Yeah we're well beyond children now...

Yeah we're well beyond children now...

I remember watching a Simpsons episode about how deadly big cars are back when I was like, young. At least 15 years ago. We've known this for so long, how is it so difficult to just set a maximum height commuter vehicles?
(It's a rhetorical question, but it anyone has an actual answer then count me curious.)
"You want to buy a Chelsea tractor? OK, as long as you know and accept the consequences." Only let them buy 4x4s that come with a wrap like the kind you get on cigarettes, but instead showing injuries and deaths to pedestrians caused by 4x4s.
" STUPIDLY LARGE VEHICLES KILL CHILDREN "
Because launching them into the sky and letting the ground do the killing impact looks better for the numbers?
with a tall flat front the entire kinetic energy gets transfered directly into the child. with a sloped lower hood this doesn't happen. you might end up tumbling over the hood but that's actually desired. the kinetic impact is way lower, resulting in higher survival chances.
No.
The lower hood is so you can SEE THEM, AND NOT HIT THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.
The damage happens because of acceleration. Hitting a wall is the maximum acceleration. Rolling over something is comparatively little acceleration.
Homie's never played GTA in the relaxed, follow the rules of the road kind of way and I think that's sad. 🙁
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.
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.
6 ft beds are available, but you have to special order them made from the factory..
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Let's play a game of "Most children deaths"! Let's see who will win tonight? Will it be cars, or guns!?
No shit?
Regards
The rest of the world
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..
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.
They also sold 884k full size trucks. How does the CEO being a woman change that the vast majority of these purchases are men?
Business person makes business decision, must be because they're a woman
I'm too tired for this shit
No, I'm not entertaining this anymore - it is overwhelmingly men at the core of the truck problem in the U.S.
You have seen how incompetent Elon Musk is and you're still behaving like CEOs actually matter. Beyond the ability to tank his brand, of course.
I don't have anything else to say.
Yes, do you know what makes them relevant in their industry? Recognizing they aren't a monolith and making decisions based off of data that their employees process.
And I guess none of these employees are women in your perfect world?
I really don't know, truth be told I don't really look at any corporation as the individuals that make it up. They're all a part of the same monster, and that does skew my understanding of certain dynamics.
I don't really know if I agree with the idea that men are trapped into buying bigger and bigger trucks. Truth be told, all I know is my experience on the road - the guys driving the biggest trucks end up being the most aggressive assholes. Make of that what you will.
Are you talking about Kei trucks? Are you seriously hinging your entire argument on legislation preventing vehicles that are less than 25 years old from being imported?
Or are you talking about the chicken tax and CAFE standards? Because, guess what, the cheapest price I found for a brand new GMC truck is 47 grand. Cheapest price I'm seeing for a brand new Toyota Tacoma is 31k. Top tier models come out to about 50k.
And even they're still too big, but none of that matters to you because you need a truck for truckin around doin' truck stuff!
Edit: shit, I can find a used tacoma from 2005 that would be a better price and size than your average brand new monster truck. Anyone trying to tell me that I'm rejecting reality in a used truck market like this tells me they've got skin in the game.
Fuck the reality people like you create.
checkmate feminists
This reminds me of a B52 meme... On the right side is the conservative B52 with Nazi and confederate symbols. On the left is the Liberal B52 with feminist and LGBTQ+ symbols ... Both B52's are raining hellfire on some minority because capitalist dictatorship masquerading as "democracy".
makes it about sex
gets refuted
goes silly mode to deflect
You will never escape samsara.
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.
lol do you think I am powerful enough to alienate entire categories of men? Who do you think I am some kind of god destroyer?
Alienation can result from actions of individuals, yes.
I'm afraid to be here because you said something about my big truck. Gonna have to add a punsiher skull and tattered "thin blue line flag" silkscreen to my back window to reinforce my manliness.
lights up cigar rolled with rainbow leaves
loads chain in and cocks DEI-A 50 Cal
Better hope you hid your heart deep enough in your toxic masculinity for these puppies not to blast through.
pets cute dog walking by
WHERE WAS I IN MY MONOLOGUE damnt I always do this
Line!
You hurt his big manly feelings.
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
It's usually driveways and right on reds. You pull up to the light on your Brodozer Yosemite edition, with the big knobbly tires, factory lift kit, and the (man)hood extension. It's a red light and you want to make a right, because every second you spend behind the wheel of your 110k overgrown minivan alternative, not driving up the ass of the Kia Pimento in front of you fills you with murderous rage. You look right, and there are no visible people, look left, and there is a 1 second gap in traffic, a perfect amount of space for your extended crew-cab single occupant truck to jam in. You floor it and crank the wheel around 4 times to full lock. You don't even feel it as all 9500lbs of your truck crushes the life out of 2 teens who waited for the pedestrian symbol before walking their bikes across the road. You didn't see them because looking from the driver's seat, over the 6ft long and 6ft high hood puts your minimum view distance of 2 kids at 22ft away. Looks like you're gonna be late to pick up your order of Crocs and socks from JCP at the mall.
Lemme try - you drive one of these things up to a streetlight, with a crosswalk. Busy downtown street, large number of pedestrians on the sidewalks. It's a red light, so you stop and wait for your turn. Plenty of pedestrians make use of the crosswalk.
Now the light turns green. How can you be certain everyone's cleared the crosswalk, and there's nobody in front of you? After all, you can't see the ground for several yards in front of your truck! Can you be certain nobody slipped and fell? No kids got away from their parents? Nobody in a wheelchair is struggling with a pothole? You might be pretty sure you've accounted for everyone, but you're literally risking someone else's life on this "pretty sure" every time you go through one of these lights!
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.
I hesitated to remove this because of the appearance of censoring someone for arguing with me, but the rule-breaking was too clear-cut. If you can make a similar point without using bad-faith tactics, I'll leave it up.
For the record, the idea that ending car dependency is even slightly equivalent to "there must be zero personal powered vehicles" is disinformation and will not be tolerated.
People do unexpected things sometimes, especially kids. Why is anyone allowed to operate a multiton pile of metal when they don't have a clear view of the space around them?
all 14 comments