Time flies when you’re having fun. Now that we’re almost halfway through 2023, a year that began with an extreme amount of electric vehicle hype, I think it’s worth looking at how the Great Gas-Less Revolution, as it’s called by absolutely no one, is actually doing—both in the U.S. and abroad. Let’s kick off this midweek morning news roundup by doing exactly that.
Also on tap today: Tesla’s charging format takeover continues, exactly why pedestrian deaths are such an issue and some not-so-stellar news about the safety of smaller pickup trucks.
The EV Market Is Growing, But Slowly And Also Weirdly
I’ve said this on The Autopian’s pages before, but after months of writing about the future of the auto industry I’ve come to the conclusion that all signs do point to a “transition” to battery EVs, but it’s going to be weirder, rockier and slower than a lot of governments and automakers will admit.
Public and private investments into battery factories (and public charging) are huge. The car companies, even those previously skeptical, have big electric plans now. Many of them also aren’t really going to give up making profitable ICE vehicles anytime soon, if ever. And cost remains a high barrier to ownership basically everywhere.
I’m starting to wonder if the revised EV tax credit scheme is backfiring a bit, too. You know how you get the maximum tax credit only if the car and its batteries are made in North America? On a long enough timeline, that spurs battery development here instead of just China, but in the interim, very few cars qualify. That Hyundai and Polestar buying spree everyone went on in early 2023—when lots of vehicles still qualified before the rules were finalized—seems to have faded a bit. (And I still think writing off hybrids and PHEVs, which save you gas money and cut down on emissions right now, is a mistake the world will collectively regret someday.)
In the U.S., EV demand is still rising each quarter. But more of them are on dealer lots now, reports Automotive News:
Dealers’ average EV supply climbed to 92 days in the second quarter, up from 36 days a year earlier. EV inventory soared to more than 92,000 industrywide, compared with less than 21,000 in the second quarter of 2022. New-vehicle supply industrywide was 51 days. Days’ supply — or the average number of days a vehicle will stay in dealers’ inventory before selling — can include vehicles in progress, in transit and on dealers’ lots, Cox said.
But Americans are still lagging behind other developed countries in EV demand, again for cost reasons:
More than 20 percent of Americans surveyed by EY in March and April said they would consider a battery-electric vehicle for their next car purchase, up 15 percent from a year earlier, the most significant leap in the study. Nearly half said they’d consider an electrified vehicle — which includes plug-ins and hybrids — up 19 percent from a year earlier, also the biggest increase in the category of the 2023 EY Mobility Consumer Index. The index included responses from 15,000 consumers globally. About 1,500 respondents were U.S. consumers.
EV-friendly policies in the U.S., such as the Inflation Reduction Act, have accelerated interest, EY said, but the U.S. still trails much of the world in EV consideration. Car buyers in Norway, China, Singapore, India, Sweden, South Korea and Austria were more likely to consider a BEV than U.S. consumers.
And now even Volkswagen, the original author of the EV transition plan to atone for its diesel-cheating sins, says it’s scaling back production for now. From the UK’s Autocar:
According to the German car maker’s work council, a shift at Volkswagen’s Emden plant in Lower Saxony has been cancelled for the next two weeks in a lead-up to an extended four-week summer holiday period for workers on electric vehicle lines in July and August.
[Manfred Wulff, head of the works council for the Emden plant] said 300 of the current 1500 temporary workers employed at Volkswagen’s Emden plant will not have their contracts renewed in August 2023. Employees were informed about the reduction in electric vehicle production on Monday.
Wulff indicates demand for electric vehicles is up to 30% below originally planned production figures.
“We are experiencing strong customer reluctance in the electric vehicle sector,” he told the North West newspaper.
Granted, this is from VW’s works council, the union group that’s none too happy about the inevitable EV-related job losses, but it’s still notable. It’s also worth noting that like every other car company, VW has had a lot of production problems getting these cars out the door and defect-free—primarily on the software front. The legacy OEMs seem to really struggle there and with battery quality too.
So what does all this mean? I think Toyota’s recently announced plans give you an idea of how this is less about making battery-powered cars and more about revamping how the whole industry works: how cars are made, what the supply lines are like, who is needed to build and engineer them and more. If current trends bear out and prove this is a permanent shift, it’s not going to happen overnight—and I’m not sure it will by the 2030s, either.
Also, the things are still just too damn expensive. Buyers across the world are fed up with sky-high car prices. Something’s gotta give on the affordability front for wider adoption to happen.
Volvo Goes Tesla As SAE Jumps In Too
But as I said, these investments are happening. And plenty of automakers are willing to throw in with the company that already put its money where its mouth is for EV adoption. The latest automaker to commit to Tesla’s charging format is Volvo, joining Ford, General Motors and Rivian. The strategy here is the same too, via Volvo:
Under the agreement future Volvo cars, starting from 2025, will be equipped with the North American Charging Standard (NACS) charging port in the region.
The arrangement gives fully electric Volvo drivers access to 12,000 new fast-charge points, a figure that is expected to grow as Tesla continues to expand its Supercharger network in the region.
Great news for prospective EX30 buyers. I bet Polestar’s next to do this. My earlier criticism of Tesla’s plug (which is great, as is the Supercharger network obviously) it’s that it’s less of a tested, agreed-upon standard and more just one company’s product. Maybe that will change soon, because SAE International is looking to turn it into a real standard now:
This will ensure that any supplier or manufacturer will be able to use, manufacture, or deploy the NACS connector on electric vehicles (EVs) and at charging stations across North America. Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Rivian, and a number of EV charging companies recently announced plans to adopt the NACS connector through adaptors or future product offerings.
The standardization process is the next step to establish a consensus-based approach for maintaining NACS and validating its ability to meet performance and interoperability criteria. The Joint Office of Energy and Transportation was instrumental in fostering the SAE-Tesla partnership and expediting plans to standardize NACS—an important step in building an interoperable national charging network that will work for all EV drivers. This initiative was also announced by The White House today.
Nothing from Tesla on that statement, though NACS is supposedly an “open” standard already. I do hope Tesla’s amenable to this. I think it’s fair to say Elon Musk isn’t a guy who cedes to regulation or outside demands very much.
Small Trucks Fall Short On Rear-Seat Safety
In America, there are basically two safety ratings that matter: the “official” ones from NHTSA, done by the federal government, and then the extra-tough “unofficial” ones rated by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The IIHS comes up with some truly confounding tests, and automakers don’t have to rise to the occasion but they try to so they can stay ahead of the competition and keep their customers from dying. (That tends to be bad for repeat business.)
The latest thing to bedevil automakers is the “updated moderate overlap front test,” an incredibly sexy and catchy name for when only 40% of the vehicle’s front hits a barrier at 40 mph. Imagine hitting a barrier on the highway with only part of your car’s front end. This is a pretty brutal type of crash because it lacks the full protection afforded by the entire front end of the vehicle. Last year, the test was updated to rate the safety of rear occupants too.
The results now: Not great! Especially for smaller trucks:
“Our updated moderate overlap front crash test proved to be challenging for small pickups,” said IIHS President David Harkey. “A common problem was that the rear passenger dummy’s head came dangerously close to the front seatback, and in many cases, dummy measurements indicated a risk of neck or chest injuries. All these things tell us that the rear seat belts need improvement.”
None of the five small crew cab pickups IIHS tested earns a good rating. The Nissan Frontier is rated acceptable. The Ford Ranger earns a marginal rating, and the Chevrolet Colorado, Jeep Gladiator and Toyota Tacoma are all rated poor. The ratings only apply to the crew cab versions.
In the Colorado, Frontier, Ranger and Tacoma, the restraints in the back seat allowed the rear dummy’s head to come too close to the front seatback. That was not an issue for the Gladiator. However, its rear restraints do not include a side curtain airbag, increasing the risk of injury from a hard impact with the interior of the vehicle or even something outside it.
Here’s a graphic from the IIHS showing where the trucks are at:
That is really rough. I hope the answer won’t be to just make the trucks even bigger, because…
[Editor’s Note: You’ll note that three vehicles that just last year would have had solid overall crash test ratings now have “poor” ratings. This happens often; someone buys a car with good crash test ratings, then the next year that same vehicle has a poor rating due to new test procedures. -DT]
More On Those Pedestrian, Cyclist Crashes
We’ve covered this here before, but as safe as modern cars are they’re getting less safe for people outside the car. Blame people driving more around the pandemic and cars and trucks getting bigger and heavier. Traffic deaths are thankfully down in 2023 so far, but the other day when we reported that statistic, I wondered about the breakdown of pedestrian and cyclist deaths too.
Now the New York Times has done its homework on the 2022 numbers and folks, it’s not great:
The number of pedestrians who were struck and killed by vehicles in 2022 was the highest it’s been since 1981, according to a report based on state government data.
At least 7,508 people who were out walking were struck and killed in the United States last year, said the report, published on Friday by the Governors Highway Safety Association, a nonprofit that represents states’ safety offices. The report used preliminary data from government agencies in 49 states and Washington, D.C. (Oklahoma had incomplete data because of a technical issue and was the only state to not provide data, the association said.)
The findings for 2022, and an accompanying analysis of federal government data from 2021, showed that pedestrian deaths in the United States have continued to rise over the last decade.
Lots of reasons for this, including the aforementioned increase in car sizes; the rise in suburbs designed for car travel, not so much safe walking or biking; distracted driving; an aging population more potentially prone to crashes; and our garbage infrastructure. (I’ve stopped running on public roads lately; too many close calls. I do it at the gym instead.)Â
It is wild that cars keep getting safer and more automated, but this group keeps dying at an accelerated rate. And it’s getting tougher to argue this shouldn’t be a greater focus in car design.
Your Turn
In what way do you think new cars should get safer? I’m deeply reluctant to say “more automated driving” on this one. Good on Waymo for making their robo-taxis pretty decent these days, but it’s hard to see any of that tech catching on in the consumer space anytime soon.
I’ve been to maybe 25 car lots this week, looking replace a family vehicle (total loss) and I’ve noticed a lot of interesting EV options, both new and used, are creeping into my price range for my next car. My next vehicle will at least be a PHEV but I really want to dive in head first and go all electric.
My experience trying to buy a Chevy Bolt and VW ID.4 showed me how poor traditional dealers are at selling EVs. Maybe part of the reason they have a 92 day supply is that Chevy dealers would prefer to sell Silverados and VW dealers can barely service the EVs they sell due to lack of training.
Kia/Hyundai are putting cash on the hood to move EV inventory since they don’t qualify for tax credits. Without the credits, they can’t compete with anything that does.
I’m trying to buy a base-trim Bolt EUV, and finding that the car essentially doesn’t exist. I’ve found only one within 250 miles of my location in the DC burbs, and that dealer has a $1300 markup on it.
I am honestly very excited for the news that Volvo signed on to Tesla chargers, I have been seriously looking at the EX30, and having access to superchargers makes it even more tempting.
I love that the IIHS has successfully made a business model out of “smash some cars and then shame the manufacturers for not meeting a standard that didn’t exist when they designed the vehicle”
The juxtaposition of the IIHS item right before the pedestrian death article is fantastic by the way.
“Pedestrians die because cars are too big, and cars are too big because the IIHS keeps doing faster and more destructive tests”
The IIHS will eventually succeed with their Vision Zero initiative by pricing everyone out of automobiles through “mandated” (read: coerced) safety equipment.
You can’t have auto fatalities when everyone’s on foot, bicycles, or the subway. /Eddie-Murphy-Head-Tap.GIF
Yes, and the dirtbags at IIHS are largely responsible for those deaths. No, I’m not being sarcastic. It’s quite obvious they won’t be satisfied until we’re all a bunch of wusses driving giant SUVs with bunker slit windows. As if “small” truck beds aren’t small enough, what’s the point when they’ll have to extend the passenger compartment even farther back, either eating bed space or making the vehicle longer overall for seats that are probably rarely occupied, anyway. When are they going to hit the 911 on safety because of the backseats nobody uses? And where are they with touchscreen tech—an actual, real safety problem? And how long has it taken for them to finally rank headlights, something actually relevant? But they love obtrusive, nagging annoyances they think protect idiots from themselves—an impossible, Sisyphean task—and that I have to shut off every time I get into a damn car that makes starting a radial engine warbird a brief procedure so I don’t crash from being pissed off by the obnoxious stupid things I’m forced to pay for when all they really do besides annoy people who aren’t eunuchs who only feel safe being babysat is allow said eunuchs to feel even more complacent behind the wheel and pay even less attention than they do. Combine that with touchscreens, massive pillars, and lack of driving engagement that’s more than partly due to all the extra weight and isolation of “safety” garbage…. I would argue they’ve made cars less safe for 99.99% of driving and definitely for pedestrians. Like the old joke about lawyers, I would say, sticking IIHS vermin on a carbon fiber submarine would be a good start.
Jesus, dude, go drive something unsafe and old then. No one cares.
Everybody really should care about getting smushed by a huge car with gunslit windows.
Yup. Why do all of the safety standards focus on the occupants of the vehicle and not on anyone outside the vehicle? Why? For the latter group, you have a fighting chance if you’re also in a car, but you’re hosed if you’re walking or on a bike.
The meds have not kicked in
The original joke writing courses haven’t started yet, huh?
I see this take on here a lot and it seems a bit misguided.
What, did anyone think that making cars safer was going to make them weigh less? Of course the cars were going to get heavier. I accept that my 2022 Camry is 300 lbs heavier than my old 2004 Camry and is significantly safer to be in during a crash. That’s a trade-off I’m more than willing to make as is most of the car driving public. That is why automakers pay attention to what the IIHS says even though they are not mandated to do anything with the results.
I’m no physicist, but does anyone seriously believe that getting hit with a 3400 pound camry vs a 3100 pound camry is what is driving the increase in pedestrian deaths? That’s ridiculous. It’s that people are more likely to be driving a crossover, SUV, or truck these days rather than a sedan. Couple that with people being more distracted behind that wheel than ever, and you get significantly more pedestrian deaths. The IIHS has nothing to do with people buying big crossovers or with people being more distracted behind the wheel.
Rather than complaining that the IIHS keeps making more realistic crash tests year after year (thank God, wtf has NHTSA done for crash safety in the last 15 years?) we should call out the real problems.
100%. Iihs tests are evolving over time to model actual crashes that actually occur. It’s not a conspiracy to dupe people into buying tanks, people were already buying those.
It’s notable that when a test gets enhanced recently there are almost always a couple of models that either pass or do significantly better than the majority of fresh fails. It seems to be the difference between comprehensively designing for safety vs designing for the test. Yes all manufacturers make tradeoffs and compromises, but some take this more seriously than others
I’d have more professional respect for thr IIHS if they met privately with automakers and said “this is a new test we’re going to start doing in 2033, so you’ve got 10 years to update your cars to pass”, instead of “ZOMG! This car just failed a test we just made up 10 days ago and that it was therefore never designed to pass and is therefore a total death trap, even though we named it one our “Top Safety Picks” literally a few months’ ago”
Frankly, cars have been pretty safe for a long time now, what with air bags and seat belts and all, so I’ve long since tuned out whatever the hell IIHS is yelling about these days. They already won all the important battles and are well into a diminishing returns situation and need to just keep coming up with stuff to stay relevant. And also generate content for broadcast TV networks’ news magazine shows for when they’re between hard hitting food safety exposes on Waffle House
I believe it was in 2010 that the IIHS created the small-overlap crash test where 25% of the front driver’s side of the car impacted the barrier. Five years later they tested the passenger’s side with the same 25% test and found that many manufacturers had only strengthened the driver’s side of the car and not the passenger’s side.
If in 2010 the IIHS had given automakers 10 years to update cars to the small front overlap standards, we’d still have passenger-side A-pillars that fold up in a crash today. Automakers will only make changes if they look bad in safety ratings that will then be widely covered by the media. Creating difficult-to-pass new tests is how you get the automakers to make timely improvements to their vehicles.
Iihs isn’t inventing ways for cars to crash
Car makers have not entirely solved the “people sometimes get hurt in crashes” issue, so keeping periodic pressure on is a good thing actually. No one is stopping these companies from making safer cars to begin with. It’s not as though crash modes and driving behaviors are unknowable.
Maybe, just maybe, BEVs are not the future…
Or maybe you’re just wrong.
Or maybe they’re right.
I live in a place with winter. There are barely any EVs around here. A car guy I know bought a model 3 so he could focus on his project car….. and he sold it. The range was abysmal in winter conditions, like less than half of the regular range. In cali where they don’t have any seasons and every day is nice out, EVs make more sense, but when the temps drop and you have slush and snow that drastically increases rolling resistance, they’re just not there yet for most people.
Where I live (Canada), I do not know anybody with ONLY BEV’s. Typically a person with extra disposable income will have a Tesla as a second car, or a commuter.
This is where the Chevy Bolt was hitting a sweet spot, for a lot of multi-car households it was small and cheap enough that they could buy one as a commuter and not worry about it having to be the “big, nice, road-trip car”, which will become much more necessary for EV tech to meet if the minimum buy-in is a $40,000 midsize crossover.
I’ll see them primarily as a commuter car until the charging network is better and I can “refuel” in less than 10 minutes.
In the interim, I’d buy one as a second car, but that also means I don’t budget $50k+ to spend on that car. It’d be a Chevy Bolt for $20k after tax credit.
So looks like I won’t be buying an EV any time soon.
I saw several EVs at ski hills in New England this past winter.
i live in a new england ski town. All the EV’s or 90% are owned by college professors with the school parking sticker on the back. The normies haven’t caught the bug in the hill towns and I haven’t heard anyone I know interested in getting one.
I live in New England. EVs are everywhere.
Pretty sure population density and charging infrastructure is a bit higher in new england than the midwest. Also your winters are a joke.
Yeah, it’s such a massive difference in temperature, it’s practically sub tropical. The point—which I can’t believe needs to be spelled out, but I guess you just really needed to flex about . . . living in a shittier place?—is that your anecdote does not match the actual usability people find for these cars. If it was as bad as you’re making it out to be, they would barely sell anywhere below a growing zone 8.
dang we got a badass over here.
Boston averages a meter (39 inches) of snow a year. Hell, in the winter of 2015 we got over 9 feet, which was about a record.
BEVs are EVERYWHERE. Lots. Lots and lots and lots. Even in surrounding cities. Even in the crappier surrounding cities.
Boston is a northern, but coastal city where the temps tend to be a little less severe than the winters we see in say, Upstate NY, or what much of the Midwest gets.
Also, Boston is pretty darn affluent. Not that it matters, Boston makes a ton of sense for EVs.
The average overnight temperature in Detroit is only 4.3F colder than Boston in January. Same for Buffalo. Milwaukee is 7.7F colder.
Central northern midwest is the only meaningful difference — Minneapolis is 17F colder. Blame the plains for that one, with the lack of trees not obstructing the arctic winds. Same reason why Mount Washington in New Hampshire can be like another planet — peak is above treeline.
Outside of parts of Minnesota and the Dakotas, winters aren’t much colder. Not enough to be a dealbreaker for BEVs.
Won’t argue the income difference though.
Charging infrastructure/population density. You see EVs in Madison or Milwaukee but outside of that, they’re really not very practical here. Yet.
I also live in a place with winter, average lows mid winter are -20C, and we saw about 15 feet of snow last winter at our house, a bit more than normal. Our primary vehicle is a bolt, which is always parked outside, charged off a standard 110V outlet, and it does just fine with snow tires. Yes, range is impacted, but is not an issue for anything besides 200+ mile trips. There has only been 1 day in the past 2 winters where we left the bolt parked and took the old jeep, and that was just because the bolt wouldn’t make it through the 3 foot plow berm at the end of the driveway to make a 9am pediatric appointment, not because it’s electric. I got some good practice with vehicle recovery in our driveway this past winter, with the wife’s clients getting stuck, including a suburban and a subaru, but the bolt only got stuck when the wife wasn’t paying attention and backed into a snowbank during a 2 foot storm. Whine all you want, but it’s fine.
And it’s going to, pretty much permanently. Here’s why.
Unless you make $X AGI as a household, unless you make $X AGM as a household, unless the car costs more than $X but less than $Y, unless the car contains X% parts not from North America, unless X% of parts are not from the United States, unless, unless, unless…
Know what’s making the EV tax credit scheme such a shitshow?
The EV tax credit scheme.
While this is 100% true, it won’t. Because line must go up. If every manufacturer doesn’t continue to post record quarter after record quarter, the entire management team will be quite literally eaten alive.
We’re already seeing their recognition of this in tying more and more installed hardware to bullshit software subscriptions and illegal removal of functions or just outright bricking. They know damn well people can’t afford cars. They don’t care. They do care a great deal about not getting to get a second bite at the apple from the used and salvage car market. Want to put your Copart purchased hybrid back on the road? You’ll need to spend several grand at the dealer before the manufacturer will un-brick the car. Want those heated seats to work on the off-lease car you got for a song? Please provide BMW with a valid credit card.
IIHS tests are also how insurers set rates. NHTSA is all well and good for a baseline. But when IIHS (which is an independent non-profit which receives a lot of funding from the insurance industry to better inform them on losses and safety) does a test? That’s the one they use.
Don’t get me wrong; IIHS is great folks, great stuff. And there absolutely is no conflict of interest; insurers don’t want to have to pay out death benefits or medical claims. Making cars safer benefits everyone, period. But the real reason manufacturers jump on IIHS is because if they don’t, the insurers will force them through catastrophically high rates.
So what you will probably see is more manufacturers adjusting rear seat belt pretensioner programs, and adding them if they don’t have them. (IIRC pretensioners are only required on frontal airbag seats.) Unfortunately, that’s a cost which will be passed on to consumers. But since they’d scream ‘inflation’ and jack the cost another $2000 anyways, kind of a wash.
Take the fucking software out. Immediately. Toyota’s spontaneous acceleration problem? Software bug. “Phantom braking”? Software bugs. Abrupt engine shutdown on the highway for no reason? Software bug. Distracted driving? Shitty infotainment software. Number one source of recalls going back more than 20 years? FUCKING SOFTWARE.
And it’s not only that they can’t do software, it’s that they refuse to do software correctly. Cars are literally life critical, period. It is a 3000lbs+ guided missile. All code in every system must be written and validated to NASA’s Software Design Principles and Software Safety, at the absolute minimum.
The fact that a device running code is extremely capable of injuring or killing people is EXACTLY why we have documents like this in the first place.
This couldn’t be more true. I’ve worked with software developers and I’ve worked with industrial engineers and while engineers can ostensibly “write code” they have no clue, nor the interest to gain said clue, how to actually develop software. The biggest difference is UI/UX, most software developers spend a sizeable percentage of their resources attempting to get UI/UX right, engineers do not. I guarantee UI/UX is as a concept is sneered at and dismissed in automotive programming. Just one more corner to cut, one more item to redline down the road, certainly nothing to let cut into profits. My evidence for these statements? 95% of the infotainment systems on the market. All of them laggy, buggy, crappy, crashy, freezy, and outdated.
Even developers get UI/UX so unacceptably wrong it’s not even remotely funny. Those principles above are only covering the behavior of the code; not the actual human interface portion. The human interface portion is covered in another document, found here. The title seems ‘unrelated’ because it covers a lot of stuff. But the big thing it does cover?
Human to systems interfaces. Which can be boiled down to a few actually quite simple principles.
There’s obviously more to it, but if you aren’t going to space, you probably don’t need to worry about specific SPLs or precise reverberation levels and the like. Good luck finding ANY interface that meets ANY of those.
That’s why I said developers spend time “attempting to get UI/UX right”, it’s not something you ever actually achieve since everybody has different expectations about how to use a device but it’s a goal you should always strive to.
I’m reminded of allegations of my county’s old electronic voting systems “switching votes” back in the 2018 midterms. No votes were being switched, nobody was “hacking the system”, instead it came down to terrible interface. You spun a scroll wheel to move the selection on the screen until the candidate you wanted is highlighted then punch a physical button to select that choice and move on to the next page. The problem is the scroll wheel had physical indents that you could feel as you spun the wheel. Those indents did not sync up with what the selection on the screen was doing. Two forms of feedback that should be working together instead completely divorced from each other. I’m reminded of this lack of attention any time I deal with the infotainment system in my car.
Btw, the county “upgraded” from that old voting system to a different one that’s even worse if you can imagine.
The Peltzman Effect is real. Maybe if we stopped making cars luxurious safety cocoons people could be bothered to pay attention while driving. People tend to be more cautious when it’s their own skin at stake in dangerous situations, which driving surely is. Make cars less safe.
Let’s also add the use of technology like phones to the list of intoxicants in DUI laws and enforce them as harshly. License suspension and jail time when caught texting while driving.
“What’s that a blow and go?”
“No it’s a signal blocker, it stops my phone from working within 10’ of the car, it’s court mandated and I have to pay for it.”
Let’s throw in stricter licensing requirements and driver training standards while we’re at it.
I’d prefer to just get rid of touchscreen based controls and bring back all the knobs, switches and gauges. Touchscreens are fine for navigation, not for controlling the HVAC.
“People tend to be more cautious when it’s their own skin at stake in dangerous situations, which driving surely is. Make cars less safe.”
LOL people have been driving like shit since horses, I’m not counting on a stranger’s sense of self preservation to keep me safe.
I had to look up The Peltzman Effect
https://tradestops.com/blog/the-peltzman-effect-how-safety-perception-increases-risk/
There’s an air-cooled VW repair manual, written in the late 60s called “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot.” In it, the author states that “…if everyone drove like they were Aztec sacrifices, strapped to the front of the car so they’d be the first thing hit, there’d be a helluva lot less accidents.” Amusingly, he was criticizing rudimentary safety features from the 60s, but I take that quote to heart and have modeled my driving behavior on that.
I’ve never owned a car made after 1999.
So driving that way amidst the modern monsters is a necessity.
My 2017 car is still in great condition but I wouldn’t hesitate to buy an ev if I could get one that’s the same type of compact econobox even if it means paying a premium but not double of what I paid, and that car doesn’t exist in my market so my ICE will have to keep going
“I’ve stopped running on public roads lately; too many close calls”
the laws of physics will not change.
the influence of this (informed, engaged, and enthusiastic) community on car/truck design and distracted driving is de minimis.
thus, it occurs to me that the only effective way to improve pedestrian safety is with pedestrian education.
whether motivated by ignorance or arrogance, pedestrians on wrong side of road (in the road ffs instead of on the sidewalk) wearing high-visibility black, and lost in their earbuds can only end in tragedy… more than 7500 times last year.
Agreed. Unless we shift to dedicated & separated lanes (ie Netherlands), biking and walking are just going to be at risk from the sheer amount of drivers we have on the roads.
as much as i’d like, i just don’t see that happening at a scale that can reduce pedestrian deaths – we can barely afford to maintain the roadway infrastructure we have, never mind paying to segregate pedestrians from motor vehicles.
i’m afraid that the only path forward i see as navigable is to educate pedestrians from an early age that high energy steel is best avoided.
Um…… almost every road in America has separate lanes for cars and for pedestrians.
yes, blame the victims. Fuck them for not wearing glow in the dark armor.
i’m not blaming the victims. i’m proposing a strategy that might help counteract the reckless behavior i see every day.
that won’t bring it to zero…but maybe trend downward?
And especially for not putting down their fucking phones….
The whole North American premise of making roads safer by making more cars. Then making walking or cycling challenging, is insane. How many times have you heard someone buy a brand new massive SUV because they feel safer? I swear we are the only people on earth planning on getting rammed by semi running a red. Making a 60 mph 3 ton automobile not deadly to person daring to cross a road is fairly improbable. Figuring out self driving, having people slow down, give everyone a car or driving smaller cars seems unlikely at this point in our collective Shark jump.
The answer has always been to make the city more habitable for a variety of transport. It’s been proven to work. But it’s not profitable to certain cooperations to have a functional cities with multiple options, thus limiting the need to both possess and drive a car. And it would be too beneficial to the middle/lower class. So we will ignore the whole logical premise of to make less MVC deaths, we drive less cars. Instead we will battle with physics and computer science for our misguided desire for open road freedom. As we strap into are respective tactical Ford Expedition to drive five miles to the mall.
Wait. You’re saying we could solve traffic safety issues with traffic engineering and city planning? Not changing the cars? Mind blowing idea!
I’ll refer to my favorite IT acronym: PEBCAK (problem exists between chair and keyboard), modified to PEBWAS.
So, we have wildly varying and mostly piss-poor driver training requirements across this great land and, surprise, we have a lot of shitty drivers. Institute a REAL driver training requirement nationwide (like they have in Germany, for example) where getting a license requires extensive time, training and money, and that will start to change.
Also called “the loose nut behind the wheel”.
Blah blah STATES RIGHTS Hur Dee DUR. There will never be a national consensus/law on driver test or inspections of vehicles in the US. You are correct that there should be, but it won’t happen.
I think the interstate commerce clause in the Constitution could be construed in the right way, or perhaps national security could be appealed to, but I’m no lawyer. You’re probably right, though. Too many hurs and durs to overcome…
The insurance companies could make it happen. Complete the insurance mandated driving courses or pay 2x rates.
In the private aviation world, the insurance companies often require training well in excess of the FAA requirements. There is nothing stopping the insurance companies from requiring more than the DMV minimums.
Agree 100%.
My daughter got her license last year. After the driving test, her first words were “I should not have passed.” Meaning she felt she did not do well enough that it should have counted as a passing grade. I reminded her that there are people that had to take this test multiple times before passing. That was a real eye-opener for her as to the quality of other drivers on the road.
I then signed her up for Tire Rack’s Teen Extreme driving class. While just a 1-day class, they have the kids go through wet skidpad, slalom, emergency lane change, and emergency braking drills. And the kids are behind the wheel for about 3-4 hrs total for the day, so lots of repetition through each course. All this amounted to a 10% discount on the liability and collision rates with our insurance. If the insurance companies would give more substantial discounts for these courses, then maybe more drivers would take them.
Those ‘extreme’ things were all part of my regular driving school in Finland.
So you understand DarKhorse’s “PEBWAS” comment.
I’m not aware of any state in the US that requires anything more than 40 or so hours behind the wheel just driving around town and highways. The most “extreme” driver’s ed training I had was the 4 hours of nighttime driving. No accident avoidance/emergency maneuvers required.
My driving test consisted of driving the one block loop around the local courthouse. Virtually no traffic on the roads, just a basic three point turn and parallel park (with no car behind you!) and you’re done. Oh, and the local driving schools would take you through the exact route so you could practice and memorize it. That’s it, literally for the rest of your life. When moving to a neighboring state I had to retake the written test, but to my knowledge there is no reason I will ever have to pass a driving test again.
My favorite IT acronym is PICNIC (problem in chair, not in computer). I think it applies here as well.
Although not an acronym I think “we have an ID ten T problem here” fits into the discussion.
I get pretty bitter that there are supposedly regulations for pedestrian safety in vehicle design, which killed our beloved pop-up headlights, yet somehow everyone around me drives a lifted truck that they cannot possibly see pedestrians out of. Or that there’s a slim chance the Cybertruck could see the light of day. That thing looks like something straight out of a Death Race movie.
Something tells me I’d be far less likely to be murdered by an RX-7 headlight, and far more likely to explode upon impact when in contact with any matter of massive truck. At least the RX-7 driver would be forced to stop after I crash through the windshield.
Wait, the feds are big gay? Shocking!
Revise CAFE to make smaller vehicles worth selling again. Smaller, lighter vehicles mean fewer pedestrian deaths. They also use less resources than larger vehicles.
I’d totally buy an EV if it wasn’t insanely expensive up front. $1k a month payment on a depreciating asset? That’s nuts. I’ll sink that payment into refreshing my two paid off vehicles, thank you very much. New steering and suspension bits go a long way to making an older vehicle drive better.
Man, that is everything now though. I recently dropped my Subaru Outback for service. Of course the dealer sends you some “why not buy a new one?” email while it is sitting there.
I’m sure the point is to try and show me how “cheap” it is to get into a new car. My old payment is on there (which I haven’t had to make in 8 years) and then the glorious payment for a 2023 Subaru Outback XT…$900 something. Oh boy, sign me up!
“I’ve stopped running on public roads lately; too many close calls. I do it at the gym instead.”
You’re not actually supposed to “go play in traffic”. Maybe try running on the sidewalk or better yet a park or school track instead.
The issue is typically a lack of sidewalks.
Outside of going to a gym, there’s something pretty twisted to me about driving to a park or a school in order to go on a walk or run. But that’s unfortunately the way that we’ve developed the vast majority of residential neighborhoods in this country.
Yeah, it’s a lack of sidewalks for me. We get back to NYC a lot but spend most of our time in a tiny town upstate. I used to go running along a really beautiful hilly road away from town (great workout, too) but had to jump out of the way of too many cars at the last second. No sidewalks, no real walking protections. I’m not victim-blaming at all, here; to me, it just didn’t feel worth the risk.
Even in the places we have sidewalks, they are a menace. Poles, guywires, heaved segments, trashcans, cars parked on them, the list is endless. Add to that that this block has a sidewalk for half its length, then you have to cross the street, then no sidewalk at all for the block after that, It’s a nightmare.
Respectfully disagree with a few of those: they might be factors but they are not new or recent factors. Cars used to be ridiculously massive; the car-only suburbs (aka sprawl) have been an issue for at least 30 years; and the “garbage infrastructure” is a problem but not one of the larger ones facing pedestrians AFAICT.
You did mention distracted driving, which we see all the time, but there is also a much more noticeable undercurrent of F-U-GTFO-of-my-way entitlement and jackassery. I think this is a bigger – possibly the biggest – factor and one which will be much more difficult to fix.
As far as vehicle design goes, in a collision a pedestrian will always lose to a car – F=MA controls that – so avoiding the collision seems to be the more practical approach. For that we would need automated systems that can identify e.g. the dumbass who walks into the street without looking and apply the brakes on the driver’s behalf. These are in progress but need to be more finely tuned to be effective.
Yeah 99% of the problem is the idiot behind the wheel, maybe 1% idiot walking. I hate when speeding is always touted as cause for crashes or deaths, it’s wrong, its a symptom of the idiot driver. Only 3 things cause crashes; bad drivers, poorly maintained/functioning vehicle, or damaged roads. Everything else is avoidable by a good driver.
EVs are an urban/suburban status symbol for people that have easy charging access and ICE vehicles for longer trips. Batteries are expensive and that cost is easier to hide in a big price tag. That is why manufacturers have concentrated on the high end of the market but that has begun to saturate, hence Tesla price cuts and advertising.
With all the investment going into EVs and the high margin easy money drying up, manufacturers will have to bring lower cost (and lower range) cars to the market. The real question is, will apartment-dwellers with no charging access buy them?
My actual answer to pedestrian injuries/deaths, likely to be unpopular here, is to crack down harder on unsafe behavior in cities.
Put people in jail overnight for running red lights. Impound cars for speeding 10+ mph over a limit of 30 or less. And yes, enforce rules of the road on bicyclists and pedestrians too.
Anecdotally, there simply seems to be worse behavior, and less consequences for it, recently. I’m not sure if this is still a pandemic artifact, a pullback in police staffing/funding/attitude, or what, but it’s bad out there.
You’re certainly right that penalties need to be real. A $90 ticket (actual price locally) for driving your $80,000 SUV through a red light (if you even get caught) is barely noticeable, but a night in jail is a real inconvenience for most people. If you might have an actual penalty, you probably think twice.
Yes, and I don’t agree with the income-based tickets used in some other countries because that simply incentivizes more bad behavior in those with nothing to lose.
Jail, impound, etc are consequences with teeth. I don’t really feel good about advocating for more of a police state, but I don’t see a clear alternative to what’s going on.
You and I disagree on the income-based tickets, but I also think there is a difference between the US, where virtually everyone has to drive and licenses are handed out accordingly, and countries that have robust public transit and make driving a privilege.
But, yeah, jail and impound are significant penalties. Also not big on advocating for a police state, especially given the leeway cops have (I suspect poor people in ratty rides would be more likely to suffer those consequences), but I do think that those penalties would be more effective.
I go back and forth on this every day. I’ve read a lot that it isn’t the size of the penalty but the likelihood of conviction that deters bad behaviour, and the chances of a conviction for most driving infractions are nil. So would taking extreme actions against the unlucky few who get caught really change the overall behavior, or would it just impose further costs on society (time missed from work, occupied jail cells, court for all the people who fight it, etc)?
On the other hand it’s clearly a bad idea to just let the highways degenerate into lawlessness. I’ve seen more truly shocking driving the past 2 years or so then I ever did before. So here’s my totally arbitrary and un-researched solution:
– Increase penalties for violations that are clearly antisocial but not dangerous on the face. Abusing carpool lanes should be a big deal. Every time people get away with it, it breeds just a little more boldness and contempt.
– Require re-doing driver’s ed and qualification for repeat offenders much more quickly… not after they rack up 35 points.
– Start treating absurd commute times as a public health/safety issue. People calculate risks based on their choices. If they have to speed home to get a little downtime, they will – relaxation is a base human need. I generally don’t get worked up over ivory tower public policy nerds, but treating commute times like a punishment on drivers for not taking public transit is disrespectful and absurd.
It’s a systemic problem overall in our judicial system, the punishment for any crime or violation isn’t severe enough to discourage the behavior.
A $90 ticket for red light running? In the Bay Area it’s $540 and done with a BS camera. I can’t wait to retire and move away.
Found the red light runner
You’re aware that the intersections with red light cameras make the yellow light artificially short to boost revenue, right? Please tell me you’re aware of this. It’s all a big scam.
Not universally though. Some cities were caught doing it and have since reversed course.
Idaho has pretty low penalties for most driving infractions. Which certainly contributes to the poor drivers here. Just last week, I was nearly T-boned by a driver one lane right of me deciding to make a U-turn in an intersection clearly marked for going straight only (never mind that he wasn’t even in the left lane).
Get out now. You will not regret it.
Tickets are usually just a tax on poor people.
Absolutely. If you can easily afford to pay a fine, it’s not much of a penalty. If you can’t afford to pay it, it’s going to wreck your life for a while. Never mind that cops tend to target rattier cars, anyway.
Same with emissions testing. Poor people have crappy cars that can’t pass. They then have a repair bill that they can’t pay so they drive illegally because they have to drive. Then they get a ticket they can’t pay for driving illegally. Being poor really sucks.
I agree, but I think it’s been simmering since well before the pandemic. I remember thinking that drivers were becoming worse or bigger assholes when I started working in EMS, so that was around 2002. Being in that field really brought the issue front & center for me.
Yeah, sorry boss, speeding isn’t the problem. Look up the montana speed limit paradox. People who are actually speeding are generally paying attention.
V10omous did indicate 10+ over in a 30 or lower area. That is a different beast than speeding on the highway. Pedestrian- and bicycle-heavy areas need people to slow down.
I am with you on the speeding in other zones. If you have control over your vehicle on the highway, can stop in time, and are paying attention, you are good. And a lot more slow drivers miss on that last one.
I get annoyed with the focus on police resources towards punishing speeding on arrow-straight, multi-lane divided highways. If everyone follows the very basic rules, I have no issue with people going whatever speed assuming that it isn’t agressive behavior.
In the towns/cities is the real issue. Our street includes a bike path crossing, a place where people (including kids) walk to get ice cream, a Family Dollar, a Thai restaurant, etc. There are pedestrians everywhere. Yet people bomb down it at 45+ all the time. The behavior is bad; there seems to be a level of contempt for the people who are simply walking around. It’s frustrating.
Yeah, that lines up with what I see around here. The existence of pedestrians seems like an annoyance to some drivers (assuming they notice them). I’ll stop at a crosswalk with a person waiting while the next lane just keeps bombing through (and changing lanes to get around me) as if I’m the one in the wrong for stopping.
Yet the cops like to sit where the freeway goes from 85 to 65, pulling over drivers and making that section more dangerous by doing so.
This, 100%. I’m so sick of the pigs sitting on the highway waiting to bust someone for going 5 over. Then I pull off the highway and see people blowing through red lights, making illegal turns and just doing plain stupid shit with narry a porker to be seen. Resources need to be allocated to where the real dangers lie.
Very much pro-highway speeding, very much anti-city street speeding.
I used to be a big road cyclist but after the smartphone revolution it got too dangerous for my taste. Anecdotal, sure, but I think already terrible driving got an order of magnitude worse with iPhone-level distraction.
I have wonderful mountain bike trails 1.5 miles from my house…but I take a round-about path to get to the trail head because there are so many drivers looking at everything but the road. Our whole town is 25 mph and I used to take the family around in our Model T, but sold it. Just getting too dangerous with people that blow through stop-signs at 45 mph because they are such entitled sh!theads or can’t be bothered to put their phone down. We need a special prison…
“… a pullback in police staffing/funding/attitude, or what, but it’s bad out there”
That’s exactly what happened. People wanted to de-fund the police despite knowing the consequences, and here is where we are.
Think about it this way. When you were in high school and your “normal” and relatively strict teacher was out for the day and you had a substitute that showed you a movie or The Price Is Right, how did you act? I bet you didn’t learn much or act the same.
People in some of the most densely populated areas are driving now like they have substitute teachers all the time.
I can absolutely assure you, absolutely no defunding of any sort of law enforcement entity happened where I live. If anything the opposite. Nothing has changed for the better.
I agree in that no changes happened where I live either. That’s why I live here. Nothing has changed for “the better” but nothing changed for “the worse”. Where I live people say hello to each other and hold the door at a store for the next person. Kinda like you are supposed to do…
Thanks for your reply 🙂
Can you provide a list of all the places that defunded police? There was a lot of talk, but nothing ever happened. This is a stretch that even Richard Simmons can’t pull off.
Are you gonna pay me for the list? I don’t work for free, lol. One place I know for certain is NYC proper certainly did.
As far as “declawing” them? Well, I can name a bunch off the top of my head. NYC, Austin, Portland, Seattle, Frisco, San Diego, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Memphis, and Savannah among many others (Detroit doesn’t count as it’s been that way since the ’70s). Those are just a few where the risk v. reward has the police quitting en masse, resulting in less enforcement of even the most serious crimes. Traffic crimes are of no concern unless there is a fatality.
Not a stretch in any way, Chris. Thanks for the response though! 🙂
I tried to edit that, ha. Anyway, the first paragraph should read as follows:
Are you gonna pay me for the list? I don’t work for free, lol. One place I know for certain is NYC proper certainly did. The other thing to consider here is that I probably shouldn’t have used the term “defund” due to the fact that these are all contracts that will naturally increase year over year, so budgets will always rise. “Declaw” is the term I should have used to begin with.
Maybe if they focused on the whole serve and protect instead of let’s murder Black and brown people they wouldn’t need “declawed”.
Cracking down on unsafe driving is never a bad thing, but when speed limits are set with profiteering rather than safety in mind, speeding is not the thing to crack down on.
Also not sure how impounding a car helps anybody involved.
Based on the stats presented, it’s hard to argue with a straight face that speed limits in cities are too low, as you seem to be implying.
Depends on where you are. The main street in my town is 25mph. That same road would literally be 55mph in the next town over. 55 is kind of pushing it, but it is literally safe for everybody involved to do 35-40. 25 is too damn slow.
It’s fairly well documented that speed limits are not usually set by traffic engineers, but more often by city councils and police departments. And what do the city councils and police departments want? Speeding tickets.
I’m not sure which stats make it obvious that speed limits are too low. There has been a lot of research suggesting that lowering speed limits does actually nothing to improve pedestrian safety below 35mph or so.
Let’s just make everything like the old VW Transporter. When you’re the crumple zone, maybe everyone will be more considerate of other drivers and pedestrians.
Who wants to pay 80K for a WT Chevy Silverado EV? High interest rates + crazy prices will slow down the EV market adoption. The tax credit is not money you see when you are leaving the dealership. I dont think I am going to replace anytime soon my Polestar 2 that I got with a 0% rate. PHEV covers 90% of my driving anyway, thats why we still have a Chevy Volt and a Pacifica PHEV.
In 2024 the credit is turning into a point of sale advance tax credit. That may have an effect.
Pedestrian and cyclist deaths should be considered a major civil rights issue. Disadvantaged people can’t afford $50,000 SUVs in order to be safe and must rely on foot or cycle power. Government regulations are only concerned with the safety of the rich auto occupants.
To improve safety, I’d start with more visibility. Lower hoodlines, probably lower vehicles overall, bigger greenhouses, less interior focus in crash testing, more on the effect on people and other vehicles. If you don’t keep building bigger tanks to protect occupants from other bigger tanks, these shifting crash tests don’t need to keep factoring in ever-larger average vehicle sizes.
Wow, is it possible that trucks are not the ideal family transportation solution?
Safer? Start with the problem between the steering while and driver’s seat.
After fixing that, then look into crumble zone, engines that break off and go under the car etc. Worry more about survival than “still looks good. Hose out the interior to remove the previous owners, and sell it”
Most of these are improving what is there.
One of my cars was rear ended by a truck resulting in 10k+ of damage. Car looked trashed, we just moved forward a bit and were like “You ok?”
But…but…it’s never the student, it’s always the curriculum that’s failing the student! Hardly anyone has an ounce of accountability anymore, and it’s PR/political suicide to imply that your customers/constituents are not the most competent individuals, even if it’s true.
Driver’s instruction is failing people, though. Until/unless we start requiring actual driving competency testing, we tell people they are ready to drive without it being necessarily true. And we should be retesting people over time. Skills and knowledge fade with lack of use or with misuse.
That said, you are right that it’s a PR disaster to tell people they’d need to truly qualify to drive, especially in areas where driving is a practical requirement for full participation in society.
I’d agree with that statement, but I’d offer one caveat. I do think the driver’s education curriculum is fine. At least when I went through it, they took great pains to teach the rules of the road, courtesy, laws, etc. The big problem is that test proctors are rubber stamping examinees with perhaps the exception of those highly-inclined to create fatalities. There needs to be more accountability on road tests, but I suppose parents who are eager to be free of their 16 year old children would ream out anyone with the audacity to fail their kid. Just like public schools…
My driver’s ed was a long time ago, run by a man who prided himself on a more difficult test than we would face at the DMV and it was…fine. He would mark you down for every alley you didn’t turn your head to look down, but he wasn’t exactly teaching us proper driving habits. That was a small town, though, so the driving was different (which is also dangerous–learning to drive in a small town does not make you ready to drive in a city).
More recently, I was talking to an adult in driver’s ed, and I was explaining to him how to properly adjust his mirrors. He was most of the way through the course and had not been taught properly. He was talking about difficulty merging onto the freeway and I had to tell him it sounded like his mirrors were improperly adjusted (he could see the side of the car in them).
There are almost certainly good instructors, but there is a lot of “teaching to the test” that goes on, and the testing is garbage.
Driver’s Ed curriculum isn’t even required in Idaho. I never took driver’s Ed. Did the curriculum fail me?
I dunno – how well do you drive?
Pretty consistently everybody overestimates how much crumple zones are engineered into a car. Unibody cars have always crumpled ok, and full frame cars never have and never will. That’s right guys, literally no 3/4 ton pickups have ever had crumple zones.
Stop building every small pick up with four doors and rear seats. Problem solved.
Yeah, the Karmann Ghia/CRX solution, worked for them
You can’t kill backseat passengers without a backseat *taps temple*