GoKawiilSign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Email address Sign Up Thank you!
The true scourge of American roadways isn’t pot holes, rush hour traffic, or grandmas ambling down the fast lane. It’s oversized pickup trucks and SUVs.
A new investigation by The New York Times found that the number of pedestrian deaths has surged by 75 percent since the explosion of these large vehicles around 2009, translating to thousands of more pedestrians being killed who otherwise would’ve lived if they were struck with a smaller car.
It’s a virtually unprecedented reversal in road safety. Before that inflection point, American roads had been steadily getting safer for decades, with improvements in vehicle designs and massive attention on issues like seatbelts and drunk driving paying off in a huge way.
Experts highlight two main issues. The bigger cars have bigger blind spots. And their hoods are higher off the ground, which combined with their incredible mass means that they’re also more lethal when accidents happen.
“We see a lot of devastating collisions even at lower speeds because the pedestrian gets punted forward,” Shawn Harrington, the founder of Forensic Rock, which conducted crash tests for the NYT investigation. “Before the driver knows what’s happened, the pedestrian’s head is under the wheel.”
These factors aren’t independent of each other. Higher hoods create bigger front blindspots. The average hood height today is over three feet tall, and it’s even more extreme with some of the most popular pickups: a 2021 Chevy Silverado, for example, has a hood height of an astonishing 47 inches, well above the average person’s center of gravity. Some more expensive trucks, like the Ford F250, are 55 inches tall. Based on the NYT‘s analysis, a typical US man with an average height of five feet nine inches tall is likely to be mowed down by 39 percent of vehicles today.
The pillars near the windshield, called A-pillars, have also widened to prevent car roofs from caving in during rollover crashes, but this has had the unintended consequence of creating a larger blindspot that reduces a driver’s visibility on left turns.
The speed with which these huge vehicles have overtaken roads is stunning. In the early 2000s, more than half of passenger vehicles were traditional low-to-the-ground cars like sedans. By 2010, SUVs and trucks became the most popular vehicles in the US and dominated American roads. Entrenching the new paradigm, some American automakers like Ford stopped selling traditional four door sedans in the US outright.
The physics of being hit by a tall car are gruesome. With a standard sedan, which has a hood height of around two and a half feet, a pedestrian who gets struck straight-on gets flung onto the hood. While perilously acrobatic, hoods are designed to absorb impacts and cushion the pedestrian’s fall.
... continue reading