www.motor1.com/features/713... my new piece for Motor1: 7,500 pedestrians are dying every year on American streets, and yet American policy is still to encourage carmakers to build ever-bigger trucks. We need to act *now*.
With 7,500 pedestrian fatalities in America every year, we must consider the safety of people outside our cars.
Great work! Additionally US guard rails are designed and built for 5,000 pound vehicles, so many light trucks owned by families exceed this. thehill.com/policy/trans...
Preliminary crash testing finds that the nation’s guardrails may not be suitable for heavy electric vehicles (EVs). A test crash conducted at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Midwest Roadside S…
Great article! I run a lot, and anecdotally something has certainly changed in driver behavior since COVID. Never been near-hit so many times and so frequently as I have in the last 3 years. Almost always at stop signs or in cross walks.
Excellent piece. Thanks for all you put into it.
I wonder what the breakdown by manufacturer is. This feels solely at the feet of Ford, Chevrolet and Stellantis and their appeal to design to rural right militia types who come home and need to cling to the identity they built in the middle east.
I remember Tom Jarrell saying in a news report, if you wanna kill someone, use a car. Still true today
Amazing read as always. Sucks to see all the nasty comments in the M1 comments section, people being defensive of their huge cars and making it personal as always. As a recent immigrant to north america, I can't tell how maddening it was to come here and see how normalized these monstrosities are
Speaking as someone who works in an auto body shops, some car lifts can't take the weight of some of these newer monstrosities
You say this is all to do with American policy but the only federal policy described in the piece is that NHTSA doesn't do pedestrian crash testing at all.
This entire piece seems premised on IIHS being a government agency, but it's a private organization that's funded by the insurance industry. And FWIW the new CAFE rules just published by EPA and DOE will limit the footprint of light trucks, which may reverse some of the growth we've seen.