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Comment by stefan_ | Hacker News Reader

The biggest mistake in all of this isn't even diesel vs gasoline, it's that the majority of engine and technology advancements have gone into making cars even more ridiculously powerful and oversize. If a fully loaded van can clear a 10% incline alpine pass with a mere 60 kW engine, there is no justification whatsoever to have any more than half that power in a car driving in the city, or pretty much all over the place.

Gasoline vs diesel feels a bit like fructose syrup vs table sugar, it's pretty clear in both the US and Europe that regulations have not kept up enough of a downward slope on emissions to prevent technological advancement from going into grotesque growths like the SUV instead of cleaning up the exhaust and reducing consumption further.

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Actually imho the reason why SUVs became popular is that

a) once a few were on the roads, you couldn't see the traffic ahead, unless you were also in an SUV which then allowed you to see through the front and rear windshield of the SUV ahead, and

b) stupid airbag regulations (you couldn't disable the passenger side airbag) meant that mothers couldn't put an infant in the front seat, because if the airbag went off it could crush the baby. Thus SUVs became more popular for use by mothers with children.

Parents can put infants in the front seat of an SUV?

In newer cars you can turn off the passenger side airbag. But there were many years when you couldn't. If an airbag deploys and the infant is in a typical rear facing infant car seat, then the child can be crushed by the force of the airbag.

This pattern is perpetuating itself with electric vehicles. Because electric is cheaper we have ended up with behemoths from Tesla and Jaguar, even the Renault/Nissan small car is far from small.

Uh really? No I'd love to replace my gas powered Minivan with a pure electric. There is no alternative other than the Model X.

And when the drunk driver of a 10-seat family van plows into you at high speed, do you want your "compact car" to become a "compacted car" with you inside?

Personally, I don't believe my life is quite worth the money I'd have saved by driving a small sedan instead of the larger vehicle I drive.

(If it were, then I daresay my budget would be severely lopsided. Seriously; what kind of idiot would I have to be to spend more than 70% of my net income to car-related expenses?)

A pickup or SUV isn’t needed to stay safe - especially not when all other cars are compact.

This reasoning reminds me of the tragedy of the commons.

This is totally tragedy of the commons reasoning. There exist big cars on the road, so I need a bigger one to protect myself against them. I'm half-surprised that no one is selling civilian-use APCs at this point.

Pfft. I couldn't weave, pass and lanechange through the usual shitty traffic if my vehicle was that unmaneuverable.

Isn't the traffic shitty (and dangerous) precisely because of the occasional people "weaving, passing and lanechanging" like crazy?

When I make a right-hand turn onto the far-right lane of a divided highway with four lanes in my direction, and over the next three blocks, three lanes become right-turn-only (gradually narrowing the road down to one lane) but I need to not make any of those right turns?

You bet I need some fancy footwork to avoid being forcibly detoured. And you bet that once I'm in the correct lane, I make a point of emulating the people far in front of me, by almost-tailgating the person directly in front of me.

In such a tragedy, any one person's most logical action is to obtain as much of the price-controlled commodity as possible, before the price returns to normal.

SUVs are top heavy with high rollover rates and generally worse crash test performance then smaller, better engineered vehicles.

And when the tired driver of a 40-tonner truck careers into your SUV you'll be compacted just as nicely. So where do you draw the line?

The semi-worst-case planning delusion is why we have convoys of 2.5 tonne SUVs doing the school run with two kids each. There doesn't seem to be any way to end the constant vehicle size escalation other than through legislation.

On the contrary. There are several reasons why vehicle size isn't going any further.

SUVs are at the upper limit of what most people are willing to tolerate in terms of unmaneuverability. Too big a vehicle, and you have trouble passing and weaving through the shitty commute traffic.

And if you try, and the vehicle is too slow for what you're doing, you'll probably crash. So it's a balance between being more survivable and being less likely to crash in the first place.

Also, bigger vehicles tend to be more expensive, non-size-related factors held equal.

We can't stop making cars bigger until everybody drives a Marauder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDoRmT0iRic

You find a way to make that hunk-o-junk accelerate as fast as my small SUV can accelerate to get a right turn into a gap in traffic ... and I just might believe you.

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