Ever-rising height of car bonnets a ‘clear threat’ to children, report says
High-fronted SUVs are more likely to kill and are on the rise in Europe, with the UK an extreme example
This isn't a discovery, this is just one of the things men in US society decided to ignore the danger of and the rest of us dutifully complied.
This isn't a discovery
No, but it's a Range Rover, so close enough.
Are you going to four-wheel drop a joke like that in this conversation!!?
This community is "FuckCars", not "FuckMen". There are plenty of men here who are here because "Fuck Cars". I don't think that alienating the men of this community will do any good.
Unfortunately that disease isn't exclusive to the US.
Nah, at least in the US women buy these too or giant SUVs with the exact same problem. Maybe it was marketing to men that started it, but it certainly isn't exclusive.
Can y'all stop making feminists roll in their graves? Learn some basic elementary school shit about how women can intentionally, unintentionally, consciously or subconciously participate in sexism against women. Please, I am terrified of how powerful an undead feminist uprising would be, human men would be fucked (or rather not fucked) for the next 10 million years. Even if we are going to continue to be sexist can we at least all agree that sexism is more nuanced than a binary "does this person possess sexism or not?" and that you can be sexist without realizing it, or be forced or cajoled into participating in sexism without realizing it?
By far the funniest evidence for my point is that I am myself a heterosexual white man who falls in a lot of ways along the stereotypes of what a heterosexual white man is like, and yet the single biggest point I am getting in pushback in this thread is that my attack on men isn't warranted because women drive pickups too so that can't be a toxic masculinity thing... but by that logic it would be impossible for me to be sexist towards heterosexual white men right now since I am a heterosexual white man, and yet I am or at least I arguably am being sexist according to many other people on this thread?
So which is it? Can you participate in toxic sexism without being part of the group that is on paper given permission to participate in applying the sexism with force to vulnerable groups? Can you participate in sexism intentionally or unintentionally as a victim of that very sexism? Can you participate in sexism against the categories that society or you yourself have imposed on yourself? Or is it impossible/nobody would ever do it and I am not being sexist because I am a man?
See the thing is, I do agree, we shouldn't be sexist towards men and men have lots of problems facing them right now (chiefly, men being allowed to grow into adult babies who are incredibly emotionally immature and don't know how to deal with intense emotions in a healthy manner, especially when they stem from their views being challenged but that is a tangent) but if everybody is going to insist on having a conversation about it like we are all babies, than I will continue to light heartedly shit on men... as a man.
shrugs
I drive a normal sized pickup and almost every day I come out of work I have that freakout moment where I think my car has been stolen because it is 100% completely hidden behind one of these kid killers some other person keeps parking next to my pickup.
Trucks don't need to be that big. Half of them have extended cabs and shortened beds, which kind of kills the point of having a pickup truck. The full bed for hauling shit is the whole point.
Also, why would you condemn yourself to the pain of parking one of those wherever you go?
Also, they kill children.
pipi small, but wroom wroom big
Half of them have extended cabs and shortened beds,
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's literally all of them at this point. Aside maybe from fleet sales and other special cases like that, I don't think there are any pickup truck models in the US that are actually available with a regular cab anymore.
(The Slate truck is supposedly going to be regular cab, but it doesn't count because it's not out yet.)
I miss the days when single cab pickup trucks were the norm. Because that meant not only smaller trucks, but also the sacrifice of passenger space discouraged people from getting them unless they actually needed one.
Imported Kei trucks have the same bed length as the newest F150, if not a little longer.
The full bed for hauling shit is the whole point.
Why not get a van though? You get much more carrying space that can also be converted into enough passenger space so that it's basically a bus.
This is what happens when politicians create laws and never revisit them to make corrections. Im a pretty tall person and i was on a dealship lot walking amongst the trucks and the amount of them I couldn't even see over was terrifying. How much bigger do these need to get before they start classifying them as big rigs?
In the US? I don't think there is a width or height requirement for a Big Rig (something that requires a CDL). Vehicles cannot be over 102 inches wide, any anything over 80 inches wide requires some additional marker lights. Height, anything up to about 13 feet is fine and legal. Maximum length is 65 feet. CDL's are generally for certain weight limits, (26000 lbs) not physical dimensions.
My favorite part about this is that many of these Sherman tank drivers come speeding behind me and then when they're a car's length from me, veer over into another lane, leaving the car behind them(who had been matching their speed) with the nasty little surprise of my car, which had been completely invisible to them a second ago.
They do that shit on purpose to piss off the car behind them for daring to "tailgate". I've had former friends and family who brag about it.
Literally putting a random person's life on the line for a small bit of petty revenge at a perceived slight.
I'm 5'3 (160cm) and feel like I am invisible to trucks when I'm in a parking lot. It also feels like they've doubled their height (or more) over the last ten-15 years
My wife is 5' 1". Any lifted truck won't see her.
These haven't really invaded New Zealand yet, but I walked past a parked one once and the bonnet came up to my shoulders - I'm six foot tall.
These... things are a "clear threat" to fully-grown adults. They're well beyond that for children.
Oh, they're here. Our parking spaces aren't big enough for American cars, so they park as far back as the curb will let them – you can see their towballs lining the paths like tripmines.
Gor a chuckle out of a 'ute' with the empty bed pulling a trailer with the tradie's gear in it though. Awww, your two-cab lifestyle ute's open bed too small for a 2x4 there buddy?
As an adult I can attest to some vehicles being way too damn high up for their own good. I'm slightly below average height for my area and while out shopping I walked by a truck with a grill that came up above my height. If the driver was in and decided to get rolling, there would definitely have been a good chance of I was directly in front of it that I'd be in the hospital.
If the drive would be unable to see me when I'm right up against the grill, a small child would probably stand no chance a few feet away. The people with vehicles like that definitely should to stop stroking their 1mm peter like it's a 2 footer and think of other people's safety.
And this is just another reason for me to get a lowering kit with my slate truck. It both gets me a little closer to the sedan road height I'm already used to, and also incidentally prevents kids from being obscured.
I'll take an unplanned bonus any day.
We must raise them even higher in order to not discriminate against children.
Bonnets close to eye level and long bonnets are a shit combination.
I'm quite high up in a Mercedes Sprinter, but I'm not mowing down kids because the bonnet is well before eye line and goes down on a steeper angle.
I loved driving a Sprinter when I was making deliveries. It’s undoubtedly a large vehicle, but I could fit that thing fucking anywhere. Tiny alleyway? No problem. Parallel parking on a busy street? Fuck yeah, perfect three point park every time. Super tight loading dock? Let me just squeeeeze right between these two semis. And it was in large part because the visibility was excellent. I never needed to worry about if I was going to hit something, because I could 100% see all the way around the vehicle. Between the giant mirrors, short hood, and top-mounted (birds eye view) backup camera, I was able to fit that thing into places that would have scared a regular pickup truck driver.
It was to the point that I was considering buying one for myself, and converting it into a sleeper. I was freelancing at the time, and many of my job sites were 1-2 hours away. If I’m working in the morning and evening, but not during the afternoon, it would have been nice to just chill in a van. Instead of driving all the way home only to turn around and drive right back, I’d often end up finding local things to do instead. I had like 16 different library cards at one point, because that was a fairly reliable place to just chill for a few hours. No matter which town I was in, there was almost always a library somewhere nearby. But if I could have just rolled the windows down and taken a nap in my van, I probably would have done that quite a bit.
This is all caused by the CAFE act of 1992-1993.
Considering that this article is about the UK/Europe, that causation is pretty indirect.
Normally I would agree, but even the European auto makers have been following these horrible "guidelines."
No shit?
Regards
The rest of the world
I dunno, I think the Yanks still outdo us.
Unfortunately this is not only a UK problem. Most SUVs as you find them all around the world are bigger threats to humans of all ages..
EU regulation, babe
TBF we're rapidly approaching an idiocracy situation, so maybe killing children is a mercy. (/s in case it's not abundantly obvious)
Look; kids need to be killed. It's easier if you don't need to see them.
Are you going to tell me americans shouldn't cull the weak? That we shouldn't be americans?
Old sedans for the win
Let's play a game of "Most children deaths"! Let's see who will win tonight? Will it be cars, or guns!?
ICE waiting backstage looking for someone to hold their beer
I read bonnet as bayonet and thought we had a mad Max apocalypse
I really dislike seeing stuff like this posted here, not because I'm a fan of big trucks, but because I feel like it's often interpreted as car-brained apologia for lower/smaller cars. It's an excuse to avoid fixing the real underlying problem -- car dependency itself -- by scapegoating one particular class of cars and absolving another.
It’s an excuse to avoid fixing the real underlying problem – car dependency itself – by scapegoating one particular class of cars and absolving another.
I agree, but until we fix car dependency, I'd rather have people who need to use a car in a tiny one vs a goddamn tank!
Yes, but larger cars make the road more dangerous for pedestrians... which might have the knock-on effect of making roads wider/ less friendly to pedestrians.
Larger vehicles make it more dangerous for everyone not just pedestrians.
Well, smaller cars are less of an issue on every metric. They take away less space, they are less dangerous to other people, they have lower emissions (unless they are decades older), someone buying a smaller car will more likely have bought it for utility rather than status reasons...
We shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of better.
Well, smaller cars are less of an issue on every metric. They take away less space...
Unless they're kei cars in an area with special zoning laws mandating half-size parking spaces for them, all cars take up the same amount of space at rest: one parking space each.
In motion, the space cars take up is dominated by following distance, not the length of the vehicle itself, so small cars don't meaningfully increase the capacity of the road either.
In other words, from an urban design/engineering perspective, all cars are effectively the same size. The only things that get considered separately are the really big vehicles, like firetrucks, buses, and 18-wheelers.
As for the other aspects: yes, small cars are better, but it's a marginal gain rather than a transformational one. In this space, of all places, I prefer to focus on those transformational gains rather than preemptively compromising. Remember, a radical flank is always necessary in order to make the moderate position look moderate. You can't shift the Overton window without demanding more than you expect to get.