The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration stunned safety advocates by proposing new vehicle design rules that it says will help reduce pedestrian deaths. The rules will likely change vehicle design permanently.
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.
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.