Fucking finally, but realistically this will become a right wing talking point and ultimately reversed by the next Republican administration
Now they’re coming for your SUVs! Can you believe that? It’s true! The woke NTSB wants to make it so your truck can’t kill whoever it hits! [crowd boos] ooh I know I know! Now what are good honest god fearing people supposed to do when some loony leftist fascist radical blocks the street, protesting, protesting to let Palestine kill more Israelis? You can’t run 'em over! But we’re gonna change that. Yes we are. SUVs and trucks are going to be MORE dangerous, hell on earth dangerous, GIVE 'EM HELL! [crowd cheering]
expectation: ramming through antifa protestors
reality: running over your own child in your driveway by accident, killing them
They’ll use some tonnage loophole to exempt their murder plow trucks by classing them as commercial vehicles and thereby increasing the size and deadliness as well as reducing fuel economy even more. Three birds with one stone!
I want to be optimistic about this, but knowing how things are here manufacturers will drag their feet on this and the government will be happy to let them do so.
I am very unoptimistic. I posted this because what I made my title was in a Bluesky post. At first when I saw it - I couldn’t believe it. Then after about five seconds I had to laugh at myself. Recently literally about once a day at Hexbear I’ve been making fun of how regulations and laws about stuff like food safety are a joke. Why would similar stuff about cars be any different? That would make no sense! In fact - the lack of such testing by the federal government started to make sense to me.
Surely a firm like Volvo has done “outside of vehicles” testing but why would any typical American firm? That would just get in the way of profits. And once they saw a highly profitable market for ginormous obscene vehicles - they had a strong impetus not to test. If you don’t test - you get no bad data. It’s Trump logic but it works. If they did tests - even secret ones - eventually the public would learn about them and get mad. Also - I’m not a lawyer but there might be legal liability.
Sure - anybody involved in creating those cars could easily see they’d be a total nightmare to pedestrians and in particular to children but why let that gruesome and ugly reality get in the way of fat, juicy profits? Making as much money as possible is as American as it gets.
The quote in context
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has now taken steps to address that issue, stunning safety advocates with proposed vehicle design rules that the regulatory agency says will help reduce pedestrian deaths.
For the first time ever, manufacturers would be required to study the impact of test dummies hit outside of vehicles. The rules would likely change the design of what America drives permanently.
“We have a crisis of roadway deaths, and it’s even worse among vulnerable road users like pedestrians,” Sophie Shulman, the agency’s deputy administrator, said in a statement announcing the proposed rule last week.
manufacturers would be required to study the impact of test dummies hit outside of vehicles.
Okay so they’re totally just going to say they passed their study with flying colors until they get caught juking the stats resulting in a $10,000 fee.
$10,000 is $10,000 I guess.
cool so assuming the nhtsa can actually enact and enforce meaningful improvements we will still only have to deal with today’s toddlermasher vehicles on our roads for another 20 years or so
