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Car bloat has made cars more dangerous to accident opponents and pedestrians. The increased height of hoods has drastically reduced visibility in front of those cars. Higher and heavier cars are more dangerous to smaller cars, and the higher hoods make accidents much more dangerous for pedestrians, because they are not just swept off their legs onto the hood but hit in their torso and run over.
I can certainly buy that. However, that leaves us with the big question:
Why did American cars become dangerously bloated in 2012, rather than before or later, and why didn’t the same thing happen in other rich countries?
2012 was the year of the big car in the US -- due to a "footprint-based" regulatory loophole. Because the cars were physically larger, their fuel efficiency was measured differently. These federal laws came in in 2012.
It was cheaper to make larger, less efficient vehicles, and these took hold in the market.
This was not repeated in other rich countries because other countries did not relax their own fuel efficiency rules. Some large US vehicles are not consider road-worthy in other regions due to this.
I was just eyeballing the graph. If it was anywhere between 2010 and 2014, it would still be a reasonable hypothesis.
There we go. That’s the kind of explanation we needed
I’m not going anywhere with it, except for poking at what seem to be weak hypotheses.
We have decades of consistently declining fatality rates followed by a reversal. That suggests something significant changed.
The SUV point is interesting and the tradeoff between driver/passenger safety and pedestrian safety is pretty well established. The problem is that previous safety improvements never reversed that downward trend.
My guess is that this is due to rising rates of distracted driving, although I don’t know why that wouldn’t be having the same effect in Europe.