I'm sure nothing I have to say is news, but it bears repeating that the common excuses for driving an SUV are either selfish or irrational.
The only advantage SUVs offer in safety is that they're likely to flatten the other car in a crash. Aside from size, the characteristics of an SUV make safety worse—they handle badly, tend to roll, and their design is unsafe to pedestrians and cyclists—so buying an SUV makes the roads as a whole less safe. People buy SUVs to avoid being killed by SUVs. It's a negative-sum arms race.
SUVs have atrocious visibility, and this has its cost in blood. They are so high off the ground that it's impossible to see what is near to the vehicle. Thousands of children are injured every year from drivers not seeing them over the hood. Hundreds are killed. This kind of incident has a name: the frontover.
SUVs are a major cause of poor visibility. The need to see over other cars mainly exists because cars are so stupidly tall. Buying an SUV to see over other SUVs is another negative-sum arms race.
When I'm driving on the road, I'm totally cool with being selfish.
Driving is statistically one of the most dangerous things we do in life, and someone else being drunk/high/distracted/overly tired can end your life, or the life of a loved one, in an instant.
I don't feel bad driving a larger vehicle than other people. I will prioritize my safety.
The problem is that a good chunk of those drunk/high/distracted/overly tired are in the same type of vehicle, and cause disproportionate damage to those who do not or cannot afford a similar sized tank. Your point is a valid one, and I think it is more of a reflection of failure on the end of car companies and legislation...
Wouldn't the failure there be with the drunk/high/dusts/tired driver? Car companies are in the business of selling whatever makes shareholders the most money, and you can't legislature away bad decisions.
> Car companies are in the business of selling whatever makes shareholders the most money, and you can't legislature away bad decisions.
You can ”legislature away” socially bad decisions, at least at scale, by sufficiently shifting incentives. You can also “legislature them in” the same way.
E.g., you can create a light truck loophole in safety and economy regulations nominally intended, but not carefully bounded, to exempt vehicles with commercial use, and thereby incentivize manufacturers to expend enormous resources on propaganda to create demand for a new class of personal vehicles that fit into that loophole, shifting the market so that even after the loopholes don’t work the same way, the demand remains.
My point wasn't that legislation has no impact, of course it can move the needle. Many people will follow the rules simply because they prefer to, and others will because the legal punishment is enough of a deterant.
My point was that jumping from some people have wrecks because they drive drunk/high/distracted/tired to we need more legislation doesn't make any sense. If we want to inform the public of the risks of driving impaired we absolutely can do that, it doesn't require laws and punishment to help educate people.
Assuming we can legislate away bad decisions is effectively agreeing that we'd prefer the state is powerful enough to take away any decision we may want to make but that they disagree with. Why not just expect the government to help research the risks and inform us, trusting us to make the best decision for ourselves?
I don't think the assumption is that government is legislating away anything. The decisions are still up to the people, but the reward or consequence will be the byproduct of the legislation. Get a DUI, lose your license for 10 years. Have an incredibly good driving record, get great benefits(not the 5% off your insurance premium).
At best that legislatures away the car makers' bad decision of selling cars without seat belts and airbags.
My point was that you can't legislate away drivers' bad decisions. At best you can leverage the fact that many people would rather follow the rules, and that punishment will compel more to comply.
Yes, we are all helpless and changing anything is just too hard to actually do. 100 people die every day in car accidents, but literally nothing can be done about this without changing something so that means literally nothing can be done.
I'm kinda really fucking sick of this particular American mindset towards cars, school shootings, gerrymandering, corporate greed, and basically everything else that sucks about our society.
I never said nothing can be done. I'm raising the view that solutions, and even government intervention, doesn't have to mean legislation.
Research and education is a huge help, for example. What I can't get behind is the idea that we're all such helpless children than only government punishment can keep us from ruining everything. What happens when the authority given to that government lands in the hands of a person or pay with whom you fundamentally disagree?
Of course the ultimate accountability would be with the driver, but a) there is little to no accountability left on the road anymore and b) changing widespread behavior patterns is usually a top down thing. You can certainly legislate in a way that either rewards or punishes types of behavior(good/bad driving), or nudges car makers to scale down models/increase safety. Higher gas prices were enough to get me out of a big truck.
Similar to a separate thread here, I just can't get behind the idea that we as a society are helpless without governments "nudging" us in what they see as the right direction.
First and foremost we need to educate or population better, but from there the government should rarely need to go beyond good faith research and trusting it's people to generally make the best decision for themselves.
I understand being afraid of a car crash. I can understand doing the wrong thing out of fear. Driving an SUV is wrong, but hardly an unforgivable sin.
But I don't think you can be let off that easy. You seem to have come up with some way to technically admit you are in the wrong without really confronting it. What is "totally cool" supposed to mean? Does being "totally cool" with something mean it is moral, or does it just mean you don't feel angry about it? Why would you defend a decision based on whether or not it makes you "feel bad"? These words are weaselly. They dismiss the moral element of your actions without really addressing it.
If you're in the right, prove it. If you're in the wrong, admit it.
That's not how it works. You can't prove morality the way you can prove math. Not unless everyone involved accepts an infallible point of reference, like a book or a pope--and even then there are differences in interpretation.
All moral questions, like, "is it moral to drive an SUV?", are variants of the Trolley Problem. Whichever choice you make ends up hurting some people and helping some others. But different people have different moral axioms about how to calculate the balance of that equation.
For example, I could probably save 5 people right now by sacrificing myself and giving away my organs. The fact that I don't means that I value my own life more than those of 5 strangers.
In the same way, driving an SUV to reduce one's own risk is not surprising.
Your own morality may lead you to different choices. That's OK. My whole point is that there is no "correct" morality.
You can try to convince others to adopt your morality (which we call "proselytizing"); you can say that some beliefs are unpopular in this society (and thus demonized); you can even look down on people who don't share your morality (we all know people like that). But you can't say that they are objectively wrong. That's not how morality works.
That attitude is the exact reason roads in the U.S. are much less safe. Cars are oversized, heavy and completely lethal for any pedestrians or cyclists. It's just a very dangerous trend that will cause more people to die.
Idk why you're being downvoted. It's well documented and obvious fact that SUVs and tracks are lethal to pedestrians and cyclists because of their hostile low visibility design.
By choosing to drive those in populated areas you're signalling a total disregard for lives of others.
Personally I rather die than kill a child, and SUVs are far worse in that regard. Despite making up 15% of accidents in this[1] study, they represent 25% of fatal accidents. A child is 8 times more likely to die if struck by an SUV according to the same study. Empirically, SUV front blind spots are crazy and if you have a young child ask them to stand in front of your car with measuring tape while you’re in it. Very easy to imagine pulling out without seeing them and crushing them to death. The problem is even worse if you have a short partner. I felt blind when I drove my dad’s.
Even if we go for the selfish perspective, rollover rates for SUVs are intrinsically higher, and it looks like the Hilux in particular hasn’t bothered fixing this design flaw in 9 years[2]. And that additional braking distance can be the difference between a massive headache from rear ending, or worse.
Driving defensively will increase your odds of survival per mile far more than any additional metal will.
And also, only 5% of all accidents are two rolling cars collisions, and a not small part of that are parking collision.
The average number of death per km was decreasing until covid in Europe and countries that did not buy into the SUV trends, but started increasing in the US in the early 2010s and correlate with the percentage of SUVs.
That's we need regulation. We are slowly approaching "let's drive a tank" territory. SUVs make the world dangerous and scary for people outside of cars: pedestrians, cyclists, other small personal vehicles users.
It's very sad to see people being cool with that but I understand it's rational. You will likely not go to jail if you kill someone because of low visibility. The victim blaming culture will even try to convince you it's not your fault that you haven't seen a pedestrian or cyclist from the vehicle you have chosen to drive.
> SUVs make the world dangerous and scary for people outside of cars: pedestrians, cyclists, other small personal vehicles users.
Unfortunately the way a lot of American culture works means that this is actually the desired outcome. Cars today are basically advertised on their pedestrian killing prowess and, unsurprisingly, have even been used as weapons of terror quite frequently recently.
My annoyance with it is that this mentality is exported outside. I'm "totaly cool" with Americans driving tanks on the roads and killing each other, I'm not fine having to deal with this shaite outside of the USA...
>the common excuses for driving an SUV are either selfish or irrational.
I don’t know if you’d call my Subaru an SUV or not, but daily I’m transporting multiple kids, a cello, football gear, groceries, various things for work - there are lots of reasons why people need larger vehicles.
I have a VW CC. Four door sedan with huge trunk space. I've driven cross country multiple times, hauled lumber in it, 30 bags of mulch, you name it. The idea that you need an SUV to carry a lot of stuff just doesn't match reality.
The other major safety advantage of the SUV is in the single-car crash (hitting a tree, pole, etc). SUV weight provides a significant safety margin here. The single car crash is nearly 1/2 of all crashes and responsible for the majority of auto crash deaths!
So your statement about SUVs making the roads less safe is demonstrably false. SUVs are the safest class of vehicles on the road, and if everyone drove an SUV, there would be fewer auto crash deaths overall.
Also, the newest SUVs have lower rollover death rates than the newest cars.
In terms of pedestrians, we should implement policy changes like more sidewalks and elevated crossings, lower speed limits and traffic calming features in pedestrian areas, tougher distracted driving laws and enforcement, and pedestrian air bags on all vehicles.
How are you going to implement elevated crossings in a suburban neighborhood, where the soccer moms in their monster SUVs can't see squat, and routinely speed? Kids are crossing multiple places; we can barely get ADA type curb cuts at the crossings.
Oh, and "pedestrian airbags" only help you avoid hitting the windshield. On most trucks and SUVs you don't even make it that far. You're just squashed like roadkill on their grills.
I think the elevated crossing is the type where the crosswalk is raised and forms an effective speed bump requiring drivers to slow regardless of whether a pedestrian is present or not.
The only advantage SUVs offer in safety is that they're likely to flatten the other car in a crash. Aside from size, the characteristics of an SUV make safety worse—they handle badly, tend to roll, and their design is unsafe to pedestrians and cyclists—so buying an SUV makes the roads as a whole less safe. People buy SUVs to avoid being killed by SUVs. It's a negative-sum arms race.
SUVs have atrocious visibility, and this has its cost in blood. They are so high off the ground that it's impossible to see what is near to the vehicle. Thousands of children are injured every year from drivers not seeing them over the hood. Hundreds are killed. This kind of incident has a name: the frontover.
SUVs are a major cause of poor visibility. The need to see over other cars mainly exists because cars are so stupidly tall. Buying an SUV to see over other SUVs is another negative-sum arms race.