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Comment by mtalantikite | Hacker News Reader

> Over the past three decades, the average U.S. passenger vehicle has gotten about 10 inches longer, 8 inches taller and 1,000 pounds heavier, according to IIHS.

As a New Yorker I'm not often in a car, but whenever I'm stuck in traffic I think about this. If all the cars are 10 inches longer, that adds up over the course of all the cars I'm stuck behind and has a real impact on the carrying capacity of the road.

To another point of the article, I walked by an SUV the other day where the front hood was up to my shoulders. I'm pretty regular height at 6' and just thought how getting hit by that thing would probably kill me. It's like all the cars on the road are in an arms race with each other.

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I think about it a lot as a motorcyclist. If you get hit by a big truck or SUV like that, not only are you taking the full force at center mass, you're also getting thrown underneath and possibly injured more.

With shorter vehicles, your legs will take the hit instead and you'll get thrown on top of the hood, and slide off depending on momentum. Which is much better than going underneath.

Nevermind the antisocial types with their tinted windows - it used to be that as a motorcyclist you could look over passenger cars and see what it happening ahead. Nowadays every other vehicle is a truck or SUV, and the behemoth has windows tinted too dark to see through. It does not increase road safety.

This is an indirect result of two factors: increased fuel efficiency and improved safety testing. Both were good things, but the implementation needs to be improved.

Late 90s / early 2000s fuel efficiency standards (probably following lobbying from GMC) set much more lax fuel standards for trucks than for sedans. The auto companies responded to regulation by heavily marketing their less fuel efficient trucks and SUVs.

The size of trucks themselves increasing, however, is a result of safety testing, where obviously larger vehicles are safer for their passengers, albeit more dangerous for everyone outside the vehicle.

Fuel efficiency standards should have been set as a function of average vehicle occupancy, rather than vehicle weight and type, which incentivises larger vehicles. Safety standards should require survival of pedestrians and passengers in other vehicles, at least for common scenarios where the driver of the vehicle under test is usually at fault.

> It's like all the cars on the road are in an arms race with each other.

My wife is trying to participate in the arms race unfortunately. She was rear ended while waiting to make a left turn and pushed into oncoming traffic. Her solution is to get a much bigger vehicle so people behind her will see the vehicle sitting at a stop with its turn signals on. At some level I can’t fault her. Though I know she’s likely to have the same or a very close likelihood to be rear ended or in other sorts of accidents as in a smaller car. I can’t blame her for feeling like she’d be safer in a massive SUV and then we’re just contributing to the problem.

I'm full grown at 5'4" and there are so many cars now where the front hood is above my head. I can't be seen, and it is a worry especially in parking lots where I'm more likely to be walking around cars.

>To another point of the article, I walked by an SUV the other day where the front hood was up to my shoulders. I'm pretty regular height at 6' and just thought how getting hit by that thing would probably kill me. It's like all the cars on the road are in an arms race with each other.

I hate to break it to you but even a little car can kill you. Cars and even motorcycles are heavy enough already that an impact at a high speed will be super bad. At low speed they aren't all that different either, provided the driver applies the brakes at roughly the time they hit you.

I though SUVs were huge. Then I saw US SUVs and was like 'Is this still passenger car?'

They're officially classified as "light trucks." Decades ago, the federal government put in tighter fuel efficiency standards for passenger cars, but made an exception for "light trucks," which kicked off the SUV boom.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popu...

I think big and high vehicles would have come into vogue regardless of government fuel efficiency standards.

People like sitting up higher, people like being the “bigger” entity, and of course, protecting one’s self by being bigger.

The US has large roads, parking lots, a driveways, advances in fuel efficiency, and low fuel taxes to enable this indulgence.

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