
such as indicators in the same color as the rear lights, are perfectly legal.
In any European car you get two lights, not in the center but in the corners so you can actually see stuff in your side mirrors while parking.
A bunch of Japanese compacts and subcompacts do it too and it was basically unheard of on any vehicle from any continent until the last 15yr or so when backup cameras proliferated.
Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
I saw some of those on some US army vehicles on the German autobahn. And what perfectly illustrated their danger was when they almost got rear-ended while entering the left-lane in front of a passing Audi at mild autobahn speed.
Had it been a yellow blinking light, the left-lane driver would have been better alerted to the fact that someone was about to go left. Instead, it was a muted blinking red, at the same intensity as the car's tired red back lights, that looked like nothing more than a defective back light.
Such a stupidly dumb design.
We also had a wedding to go to in France where we drove a Citroen C4. To be honest, if these weddings weren't so far from railway stations and we didn't have to transport so many people together I'd never have done it. And both these cars were tiny compared to the GMC Sierras or Cadillac Escalades you see on San Francisco streets.
I can only conclude that anyone who drives an American-size vehicle in these places is a masochist. It cannot be fun. No, not even to ride in while someone else drives.
But still, I wish they would ban them.
US soldiers/DOD etc PCS'd to EU manage (not always well).
And, us EUians get the advantage of seeing just how disgracefully oversized US cars and trucks are.
Aside: No yellow indicators? I'd rather US red ones than the 1"x3" mini-yellow-indicators that are becoming more common.
They're not the only ones to double park, but the only ones to exclusively double park.
Why were you even driving in London?
> Yet, EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%.
WOW! That's massive
It's time to also take into account area when it comes to vehicle tax in my opinion, even European "cars" (SUVs) are bulging out of normal parking spaces these days.
Man, everything old is new again. Remember when shortsighted idiots killed compact pickups and balooned SUVs with the CAFE footpring rule?
What you're advocating for sounds like it's end up being a punitive tax on minivans.
The CAFE footprint rule killed compact cars because huge cars were permitted to be exempt. I don't see why we'd need another such exemption, other than the business vehicle exemptions we already have (otherwise vans and trucks would be impossible to afford for anyone).
As for a punitive tax on minivans: if those minivans take up more space on the road/parking spaces/public spaces, I don't see why not. The impact doesn't need to be high enough to kill minivans in general, just enough not to drive an 80% minivan to work every day.
The government is ramping up the tax rates for EVs. They will pay road tax based on their weight in a few years.
Look at the license plates of these "tokkie tanks": they all start with a "V" (https://www.anwb.nl/auto/autokosten/grijs-kenteken) meaning the owner pays reduced tax.
I personally like the wanktank since it's more internationial.
You cannot use a "grijs" plate as a personal vehicle unless you pay "bijtelling" which starts at 500km yearly for private usage, but I guess the milage administration will be on the same order as the driving style.
I thought this stark difference might be partially explained by US population increasing more quickly than EU. However it turns out in the 2010-2024 period, US population increased by +10% while EU27 pop increased +2%. So although there is a minor 8% difference, this is far, very far, from explaining the stark difference even if we compared per capita. The EU is certainly doing something right here.
In Ireland, public transport usage now is also much bigger share of commutes than pre-covid, particularly in Dublin, though I'm not sure if that's due to local factors or if it's replicated across Europe.
See page 12 on https://etsc.eu/wp-content/uploads/15-PIN-annual-report-FINA...
Usually road deaths is all deaths and pedestrians get split out as a sub category. Primary sources and academic papers are typicaly good. Analysis thereof almost always has a policy it's trying to advance and will frequently mix and match to that end. Internet comments are worse still.
Adopting such standards in Europe risks accelerating the "bulkinzation" and "truckification" of our roads. This would not only strain already limited space for essential transportation and parking, but also severely increase risks to pedestrian and standard vehicle safety, and in general bring a more hostile road/societal environment a la American "predator capitalism" exemplified.
Big trucks happen to be a popular market in the US. If you build cars in the US, you’ll have to serve that market. Even more so if your goal is to prove that an EV can be anything that an ICE can be, and more.
[1]: Based on the chart in this old meme https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/140dgn8/many_popu...
American regulations created a dichotomy where there's no middle ground. Big car or sour cream dollop with no space and no power.
Americans want big because big means "safety". An SUV feels safer next to the semi than a Smart car. They also want big to haul the occasional furniture between moves, go on the occasional road trip, bring all the gear when camping, or bring back a massive shopping haul.
American housing is way less dense outside the cities. There's no reason for a compact car if you live in the burbs apart from gas mileage.
At the same time, more and more people want to build bike lanes and people infra near roads. "Strong Towns" movement, etc.
We're putting more bicyclists on the roads next to big cars now.
I know. Sold my Tesla, now drive a Land Cruiser. A small car is just an exercise in pain when you have kids and need a car to get everywhere. If I had safe bike lanes to get the kids to school and practice and the grocery store, I’d just have an urban arrow… but I’m not contending with the aforementioned kindercrushers that aren’t looking for cyclists and risking my kids with the way our streets are designed. I would happily support changes that fix this, but this is the world we’re in as parents.
You're right though, if we hadn't moved to the Netherlands, we'd have bought something like that too, to make sure we'd win in any crash. Luckily we do, indeed, use an Urban Arrow instead.
Ironically I can hold more kids on the Urban Arrow than I could in my last car - 4 small kids can ride on the bike (3 in bucket, one on a seat on the back), plus the rider of course.
Trunk based 3rd rows were eliminated at the behest of the 30yr ago equivalent of people like you because they performed very poorly in rear end crashes.
The death of it has more to do with the death of station wagons than safety (I imagine sitting backwards is actually MORE safe)
And even a minivan is quite large (usually SUV size without the height).
And while I call them "Brodozers" to be derogatory, a significant number of really tiny females are driving them as well in the name of "safety". And they REALLY can't see anything over the hood.
The combination of gigantic blind spots and complete energy transfer is good at killing unarmored people.
https://images.sanoma-sndp.fi/98ad49728452bf5d3e1c9d1d90d899...
And if the incidents of vehicle/pedestrian collisions are directly attributable to reduced visibility, then they should be resolved (the "school bus arm" in North America). But if the collisions would have occurred even with a perfect visibility bike, then changing the vehicles won't solve the desired issue.
For example, there is no way to have any vehicle traveling safely through a school yard at 70 miles per hour; no change to the vehicle makes that work. You have to separate or reduce speeds to crawling.
No one is advocating for this.
> And if the incidents of vehicle/pedestrian collisions are directly attributable to reduced visibility, then they should be resolved (the "school bus arm" in North America). But if the collisions would have occurred even with a perfect visibility bike, then changing the vehicles won't solve the desired issue.
Which is exactly what you were responding to: a massive vehicle with low to no visibility of pedestrians in front of it.
> For example, there is no way to have any vehicle traveling safely through a school yard at 70 miles per hour; no change to the vehicle makes that work. You have to separate or reduce speeds to crawling.
This is false. Smaller, older vehicles were designed with exactly these issues in mind. That's why pedestrians would be lifted over and on top of the hood, which would reduce the total surface area of impact and prevent pedestrians from being pulled under the vehicle (which is drastically worse). And even worse, some designs of cars will outright shear pedestrians when they hit them at high speeds.
I also see a lot - and I mean a lot - of people holding a phone while driving, even in dense city traffic. Add to that non-walkable streets in some places and unsafe rules like legal right turns on a red light. Cyclists often have to squeeze into a narrow bike lane that is level with the car lanes instead of raised onto the sidewalk. That adds up to a much higher amount of latent dangers than in Europe.
I'm now a father so one cannot discount the amount to which my tolerance of bad actors has changed, but my experience has been that the lack of enforcement for violations (right-turn red lights in SF are rarely obeyed) is definitely taken advantage of by many drivers. However, the collisions report does make it somewhat clear that a non-trivial amount of the new fatalities are due to new traffic modalities: people now have the stand up OneWheels, and there are many more food delivery drivers on e-bikes.
But one gratifying thing is that the newer parts of town where people are having children have a lot more safety construction. I was walking home from the gym here in Mission Bay when I saw a group of kids between 6 and 12 on their little scooters.
[0] https://www.visionzerosf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/San-...
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/car-traffic-pede...
We had the political will to solve it around schoolbusses so we could enforce more, but we don’t.
The average weather pattern of the region a person lives in plays a part, the amount of public transportation avaliable plays a part, how densely packed cities near you are plays a part. What car is avaliable is obviously a big part. All that stuff will be probably be considered before the "overall safety" of the car you want (and can afford) to get.
The people who can afford to think about safety will most likely be considering "passanger safety" rather than at the societial level. The more big cars around them the more someone concerned about safety will feel the need to own and drive in a big car. Sometimes you need the bigger car for the larger range a bigger gas tank allows. There are still places where you can find around 400 km between gas stations, especially if you are driving outside normal buisness hours.
One topic for the American car market has been how the "mid-sized" or "mid-range value" car space has been vanishing. That the options are increasingly moving towards either minimal passanger/storage Eco-Cars or the larger Trucks and SUVs. That plays a part, the used car market plays a part, and other world events play a part.
So at least from one point of view here all that leads to a lot of topics like this where there are people who have only lived in the US (and often not even moved around to other parts of the US) pushing their world view on others. You also have people who "have been to the US" claiming qualified expertiese based off their point(s) of reference, valid or not. The "US needs better public transportation" crowd will usually come out as well with sometimes more militant views against car use and ownership.
But all this circles back to the idea that the "normal American" has time to think about this or try to act on any of this. Some do, some don't, most won't really think about this unless a headline prompts something from their brain. The hard thing for the "normal European" to understand is the economics of distance and scale at play in the US given just how much space between cities and towns there can be.
People can blame the "American Dream" or the auto-industry, or whatever else you might want to imagine has contributed to the damage done in the last century of road construction and sprawl. The end result is that most Americans don't have a choice but to own a car, and may be far too tired to be trusted at the wheel of a vehicle. Multiple people driving less than a few miles to work may be involved in an accident with someone who had driven hundreds. Miles driven in a year is part of insurance calculations for a reason.
This was much more comment than I intended to give.
The first thing and the most obvious is that for 99% of people, you need a car to live. I've been able to work around that issue, but you simply cannot exist anywhere without a car. Our public transit networks are terrible, our roads are terrible and our commutes are even worse. Half-hour to an hour commutes are normalized among a lot of people. I don't see a need to hammer this point any further as I'm sure almost everyone who has tangential knowledge of the US knows.
The more insidious problem is that Americans are also incredibly afraid and incredibly self-serving, and our law system is set up to benefit that. Drivers can very easily get away with vehicular manslaughter because our system is tilted in favor of drivers. This is why we see larger and larger cars, because people want to protect themselves at the cost of everyone else. And if they do hit a kid or murder a pedestrian it was an accident and not their fault. This is also why Americans drive like absolute maniacs. Our police also rarely enforce traffic laws and drivers have only gotten worse as a result.
So we have a bunch of people that should not be allowed to drive on the road because they have to drive, where they rarely get punished for breaking the law and where the law is set up to benefit them when they do break it. This has been a universal constant across every state I've lived in, though notably Virginia was worse than both Texas and Washington in terms of drivers.
I am European, I don't think big trucks are particularly well supported by our road systems but I don't think we need to look at American car standards to get the next 10x reduction in traffic-related deaths.
IMHO it is not explainable how in 2025 there are still cars sold without LIDAR-based anti-collision systems, how are these still extra? Systems to warn of objects in the blind spot areas are available yet not mandatory.
This reads like the classic western world strawman to me. Instead of looking at how to improve things we just make sure things are not getting worse. By burning a strawman, in this case trucks from the US. Which are best described as a niche market over here, but now that we have a newly defined enemy, we do not have to confront our shitty carmakers about technological advancements.
These people do not care about human lives, they care about politics.
It’s 95% a political football; the other 5% is people actually concerned about the issue.
Edit:// I also don't know when this believe ever should have existed. Or why it would have existed in the first place
During the Bush and Obama eras Europe was at least important as a staging ground for war in the Middle East, but the US wants to get away from putting boots on the ground there.
But now most of the common ground is gone, and the gloves are coming off
How you feel makes sense though. The US does not and has never had Switzerland's back (and vice-versa).
Pretty much every government unfortunately.
From the media I can see it's only Germany who has a really weird relationship with the US. Switzerland, Italy, France, .. are pretty clear in what they think and how they will act.
See the debates about how the European funds (ReArm Europe) should be spent, and whether or not it should be allowed to be used to buy US equipment. Or the recent procurement of additional F35 (at least Belgium, Netherlands, Italy and Germany have ordered more).
Also, none of the re-arming plans seem to consider the assumption that the US logistics (airlift & tankers) could not be relied on.
Nobody's under any illusion that this was a good decision, including the people that made this decision. It was just a means to an end, the end being lowering tarrifs on the EU.
There's still quite a few steps between the current state and the dominance of US cars on European streets. It's still an empty promise from the EU side.
Can't speak for my whole country, but the opinion among the people in my age group at least is that the US would expect a ROI on military interventions in Europe
I'd say keep everyday life better and buy some stupid US military airplanes instead, to keep this deteriorated stupid smug child satisfied!
The EU representatives shall remain adults!!
This is fine in isolation but at scale it leads to a race where everyone, especially pedestrians, loses.
The extra dumb thing about it is that I don't believe the numbers in the US really even strongly support that preference. Yes, you're less likely to die in a big SUV than in a sedan if you get into a crash, but the difference isn't that large, and the risk of death in general is low enough that it's not worth worrying about.
I drive a sedan, but I'm only really worried about getting killed by one of these monster vehicles when I'm out walking, as a pedestrian, or while I'm on a bicycle.
If you've never experienced it, I think you should at least understand what you are up against. Most people aren't buying these things to be evil to each other in some big dick safety war. Go visit an FCA dealership and see for yourself. Have a sales guy drive you down the freeway in that Ram 1500 Lonestar Edition. Observe how quiet your conversation can be at 80mph. It might change your perspective a bit.
Take a train some time. It might change yours.
But pedestrians can be at fault there, they’re not allowed to be with cars.
I feel the same way about a similarly priced Mercedes, or a similarly priced Chinese Volvo too
I have been driven in luxury murdertrucks before, but none have come close in terms of sound isolation to German executive sedans from a similar price bracket
European consumers want livable cities with smaller (and more affordable) cars. Thanks.
It literally lets manufactures go as bright as they want, any direction they want, mounted at any height.
EU headlights are not perfect and still can blind, but nothing as bad as bypassing Dodge Ram headlamp being higher than regular car side mirror. Tesla Model 3 and Y headlamps are just engineering failure, spreading light 180 degree and being super bright.
The safest areas are the ones where people can't afford modern cars yet and with no tourists that rent them. It's sad state of affairs, the space is shrinking every year.
I don't think its EU citizens, because:
* roads will be damaged faster
* risk of hitting and killing more people
* because roads damaged more tax money spent on fixing them
* more CO2
Just come to Amsterdam and see if you can drive those cars in the middle of Amsterdam. Even trams from 2 opposite direction share same line in some areas.
Kinda hard with someone trying to expand, starting wars and engaging with genocide. Literally.
Being accommodating to Russia is how we got here.
This is horribly naïve at best. You're suggesting building good relationships with a country waging a war of aggression with a neighbour it shares with the EU. A country that's committing genocide against that neighbour. A country that has been rather consistently stepping up its attacks against European infrastructure over the past several years.
I'm not saying that you are an idiot. But I am saying that you would have to be an idiot to sincerely believe what you just said.
There’s simply approximately zero demand for F150s in the EU regardless of if Ford sells them directly or not.
The quote is attributed to Soichiro Honda, in the book Driving Honda: Inside the World's Most Innovative Car Company by Jeffrey Rothfeder
Why solve hard problems when you can just lobby your way out of it?
With its pointy edges, even in a very slow accident hitting a pedestrian, the outcome will make any Tarantino movie look soft, in terms of blood being spilled around.
Don't even get me started on those huge American cars, they are the absolute terror in terms of pedestrian safety.
Here, owning a car is extremely expensive - perhaps one of the most expensive in Europe. This price goes up considerably when you get a larger vehicle, both because fuel costs are very high but also because you are taxed quarterly for CO2/weight of the vehicle.
With a larger family, you are squeezed into an uncomfortable position since you are outside of the <= 2 child norm. Many 7+ seater vehicles (French cars, etc) are extremely impractical to the point of me thinking that they are not actually designed for more than 5 seats in use, as there is comically low cargo room and the 3rd row is extremely cramped (try fitting a stroller or anything besides people...ha!).
I ended up picking up a Chrysler Town & Country import from the USA for my family, because it was the only vehicle that I could find for a reasonable price that checked all of the boxes, and am paying dearly for it (400+ euros every quarter just to have the privilege of registering it!).
Before you say anything about us having a "kindercrusher" we also have 2 bakfiets cargo bikes and use them regularly, but public transit and bikes don't scale well to large families for anything more than a short distance ride (school, groceries, etc).
Large families are being squeezed out of existence here.
VW Caddy we looked at and almost bought, but we had many bad encounters with dealers and instead bought from the private market.
From there you have to go to transit van or other commercial offering, but then nobody cares about you anymore because they assume you’re a private bus.
Sure, car ownership is expensive here, but this is necessary to discourage car-centric culture.
Oh, I would have bought a VW transporter in your case, but that's a personal preference matter.
Oh I love cycling. I know it's hard to find even remotely comparable cycling-friendly locations in the States, even if growing up (also in a large family) we were fortunate enough to live walking distance to schools in a suburban area.
But for education and health, health care isn't "free" in the Netherlands. We pay hundreds per month for the whole family for health insurance on top of the high taxes that support the "system". Public education is also tax-supported in the USA for K-12, although indeed higher education is more expensive.
I'm more referencing policy that is intentionally "squeezing" everything to make it all smaller and more frugal in a way that makes a <5 family size far more practical. It is not the same in the States.
Incidental costs go up but not terribly so. And vehicles get cheaper per person the more people you have unlike many transit packages.
I don't know why anyone who isn't a complete psycho would actually prefer being more limited in forward vision (though I imagine it allowed more space for dual-motor engines).
Honestly if I were the government, I'd require a downward sightline such that you can see, with your own two eyes, a child of a certain height standing against the front bumper. No visibility, no sales, no imports, no excuses. Let the car manufacturers figure out how to build a car that meets it or settle for "only" being able to sell car-shaped estate cars.
I think the reason you don’t see many big cars is that we are generally so poor that we can’t afford what we would like to buy. At least where I live… Also our streets are old and narrow which makes it impractical.
Same when I flew to Bilbao. I booked late, the only rentals left were in the luxury segment. I drove off in a mild-hybrid Lexus NX, where I struggled to fit the luggage that fit reasonably well in the boot of my car on the way to Schiphol.
Everyone rightfully highlights this striking statistic. But I notice a sleight of hand ("have supported" = correlation) and would like to see a breakdown of the factors that may have contributed to this divergence.
Your freedom to do stuff stops where my freedom to walk & cycle around without undue fear of death begins.
In NL, for example, I see plenty of large EU cars driving around with only a very occasional US "monstrosity" like a pickup truck, and I don't even live in the city.
Of course, we are talking about two completely different sets of traffic cultures here (urban design, laws etc.) but I wouldn't be surprised if this gets accepted fully as part of a trade deal. EU isn't a strong negotiator, caves easily under American pressure and Trump has a firm hand and knows how to get the best deal for himself.
The only place on the entire continent where I've seen American cars being driven is the Netherlands and they stick out like a sore thumb. They are too big, too loud, too heavy, emit massively more CO2, usually don't have good acceleration (which you need into/out of roundabouts). Just not a good fit for European roads and streets. God forbid you crash into a pedestrian or a cyclists, you kill them instantly. They are built like a tank whereas European cars will self-destroy to preserve pedestrian life.
The EU is a strong negotiator, we just prefer that everyone works with the carrot because the stick is uncivilised and hurts a lot.
(For Europeans)
Every euro city seems to be able to set their own regulation on car exhausts
So why not limit the sizes of cars or prohibit specific cars into the city?
I’m frankly surprised Amsterdam didn’t ban some of these huge machines yet
I detest how each city has different rules on exhausts but it might be the only way
France has a layer where they translate from the Euro standards to their own system, but that's no different from having to mentally translate temperature units or distances.
There are 27 EU countries, so if it's "a different sticker for each country" that seems easy enough, except, all the ones I thought of do not require stickers so...
EU leaders are bankrupting their continent, lying to their citizens, marching into a war they'll NEVER win... but pedantic auto safety standards - this is important? this is news?
europe deserves it's little seat @ the kid's table.
It seems myopic for this group to go after American vehicles and the size of their market share in the EU and UK, whilst China guts our car market with a thousand cuts from the other side.
I could not find one negative article about China on their website, maybe it's not an area of focus for them (or they're bought out already)
https://etsc.eu/?s=china&submit=
As a Brit I am less worried about my VW Passat blowing up or having some wiretap back to Beijing, or locking me out of the car when the firmware defaults back to Mandarin.
My cheap, Chevy Trax has some of these features. Lane keeping assistance is there. It will tell me if there is a pedestrian in front of me. If it sees someone’s brake lights then it will flash a red light on the windshield to warn me that I am too close.
It doesn’t have emergency braking but my Wife’s 2019 Honda Odyssey had all those things except the pedestrian protection. All US vehicles.
What standards are we really talking about?
This is one of these articles that feels more like clickbait and judging on the emotional responses I see in this comment section it worked. The top comment is railing against Dodge Rams which wasn’t mentioned in the article.
https://youtu.be/--832LV9a3I?si=HpfmA8mFIsJJ_Uhp&t=333
Of course, I think if a company is targeting both markets, you may benefit from some features.
And it's not just about you, but the other people driving around you who pose a danger to you.
[1] https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2020/02/26/driver-wh...
[2] https://www.wesh.com/article/calls-for-crosswalk-changes-aft...
NotJustBikes on youtube has a video listing more of these features which don't exist in cars sold in the US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--832LV9a3I
There might be something in those stats other than anecdotal vibes.
How do we really know that? If people walk more and drive less one could argue that road deaths go down too. US has a lot more cars and roads than EU. And we have this massive Interstate system.
Pointing to “a lot of European routes” does not explain why US pedestrian deaths climbed 80 percent in 15 years while EU rates fell. Road geometry, car size, and enforcement patterns do. Sidewalks and bike lanes are part of the story but not the whole story.
If we are trading verification requests, the burden applies both ways.
As the Devils advocate, the burden is upon you to propose a viable alternative.
Merely asking "what if it's not that" is called sowing doubt, a practice that aims to undermine trust in established information.
Suggest a viable reason for any of the below figures, and then others can chime in with their criticisms of your rationale.
USA car fatalities over the last 15 years:
- 30% increase in road deaths
- 80% increase in pedestrian fatalities by car
- 50% increase in cyclist fatalities by car
If pedestrian and cyclist deaths rise 80% and 50% while vehicle size, road design, lighting, speeding, and impairment trends also shift, then asking whether those factors matter is not “sowing doubt.” It is literally how causal analysis works. If your position is that questioning causality is illegitimate unless I hand you a fully formed alternative theory, then you are not defending evidence. You are defending certainty.
You're free to suggest an alternative concept, and that would be discussed because this is a forum, and not a place to play transparent political games.
Agreed that this feels like click/rage bait mostly against US pickup trucks, which many people in the States express frustration with too!
The USA has 34 people per square km while Germany has 234. So pollution per capita would be a better metric.
If they start driving, the situation changes dramatically!