this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
1086 points (92.9% liked)
Technology
59657 readers
2786 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
For some people, bigger is more comfortable. Different strokes for different folks. Others don't want to deal with playing Tetris with baggage and family every time they need to go on a trip. For others, it's a safety issue or at least they feel safer in a bigger car.
But yes. I generally agree with you.
Especially for an obese country.
It isn’t even that. America, Germany, and the UK are all very similar. And those numbers are only becoming more similar over time.
Europeans need to remember that American states are often larger than European countries.
And that generations of neglect or intentional sabotage has rendered public transport completely useless outside of outlier scenarios.
People want to handwave it away, but there are legitimate safety concerns with driving smaller vehicles in the US. Not only are they less comfortable (in a country where you have to drive everywhere, for long periods of time, even for incidental items). They will get destroyed by our obnoxiously huge SUVs and trucks. Happens all the time.
Same thing needs to be remembered when people who don’t live here insist everyone should just be biking everywhere. I agree in spirit, but the reality is that biking in the US is a gamble every time someone does it. And you can’t convince a populace to do it when a normal American is 10+ miles away from a grocery store, and when most of our states experience both extreme heat and extreme cold.
The problem is truly systemic. We have a majority of civil planning intentionally implementing hostile engineering to incentivize vehicles.
So actually there are many cars that are nearly or just as safe as SUVs and have similar storage capacity. These arguments are often used by industry but don't really hold any weight
https://youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/rollover/unsafe/theme.html
As someone who goes to Italy yearly with a family of 4 and a dog often the smaller car storage notes are bullshit.
We rent to drive to our home here and then use bikes when or borrow the inlaws car but they often say 5 or 6 seater with room for 3 luggages but it often means at the expense of seats. I often travel with my daughter's stroller beneath the kids feet and a luggage or several backpacks on the floor or in the middle seat and for a several hours drive it's not comfy. Meanwhile my traverse in the states I can fit all of them plus the luggages etc on way to anywhere and we're all comfy for hours.
Not that that's a justification for larger cars but it's definitely not on par and you totally need to play Tetris or sacrifice comfort to make it work.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/jN7mSXMruEo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.