alt Hacker NewsI agree with you however I believe weight and safety are in a complex relationship right now, which has nothing to do with performance and handling.
Unfortunately I feel much less safe in a Fiat 500 when a significant portion of cars in the road weigh nearly 3 tonnes and perhaps can't even see me. I suspect most people are in SUVs because they're the pragmatic trade off between safety and convenience, not because they were hoping for excellent performance.
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Your intuition is correct.
Americans’ Love Affair with Big Cars is Killing Them (https://www.economist.com/interactive/united-states/2024/08/...) - The Economist.
> In a crash, the fatality rate of the occupants of the heavy pickup truck is about half that of the compact car. But they are also far more dangerous to the fatality rate of people in other cars.
> The fatality rate is roughly seven times higher when colliding with a heavy pickup truck than with a compact car. As the weight of your car increases, the risk of killing others increases dramatically. For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles.
Unfortunately car safety is only evaluated in terms of safety for the occupants. Not safety of society.
Classic prisoner's dilemma.
Everyone who can will naturally choose "defect" unless there's some sort of external coordination mechanism.
I wonder if larger/heavy non-commercial vehicles were taxed at a very high rate, would more people choose Fiat 500 sized cars?
Yup, it's an arms race to see who can buy the biggest vehicle so that they can see over the second biggest vehicle and survive a collision with it.
But small cars are only unsafe because of that discrepancy between the largest and smallest cars, and it's not just weight, but height difference. It's possible to survive crashes at very extreme speeds in very light cars if they are designed to work that way (see: F1 crash g-force). Not so much if you literally get run over.
The culture needs to change. A vehicle is not a living room. The driver's seat is not a sofa. You don't need a TV in the dashboard. You don't need 8 seats when 7 of them are unoccupied 90% of the time. You don't need to go into debt to buy a land yacht.
So yeah... you're right, but it's a bummer that we've arrived at this situation.