Large Vehicle Safety

Mostly marketing, but also the bigger vehicle safety dilemma: if you drive a bigger vehicle and crash with a smaller vehicle, you will be fine but the smaller vehicle will not. Hence, to remain safe in a world where some drivers get SUVs/trucks, you more or less are forced to get one yourself.An easy solution would be to tax vehicles in relation to how much road damage they cause. If drivers had to pay the weight of their vehicle to the fourth power, then they would all think twice befor

Not the OP but this article agrees with the OP:And more Americans than ever are zipping around in SUVs and pickup trucks, which, thanks to their height, weight and shape are between two and three times more likely to kill people they hit. SUVs are also the most profitable cars on the market, for the simple reason buyers are willing to pay more for them. As with speeding, there appears to be a self-perpetuating cycle at work: the increased presence of large cars on the road makes them feel

The problem is that you get hit by another car in an accident. Getting hit by an SUV while in a sedan tends to end up a lot worse than getting hit by an SUV while in another SUV. The bumper height mismatch and large weight disparity are serious killers.Of course, the right answer would be to regulate car size, not have everyone buy increasingly large cars because they feel unsafe. Those large SUVs are absolute killers for cyclists and pedestrians, not to mention that they are actually

Large cars are less agile, making it more difficult to avoid accidents. SUVs in particular are also much more likely to rollover than passenger cars. This makes larger vehicles less safe for their passengers.

The cost in human lives and misery of these larger vehicles is...staggeringhttps://www.reuters.com/world/us/tall-trucks-suvs-are-45-dea...https

Thats because the SUV is too big, not because the car is too small.If you lived somewhere where all the cars were small, both vehicles would be better off, because there would be much less energy in the collision.SUV's aren't safer, they're more dangerous to other people. and that shouldn't be OK.

The conflict here is that while bigger vehicles are often safer for the occupants, they are way more dangerous for anyone not inside a vehicle that big, especially pedestrians. Namely, if you get hit by a larger vehicle, you're less likely to tumble over the roof like what would happen with a sedan and instead you get knocked over and crushed.And of course, "the fact that this makes it into an arms race of weight and size" is absolutely not something that we can ignore. This is

Large vehicles make crashes more common and more deadly. This is extraordinarily well-documented. They have poor visibility and so often drive right into pedestrians (especially children). If they hit pedestrians, they are far more likely than a normal car to kill them. They are tall and block other people's line of sight. People in a sensible car hit by a large car are several times more likely to die than if they are hit by a sensible car.SUVs make collisions more common and more deadl

Vehicle size has minimal impact on collision safty. People regularly survive collisions with Semi Trucks for example.Also those SUV’s often look huge, but a Honda Accord weighs 2/3 as much as a Chevy Suburban before adding passengers. Weight reduces acceleration and fuel economy so they use body styles that look huge while being mostly hollow.

Getting hit by a car is much more survivable than getting hit by an oversized pickup truck/SUV whose designers deliberately chose a huge, blunt frontal cross-section with poor visibility over the hood.This deliberately unsafe design needs to be outlawed. Infrastructure improvements like traffic calming and dedicated grade-separated pedestrian/cyclist infrastructure are great too, but we need both.