Monster trucks and SUVs and their huge blind spots are causing a monstrous number of pedestrian fatalities every year.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/47995540

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.

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Federal researchers at the Transportation Department’s Volpe Center, for example, warned that taller cars with their bigger blind zones were killing hundreds of pedestrians and cyclists every year back in 2022. But as the reporting notes, it still receives far less attention than other road safety issues like drunk driving. And those federal researchers say their warnings were ignored.

“There was just zero acknowledgement of the problem,” Angie Byrne, a former Volpe Center employee who was involved in the research, told the NYT.

If you drive a pickup like this, you have made an arbitrary choice to kill the next person you accidentally hit.