You could just make them smaller. There's no rule saying you can't.
Cars are huge now. This is known. These massive vehicles kill more people than smaller cars — this is also known. Yet, when confronted with these facts, automakers seem to prefer complex, expensive, high-tech solutions to reduce crashes, when there’s a much simpler option available: Make cars smaller.
Wired spoke with the chief engineering and technology officer for Stellantis recently, Ned Curic, and discussed this exact problem — how to make bigger cars safe. While he mentioned the prospect of shrinking cars, he stopped short of suggesting it for the States:
Some researchers and advocates have argued that automakers should push customers to understand that they don’t need a long-range electric vehicle with a big battery to meet their daily needs. Do you see customers changing the way they think about battery range?
I’m a big believer in freedom for the customers to choose what’s best for them. Having that selection is critically important. Stellantis is in really good shape from that perspective. We have a broad range of vehicles. We have the Ami and the Topolino. We have the Jeep Wagoneer. We do need to work on the Wagoneer, to put it on a diet a bit. [The gas-powered 2024 Jeep Wagoneer is around 6,000 pounds, depending on the specs; an electric version, the Wagoneer S, will be available in 2024.] I wouldn’t say we’ll push customers. For some of them, range is always going to be important. But we’ll have the selection, and eventually customers will be educated and decide where they want to go.
The Ami and the Topolino, while fantastic little dudes, aren’t available stateside. Instead, we get cars like the mentioned Wagoneer, which weighs approximately the same as a small star — and can hit a pedestrian with the same force of impact. When probed on that front, Curic had this to say:
We talked about making sure cars are safe for their occupants, but what about pedestrians? Advocates worry that big vehicles cause disproportionate harm to people outside of cars. US regulators have proposed new rules that would push automakers to comply with the same kind of pedestrian safety standards that already exist in Europe.
A lot of progress is going to be made on advanced driver-assistance features enabled by sensors and cameras. Most of our vehicles are now very, very smart. If you try to brake, and the system picks up that you’re about to hit something, it will add more pressure on the brake system to slow down and stop the vehicle. I think the biggest progress in pedestrian safety is going to come from that kind of active safety.
We have to be very smart in deploying active safety for vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. The industry and different countries’ governments are dropping the ball on vehicle-to-vehicle communication and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. For me, personally, this is very painful to observe. Active safety is one area where the whole industry should get together and have the regulators make it very easy for carmakers to communicate between cars, to understand traffic more. Right now we do a lot of experiments with vehicle-to-vehicle communication, but you need to have more cars on the road with the technology to make it useful.
The solution, in Curic’s mind, is tech — not size. But tech increases repair costs, risks the safety of your data, and can add thousands of dollars to a car’s initial purchase price. If safety is locked behind a paywall, can modern cars really be called safe?
Read the original article
Comments
You could just make them smaller. There's no rule saying you can't.
There kind of is. Fuel efficiency requirements are stricter for smaller vehicles, creating a perverse incentive to increase size. Here's a 2011 paper that predicted exactly what would happen: https://news.umich.edu/cafe-standards-create-profit-incentiv...
Thanks for sharing this here, it really does appear to be the primary culprit. If anything the larger the vehicle the more fuel efficient it should be, not the opposite.
But that is just one part of the puzzle.
The other is of course just normal marketing, advertising, etc. convincing people that they do lots of things outdoors that they don't actually do. Ford, GM, Toyota, Dodge, etc. are not the only ones guilty of this of course as Patagonia, REI, Apple (Ultra watch), and other companies that tout the Great American Outdoors have suckered us (me included) into these outdoor lifestyle brands as well. They all make fine products, of course, but people who tend to want trucks want them because of what they think they enable.
By vidanay 2023-12-2821:32 The marketing works. As one of the people who has done outdoors stuff for 40+ years, there has been a clear increase in participants. It has not necessarily been for the better
> The other is of course just normal marketing, advertising, etc. convincing people that they do lots of things outdoors that they don't actually do.
> but people who tend to want trucks want them because of what they think they enable
Those two of statements, sandwiching a paragraph, are completely contradictory.
If the marketing works (and I would claim it does) then people who want FOO want it because of marketing, not because of actual real need fulfillment.
Bernays told us that propaganda/PR/marketing was about selling feelings, not facts. And he demonstrated to us all how well it worked in various domains. The auto industry has been selling more "freedom" than cars and trucks for longer than I have been alive.
By ericmay 2023-12-2822:59 Those two statements are not contradictory.
I am also quite confused about your follow up comment as well since I haven’t written anything to the contrary here in my previous post.
By Scoundreller 2023-12-2820:551 reply And tax advantages for “business use” vehicles when they weigh over 6000 pounds:
By Scoundreller 2023-12-2823:511 reply I wonder where the weights they added to the Lincoln Aviator are to get it to 6001 pounds. Can they be removed?
By qbrass 2023-12-293:36 They added half a ton of hybrid system.
By falcolas 2023-12-2822:06 Don't forget the chicken tax.
> The Chicken Tax is a 25 percent tariff on light trucks ... imposed in 1964 by the United States under President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to tariffs placed by France and West Germany on importation of U.S. chicken.
> ... since 1964 this form of protectionism has remained in place to give US domestic automakers an advantage over imported competitors.
By soupfordummies 2023-12-2821:041 reply But then you have things like the newest Civic being considerably larger than my 10+ year old Accord. There's a size arms race for sure and it seems maybe it was caused by those requirements initially but at the end of 2023, I think it's only one factor at play.
By aperson_hello 2023-12-2821:08 This footprint based fuel economy is (one of the reasons) WHY the civic is so much larger
By tastyfreeze 2023-12-2820:571 reply This is the reason we are all driving beasts. For a small wheelbase vehicle to meet CAFE standards it has to get an unreasonable 90mpg or the manufacturer gets fined.
By gruez 2023-12-2821:55 > For a small wheelbase vehicle to meet CAFE standards it has to get an unreasonable 90mpg or the manufacturer gets fined.
Source? At least according to this source[1], a car with footprint similar to a Honda Fit only needs to hit 51 mpg this year, which it currently meets[2][3]. There are certainly cars that are even smaller than a Honda Fit, and maybe those do need to hit 90mpg, but the existence of cars like the Honda Fit proves that you can have CAFE compliant cars that aren't "beasts".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy...
[2] https://hondanews.eu/eu/fi/cars/media/pressreleases/1523/hon...
[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=+4.5+L%2F100km+to+mpg
By infecto 2023-12-2821:02 I wish this was higher up. We love to blame consumers and automakers but in America a large part of the problem is the incentive driven by CAFE.
Back when I used to have a car (over 10 years ago now...) I drive a 2001 Subaru Forester. Newer Foresters are much bigger and nigh unrecognizable.
I occasionally rent cars and always ask for a sedan, but half the time I get "upgraded" to a tank that has huge blind spots (how are you supposed to see cyclists?), uses twice as much fuel and is much harder to park in front of my condo building (which requires maneuvering around elevated train pillars). My toddler even calls it a bus.
Similar, I'm always getting an "upgrade" when I travel. Inevitably to a Suburban or most recently a Expedition MAX which was one of the biggest pieces of absolute crap I've ever driven. The hoods are so long, tall and square you could hide an entire classroom behind them. They drive like absolute trash, slow to stop, body roll for days, turn the wheel 4 times to make a tight turn, etc... I know there is some demented subset of people who equate their masculinity to these things, but who else actually want to drive these monstrosities?
By throitallaway 2023-12-2821:06 I've always driven small cars. One time when I had to get a rental vehicle they only had F150s available. The visibility was so bad that I ended up backing into a shopping cart in a grocery store parking lot. I hate that everyone is running around in multi-ton death machines nowadays.
I was curious how they defined 'unsafe' in this context. Following the links in the article, I found this quote:
> These massive trucks are actually safer for their occupants, but far more deadly to the people outside
I’ll point out and it will probably get downvoted again because it is an inconvenient truth, but making vehicles safer for the occupants at the cost of slightly to somewhat more dangerous for non-occupants can still result in a net improvement of overall safety because pedestrians and vehicle accidents happen far less frequently than vehicle to vehicle accidents.
By bryanlarsen 2023-12-293:261 reply No it doesn't. The larger vehicle in a collision is safer, but the smaller vehicle is less safe. If you buy an Expedition, you're more likely to kill a pedestrian, plus you're more likely to kill the occupants of any other vehicles you collide with. You're more likely to die in a rollover, and dont significantly affect your odds when colliding with a fixed object.
Your personal risk goes down because as you say vehicle to vehicle is the most common and you win that zero sum game, but overall the score is very negative.
So you do or don’t agree with my statement of “making vehicles safer for the occupants at the cost of slightly to somewhat more dangerous for non-occupants can still result in a net improvement of overall safety”?
By bryanlarsen 2023-12-297:281 reply No, you are making it far worse for people driving smaller vehicles too.
By kcplate 2023-12-2913:43 [flagged]
