This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The best way to kill a person and get away with it in the US is to hit that person with a SUV when they are walking. A jury of lifted truck owners will return a not-guilty verdict. Even better if the target is on a bicycle, you’ll get a pat on the back by the judge.
Or worse, motorcycle!
-seethes with rage at the very notion of vehicles with less than four wheels-
Not being able to see someone walking in front of you is a god given right.
Doubly so if they're a toddler.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to protest at an abortion clinic because killing children is immoral when a woman does it.
I keep saying it, you don't need trucks. Maybe 1 out of a thousand. No, that isn't you.
And out of the people who do need them, vans are still a much better way to go for many of them. Vans which have at least a margainally better field of view with their short, sloped hoods.
I have a large family and we drive a Transit 350 van.
One day we needed to move a pair of beds and mattresses. We asked my father in law to help us since he has a F150. But it soon became apparent how much more we could fit in the van (with the two back seats removed) than we could fit in the truck, which couldn’t even fit one mattress in the truckbed without hanging out the back of the tailgate.
From what I’ve seen my van is far superior to a truck in almost every need I’ve had. It can carry more stuff and it can do so in the rain keeping the cargo dry.
The one thing a truck could do that my van can’t is pick up a scoop of mulch or gravel dumped from a loader.
My grandmother used to have a GMC Safari and yea, you’re absolutely right. If someone offered their truck for free to help me move I’d still pay for a U-Haul and I have less than zero money. They’re fucking worthless unless what you’re dragging around is a fifth-wheel so you literally need the special towing connection in the bed. Even the tow-trucks and stuff could be cab-over-engine but we don’t live in sanity land.
I know someone who insists that a pickup truck is more practical and her example is "you can lift a bookshelf over the side of a pickup truck instead of having to put it in the back like a van". Apparently it's more practical to lift something like 4 feet off the ground to the side of a pickup truck bed instead of like 1 foot to the floor of a van
And those who actually need them would be far better served by a VW Transporter with an aluminium bed.
This is true, but there's also a real lack of small pickups on the market. The fuckers just seem to be getting bigger and bigger. I used to have a Proton Jumbuck and it was really useful. Used it a lot for hauling wood and soil, it was small enough to get around and park easily in the city. I got rid of it eventually because it was so hard to find parts, shame, it was a handy little machine.
One of the guys in my police academy class would rib me for being less of a man because I didn't drive a truck.
A couple months later, he would go on to commit a felony on duty in front of a half dozen of his peers, including me. Nobody bothered to report him but me, even after we had a meeting about someone from a neighboring agency doing nearly the exact same thing that had been fired and arrested for it. Being a brand new deputy, I thought it was an integrity test so I was more than willing to report it. IA dropped the case.
In hindsight, that was a clue I should've started applying elsewhere or quit, but I had three more years to put in before I wouldn't have to pay back my academy pay, not to mention I naively trusted there was some other interpretation of what happened I hadn't considered that the agency's brass and legal team had; I wasn't about to be the Apprentice telling the Master he's full of shit.
Years later they'd fire me for some complete BS. He still works there as far as I know, and the US Army promoted him to Captain.
I have a F150 I use as a farm truck, and an old samurai. (The little 4x4, not the feudal warrior) The samurai is lifted and has larger tires on it, and the hood is still still only about waist-high. Much lower than the F150's hood which is almost chest high. (Im 6ft tall, that's ~183cm)
The F150 is honestly not very useful for hauling, because the sides of the bed are armpit high. Heavy things must be lifted a few feet to get up on the tailgate when its open. Most of the time anymore I use the samurai to pick up things like animal feed or fertilizer or other heavy bags of stuff, because it won't get stuck in the yard like the truck will, and its just more fun to drive, all 65 horsepower of it.
But the f150 is much more gender affirming to cismasc people, you misandrist cisphpbic piece of shit.
800ish more fancy tech "safety" features and even more death. Fuck the "we will protect you" bullshit. It's way cheaper if I protect myself, but that option doesn't exist. "Look! My car flashes and beeps when another car passes me on a city lane!". That's not assistance, that's a distraction.
I was talking about this with my wife. If it beeps when I'm in reverse and a car is 50 feet behind me then it's only training me to ignore the exact same beep that it makes when a person is approaching from my blind spot on foot.
I saw a chart that showed a much stronger correlation with smart phones
Why not both?
If phones are causing more collisions... then bigger vehicles have more kinetic energy, hence more deaths...
I don't think that we see the same increase in pedestrian fatalities in other countries though, which do have smart phones but do not have massive personal trucks.
In Europe:
In the US:
Not exactly the same years, of course, and comparing data sets is tricky.
No more inexpensive cars for the masses. No one is building a sub-compact or a sedan anymore. Now I have 300 "options" I don't even want on a vehicle and no way to get out of paying for them. Driving is becoming more of an upper-class activity nowadays and we all know how size matters to that crowd.
Its ok though, we had to get rid of popup headlights because "oh no pedestrian safety". But classify fucking everything as a light truck and you can do whatever the fuck you want.
Instead of headlights 2 feet off the ground, now we have overpowered searchlights (brighter = safer, amirite?) mounted 4 feet high, guaranteed to blind pedestrians and any shorter vehicle's driver.
I wanna vomit especially when I see carolina squatted pick up trucks or really any pick up truck that isn't actually used for their original purpose.
Pavement princess is my favored term for trucks that clearly have had work done but do no work.
I was standing in front of a parked SUV the other day and I swear its grille was chest-high. I'm 5'4", I'd definitely not survive if one hit me.
Some years back, a couple of my friends drove Toyota Rav 4s. They were cute little all-wheel drive cars with three doors. This article tracks how the Rav 4 "evolved" into the ugly, massively bloated vehicle it is today. https://www.carwow.co.uk/toyota/rav4/news/8854/toyota-rav4-generations-evolution
And that giant truck has never hauled anything beyond kids to games and groceries.
No surprises there. They're more difficult to drive and have bigger blind spots. Yet, Americans love them even when they don't need the added space.
Literally the only thing I want from modern vehicles is blind spot cameras. And you could argue that's not particularly modern since they've been available for over a decade.
Otherwise, today's new vehicles are privacy dystopias and it's becoming quite difficult to find a decent sedan for a midrange price. I have no interest in light trucks or SUVs.
In short, we'll be sticking with my ICE 2012 Toyota Avalon and 2015 BMW until they stop running. I would like to buy an EV to pair with our solar panels and insulate myself from the whims of the bitch baby in the White House.
But I think I basically can't do that without giving up my privacy.
Everything sucks.
