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The Economist has published a deeply-researched story about car bloat -- and it's very, very damning.

"For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles."

Well worth your time: https://www.economist.com/interactive/united-states/2024/08/31/americans-love-affair-with-big-cars-is-killing-them

in reply to Sally Strange

@SallyStrange A neighbor was driving home on our local 35mph road when someone driving a car ran a stop sign and T-boned my neighbor's vehicle which was pushed off the road and rolled over into a ravine. He was seriously hurt and is convinced he would have been crushed and killed but for the fact that he was driving a heavy truck which absorbed enough of the impact which allowed him to survive. So, there are two sides to this story.
in reply to Joseph Elfelt

@mappingsupport there aren't sides in this story. You happen to have a friend that benefited from a phenomenon that benefits people who drive, at the expense of the lives people who don't drive. Imagine if he'd been unable to afford a car and had instead been walking home, and the other driver was driving his truck. Can you do that? I feel like if you could then you wouldn't find your friend's story as relevant.
in reply to David Zipper

might be interesting to graph the car crash statistics vs which vehicles the drivers were still making payments on. Who makes more profit by frightening people into larger and more expensive vehicles: the financiers or the manufacturer?
in reply to David Zipper

Pickups are absurdly overinflated just to inflate the ego of the owner.