Giant SUVs and Trucks are Killing Us

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Transcript:

When I was a kid, my mom drove a Dodge Caravan–the one with the faux wood paneling along the side, obviously. The best kind. It was handy, because my parents had three kids, and each of us had a bunch of friends who constantly needed to get around a rural area with no public transit.

When I went off to college, officially ending my parents’ kid-karting era, I was surprised that my mom replaced the minivan with an SUV. Why on earth, I asked her, did she need a vehicle that seats seven? She told me that it’s simple: she didn’t feel safe driving in a normal car, especially when she had to get on the highway and was surrounded by big trucks and SUVs. She liked having a higher vantage point, and felt more secure in a large vehicle, despite the fact that it got terrible miles per gallon and she didn’t even need all that space.

That was back in the early 2000s, and unbeknownst to me at the time, my mom was voicing an opinion that would become the de facto American mindset over the next few decades: when it comes to cars, trucks, and SUVs, bigger is safer. And that might be true, for the people inside the vehicle. Unfortunately, it’s absolutely not true of the people outside the vehicle: particularly, cyclists and pedestrians, who a few separate new reports show are dying with increasing frequency because of the growing size of vehicles.

First up is a report from the New York Times, which looked into why pedestrian deaths in the United States suddenly started to rise around 2009 after years of falling. Because other industrialized countries did not show a similar rise, experts suspected that it wasn’t due to a rise in the use of cell phones, or other factors that reasonably affect all similar countries. But the US was the first country to truly embrace giant trucks and SUVs, so these analysts suspected that might be the issue. To test that, they examined a federal database of crash data involving one vehicle and one pedestrian, and then added in information on the involved vehicles’ hood heights. Then they built a statistical model to analyze how changing various factors would reasonably alter the chances that the involved pedestrians would die. They found that by adjusting the hood height of the vehicles down to the average from 2002 would have saved about 3,000 lives between 2016 and 2024. Here’s how the New York Times illustrates how a taller hood height results in more fatalities.

And that’s just based on the data they had available, which didn’t include crashes that happened on private property like parking lots, driveways, and private roads.

This also doesn’t consider the other factor making large trucks and SUVs more deadly: in addition to hood heights that now average four feet, which makes it impossible for drivers to see children right in front of them, increasingly large A-pillars, which protect the driver in a rollover, block visibility to the left and right. These drivers are operating multi-ton vehicles half-blind, and more people–especially women and children, are dying as a result. Watch as the New York Times compares the visibility from a 2021 Silverado to that of a 1998 Silverado, each turning left as a pedestrian crosses the street.

Of course, none of this is a shock. It echos a meta-analysis published in January of this year, which found that an adult is 44% more likely to die if they’re hit by an SUV compared to a passenger car, and a child is 82% more likely to die.

Unfortunately, this is no longer a uniquely American problem. Another report published this past month found that the size of vehicles in the EU is growing by 1.2 cm in length and a half a centimeter in height each year, which means that the average car’s hood height was 77 cm (or 30 inches) in 2010, is now 85 cm (or 34 inches), and if the trend continues, by 2040 it’ll be 92 centimeters, or over three feet.

Those researchers found that if the trend isn’t nipped in the bud, it’ll result in 40% more children dying every year while walking around.

Unfortunately, the people buying and driving these trucks and SUVs don’t give a shit. “Oh, but they probably don’t know,” right? Wrong. In another study published this month, psychologists in the UK asked subjects whether or not they were interested in buying an SUV and what potential risks there might be in driving an SUV, before showing them several ads for new SUVs. One group saw ads that explicitly called out the increased danger to pedestrians. In a follow-up survey, that group saw a 28% rise in the number of subjects who understood that SUVs posed a greater danger of killing pedestrians. Despite that, 95% of them still said they planned to buy an SUV. They straight up did not care.

The authors concluded that we can’t educate people out of this dangerous trend–the only solution is policy based, like forcing people to pay more money to have larger vehicles. Or, you know, just making them illegal.

Just kidding, that will never happen, because adults’ personal freedom to run children over trumps children’s freedom to not be run over. Sorry kids, but if you wanted to keep living I guess you should have been safely driving a monster truck instead of walking around like you’re made of adamantium.

Giant SUVs and Trucks are Killing Us (YouTube)