There needs to be regulations on the size of personal vehicles for a shit ton of reasons...
But this one by itself should be enough.
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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There are… but there are loopholes. Which is why the vehicles get bigger every year. They’re all using loopholes to continue not bothering to meet the standards the regulations set forth.
"loophole" implies that regulators are trying to restrict them, but manufacturers are finding ways to work around those restrictions. There is no "loophole" here: CAFE standards are specifically driving manufacturers to produce larger cars.
CAFE standards gradually tighten emissions standards. The problem is that they tighten the standards on smaller cars faster than on larger cars. CAFE are making it harder and harder to make small, compliant vehicles, and easier to produce larger compliant vehicles.
This isn't a loophole. This is incompetent, counter-productive regulation.
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There needs to be a social cost of owning these abominations. If we make it more expensive or more regulated, they'll still find the people who want to drive them. If we make them embarrassing, shameful, or otherwise costly in social standing, the market for them will soon collapse.
Other countries require a special license for vehicles that big.
It costs more, and requires frequent tests, written and driving. The large vehicles are also prohibited from driving down small side streets and using normal parking spaces.
Because at this size, they're only needed as commercial vehicles.
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I live in Basel, Switzerland, lovely old city, very unfriendly to cars, which is fine due to the great public transit. There is this one dickhead who has a bright, shiny red Dodge Ram. It's monstrous. And it doesn't fuckin' fit in the streets, I'd love to see how much in fines that idiot has had for blocking trams, traffic, and all the other nonsense I've seen it do, was actually stuck in traffic once because it got stuck on a corner, took 30 mins to get it backed up and out of the way.
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The conservative Supreme Court is about to make that a lot harder in a few days. Get ready for the Canonaro to be real.
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Road taxes should increase after certain dimensions and weights. Bonnet/hood height should be one.
Also, safety ratings should give equal weighting to the a vehicle's impact absorbtion and impact contribution. It's insane that something is considered safe solely because the occupant is protected.
Agreed. They should but there are these Cafe Standards that need to be dealt with. The cars have to be larger to be exempt because we're using wheel base to help determine fuel economy (it should be weight not wheelbase) These exemptions need to go away.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
I haven't given it much thought before but you're right, that is insane.
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A truck has to have a nose that looks like a big slab of concrete to oncoming traffic. If it doesn't men will be forced to wear dresses, sing show tunes while sitting to pee. Thems the rules.
I sit to pee because I'm lazy. The dresses I wear while belting out ballads from Skykid shows are just to assert my dominance in the workplace.
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No shit? I forget where I saw the comparison but the length of the view that is blocked when being in a big ass truck is absolutely insane. There could be a gaggle of kids in front of you and you would never know until you hit them.
Was seriously considering a pickup as my next car until my partner pointed me to similar research a while back.
They also seriously injure the people they do hit.
A car tends to hit low and send people onto the hood. A truck hits high (head and torso injuries) and knocks people to the ground where they get run over.
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This according to a study published in the journal "No Shit Quarterly".
But they need their Emotional Support Vehicles!
Refer to them as Gender Affirming Care, and watch the fragile pavement princesses lose their minds. Why do you drive the truck? Cuz you feel like it’s what a real man would drive? Congrats, that’s gender affirming care.
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It is honestly a major failure of US society (comedians I am looking at you) that people aren’t made fun of for driving these trucks so mercilessly that most people feel too ashamed to drive them.
I mean lots of other failures too, it shouldn’t be legal especially because there is zero reason for the high hood height from a vehicle function perspective. Unless of course you consider your vehicle being more efficient at killing pedestrians a reason to have them that way. I suppose we have entered that stage of things here in the US haven’t we.
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My 5 year old son loves Monster Trucks. We walked past one of these behemoth in stock form and he thought it was a monster truck. He wasn't far off.
But i Like sITTinG uP hIGhEr
This is a legitimate desire, I think. Being able to see more of what’s ahead is really luxurious and makes the whole driving experience feel safer (for drivers, anyway.) That said, now that every car on the street is a damned SUV, you’d need a damned semi truck to gain any real visibility advantage. Driving a “normal” car is like being the only dwarf in the NBA.
Sitting up higher only makes you feel safer. A taller car (especially a hatchback on stilts like most crossovers are) makes you more likely to roll over, and less able to make defensive maneuvers.
That said, now that every car on the street is a damned SUV, you’d need a damned semi truck to gain any real visibility advantage.
Get one of those Google Street View cars with the 360 degree cameras on a pole and wear VR goggles or something.
Try the all new Dodge Pedestrian Rammer.
Ford F-150... the best selling child mulcher in the United States.
Now with optional add on to munch 20% more child per child!
Pedestrian infrastructure is not typically great either
I just biked home and cars were in the bike lane for 90% of it. The plows pulled all the reflectors off the road and now drivers can't tell where the lanes are. Even though that entire lane is the dedicated right turn lane, they go in the bike lane. When we had snow a few days ago, pedestrians were in the road because the snow was plowed into the bike lane and sidewalk. Fuck 99.9% of US and Canadian infrastructure
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We got rid of pop-up headlights because they were causing pedestrian deaths, but I don't think we'll do anything about these monstrosities because not only are they deadly, they're not fun. And our regulators want to prevent fun more than they want to prevent death.
I hadn't heard this before. How were pop-up headlights killing pedestrians?
A pedestrian’s body doesn’t slide up the hood obstruction-free. It gets mangled by a sconce.
The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe's 1998 Global Technical Regulation Number 9 deals with pedestrian safety sets out how countries should test the pedestrian safety of vehicle exteriors. The U.K.'s Individual Vehicle Approval framework, which is based on the aforementioned Global Technical Regulation, limits the size and presence of sharp edges on any surface where a pedestrian or cyclist is likely to impact in the event of a collision. According to the U.K. regulation, protrusions greater than 5 mm (0.195 inches) must have a radius of at least 2.5 mm (0.098 inches), and further rules prohibit protrusions on which pedestrians could get caught in the event on an impact. These and other regional E.U. laws made it prohibitively difficult to engineer pop-up headlights into a vehicle.
They weren't killing people, I don't think, but they were unnecessarily sharp protrusions. They can still be used, but you have to make them roundish and smooth, which is tougher to accomplish with a flush-with-hood-look. It's more that to meet EU regulations, they would look uglier.
I think the bigger issue isn't death but simply that you can get caught on them, instead of rolling over the vehicle, which causes less harm.
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I'm fairly confident the folks over at !fuck_cars@lemmy.ml, !fuck_cars@lemmy.world, and !fuck_cars@lemmy.ca, could have told anyone that.
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The automotive industry must be jealous of firearms killing so many Americans and beating the annual death toll of vehicles, so they're upping their game to really push us into an increasingly dystopian and dangerous world. How dare you walk or ride a bike!?
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They know. And those vehicle owners like to bully people and other cars with that.
Tax it hard like a luxury tax or vice tax.
Call it a Bully Tax so that we can look at them for what they are.
Last time I was visiting family in Toronto, I noticed the speed limit on major streets had been lowered to 40 kph (25 mph). So the same as residential streets, in other words.
I asked my brother about this. He said that in spite of measures taken by the city to improve infrastructure, pedestrian and cyclist fatalities were on the way up due to the heavier and higher off the ground vehicles people drive today. The city admitted they did not expect people to drive that slow, but if they could start ticketing people doing over 60, that might save some lives? It's pretty sad.
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