The cause was easy enough to identify: Data parsed by Kuhls and her colleagues showed that drivers were speeding more, on highways and on surface streets, and plowing through intersections with an alarming frequency. Conversely, seatbelt use was down, resulting in thousands of injuries to unrestrained drivers and passengers. After a decade of steady decline, intoxicated-driving arrests had rebounded to near historic highs.
… The relationship between car size and injury rates is still being studied, but early research on the American appetite for horizon-blotting machinery points in precisely the direction you’d expect: The bigger the vehicle, the less visibility it affords, and the more destruction it can wreak.
Car sizes are getting larger in america to meet the fule efficiency requirements imposed by the government.
Car manufacturers could not meet these requirements, but they figured out that if they increase the weight of the car they could meet the fule efficiency.
Here is a video that explains it better then my ape brain could.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh4H9qZ-_6Y&t=55
You don’t need to make the cars bigger to meet fuel economy requirements; it’s a decision by vehicle makers to make them bigger rather than take advantage of the more efficient engine designs available to produce a vehicle which uses less fuel.
It’s partly that, but the other aspect is the absurd “light truck” exemption where SUVs and pickup trucks have less stringent emissions standards. So there is less incentive to go the downsizing route, and instead make bigger and bigger cars because if you’re a car company, you make more money per vehicle this way.
I’ll burn this bitch to the ground before I drive a 4-cylinder.
But my freedoms
If killing every goddamn mammal on this planet and letting the octopi take over is the price we pay for liberty, so be it.
In case you forgot, we’re mammals too. The only freedom you’re rushing towards is the freedom of death, but at least we get big vroom vroom sound make happy on the way
You can stop trying to sell me on it, I’m already on board!
That’s probably the most pathetic thing I’ve read on Lemmy so far. Kudos on sharing, I guess - I wouldn’t humiliate myself in public this way for sure.
Sounds like something a virus would say
Everyone else was making the same joke, why did you get the downvotes?
Because this sub is an outrage factory with notoriously bad sarcasm detection lol
Ahh first day on an Internet forum eh. There there.
Poe’s law.
Sure bud. Whatever makes you feel better.
You know oil companies aren’t going to thank you personally… right?
I’ll take a car with an inline 4 and a stick over the majority of other vehicles.