98
Australia’s roads are full of giant cars, and everyone pays the price. What can be done?
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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ANCAP guidelines are pushing for larger and larger vehicles.
Crumple Zones, and pedestrian protection add significantly to the size and weight of a vehicles, and negatively impact driver awareness.
Driver Assistance is OK to provide an extra level of protection, but result in complacency.
A compact vehicle with good visibility and visceral road awareness will be less destructive on the roads than an oversized SUV with a driver ignoring all the ADAS technology blithely unaware of their surroundings.
That said, a compact vehicle with unobtrusive ADAS would be even safer.
I'm just grappling for an objective measure of the impact hazard posed by a given vehicle which might be more accurate than weight alone.
Impact hazard × Impact likelyhoodcould form a determination of whether a vehicle should be subject to a Zero BAC requirement.Impact likelyhood should be determined by dimensions and sight-lines -- maybe there's a good comprehensive measure of this that doesn't give too much weight to things like ADAS?
Time for an anecdote. When Holden were designing the HQ, there was a design paradigm called “Passive Safety”.
The reasoning was that if the driver did not feel safe driving at speed, they would drive more slowly, and therefore be safer.
That is why the HQ had narrow A-Pillars that were unfortunately in the wrong position to observe cross traffic and a suspension geometry that caused terminal understeer.
As terrible as this paradigm was (they reworked the geometry for the HZ) it was vindicated in the 1990s when inexperienced and unskilled Subaru WRX drivers felt so confident in their handling that they would push beyond the capabilities of their vehicles.
I still believe that deliberately engineered flaws are a terrible idea, but I can tell you that I am ultra careful and ultra aware of the traffic in my tiny little Jimny with bad driver crash ratings and live axles front and rear.