This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
No more inexpensive cars for the masses. No one is building a sub-compact or a sedan anymore. Now I have 300 "options" I don't even want on a vehicle and no way to get out of paying for them. Driving is becoming more of an upper-class activity nowadays and we all know how size matters to that crowd.
That, and the tiny distracted driver machines in our pockets and dashboards
Frontovers is the highest growing category of accident. They're happening because people can't see small children over the hood of their emotional support freedom truck, orphan crushing model.
Yes, cell phones but mostly lack of visibility.
Pulled into a parking lot the other day and one of those beasts had a camera in the grill. Didnt look after market so I looked it up and up they’re OEM. Maybe your damn truck is too big?
*In the US.
Its ok though, we had to get rid of popup headlights because "oh no pedestrian safety". But classify fucking everything as a light truck and you can do whatever the fuck you want.
Instead of headlights 2 feet off the ground, now we have overpowered searchlights (brighter = safer, amirite?) mounted 4 feet high, guaranteed to blind pedestrians and any shorter vehicle's driver.
I keep saying it, you don't need trucks. Maybe 1 out of a thousand. No, that isn't you.
They’re easy enough to rent if you need one.
And those who actually need them would be far better served by a VW Transporter with an aluminium bed.
This is true, but there's also a real lack of small pickups on the market. The fuckers just seem to be getting bigger and bigger. I used to have a Proton Jumbuck and it was really useful. Used it a lot for hauling wood and soil, it was small enough to get around and park easily in the city. I got rid of it eventually because it was so hard to find parts, shame, it was a handy little machine.
It’s super frustrating because if you talk to anyone in a blue collar or rural area they all tell you they wish they still made small trucks. The manufacturers keep upping the size and cost adding shit nobody even asked for.
1 out of a 1000? Don't be silly, way more people than that have inferiority complex.
Hence the word 'need' probably
And out of the people who do need them, vans are still a much better way to go for many of them. Vans which have at least a margainally better field of view with their short, sloped hoods.
I know someone who insists that a pickup truck is more practical and her example is "you can lift a bookshelf over the side of a pickup truck instead of having to put it in the back like a van". Apparently it's more practical to lift something like 4 feet off the ground to the side of a pickup truck bed instead of like 1 foot to the floor of a van
I have a large family and we drive a Transit 350 van.
One day we needed to move a pair of beds and mattresses. We asked my father in law to help us since he has a F150. But it soon became apparent how much more we could fit in the van (with the two back seats removed) than we could fit in the truck, which couldn’t even fit one mattress in the truckbed without hanging out the back of the tailgate.
From what I’ve seen my van is far superior to a truck in almost every need I’ve had. It can carry more stuff and it can do so in the rain keeping the cargo dry.
The one thing a truck could do that my van can’t is pick up a scoop of mulch or gravel dumped from a loader.
Or COE light trucks ... I had a ride a while back in a Thaco Frontier -carries 1/2 ton, available in a crewcab, available in an off-road variant, and no visibility problems :-)
I saw a chart that showed a much stronger correlation with smart phones
The instant messengers on the smart phones might have played a critical role. Whatsapp started in 2009.
Texting and driving is a thing, so there's a way to derive causation and not only correlation from that.
...it triggers a certain kind of rage/hate in me when I spot people texting and driving, which I usually do several times each day.
I don't think that we see the same increase in pedestrian fatalities in other countries though, which do have smart phones but do not have massive personal trucks.
In Europe:
In the US:
Not exactly the same years, of course, and comparing data sets is tricky.
The minima at 2009-2010 is absurdly clear though. You undid 20 years of progress in about 10 years. I'm honestly shocked - what happened in 2009 to cause this? I would think increasing truck sizes would cause a much more shallow minima, since truck sizes don't suddenly increase from one year to the next.
The rise of smartphones with instant messengers might have contributed to that.
Texting and driving is a thing...
...which triggers a certain kind of rage/hate in me when I spot people doing that, which I usually do several times each day.
That also happens in Europe and yet you don't see a similar increase in pedestrian deaths.
What did not happen in Europe but did in the US during that time frame was the invasion of roads by personal tanks.
So many other variables though. European cities are designed so much better for pedestrians and cyclists. I’d argue that the driving standards are also higher in a lot of areas. Speeds often slower too since infrastructure is designed for mixed use. In North America the actual design of most roads is almost hostile to pedestrians. It’s clearly a mix a factors.
Such differences remained steady during that time frame, so whilst they explain the actual baseline levels, they don't explain the change in trend that happened in the US but not in Europe.
(What you suggest would only make sense if in 2009 the road infrastructure design, driving standards and average speeds became much worse in the US and kept getting worse, something not really supported by observation of those things)
The most logical conclusion is that something changed in one place that did not change in the other.
The biggest change that happened in the US but not in Europe in that time frame was the in the US the prevalence and size of light trucks increased massivelly but not at all in Europe. Further, as we see in this study such vehicles are far more dangerous to pedestrians, so this specific change that happens in one geographical zone but not the other does seem to be the most likely explanation. Certainly this is a lot more logical than an increase in mobile phone use whilst driving (as that also happened in Europe) or the better road conditions in Europe vs the US (as that didn't change even though the rate of pedestrian deaths in the US reversed its trend and started climbing up whilst in Europe it remained on a trend of slowing falling down)
You may be right, but as with the trucks, I would expect a much less sharp minima: Smartphone and instant messaging adoption didn't happen all at once, but from this graph we see that we're going from a substantial year-on-year decrease directly to a large year-on-year increase. A change that is gradually adopted over the course of several years can't really cause that kind of effect.
Why not both?
If phones are causing more collisions... then bigger vehicles have more kinetic energy, hence more deaths...
The kinetic energy difference between a 180 pound person and a 3,000 pound vehicle or a 6,000 pound vehicle is completely irrelevant. The height of impact from a truck or suv is what makes it worse.
Either way, it's surely more like 90% cell phones distracting drivers than it is vehicle type.
Thats not how kinetic energy works, no pedestrian is heavy enough to stop any car, small or large.
A higher kinetic energy means the vehicle takes longer to stop from the same speed (that's true even with better brakes and better tires, because if you try to reduce the energy faster than a certain rate the vehicle just starts skidding) which in turn means collisions with pedestrians happen at a higher speed, which is more deadly.
I couldn't find a page of info for specifically light trucks, but here's one for trucks.
This is not to deny the effect of higher fronts and hence lower driver visibility, just to point out that kinetic energy too matters.
Bigger in the context of vehicles means not only heavier, but also a higher point of impact. It could be the difference between getting hit in the legs vs the torso. Or the difference between rolling onto the hood vs knocked down and run over.
I agree, large cars are generally much more lethal to pedestrians, due to their shape, not kinetic energy.
Kinetic energy is related to mass and the square of velocity
A heavier vehicle absolutely has more killing power against a pedestrian...
You're right. The mass of the pedestrian makes no difference... any vehicle is going to turn them into a red mist
You have it backwards. Larger vehicles of course have more energy, but pedestrians are too light for that to make a difference.
If you get hit by an oil tanker ship going ~1 kmh, that ship has orders of magnitude more kinetic energy than a car at highway speed, yet, unless theres a wall or something, the ship will merely push you harmlessly aside.
Its about the manner of delivery, not the vehicles energy.
Larger cars are more dangerous because they hit you higher up, where you have more vital organs.
The danger from higher kinetic energy comes from the longer break distance and time to stop: given the same driver reaction time and distance to the pedestrian, a heavier vehicle will take longer to break to a stop and thus have a higher velocity when it collides with that pedestrian than a lighter vehicle.
This is not to deny the difference that a higher front makes, just pointing out that kinetic energy does in fact make a difference, though of course as you point out not because of any "higher energy transmission on collision" or such, but rather indirectly because the vehicle is more likely to collide at a higher speed because it takes longer to break.
I couldn't find info on this for explicitly for light trucks, but here's some for trucks.
