The US finally takes aim at truck bloat
The US finally takes aim at truck bloat
The government is taking aim at big SUVs and trucks.
I like the title, I like the framing, but unfortunately it's a nothing burger. They need to close the SUV/truck loophole and regulate vehicle size directly.
Personally, I have to haul heavy loads across the whole country.
You know what would work better for that though?
Trains. High speed electric trains.
I do not like having to pay off this expensive ass truck.
Finally some sense in the regulators. Something like the Hummer EV and Cybertruck shouldn't be legal.
The easy way would be to repeal the chicken tax.
I didn't see the community and was already primed to say no half measures! abolish cars! and instead have functioning public transport (and if elon musk sabotages it like he did with california high speed rail he gets launched into the mars on his own garbage shuttle). Then there can also be housing layouts that aren't atomizing and reactionary social-engineering projects to facilitate white flight and capital extraction from cities like the hellscape that is the suburbs; where people are conditioned to give money to the chemical/chemical-weapons companies who invented the concept of "lawn weed" and to fossil fuel industries to pollutively wastefully mow and always forever re-mow their sterile mediocre lawns so theyre 'too busy [with pointless busywork] to be a communist'
I swear the number of car-brained people who have told me (when discussing a pedestrian or child death in a car):
Well what were they doing in the road???
Why the FUCK does it matter what they were doing in the road. I don't care where the parents were. I don't care what they were doing there. There is no excuse, I don't care if it's the freaking freeway, if you see someone you stop. But these people can't even see over their hoods so they have no clue there's even someone there, so they've shifted all blame to the other person. It couldn't be my fault, it must be there's!
Fuck I'm so mad at them, and the auto industry is also to blame for promoting that way of thinking. "If you're in an auto accident, your family will be safe. Just fuck those other people right?)
It's America's selfishness, just blatantly on display.
The rules announced this week would update the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS), the government’s bible for everything that’s required in a new vehicle before it’s sold — from steering wheels to rearview mirrors — to set testing procedures to simulate head-to-hood impact, with the aim of reducing head injuries. If enacted, automakers will have to test their vehicles using crash test dummies representing adult and child pedestrians for the first time. NHTSA says the changes could save up to 67 lives every year.
And they expect people to stop making trucks because of pedestrian crash testing? Seems unlikely.
At least this isn't relying on sensors or some other nonsense. Though it might be nice to require things like visibility requirements so people driving Rams could actually see the children they're flattening.
The full size pickups today have horrible sight lines. I own two pickups, one is a '95 F150 and one is a '05 Super Duty. Even the 10 years between the two of those trucks brought a huge difference in sight lines, but surprisingly the situational awareness is better in the '05. Harder to see a child in front of the truck but much easier to see anything to the sides and rear. Camera and backup sensors on the '05, in addition to MUCH better mirrors.
