Big Pickup Trucks and SUVs Kill

 According to the New York Times (""The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s" (NY Times article on taller hoods and larger blind-spots)"), 10% of the increase in pedestrian deaths--which have risen at a rate in the US higher than other countries--is because people's purchases shifted from low profile cars to high profile trucks and SUVs.  And that 10% number only includes deaths on roads, not in parking lots, private roads, or driveways.

Left turns are the biggest source of crashes resulting in death.  The way that the article describes the various blind zones of the Chevy Silverado truck are exactly the circumstances that killed an elementary school child in my neighborhood a few years ago ("Salt Lake City girl struck, killed in crosswalk near elementary school," Salt Lake Tribune).

It was worse than shown in the simulation because the driver was short, making the blind zones even bigger.  From the Times:

To analyze how these blind zones have changed, we used a three-dimensional scanner to compare sightlines in four of the most common pickups today — the Chevrolet Silverado, Ford F-150, GMC Sierra and Toyota Tacoma — with their counterparts from the 1990s or early 2000s.

The Silverado’s blind zones have nearly doubled.

The Sierra’s and the Tacoma’s grew by about 60 percent.

The smallest increase was the F-150’s. Its blind zones grew by about 25 percent.

Money. ‘King of the Road’. 

Our overall findings match what we found in court records and heard from dozens of experts who reconstruct crashes for police and lawyers. Today’s S.U.V.s and pickups promise more: more seats, more space, more safety, more power, more domination, more prestige.

And, for automakers, more money.

They are the source of virtually all of the U.S. auto industry’s profits, said Mark Wakefield, an industry expert at the consulting firm AlixPartners. For nearly a decade, Ford and G.M. have said in their annual reports that their earnings depend on larger S.U.V.s and pickups. The cost of making bigger vehicles is usually not much higher than it is for cars, because they are often built in automakers’ most efficient factories and the extra raw materials are relatively cheap.

Left: 1998 Chevy Silverado.  Right: 2021.

Yet customers are willing to pay much more for them. The average sticker price for a full-size pickup is $70,000, double that of a sedan, according to Cox Automotive. (Some people pay more to soup up their trucks with “lift kits” that raise their suspensions.)