> <i>Using three separate identification strategies we show that, controlling for own-vehicle weight, being hit by a vehicle that is 1000 pounds heavier generates a 40–50% increase in fatality risk. [...] We consider two policies for internalizing this external cost, a weight-varying mileage tax and a gas tax, and find that they are similar for most vehicles. The findings suggest that European gas taxes may be much closer to optimal levels than the US gas tax.</i><p>In an environment of wealth inequality, this seems like another way that the wealthy can benefit: easily afford to drive heavier vehicles that increase their personal safety while increasing the lethal threats against the poor.<p>How about instead: if larger vehicles are more dangerous for the population overall, then they should be banned <i>for everyone</i>, not only effectively off-limits to the poor.
They even had to change a decade old standard crash test to account for increase in weight and count of current style SUVs. IMO they should be banned as the creeping normality will lead to all of us sitting in battle mechs eventually:<p><a href="https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/small-suvs-struggle-in-new-tougher-side-test" rel="nofollow">https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/small-suvs-struggle-in-new-...</a><p><a href="https://youtu.be/3Lu-t5dJrxI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/3Lu-t5dJrxI</a>
I feel like heavier cars being a separate license or an endorsement on your existing car license is a sensible idea. They have very different handling characteristics, and it's pretty noticeable a lot of their drivers lack the skill required to operate them safely.<p>I mean the idea that you can sit your license test in a subcompact and then go out and drive a 4 door high displacement ute/pickup truck is pretty absurd on the face of it.
Perhaps an interesting, related anecdote to this is that the song "Red Barchetta" by Rush is based on a speculative short story related to this article's premise. In the story, Modern Safety Vehicles are by design massive and heavy, and through their design (and either carelessness or aggression by those who drive them), are a danger to older, smaller cars.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barchetta" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barchetta</a><p><a href="http://www.fiatbarchetta.com/links/nice.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.fiatbarchetta.com/links/nice.html</a>
The new Hummer EV is over 4 tons and does 0-100km/h in around 3 seconds.<p>Between the obvious danger per the article, there’s also lots of extra wear on roads, particularly small residential ones.<p>Lots of external costs.
Worse for stopping distances though, especially to the extent that SUVs (very popular in the US) have a higher CoG and therefore the ABS has to be calibrated differently. The car is "safer" in that you won't die, but not safer in terms of avoiding accidents.
I hate that I will likely buy a larger car than my current Corolla just so I can feel slightly safer. I don't need it, I don't really want it, but given the adversarial nature of other drivers, I feel I would be putting myself unnecessarily at risk if I don't.
A few weeks ago I was nearly killed by a Jeep Grand Cherokee turning left across an intersection I was crossing (as a pedestrian). It was going faster than 25 MPH and I only had two seconds of leeway to scramble back onto the sidewalk. If I hadn't been vigilant in paying attention I would not be alive today. And I only had that vigilance because I already believed that if I was going to die suddenly, it was probably going to be because of a vehicle.<p>It still gives me anxiety nearly every day, knowing that there's nothing more I can do to address the situation except to keep being vigilant when crossing roads. People are not going to give up their SUVs or stop buying them.
This is basic and obvious physics. I always was frustrated any time I heard someone say they liked their massive vehicle because it made them feel safer. It is such a selfish way of thinking. Sure you're safe, but think what you're going to do to the other car and people inside. Might as well add missiles that preemptively fire and blast the other car off the road in a detected collision. That would even be safer for you.
Yep, when I bought my Hilux I was told that it had an ANCAP Safety Rating of "5" (which is the highest in Australia). If I chose to get a bullbar installed, it would reduce to "4" even though I would be safer as pedestrian safety is significantly reduced and that factors into the rating.
I think people are letting their personal biases (e.g. SUV=bad) get the better of them. With the rise of EVs, even small vehicles will weigh a lot. For instance, the curb weight of a Tesla Model 3 is between 3,648 and 4,250 lbs, which is about the same as a Toyota Highlander.
We have had big cars for a really long time. Look back to the 70s, the cars then were called "boats" because they were huge and they had a lot more steel than current cars.
Yes, I agree, more people are favoring SUVs and trucks than prior generations, but huge cars have been around for decades.<p>I recently purchased a 79 Lincoln Continental Mark V and it is that same length as my 2020 F150 - 40 year spread, same size vehicle.<p>People need to drive safe and not be stupid behind the wheel. I would guess that cell phone use while driving kills way more people than "big vehicles" do (most of us are guilty of this). I feel it is a technology+cultural issue.
I used to live in NZ where big Utes and whatnot were relatively common. But in the cities people still generally drove city cars. You'd see Utes more often when you were close to the border between populated/rural. Sometimes in city/town if someone had come in to do some shopping.<p>Now that I live in London I see huge SUVs CONSTANTLY. And the pandemic made it worse! I started driving myself during the pandemic and picked up a little (BMW) Mini. When I first started, every car in our parking was your average kind of car. Now they're all SUVs, it's kind of funny to see the Mini nestled in between them; you can't even see it until you walk along the row of apartments on wheels and see if squeezed in between them.<p>If the mayor of London was smarter, they'd have banned new registrations for SUVs in London 10 years ago. But of course that would never happen, because £££. Nobody _needs_ an SUV in London. Nobody.<p>Hell, even the styling of these huge cars has changed from being rugged/practical to be used on a farm like the kind I grew up with, to being rounded/soft/comfortable designed and expected to be driven to the supermarket when instead they should be using a Fiat 500/Mini/Micra etc for that.
What if there was a speed governor proportional to the weight of the vehicle, so as to cap the possible level of kinetic force? People driving monster SUVs and pickups would still be safe from collisions, but would have to travel much slower and/or be confined to specific lanes.
Why would taxes be needed to internalize the increased risk to others? It seems to me that liability insurance is the appropriate place to factor those risks in.
Do five star crash test ratings therefore overstate the COMPARATIVE safety of small cars? Or do they account for the risk reduction of larger cars? Eg <a href="https://www.ancap.com.au/safety-ratings?is_current_model=true&page=1&field=rating_year&direction=desc" rel="nofollow">https://www.ancap.com.au/safety-ratings?is_current_model=tru...</a>
A higher gas tax is an obvious approach for both safety and climate change. We could lower income tax a little to make up for it and add a supplement for those who can least afford it.
these internet anti car and urban planning discussions are like bubbles of alien culture. I would not be able to walk around town, well one of the largest cities in the US, and find ANYONE that thinks like this. maybe if I camped out in one or two particular locations over a few days like the most hipster bike shops I know.<p>Before I was able to WFH I even rode my bike to work 60% of the time. I'm the outlier..
When picking a car I wanted as much safety as possible for myself but also especially my kid and the obvious choice was a SUV (Qashqai in my case). I am aware of the dangers of a big car to others and try to drive responsible, but self-preservation (and that of my family) is top priority. Whether that warrants discussion (Maybe it's better dying myself than killing a family of 5 driving the other car) I don't know, but we're touching absolute basic instincts here if we want to change that.<p>On a side note: Newer cars also really do a lot to avoid dangers to the outside world (e.g. emergency braking for bikes and pedestrians), so I would rather throw a lot at improving here than discussing the safety of heavier-build cars.
That's basically a desired property exposed by covid past few years.<p>"So, what's good for me but who cares about everyone else?"<p>Go ask retirement/nursing-home workers how many times they went to work sick and then count how many residents died there.<p>Good luck undo-ing SUVs (and massive 4x4s) I distinctly remember the year they started becoming popular and you could no longer see down the road anymore.
'mass * velocity' means it's a truism that heavier cars are more dangerous if they hit you. All factors being equal the question of car mass is indeed a significant issue. But if you compare road deaths in (for instance) Britain (about 21 per million) and Romania (about 93 per million) it's clear that priorities in this case at least, should be a focus on driver behaviour unless someone wants to suggest there's some other factor I've missed. That's my experience having driven extensively in both countries. I gather EU average is around 44 deaths per million.
Heavier cars are not only deadlier — the formula for road wear is a ratio of weights raised to the power of 4 — that means heavier cars are also worse for our roads by magnitudes.<p>Sure they still don't compare to trucks, but hey, sure.
Here's an odd idea. Imagine being able to limit the overall momentum of a vehicle based on its expected mass. That is, a governor would cause the top speed to max out sooner for heavier vehicles, so owners would have to tolerate being just a bit slower than their more nimble road-mates.<p>Sure, people could fudge with them, just like some do with scooters, but could be tied to penalties in the event of a collision or other traffic enforcement that detects the excess speed. Defaults matter, so the net effect would still be improved safety.
There's another factor here and it's large animal collisions. You're safer in a high driving position with a heavier vehicle. Here in Australia SUVs with "roo bars" are popular with people who do a lot of bush driving. There are a lot of collisions with kangaroos and other animals unfortunately and they can more easily come over the bonnet and through the windscreen of small cars.
This is <i>exactly</i> what taxation, regulation, laws, and the like are designed to solve (and what Nash spent a lot of effort studying [0]).<p>Buying and using a car is a great example of a "finite non-cooperative game". Everyone's self-interest in not dying drives them to make decisions that <i>increase</i> the chance of dying for everyone else. Everyone against everyone. Individual gains result in an aggregate loss for the whole population (everyone drives increasingly larger cars, dangerous to more and more people, i.e. cyclists, pedestrians, other cars, etc.)<p>The fact that the US government simply just allowed a cave-man-esque non-coop game to take hold is the most shocking aspect of all this, particularly when there is an entire field dedicated to studying this kind of phenomenon.<p>As someone who doesn't live in the US, how did it get like this? In my own country, higher taxes for larger vehicles and smaller roads luckily exist.<p>I disagree with the other comments that mention taxation as a solution, as that's just, obviously, egregiously, an awful tragedy of the commons.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium#Examples" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium#Examples</a>
Ahh, time to shit on drivers of larger vehicles and pontificate on all the ways we can tax or regulate owners into submission.<p>I will say one thing we can benefit from is raising the bar to getting your license. It’s extremely easy to get in the US, and it should be much harder. Regardless of what you drive.
We’ve known that the heaviest cars are the safest for a long time. It’s the reason why, in the 1970’s and 80’s, parents bought big heavy cars for their college-bound children.
This headline contradicts the linked article.<p>The HN headline (Heavier cars are safer for their drivers, but far deadlier for everyone else) includes the non-driving passengers with "everyone else," implying that heavier cars are deadlier for them.<p>The first sentence of the abstract in the link states "Heavier vehicles are safer for their own occupants but more hazardous for other vehicles."
To add irony, part of the added weight of cars is the ton of safety equipment that legislators mandate more and more of every year.<p>Maybe the last stage will be airbags on the OUTSIDE of the car.
About ten years ago, when the idea that we might soon be buying self-driving cars was itself rather new and the speculations on ‘robot ethics’ popular in the media, one dude wrote: “This will be easily decided by capitalism—why would anyone buy a car that kills its driver and not others?”.<p>Though for Tesla the prediction was afterwards adjusted by current obvious cyberpunk tendencies, in that publicity points for the corporation turned out to override the driver's wishes—still, evidently traditional manufactures don't have the same compunctious, as they need little advertisement in the US.
As a road cyclist commuter, I find that the most aggressive motorists tend to also be in larger vehicles. Whenever I'm taking the lane to attempt to prevent an unsafe pass, it's almost always the driver of a large truck that will still execute an unsafe pass anyway (forcing oncoming traffic to take evasive action) or will tailgate, rev their engine, yell out their window, and/or wiggle back and forth in apparent frustration and intent to intimidate me.
Also why parents buying their teenaged children large vehicles is a tragedy of the commons type situation. They're more likely to get in accidents because they're young and and inexperienced, but hey a big car will save them..<p>Edit: Wow a whole reply chain spawned from this comment got nuked! Stay safe out there Americans, you've got some wild divisions amongst yourselves and its only getting worse. For the record, I love trains, subways, buses and biking but I also own a crossover sized vehicle and recognize that everyone has their own personal preferences and requirements and that no one transit solution will meet everyone's needs, I hope you all can see that too without violence.
More anti-car rhetoric from the globalist academics... No thanks, I'd rather live a life I enjoy than what they think, even if it's more dangerous. Large-scale personal autonomy is precisely what they are most afraid of.
Meanwhile, being hit by a bus or train is far more deadly than being hit by the largest SUV on the market. And yet will anyone here say that moving away from cars and adopting public transit is a bad thing? Perhaps focusing on one variable isn't the best way to reason about the world. Just maybe...
This is why I drive a Toyota Tacoma. Being high up is also safer, your vitals will be less impacted. I'm always surprised people don't know this. Driving a small car is almost irresponsible, especially with children