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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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
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)?
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.
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.
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!
[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
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.