I’ve driven in a number of models of full-sized trucks of recent vintage. None of them prevented visibility of pedestrians. More likely that the driver was on their smart phone and blamed the vehicle.
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I mean - Mucks has already shown us that you can run a car on bullshit.
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I don’t know what specific trucks you’ve driven but, on average they have objectively taller hoods and larger blind spots than vehicles in the past.
Whether that’s the primary driver in the increase in pedestrian fatalities in recent years may be debatable it’s hard to believe that it wouldn’t at least be a contributing factor.
I was a passenger in a Ford, Dodge, and Toyota, all within past 5 years models.
I would agree about the A-pillar visibility, but that is across all vehicles. The combination of increased crush strength and airbags has stretched A-pillars to be much wider.
What mentioning hood height fails to capture is that driver and passenger position has changed to match, with a higher and more forward seating position to counter the hood height. I found it easier to gauge vehicle bumper position while the driver was parking. That would also address pedestrian visibility in front of the vehicle.
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IDK maybe drive them to safety BEFORE a hurricane comes blowing thru?
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$2MM car, protected by a home depot garage door. Smart, that ain’t
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My Honda Fit is almost at 300,000 miles and has been showing its age, so I’ve been thinking about getting a Ford Maverick hybrid which gets impressive gas mileage for a truck (42 mpg city!) and is supposed to start at only $20k. On my drive home today I saw that my local dealer finally has a couple in stock (lately they’ve been sold even before the dealership receives them) so I stopped to take a look.
They had a bunch of B.S. fees on top of the $20k base price on the window sticker but I was astounded at the “market-based priced adjustment” that was added with a sharpie. TEN. THOUSAND. DOLLARS. I’ve heard of similar mark-ups for rare, high-demand sportcars and the like but that’s one hell of a mark-up on a $20k car!
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5 minutes?? Ain’t nobody got time for that!
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So much for using EVs as temporarily floating devices.
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I know nothing about ev car batteries- but they’ve known about backflow valves in plumbing for a long time.
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Bilge pumps work great as long as they have power…oh.
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An important but depressing article on the status of the California bullet train project:
I voted for the original bond measure to build the thing but lost my enthusiasm for the project years ago when it became clear that the project would be much more expensive than promised and also be much slower, less direct, and less useful.
We’ve already invested many billions and built miles of rail, but given how fundamentally compromised the current project is I think that continuing to spend money on it (to the detriment of, say, regional rail projects and other forms of public transportation) would be a sunk cost fallacy. Change my mind! (But read the article first.)
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Paywalled, but I hope folks involved in this project learn some lessons from California’s struggles:
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Interesting. The (imaginary) price tag for the maglev project is less than 1/10 of what it would take to complete the California train project. But it’s mostly being done with a huge, long tunnel and the East coast does have some experience with tunneling projects that got out of hand. Hope this works though.
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Rivian recalls nearly every vehicle it has sold
Beleaguered electric automaker Rivian is facing another setback: the recall of nearly 80 percent of the vehicles it has produced.
Rivian’s R1T trucks, R1S SUVs, and a subset of its electric delivery vehicles (EDVs) – 12,212 vehicles in all – are being recalled due to “a loose steering knuckle fastener [which] could separate, causing a loss of vehicle control,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on its recall notice page for the R1T, where documents for all the recalled vehicles are linked.
[…]
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