Which argues that because larger cars are more likely to injure/kill someone in the event of a crash, buying a larger car makes you morally culpable for all such harms.
Discussed more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35082315
Don’t hate the player. Hate the game. The real moral culpability is in the people that created and support the policies enabling the SUV Arma race.
See also
Hate the player. You can hate the game too but if nobody played it there would be no problems.
My point it is an invalid moral defense in both instances.
No demand for SUVs? That's possible, but hard. Most auto makers have killed most (if not all) of their cars, meaning if you have a family, you're in a sardine can, a muscle car, or an SUV.
I own a Prius, because I don't have a kid. I loaned it out to family who had a kid, and it was a veritable clown car routine anywhere they wanted to go.
I knew a family growing up that had six kids, so 8 person household, they had a minivan (Toyota Tarago).
A modern SUV would likely be a) heavier b) have worse blind spots, and c) has a higher front bumper, so worse impact if you hit a pedestrian.
The "I didn't have a choice" argument is almost always a logical fallacy.
One answer is to not have pedestrians. As the suburbs do.
Not everybody wants to live in a city or can live in a city.
> I knew a family growing up that had six kids, so 8 person household, they had a minivan (Toyota Tarago).
Unlike pickup trucks, SUVs are fantastic for hauling both children and assorted cargo. Unlike minivans, they're great at handling a variety of driving conditions: gravel, dirt, ice/snow, inclines. They're also fun to drive and don't make it feel like the next sixteen years of your family's life is just dedicated to the brood.
That's such and absurd suggestion I'm surprised you felt it worth writing, not to mention there are still plenty of pedestrians even in the suburbs.
It's not absurd at all, which is why it's interesting to watch people who have never fathomed this try to come to grips with it.
There is so much of this country completely unserved by sidewalks, busses, or cycling infrastructure. And it's fine. It works.
The minivan also has horrible clearance that bottoms out frequently when you drive on dirt trails trying to get to hiking trails and primitive campgrounds.
They each serve their purpose. The minivan is by far the best suburban people carrier we could’ve bought, and it has incredible storage capacity when you stow the seats, but it definitely has its limitations.
The idea that SUVs have good storage space is a marketing myth.
A lot of people I've talked to about car buying decisions like buying these SUV/crossover things. They prefer the more upright seating (higher h-point). They prefer the higher entry/exit point. They feel they need all the cargo space. Lots of people which I agree would probably be just as well served by a sedan or a hatchback just don't care for those car styles these days. Even if the sedan was a few grand less than the SUV (they often were when they were still sold), these people probably still go for the SUV if they could afford it. People didn't generally like them in the past because 1) modern SUVs are kind of a new-ish concept which only really started in the 90s where they absolutely exploded in popularity 2) those 90s body-on-frame SUVs drove like trucks while modern unibody crossovers drive more like cars and 3) it wasn't until about the 2000s that car makers started actually trying to make these vehicles appealing to average drivers as opposed to just work vehicles.
These kinds of people are incredibly common from my experiences.
Don't get me wrong, I do agree things like the chicken tax and CAFE requirements drove sedans and "light trucks" closer to the same price points, but generally speaking a ton of consumers want it this way.
> A lot of people I've talked to about car buying decisions like buying these SUV/crossover things.
Classic.
City-dwelling non-car owners projecting their understanding of the world onto the rest of the country. (Or in the case of Europeans, onto Americans.)
American suburbia and rural life is car-centric, and that's not going to change. People are not going to want to move to densify or live in the city because that's what "everyone should want". They enjoy their private cabins, their tall all-wheel drive vehicles, not shared transit and subway.
If you try to force these people to move to cities through taxation or a lack of support for their infrastructure, they'll vote out your political candidates.
There are a lot of people from SF and NYC here. As is the case with /r/fuckcars and their advocating for bikes and "strong cities", these are not the views shared by the rest of the country. If they were, you'd see policies changing overnight.
I've watched the local town halls in my area filled with people raging about apartment complexes or even owner-occupied townhouses getting built. Voting out the city hall members who approved those developments. The hate for even zero lot line houses as being "too crowded". People questioning why I'd ever even think about taking the light rail into town instead of just driving. Voting against expanding transit access because "the wrong people" would be coming into their town, arguing that having busses run every 10 minutes instead of 20-30 minutes would lead to higher crime rates and make it less safe.
There's tons of Americans who furiously don't want the density. Who don't want transit. Who push to have their lifted trucks with offroad wheels to drop their kids off at daycare and make a 20mi commute to an office job and wouldn't have it any other way. Lots of people here act like these people just don't exist or aren't a significant percentage of the population, but remember, Trump carried 46% of the popular vote. The percentage of these kinds of people is absolutely not a small number.
People act like these zoning laws just appeared on their own. They're made by local governments, some of the easiest people to replace in the end. The zoning laws reflect the popular priorities of the people living there. If the majority of people really wanted dense housing, they'd be voting to change their zoning laws to allow it. But, from what I've seen, a lot of those candidates don't tend to stay in office very long.
I'm reminded of a recent proposed development near me. A developer bought up the remains of an old farm and a cleaned up meat packing plant lot (torn down, cleaned up, empty field at the time). The developer wanted to build a few zero lot line SFHs and a few 3-4 unit townhouses, and then finally a small little commercial spot for potentially like a doughnut shop or cafe or bodega kind of thing. The close neighborhoods instantly fought against it bringing up loads of arguments about increased traffic (the location actually had a couple useful bus lines serving it...needs more frequency) and building too close to the creek (despite the most vocal neighborhood having structures just as close!). The development company tried to make a number of concessions, increasing some of the lot sizes of the SFHs, eliminating some of the construction closer to the creek and instead having a linear park/dog park there, redoing the entry and exit points of the development to adjust traffic patterns, etc. The NIMBYs would never accept any proposal. Eventually the developer gave up as city hall wouldn't risk approving something that so many virulently hated.
In the end, that property was acquired by a different group. Since the property was already zoned industrial, it was quick and easy to get the permits for their tilt wall warehouses to be built. Now instead of reducing the high housing demand and adding a small corner commercial space on a popular bus route, we're going to have loads of semis driving through this overall pretty highly residential/office area. I wonder which was worse for those neighborhood's property values.
And so here we are, at a point where most car models have been canceled by the big auto builders while their SUV offerings have exploded.
The big automakers stopped making small cars because people largely stopped buying them.
This might be morally defensible for players making equal trades between protection for themselves and protection for others, but at some point this is clearly no longer the case. For example, most people would agree that killing 1000 people to save your own life is bad. If players aren't even bothering with this calculating the tradeoff between more protection for themselves and less protection for others -- and I think most people who protect themselves with large cars have not done this calculation -- then yes, it's fine to cast aspersions.
According to this post from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety [1] (which I think is reliable?), going from a 2023 Prius (~88 square feet) to a 2023 Toyota Sequoia (~116 square feet) reduces car driver deaths from 47 per million vehicle years to 26. This seems, uh, fairly low down on the list of interventions your median SUV-driver could take to reduce their mortality, and it's made at a cost to other people, since "light trucks" (like SUVs, trucks, and vans) increase pedestrian fatalities by somewhere north of 50% [2, third page].
At some point, you're just being lazy, which you have a right to do, but I don't think it's particularly defensible.
You can't seriously tell someone they have a moral obligation to buy a smaller vehicle when doing so puts their family and themselves at increased harm.
If you want to ban vehicles above a certain weight or a certain displacement, fine let's talk about that. But until that happens I'm not going to intentionally make my kids less safe to reduce some wishy-washy definition of my "moral culpability" for accidents and deaths I've played no part in.
You certainly can what the hell. Nowhere is it guaranteed that moral necessities align with comfort or safety.
If being in traffic is so dangerous to your family then your protective response should be to reduce their exposure to it as much as possible.
People in this thread are jumping straight to their right to increase the overall danger of driving, and put more of that danger outside their personal sphere, before taking any other actions to reduce or mitigate it.
They certainly have that right under the current arrangement. And I'm not saying all evaluations or decisions along these lines are immoral, I can approach this with understanding of real conditions and nuance. But along with that right comes being considered morally culpable or even cowardly for exercising it.
An individual who needs to commute by car has two options:
1) put themselves and their family in greater danger by driving a lighter car.
2) protect themselves and their family but increase total danger to society by driving a heavier car.
I am unconvinced that there is an obvious morally correct answer. What are one's moral obligations to themselves, their families, and their society? How are these prioritized?
You can't just say "don't drive lul". It's literally not an option. We should have better public transportation, but we don't.
(0) a place where nobody else can have an SUV whose extra size directly increases the danger to your kids, but you also can't own one to keep your kids slightly safer while you drive them; or
(1) a place where you can have an SUV that keeps your family slightly safer while they're in it, but everyone else can also own one and they make your family less safe whenever they're not in an SUV themselves?
Social rules are, at least at their best, a way to do better than a Nash equilibrium of mutual defection.
If they took away gas guzzling V8 engines, they can take away unwieldy oversized light pickups and SUVs.
At some point your family is going to be on the receiving end. We don't have to be so shortsighted.
The harm/benefit to society would have to be much larger for even the most altruistic people to give it more weight than the harm/benefit to their own family.
That’s not the case here.
* https://ifunny.co/picture/a-semi-truck-has-better-visibility...
Newer models have forward collision sensors that partially mitigate that. (And backup cameras that do an even better job of mitigating the rear low-height blind spot, as long as people use them instead of direct vision when backing up.)
No, it's important to point out hard facts here: by driving a car with less visibility, you become more dangerous to your family and your neighborhood. You don't even protect your family, because you've now entered a vehicle significantly more likely to flip over in an accident-- which you are now more likely to have because you bought a vehicle with reduced capacity to see what is in front of you.
Your choice is your choice-- but it's important not to lie to yourself or others about what that choice entails.
Drunk driving is illegal, having a large vehicle isn't. If it's illegal, I won't do it.
And even ignoring that, this isn't what I'm saying. I'm saying that because you haven't killed anyone drunk driving, you're not morally culpable for drunk driving deaths. Which you're not.
similarly, regardless of whether or not you've killed anyone with a larger vehicle, the fact is that larger vehicles pose a greater danger of running over children.
Legality and morality are not the same things.
> I'm saying that because you haven't killed anyone drunk driving, you're not morally culpable for drunk driving deaths
This is a weird statement... which I guess is true in the narrowest possible meaning. It's true in the way that it is written, but not in a way that matters.
If you drive drunk but haven't killed anyone yet you aren't directly culpable for drunk driving deaths.... but it is still an immoral action. Just because it hasn't caused the worst possible results yet doesn't mean it doesn't significantly raise the risk.
I think the important thing here is that morals and ethics are a relative concept. It's deeply personal and everyone places there own values on it. You've taken a stance that your absolute responsibility above all else is to your family. If your actions makes things safer for your family at the determent to others then you see that as the moral thing to do. That's valid. You've got the right to the world view but it doesn't change the larger discussion. People will discuss this in a moral lens. Some of them will view your stance as immoral or selfish.
Surely it doesn’t supersede any obligation you have to protecting strangers. If you’d greatly increase the likelihood that you end up killing a pedestrian to only slightly increase the safety of your own family, I think that is morally wrong.
[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
So I wouldn't expect a rise in pedestrian deaths (particularly over a very short 2 year period which could just be an aberration in the data) to necessarily mean there was a similar rise in child deaths if they happen in fundamentally different circumstances for different reasons.
In and of itself it is not an excuse to curtail freedoms because nothing would get done. There needs to be an acceptable risk level for things. We need to talk about "unreasonable risks" that are based on evidence and not what might or could happen.
Same story with guns: the danger of guns is entirely correlated with demographics. People outside of certain demographics and locales face very little risk from guns.
The fatalities per 100 million miles driven are as follows (NHTSA data):
- 1.1 for car and truck drivers
- 2.3 for all motorcyclists
- 21.8 for motorcyclists over 50
Why is a 50 year old 20 times more likely to die on a motorcycle than a 20 year old? Here are some reasons given by the MSF:
- Decline is physical and cognitive abilities
- Increased risk-taking behavior (20 year olds don't typically do poker runs from bar to bar, for example)
- Riding bigger, faster bikes (as you know, tourers cost a lot of money, money that a 20 year old simply doesn't have)
Now I know neither you nor I are going to park our bikes, but it behooves us both to recognize the dangers in riding at our age and doing what we can to mitigate those risks.
Also, remember this: when those 20 year olds do something stupid on their sport bikes and crash they're pretty much good to go due to the resilience of their young bodies. Us? We're going to the hospital or the morgue. Those are just life's realities.
Keep the rubber down!
I remember how fun riding was after a few beers when I was young, and that's why I don't do that now, but biker gang culture, which is older doesn't care.
I don't know a lot of people who've died while riding, but for the couple I do they were riding late at night (wee hours of the morning) and were well over the legal limit for a DUI. One was a buddy of mine who was having a bit of problems in his personal life and went to the bar and got shit faced and left around 2:30 AM. Went riding home on a 4 lane rd here that has a 50 MPH speed limit and winding curves. He failed to negotiate a curve.
So stay sober and enjoy your ride!
Also, large SUVs are waaay more likely to roll in the event of a "dodge to not die" scenario.
In a world of only smaller sized cars, having a larger car would likely be less safe for the reasons you listed. However, with large cars being so popular, it would make sense that being in a smaller car is less safe as you are more likely to be in a collision with a vehicle that has more mass than yours—not to mention you have less room for crumple zones and the larger vehicle would hit you at a higher point on your vehicles, which is known to be more lethal.
I don't mean to be snarky, but most moral dilemmas boil down to some trade off between what is best for yourself and whats best for society. In an evolutionary sense, our monkey brains see our children as an extension of our self. It seems to fit well.
You might decide that trade off is well worth it, which is a fair conclusion, but you can't deny that moral calculus is there to some degree.
It's The Onion, so you don't need to read the article to get the point. Its title is "Conscientious SUV Shopper Just Wants Something That Will Kill Family In Other Car In Case Of Accident."
A sucky arms race.
picking up and moving to a location on earth which doesn't require you to own a car to live is the safest bet
it's possible; i'm one (of many many millions around me)
This can all be priced in. If bigger vehicles are more dangerous, we could make auto insurance premiums a function of weight (and other criteria).
We all take on culpability for certain harms to others. It’s just a question of what as a society we are willing to accept.
I don’t think this is an issue of society “overlooking” the morality of this specifically. It’s just that people have a lot of problems to worry about, and the crash safety of large vehicles isn’t high on the list.
If you ranked the harms you are likely to cause, driving a car would be very near the top of the list.
You are exhibiting an aspect of the myopia the article is highlighting.
This particularly stings when a person thinks they are doing something normal like buying a car large enough to meet their family’s needs.
Determining the moral culpability of actions and complaining about it is one thing. And it’s by far the easy part. The harder and more important part is to craft a message that doesn’t sound like an attack on a person’s morality.
"If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose" https://slate.com/business/2023/01/electric-cars-hummer-ev-t...
You're taking an action that means you're more likely to harm someone else, but that same action also means the people in your car are less likely to be harmed.
Its also subconscious bias of legislators on display, because they typically knock around in said big vehicles. Just look at presidential vehicles or ministerial vehicles, or royal vehicles.
I'd love to see a big wig, knocking around in a Peugeot 106, or mini with a cavalcade. Even better if they can drive it themselves!
Do you think car manufacturers would spend more time making smaller lightweight bullet proof crash proof cars, like you see in Formula 1? Something less likely to kill but bounce its occupants around when it crashes and do less harm, like zorbing.
Nothing against cars per se, I love them, but it would be nice to see more Toyota Yaris GRX's or Polo GTI's which are pocket rockets but with better crash protection. Problem is people now haul around so much guff in their vehicles, they need these bigger vehicles.
Blame it on the complicated consumer based form of capitalism we live in today.
Consumption, consumption, consumption.
The photos of the car being dwarfed by the US security vehicles is funny, but a classic example of virtue signalling.