Posts Tagged ‘vehicles’
“I know a lot about cars, man. I can look at any car’s headlights and tell you exactly which way it’s coming”*…
… too often, it’s coming for us…
Over a 15-year period, 6,253 cars crashed into 7-Eleven storefronts in the U.S. – an average of 1.14 per day.
– Source
Of course, retail rampages are the least of our automotive worries. In the last several years– after decades of decline, and unlike other developed countries– vehicle deaths in the U.S. begin to grow (gift article).
While there are a number of factors at work, an extraordinary piece in The Economist homes in one of the most salient: Americans love big cars, but heavy vehicles kill more people than they save…
For all the safety features available in cars today to help them avoid crashes, the laws of physics are cruel. When two vehicles collide, it is usually the heavier one that prevails. This advantage has changed little over time. Thirty years ago when a passenger car crashed with a pickup truck or sport-utility vehicle (SUV), the driver of the car was roughly four times as likely to die; today this driver dies around three times as often. Critics say this is too high a price to pay for roomier interiors and more powerful engines. Carmakers insist they are giving consumers what they want. An analysis by The Economist shows that weight remains a critical factor in car crashes in America. Reining in the heaviest vehicles would save lives…
… Over the years policymakers struggled to solve this mismatch, or “incompatibility”, problem. Often, they made things worse. When Congress set fuel-efficiency standards in the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s, cars were swiftly downsized. Within ten years cars shed 1,000lb; trucks dropped 500lb. Although these changes saved motorists money at the pump, they also led to more traffic fatalities. A paper published in 1989 by researchers at the Brookings Institution and the Harvard School of Public Health estimated that the shift towards smaller, lighter cars in the 1970s and 1980s boosted fatalities by 14-27%. A report released in 2002 by America’s National Research Council concluded that the downsizing of America’s fleet led to thousands of unnecessary deaths.
As cars got bigger, regulators shifted their focus from the lightest vehicles to the heaviest ones. The impetus for this was the rise of SUVs. Between 1990 and 2005 the market share of such vehicles in America grew from 6% to 26%, pushing up the weight of an average new car from 3,400lb to nearly 4,100lb. As suburban soccer moms traded in their station wagons for Ford Expeditions, many felt safer. And they were right. “One of the reasons the roads are much safer is because vehicles… [are] bigger and they’re heavier than they were,” Adrian Lund of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), an industry research organisation, told conference-goers in 2011. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, even advocated supersizing America’s fleet to improve safety, writing in the Wall Street Journal that large vehicles are “the solution, not the problem”.
But researchers quickly learned that the extra protection provided by heavier vehicles comes at the expense of others on the road. In a paper published in 2004 Michelle White of the University of California, San Diego estimated that for every deadly crash avoided by an SUV or pickup truck, there were an additional 4.3 among other drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. Another paper in 2012 by Shanjun Li of Resources for the Future, a think-tank, estimated that when a car crashes with an SUV or pickup, rather than another car, the driver’s fatality rate increased by 31%. In 2014 Michael Anderson and Maximilian Auffhammer of the University of California, Berkeley estimated that when two cars crash, a 1,000lb increase in the weight of one vehicle raised the fatality rate in the other by 47%.
Researchers also found that the safety benefits of vehicle weight suffer from diminishing returns. This means that, once vehicles reach a certain weight, packing on more pounds provides little additional safety, while inflicting more harm on others. e pounds provides little additional safety, while inflicting more harm on others. “At some point heavy vehicles cost more lives…than they save,” wrote Brian O’Neill and Sergey Kyrychenko of the IIHS in 2004. This makes intuitive sense, says Mr Anderson of Berkeley. “Once you outweigh the other guy by a factor of two times, is adding 200 pounds more really going to make a difference for you? Probably not. But it’ll make sure that he gets completely destroyed.”…
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… Regulators are ill-equipped to fix the problem. America’s tax system subsidises heavier vehicles by setting more lenient fuel-efficiency standards for light trucks, and allowing bosses who purchase heavy-duty vehicles for business purposes to deduct part of the cost from their taxable income. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), America’s top auto-safety agency, uses a five-star rating system to score crash performance, but only takes account of the safety of the occupants of the vehicle in question, not that of other drivers. “Our rating system reflects a bias towards the occupant,” explains Laura Sandt of the Highway Safety Research Centre at the University of North Carolina, “it is not designed to rate the car in terms of its holistic safety effects.” The NHTSA declined to comment on The Economist’s findings.
There are signs that Americans may be wising up. A survey conducted last year by YouGov, a pollster, found that 41% of Americans think that SUVs and pickup trucks have become too big; 49% said such vehicles are more dangerous for other cars and 50% said they endanger cyclists and pedestrians. Researchers are raising the alarm. Since 1989 the IIHS has regularly published the driver-fatality rates of popular car models. In 2023, for the first time, the group also estimated the rate at which cars kill drivers in other vehicles. Policymakers are starting to take notice too. “I’m concerned about the increased risk of severe injury and death for all road users from heavier curb weights,” Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in a speech last year.
But the odds that carmakers curb their heaviest, most dangerous vehicles are slim. American car-buyers value safety, but mainly for themselves, not society as a whole. And although regulators are tasked with protecting consumers, they rarely do so at the expense of choice, no matter how deadly the consequences. “There may be a certain point where you say, ‘You know what, passenger vehicles shouldn’t be weighing this much,’” says Raul Arbelaez of the IIHS’s Vehicle Research Centre. “But it would, politically, be really hard to gain any momentum on that.” Finally the shift towards electric power is likely to increase their weight further, as battery-powered vehicles tend to be heavier than their internal-combustion equivalents.
“Manufacturers are playing by the book,” says Mark Chung of the National Safety Council, a non-profit. “They’re making a business decision, and it’s a rational decision. Unless they’re forced to think differently, they’re not going to. So I think this is where our federal partners really need to step up.”…
From the annals of auto safety– when big is bad: “Too Much of a Good Thing,” in @TheEconomist.
See also: “Why American cars are so big” (gift article).
* Mitch Hedberg
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As we downsize, we might recall that on this date in 1982 Knight Rider premiered on television. The show starred David Hasselhoff as crime fighter Michael Knight who drove a customized car– a supercomputer/AI on wheels– named K.I.T.T. (Knight Industries Two Thousand). K.I.T.T. was designed by Michael Scheffe (a designer who had worked on toys for Mattel and on Bladerunner) using Pontiac’s 1982 Trans Am; in the event, he had 18 days to create his first mock up of K.I.T.T. for the network.
The original Knight Rider (1982–1986) and sequel series Team Knight Rider (1997–1998) and Knight Rider (2008–2009) spawned three television films, computer and video games, and novels, as well as KnightCon, a Knight Rider convention.
“The American really loves nothing but his automobile”*…
FT correspondent John Burn-Murdoch on America’s infatuation with large personal vehicles, and its consequences…
For all the grim tales of guns and opioids, the thing that really hits you as a visitor to the US these days is the cars. Literally, for too many people. In 2021, road fatalities were the second leading cause of death among Americans aged under 45, ahead of Covid-19, suicides and gun violence.
On a visit to the US last month, three things made a strong impression: the sheer size of the cars; the relative lack of electric models with their characteristic hum; and speed limits that seem entirely optional. All, I think, stem from the same underlying tendency: to see driving as an expression of personal freedom.
To an extent, a similar dynamic plays out the world over. Just look at the furor that has accompanied recent schemes to curb residential traffic in the UK. But, when it comes to vehicles, the US really is exceptional.
The average new American car purchased in 2021 weighed 1.94 tonnes, fully half a tonne more than the European average. Purchases of SUVs and “light” trucks together now account for four out of every five new vehicles bought in the US, up from one in five 50 years ago…
… This would all be a mere curiosity except that these vehicles have a variety of lethal qualities. As American cars have bulked up, the number of fatalities for the drivers and passengers inside these rolling fortresses has fallen by 22 per cent. But the number of pedestrians killed has risen by 57 per cent. According to an estimate by Justin Tyndall, assistant professor of economics at the University of Hawaii, the lives of 8,000 pedestrians could have been saved between 2000 and 2018 if Americans had stuck to smaller vehicles.
For many inside the cars, too, the association of individualism with driving proves lethal. Almost one in 10 drivers and passengers in the front seat of US cars do not wear a seatbelt, and 45 per cent say they often drive at least 15 miles per hour above the speed limit on motorways. In the UK, both measures are way lower, at 3 per cent.
The grim result is that half of the car occupants killed in the US in 2020 were not wearing seatbelts vs 23 per cent in the UK. Speeding is implicated in 30 per cent of fatal crashes in the US but just half of that in Britain. All told, 43,000 people died on America’s roads in 2021, the highest mortality rate in the developed world by some margin. By my calculations, a fifth of those could be averted every year if rates of speeding and seatbelt-wearing matched peer countries.
Finally, there’s the environmental impact. Less than 5 per cent of new US cars last year were either partly or fully electric, compared with 17 per cent in Europe (rising to 86 per cent in Norway). As a result, the average new US car emits twice as much carbon dioxide per mile as its European counterpart, all while carrying the same number of occupants as in the UK — 1.5 people per trip, weighted for distance driven…
When bigger isn’t better: “America’s obsession with big cars has fatal consequences” (gift article), from @jburnmurdoch in @FT.
See item #2 in this post from @Noahpinion for a gentle critique of Burn-Murdoch’s charts, resulting in a (slightly) more positive take on U.S. road safety… though it seems to your correspondent that Burn-Murdoch’s fundamental point still hold.
* William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust
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As we scale back, we might recall that it was on this date in 1986 that President Ronald Reagan issued Proclamation 5457, designating 1986 the Centennial Year of the Gasoline Powered Automobile.
“When transformation is done right, it’s like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong, all you have is a rejiggered caterpillar.”*…
Mail trucks, with mostly short and predictable routes, are naturals to lead the electrification revolution. But as Aaron Gordon explains, the USPS, as an institution, is not…
A year ago, the USPS announced it was buying between 50,000 and 165,000 new delivery trucks over the next decade from Oshkosh Defense, a defense contractor based in Wisconsin, as part of the long-awaited replacement of the current iconic mail trucks. The USPS provided few details about the vehicles, except to highlight key features like air conditioning, automatic emergency braking, and other safety technology, none of which the famous boxy neighborhood delivery vehicles have. The USPS also said the trucks would be a mix of both battery electric and internal combustion engine vehicles, but didn’t specify the ratio.
At first, the new vehicles, whether gas or electric, were a hit. They’re rather cute for a truck, with a low front grill and huge windshield, giving it the unmistakable likeness of a duck. And your friendly neighborhood postal worker desperately needs them, since the USPS’s current fleet of trucks is 30 years old on average, far longer than the USPS expected them to run. It costs the USPS $5,000 per vehicle per year in maintenance alone to keep them running. And despite that exorbitant expense, it still can’t stop dozens of them from spontaneously combusting every year.
But what began as mostly good-natured celebration over a cute, much-needed truck went downhill fast. It increasingly became clear the massive order was utterly unfit for the modern age. In a legally-mandated environmental review, the USPS revealed the gas version of the truck will get essentially the same miles per gallon with the air conditioning on as the current truck gets, or about 8 mpg, worse than the RAM ProMaster, which the USPS also uses, which gets roughly 14 mpg. It also revealed the truck’s weight was selected to be precisely one pound heavier than the “heavy duty truck” cutoff which frees it from various environmental regulations, including getting better gas mileage. And, most controversially of all, only 10 percent of the trucks will be electric, even though the USPS itself said in the environmental review that 95 percent of its routes are fit for EVs.
Why? Well, part of the reason is internal…
“The Postal Service made individual decisions that might have been rational,” said Michael Ravnitzky, chief counsel to the chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission from 2009 to 2015, “but taken as a whole, they don’t seem explicable to the public because the public is judging it by today’s standards, rather than the standards of when [the postal service] started this, like 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.”…
Starting in the 1980s, the USPS had to pay its own bills, received no subsidies from Congress, had no mandate to consider environmental or social issues, and mostly heard from Congresspeople when they were getting complaints about their local post office reducing its hours but were nowhere to be found when it came time to discuss the $56 billion in made-up debt the agency had been saddled with. If politicians weren’t publicly rooting for the USPS to go away as an antiquated institution from a bygone era, they at least weren’t going to stick their necks out for it, because they could no longer see to it that a local political supporter got a job at the post office. For most politicians, the post office had become a non-entity in ways that both helped and hurt the postal service. The USPS was going alone and would have to make do with what it had.
And what it had, in the late 2000s, was some 142,000 decaying delivery trucks, most pushing 20 years old then, with no air conditioning or power steering, that didn’t comply with any environmental regulations because they had been built before such regulations existed, got terrible gas mileage, and needed replacement parts that manufacturers were no longer making. USPS engineers were taking the body from one truck and the parts from another to make a new one, stacking safety hazard upon safety hazard as it created more and more Frankentrucks.
The engineering department knew it desperately needed new vehicles but that it wasn’t going to get them any time soon. So it became intimately familiar with the 142,000 of the ones it had. Internal combustion engines were what the engineering people knew. If a part broke, they knew how to get a new one, or how to fashion one together if new ones didn’t exist. The fact that they were able to stretch the useful life of these trucks beyond the planned 20 years and push 30 years or more has been considered by the engineering department as nothing short of heroic.
For the people who “bleed blue,” as the saying in the USPS goes, electric vehicles may have been better in theory, but gas was better for the realities they faced. Because when Congress inevitably screws them again and makes them stretch the lives of the next trucks a decade or two longer than planned, they’ll need to duct tape and glue those trucks together, too. And they don’t know how to glue an EV back together…
And part of the reason goes to rules imposed by Congress. EV’s are more expensive upfront, but promise lower overall expenses (maintenance, fuel, etc.) overall; still…
After a 2006 law saddled the USPS with made-up debt to help balance the federal budget, the USPS acts as if it lacks the financial flexibility to make any mistakes, a fear that results in an organization so tepid and conservative it ends up making many of them…
The USPS, like many large government bureaucracies, have two different budgets: operating and capital expenses. The operating budget of some $80 billion a year is the one that goes towards delivering mail every day: paying people, fueling trucks, fixing trucks, running their equipment and facilities, and so on. The capital budget, which is just a couple billion dollars a year at most, is the one that pays for investing in upgrades to all that stuff: Buying new trucks, purchasing a new HVAC system for a post office, and the like.
While any individual USPS employee easily understands that paying $5,000 a year to keep 30-year-old trucks running makes no sense, the USPS bureaucracy can’t. To buy new ones would be a capital cost, for which the USPS would have to borrow money, something it legally could not do for the last decade.
It had reached its Congressionally-mandated borrowing limit. If the USPS had been able to borrow more money, it would have had to give it to the federal government as part of the terms of that disastrous 2006 law, which mandated the USPS pay it $5.5 billion every year. The USPS did so, amassing some $18 billion in an account managed by the federal government, until 2011, when it stopped because it could no longer afford it. So while the USPS could continue to run up deficits in its operating budget, it couldn’t borrow any more money for capital expenses, the kind that saves an organization money in the long run…
Why the USPS bought expensive, environmentally-unfriendly mail trucks: “Who Killed the Electric Mail Truck?,” from @A_W_Gordon in @motherboard. Eminently worth reading in full.
* paraphrase of George Westerman
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As we think systemically, we might recall that it was on this date in 1818 that Mary Shelley’s epoch-making tale of a man-made monster, Frankenstein, was published. Shelley had begun writing the story two years earlier, when she was 18 and on vacation near Geneva with her soon-to-be husband (the poet Percy Shelley) and their friend Lord Byron. The house party set itself the task of each writing a gothic story; only Mary finished hers. The first edition was published anonymously; Shelley was first publicly identified as the author on the title page of the 1823 second edition.
The work has, as Brian Aldiss argues, a strong claim to being the first true science fiction novel. As the sub-title– “The Modern Prometheus”– suggests (and like most great sci fi), it treats the philosophical, cultural, and psychological ramifications of scientific and technological progress.
“The future is electric”…
And also a thing of the past…
For a brief period in the early 20th century in the United States, the electric car was high society’s hottest commodity, sought after by socialites and businessmen alike…
During the early years of the “Automotive Age,”—from about 1896 to 1930—as many as 1,800 different car manufacturers functioned in the U.S. While innovators in Europe had been working on battery-powered vehicles since the 1830s, the first successful electric car in the U.S. made its debut in 1890 thanks to a chemist from Iowa. His six-passenger was basically an electrified wagon that hit a top speed of 14 mph.
By 1900, electric cars were so popular that New York City had a fleet of electric taxis, and electric cars accounted for a third of all vehicles on the road. People liked them because in many ways early electric cars outperformed their gas competitors. Electric cars didn’t have the smell, noise, or vibration found in steam or gasoline cars. They were easier to operate, lacked a manual crank to start, and didn’t require the same difficult-to-change gear system as gas cars.
Electric cars became extremely popular in cities, especially with upper-class women who disliked the noisy and smelly attributes of gasoline-powered cars. A New York Times article from 1911 reported, “The designers of electric passenger car-carrying vehicles have made great advances in the past few years, and these machines have retained all their early popularity and are steadily growing in favor with both men and women.”…
Like today, one of the challenges for early electric car owners was where to charge them. But by 1910 owners could install their own charging stations on their property, and an increasing number of car-repair shops popped up that allowed electric cars to charge overnight.
One of the most eccentric and interesting manufacturers of early electric cars was Oliver P. Fritchle, a chemist and electrical engineer who began as an auto repairman until he realized he could build a better electric car himself. Fritchle sold his first vehicle in 1906 and set up a production plant in Denver, Colorado, in 1908.
Fritchle made one of the best car batteries in the business, which he claimed could travel 100 miles on a single charge…
What’s old is new again: “Before Tesla: Why everyone wanted an electric car in 1905,” from Megan Barber (@megcbarber) in @Curbed.
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As we recharge, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955 that the U.S. Federal government standardized the size of license plates throughout the U.S. Originally, owners had been responsible for their own tags; then individual states had designed– and dimensioned– license plates, resulting in wide variations.
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