this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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You can thank the EPA and their CAFE standards for that.
The more I read about them, the worse it gets.
It seems like auto manufacturers are using vehicle footprint as a means to reach higher safety statistics instead of actually designing safer vehicles, which in turn directly impacts gas efficiency.
It's like a rat race to the biggest consumer trucks we now have on the road; the more truck-class vehicles we have, the less safe it is for cars. So they make bigger vehicles to accommodate and the cycle continues.
The dumbest thing is if you look at actual crash test statistics, SUVs don't actually perform better than passenger cars, by and large. Maybe a bit, but definitely not enough to justify the huge difference in size and cost. Smart cars are a great example -- they actually perform super well in crash testing in spite of being so tiny.
People get so confused about the whole relative size thing. They think being in a bigger vehicle makes them inherently safer -- but that isn't really true. Being in a SAFER vehicle makes you safer. Big SUVs with their poor suspension and stiff frames, in many kinds of common accidents, perform very poorly.
The confusion comes because people forget there are two vehicles involved in the kinds of accidents they are scared of. They think that if their vehicle is bigger, it means the other vehicle is smaller. And of course, if the vehicle you're in a collision with is smaller, you will be safer. But it doesn't matter that it be smaller than you. It needs to be smaller in absolute terms.
And in a crash with a stationary object or rollover, being in a one of these trucks is pretty much universally worse.
Of course, the entire appeal to "safety" is nonsense anyway. US roads are just not safe. They are not designed to be safe. Safety is not a priority. Level of service is the priority. We can and happily do sacrifice safety for the sake of reducing congestion all the time. Just look at how nearly-universal right on red and sliplanes are, or how often we put in expensive urban signalized intersections instead of all-way stops.
Yes, because free market capitalism has been working out great.
I think you assumed that comment said something it didn't.
Regulations literally brought us to this…
Regulatory capture brought us to this.
Poorly written regulations with giant gaping loopholes for companies to skirt caused this.
You really blame the companies for following the law as written?
Enforcement is also the EPA's responsibility, not the companies.
And you can't enforce the 'spirit' of the law. That's not how laws work. That would be soooo easily abused.
I'd honestly say it's a bit of both. The regulations affecting this are pretty terrible and allow for the loopholes that are creating the issues we're seeing today. But from my perspective, reducing these regulations won't solve the problem. I would argue that we need both incentives and regulations that address this directly. That way, any companies that are still producing larger vehicles just to shirk regulations would be doing it at their own expense and for (hopefully) a niche market that still wants larger vehicles.