As a fine paste, and a footnote in the newspaper "he should have been wearing a helmet" or "he was found with a phone". You want victim blaming in the US? Be a pedestrian or cyclist.
No more juicing your safety rating by adding more mass.
The issue is that the US still hasn’t done it.
https://www.fatherly.com/news/vehicle-safety-ratings-will-so...
I will say that people seem to put up with emissions standards, so it wouldn't be unthinkable to add some standards that improve the safety of other road users. But as the other comments mention, it's a hard sell; most Americans think the people on the sidewalk or on bikes should be driving instead.
That's what the original article is about; people buy heavy cars so that they are more likely to survive the accident than whoever they hit.
If even one car model gets changed as a result of this, that would already represent a possible decrease in deaths. It doesn't have to be a total, dominating success to be a net positive.
I wouldn’t even really call it a backdoor. The equivalent European and Australian tests already have this, and they have not seen our recent uptick in deaths.
Basically, the industry puts 0 thought into protecting other road users, and it's a really big problem. We should start mandating safety features for those outside of the car.
The big problem is that driving isn't just for rich people. It's a lifeline for the poorest Americans that have no choice but to trade free time for commuting time to be able to afford to live. So if we mandate expensive safety features, it's just a tax on the poor. People might be willing to pay the tax to save their own bacon, but they certainly aren't going to do it to save some random person riding their bike to work. That's why we have to dramatically rethink how we build our cities and suburbs. Things like electric cars to combat climate change are a distraction from the real issues. Fossil fuels aren't smashing pedestrians, dividing our cities into unliveable neighborhoods with 20 lane freeways, or mandating 1 parking space for every person in a 10,000 person office building. That's just cars, and electric cars fix none of it.
The good news is, it looks like all the suburbs built in the 50s are due for things like water main replacement, street replacement, sewer replacement, etc. and nobody can afford it. So we'll have a chance to densify and cut cars out of our culture for good. Until then, hide your children and hide your wives, so that people can freely rampage through your neighborhood on their way to a meeting they're already 20 minutes late for. In a carbon-sensitive way, of course.
The Euro NCAP rating has been evaluating pedestrian safety for some 20 years now. That’s why all modern cars have tall fat noses – it distributes load across more of a person’s body and reduces injury rates. Fifth Gear did a great segment about this in the early 2000’s where they found it’s better to be hit by a 4x4 (term SUV didnt’ exist yet) than by a sedan.
https://www.euroncap.com/en/for-engineers/protocols/vulnerab...
The American NHTSA is starting to add pedestrian safety ratings as well.
https://www.fatherly.com/news/vehicle-safety-ratings-will-so...
My favorite pie-in-the-sky-impossible-in-practice thing: force cars to be ugly as sin. Would help with the huge cars, but also has a nice side effect of getting rid of sports car drivers as well.
My favorite “pie-in-the-sky-impossible-in-practice thing”: force anyone advocating for this kind of petty authoritarianism (my sardonic comment included) to wear a neon pink t-shirt in public, labeled, front and back, with “I tried to be a little dictator on the internet and all I got was this stupid t-shirt”
Everyone can act like piloting a multi-ton machine through city centers is their god given right, but I like thinking about the alternate universe (and hell, the _actually existing universe_ in many places in the world) where people can feel safe, even if it means that city driving is a slog.