A Killdozer in every garage; modern truck designed to be insanely dangerous

You may have noticed that US made trucks are getting really, really big. Like, absurdly large, especially in the front end, for no real good reason.

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What Happened to Pickup Trucks? As U.S. drivers buy more full-size and heavy-duty pickups, these vehicles have transformed from no-frills workhorses into angry giants. And pedestrians are paying the price. To get a handle on what’s happened to pickup trucks, it really helps to use a human body for scale. In some nerdy Internet circles — specifically, bike and pedestrian advocacy — it has become trendy to take a selfie in front of the bumper of random neighborhood Silverados. Among the increasingly popular heavy-duty models, the height of the truck’s front end may reach a grown man’s shoulders or neck. When you involve children in this exercise it starts to become really disturbing. My four-year-old son, for example, barely cleared the bumper on a lifted F-250 we came across in a parking lot last summer. Vehicles of this scale saddle their drivers with huge front and rear blind zones that make them perilous to operate in crowded areas. Even car guys have been sounding the alarm about the mega-truck trend recently. A few months ago, the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Neil complained about his close encounter in a parking lot with a 2020 GMC Sierra HD Denali: “The domed hood was at forehead level. The paramedics would have had to extract me from the grille with a spray hose.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...d-pickup-truck

Article includes a picture of a child standing in front of one of these street-legal monstrosities. His head barely rises above the front bumper, there is no way a driver would see this kid in the street before running them over.

Here's a thread of pictures of a 6'1" journalist at a car show. Many of these trucks have hoods at shoulder or chest level of a grown man:

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The front end of the new GMC Yukon. For reference, I'm 6'1". The top of the hood is nearly up to my shoulders. https://twitter.com/ajlatrace/status...24630868213764

many of these trucks now come with front facing cameras because the frontal blind spots are so huge. Here's a video of a truck driving down a street where a entire passenger car disappears into a blind spot:

https://twitter.com/bontrager_keith/...43890253357059

An entire corvette is in the blind spot from the cab, only visible in the tiny screen of the front facing cam of this obscenely large truck.

The consequences to pedestrian safety are pronounced.

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The change in height of these vehicles has increased pedestrian fatalities over the last 20 some years. Basically a generation’s worth of gains in auto safety wiped out because auto manufacturers decided to make their vehicles look like a giant fist made for smashing children.

https://twitter.com/PostCultRev/stat...53918356140033

ETA: From the bloomberg article, women seem to be disproportionately injured by these things, because the absurdly intimidating by design mega truck is largely an appeal to tiny-ego men:

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The truck trend is contributing to another troubling crash-related disparity: In a new study, the IIHS shows that women — who tend choose smaller vehicles — are suffering higher injury and death rates than their male counterparts, despite the fact than women engage in fewer risks and crash less.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/l3UD0dz