The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs

It's really astonishing how virtually every single quality of life indicator is negatively correlated with number of cars in the road. One of the most effective things you / your city / your nation can do do improve your live in every dimension is to take measures to reduce the number of cars.

i really enjoyed the interactive elements / visualization in this post.

I hate everything about modern vehicles. Built cheaply, yet cost a fortune. Are filled with laggy infotainment computers that requires subscriptions and replace reliable and easy to locate climate controls. They are the size of tanks despite having a smaller bed size than a Japanese kei car. The list goes on and on.

https://xkcd.com/3167/

What a marvelous piece of visualization. Best in class

I propose a radical solution where the US government pays people by buying back their big trucks, after which they are scrapped for raw materials.

Yes, this is a problem. Look at a typical truck from the 90s or so, they are tiny compared to today’s trucks.

The same thing is true of cars. Today’s civic is as big as an accord used to be. There is no Del Sol.

We need to turn the incentive knobs that worked so successfully on consumption so we now work on vehicle size.

Also, about the center of gravity discussion: I used to have an old friend that spent decades in business running a body shop. I asked him once what was the worst animal for causing vehicle damage. ( This was in rural South Dakota. I was thinking cow, horse, maybe bison. ) Nope. He said most animals would go up and over the hood, just like the people in the article. He said pigs were the worst. They stay low, going right into the car and not bouncing over. Often resulting in a total loss for that car.

I take my 7 year old daughter to learn how to ride a bicycle You take your 7 year old daughter to the gun range

We are not the same.

There are many factors driving this:

1. Fuel economy regulations that scale regressively with vehicle size, that incentivize automakers to build and market larger vehicles that are easier to hit regulatory targets.

2. Rollover and crash worthiness regulations that require thicker A-pillars and more robust roof structure.

3. Towing performance. The large pickup manufacturers are in an arms race to beat each other’s power and towing capacity numbers. This requires a large, upright grille to provide adequate cooling for a large engine.

4. Consumer demand. The idea that marketing is telling people what to buy is silly. People are spending $80k+ on massive vehicles because they like them. Simple as that. The industry puts lot of marketing effort behind vehicles that are flops. They can’t make people buy a product they don’t want.

Disclaimer: I own a huge diesel pickup, along with a Tesla Model Y and a Porsche 911. Why? They’re fun! I use the pickup to tow an RV, but it’s also just fun to drive.

I have definitely noticed the visibility problem though. Forget pedestrians, sometimes entire cars are hiding behind the A-pillar! You have to move your head to the side to clear the blind spot safely.

Does the added risk translate proportionally to increased insurance costs? Or is there an imbalance? When I was a teen getting insurance for the first time, certain vehicle colors were significantly more expensive to insure, and that fact factored into my car buying decisions.

I can't take the argument seriously when they ask "Pop quiz: You’re going to get hit by something coming at you at 50 miles per hour; given equal mass, would you rather that be a small object, or a large object?"

Either way you're dead.

To make a stronger case of their graphic "you go under vs over" you'd only need to sample coroner reports and find evidence of crushing, which shouldn't be that hard given the sample size. This seems a bit correlation != causation pushing hard into p-hacking given the bounds from the 1980 data long before the hood-height hypothesis could carry and other obvious hypothesis like smart phone adoption curve.

Very thankful for Reader Mode.

Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.

Just no.

Took less than 5 seconds of reading the article to find out the title is a total lie:

“That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.”

Edit: The title of the OP has been changed after I made this reply.

At the same time avoidance systems have become much better on those large new cars… so would it have even worse had collision avoidance not come into being?

Also interesting that often people tend to imagine F-150s, Silverados ,etc., but if you see what people drive they are large Bentzs, Toyotas and of course Suburbans and F-150s. But everyone is building them not just American manufacturers.

The inevitable march of progress.

Datac enters bad, big cars bad, nulcear bad (yeah those were people of the same ilk that ruined that industry).

Keep it up. China will win, as we flagellate.

The solution is not to ban large vehicles. Self-driving vehicles are what will solve this problem (slowly, as the current fleet of human-driven vehicles phases out). In general, having humans drive vehicles is incredibly dangerous. Small cars too.

all we want are 70-series land cruisers, prados and suzuki jimnys

end the idiotic chicken tax and make small trucks and utes legal again

while we are on the topic, full size vans make a lot more sense than "suvs" for most families

Unfortunately, in the car size arms race, bigger and heavier cars are safer for their occupants.

"Everyone outside the car be damned" is the expressed preference of US buyers.

Deadly for the rest. Not the owners. We need more trucks. Be the good guy in a truck.

It could be why.

It could also be from people staring at their cell phone and walking down the road. I see it all the time. I've seen people walk right into intersections against the light.

Maybe, it's even both, because while I can believe large cars aren't helping... I surely know staring on your phone, walking, and not paying attention is just plain dumb.

non-paywall link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/21/us/trucks-suv...

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there’s another thing that started to get quite popular in the late 2000s… smartphones

"Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century"

They're making loud noise about nothing. 200-400 people in a country of 200+ million is nothing.

Yes... big trucks and SUVs might have something to do with it. Could also be that people are not paying attention more because of their phones. Could also be that the people in these vehicles suck at driving them.

The data doesn't account for particular instances, it's just a guess at what is the cause.

Human drivers are killing people, not the cars.

Weirdly NYC just blocked Waymo again.

These are gender-affirming vehicles for a large number of men. Taking them away is a direct attack on their masculinity. When we say, "Men are under attack," it refers to things like this.

Regardless of any safety claims, for that reason alone, I don't see it as a politically viable issue.

Ban private vehicles tbh

I have 360 degree cameras (at toddler height), auto braking, every conceivable safety mechanism. I really think that once these are implemented, any hatred of large vehicles is just jealousy.

Okay. What's the correlation coefficient?

"200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died"

Or, put another way, 0.000058% to 0.0001159% of the population.

What also happened around 2009?... Smartphones taking off in a big way.

Distracted pedestrians must be a significant factor too. Especially if they've got noise-cancelling Airpods or similar in their ears while looking at their phone.

> Pop quiz: You’re going to get hit by something coming at you at 50 miles per hour; given equal mass, would you rather that be a small object, or a large object?

> Whap! Time’s up. What did you get hit by? If you picked small, you might be dead. If you said “large,” your odds are lower. Why? Two reasons. First, F=ma and second, P = F/A. OK, I suppose that’s really just one reason, and it’s called “physics.”

I drive a big SUV because I have a better chance of surviving if something hits me. That has to be a significant statistic somewhere too, right? How many lives were saved because of big cars?