Indeed, this has been well known in Europe for many years, and rules put in place to mitigate the problem.

Unfortunately, the people buying or building the big cars are not the people being hit by them.

> Win stupid prizes

(American Lawmaker Response) "Clearly we have a pedestrian pandemic problem within a populace armed with fully automatic legs capable of running over entire (cough, ant) colonies at a pace that justifies making walking illegal without a license and a new IRS per-step tax rate, adjusted for altitude.."

TL; DR - When your pedometer, goes rogue on your ass.

Embrace stupidity, get tired of winning.

People have passengers sometimes, and driving from the middle of a three-person bench seat is much more dangerous than from the side.

Cars don't have tall hoods, trucks and SUVs do to ridiculous proportions now. Your average truck sitting at a red light can't see pedestrians at a crosswalk, especially children. [1]https://lloydalter.substack.co... [substack.com]

I'd like a new rule. If you drive truck and the hood is taller than your shoulders you should require a CDL.

[1] https://lloydalter.substack.com/p/study-higher-hoods-higher-speeds

How can you tell someone hasn't taken useful and serious drivers education? They don't understand why the driver is positioned as they are in a car/truck/etc.

A driving trick: Most passenger cars have a hood. If you find the center point of the front of the hood, and sight down that, you find the point on the road where your outer wheels will track. So set the edge of the road along that sight line, and you're safely driving at the edge of the road. Few exceptions. It is true despite the apparent design diff

Because you're not driving straight but also taking turns. Think about why countries where you drive to the left have the driver seat on the right. It's about what you can see before taking a left turn.

off-center driving position is nice so that the driver is placed in the most risk of a head on collision. They need that sense of fear and consequences in order to stay in their damn lane.

You don't wear your car on your head, silly!

Go stand in front of a truck and ask yourself are you going under, or over when it hits you

> I think they're talking about the bonnet, Bruce.

Better get a rubber out for this one.

I was wondering how many of the deaths were due to someone being where they shouldn't have been, in which case the work should be to keep the pedestrians away from the cars. Also it's really such a low amount of people killed. COVID still kills many more per year.

It'll be the same for studies on "speed kills" too. It's still the correct conclusion even if it's not a perfect proof.

I hate the way modern small car bumper zones just fall to pieces with the slightest bump. Yet somehow these massive SUVs managed to get built like tanks after all those standards were imposed on small cars to add cushioning and the likes. How that happened I wouldn't know.

Sometimes the reason is obvious long before the evidence is glaring. Only the severity needs studied.

There are ethical questions here thought.

Some might argue that as the purchaser the vehicle owes its safety optimizations toward those owners/operators. You bought the machine the best product should do what you ostensibly would want it to, and that is safely transport you and yours wherever you are going.

Others might say we operate cars/trucks in public space some of which belonged to pedestrians first and buying a car does not confer upon you some right to impose safety risks on them.

I would argue that we

If you're going to play that game, then you also need to look at cars in other countries. There, lower hoods, the same, if not better crash test requirements and a lot more pedestrians per capita. Somehow they all seem to do okay, and America doesn't. How is that, do you suppose?

Engineering car safety is notoriously hard. Almost every design choice is a compromise of one thing or another

Crumple zones make cars a lot safer without adding significant weight and reducing fuel economy. It means, though, that even minor collisions can total a vehicle, or cost multiple thousands of dollars to fix.

The most dangerous accident for a car is a rollover. One of the reasons is the roof can cave in and hit your head, injuring or killing you. One way to fix this is to reinforce the roof, w

You don't need a double blind study to establish causality, a double blind study is done to mitigate bias. This sort of basic scientific error has become very common in anti-intellectual circles, you have to be careful who you're picking up habits from. A correlative study is exactly what you'd expect to use when comparing different parameters such as these, you can generally set up the data set with slicers to compare stuff like the A pillar size, or blind spot monitors as you point out. Tellingly raisi

Additionally, TFS claim that automakers have ignored pedestrian safety is BS. My Tahoe yells at me whenever it sees a potential pedestrian within 30 ft or so.

Indeed, and America is a country with (comparatively) few pedestrians. Imagine how much worse these numbers would be if we drove those awful cars in more normal countries.

When Trump says no countries buy American cars - it's for these reasons (amongst many others). American 'cars' are terrible in just about every way you can imagine.

The problem is being seen by the driver.

> C'mon, people. Cars have seat adjusters. If you're short, in a big car, and can't see past the hood - raise your seat.

Most seats do not have a height adjustment.

Belt-lines in cars got really high because that is how you achieve that roll over safety rating.

As a driver I hate that every sedan and SUV has these super high belt lines and wide as my head A-pillars now. Every time I get in my 80s classic on the weekend it reminds me how much my visibility is in fact impaired in my daily.

Do and realistically am I much safer in my 2020's car - yes, do I also belive I am more likely to be involved in some for of accident because I can't see as much also yes.

Most common case country T intersection with yield on one road and no stops. (Probably the most dangerous type of intersection) There will be a 30 yard long space along the perpendicular road, that is a blind spot because of that thick pillar. Obviously that leads to the only safe driving practice being, be slow enough to come to a complete stop at the intersection until you are near enough to see completely down the road looking over your shoulder. Which by extension forces you to approach quite slowly or subject you and your passengers to uncomfortably short stops, should there be another vehicle approaching.

Meanwhile in the vintage car with A-pilars just bulky enough to hold up the roof, there basically isn't a blind spot large enough to conceal a vehicle or cyclist for any period of time, so they will be detected on the second look if not the first, and you able to see for miles down the perpendicular road over top of the soy beans..

Modern cars kind of suck for driving..

Raise your seat? are you an alien, have you never been in a car on this planet?

How would someone short reach the pedals if they had their seat height jacked up, it's not going to help. And it's an incredibly rare feature.

Even if your eyeballs are at the top of the windshield, the angle you can see is not going to let you see beyond your vehicle's hood. Especially if it's an SUV with a long hood and square front. Sloping downwards like typical (and safer) compact car gives you far better visibility for what

Most of those cars were not so tall though, and you could see out of them. If there is a 7 year old standing in front of your 70's GM A-body you can see them.

> Has anyone actually taken a look at the reason we called it the land yacht era? Perhaps we stop pretending like the 1970s

Found the guy who hasn't actually compared 1970s vehicles to 2020s vehicles. They had lower hoods in both trucks and most cars (as most cars are now crossovers) and also had superior visibility in every other direction as well.

> This is why some US vehicles are near impossible to import to the EU for sale.

[1]Yeah. [daimlertruck.com]

The real solution is pedestrian/obstruction front end sensors and automated braking. But my state makes me put a front license plate in front of the sensor. So fat coops don't have to walk around to the back to get my plate number.

[1] https://www.daimlertruck.com/fileadmin/press/6/7/D674405/cms.jpeg

Especially the electric ones. They outweigh my 4X4 Colorado.

You could do a study in other countries and compare the results. They have the same gadgets, but not the increased hoods on their cars. Once you corrected for the gadget distraction, you will still find higher casualty rates.

One does not negate the other.

That said, my own current work car is a 2025 Chevy Equinox. I previously had a 2021 Equinox. The 2025 pushed the top of the hood up a good 3-4 inches compared to the previous, and changed a few other functional angles as well. The goal was evidently the "truckification" of a small crossover SUV. The result was terrible. Sight lines are dramatically worse out of the front of the vehicle. Short people can disappear in front of the hood now that it is that much taller. This is even worse on actual trucks; Chevy Silverado full-sized pickups are leaving dealer lots with hoods that are 5 feet off the ground for no functional reason.

It is fair to point out that such collisions shouldn't happen often at normal driving speed. However you're overlooking other places where collisions do happen often between vehicles and pedestrians; namely parking lots and driveways. While the new cars have far more mandatory cameras to help drivers spot obstacles, they don't prevent every situation. Car manufacturers should be taken to the woodshed over this awful decision, and it's not just the American auto makers.

Ever wonder why so many new pickups pull backwards into parking spots? I had a new Silverado recently as a rental and I believe I discovered why. Those new trucks don't have forward facing cameras, but they do have backup cameras. They sit so high the driver can't easily see the lines or obstacles in front while attempting to park but when backing up the camera shows what's coming up behind. Terrible, terrible decisions.

Did you look at the methodology that they used? Did you look at the way that they compared the pedestrian injury rates both over time and between different types of vehicles of the same age? Perhaps it's a tall order, but did you even read the article?

Years from now, people will wonder why they ever put touchscreens in vehicles... and interface that forces you to LOOK AT THE SCREEN to use it! For most people, voice recognition would be lot more safe.

If short hooded cars did not have gadgets then indeed it would be difficult to separate the two.

Wait.. you think vehicles with taller hood heights have more gadgets than ones that don't? What an interesting reality you live in!

Or educate them. After all, in a large chunk of the country, we have wide open spaces where wildlife cause accidents more often than hitting pedestrians. People who hit deer or larger animals in small cars never fare as well as those who have the big oversized pickup truck or SUV. We can't educate the deer, so I suppose teaching kids to watch where they're walking and how to be safe is the best we can do. It was a skill people needed even in the horse and buggy days.

That's the origin of jaywalking laws.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking

NY Times is well known for being under the thumb of the big tiny car industry and big bicycle to work lobbyists.

- Left is best. Have a nice day.