There's been lots out there about vehicles getting giant and the rammifications for pedestrians:
Trucks and SUVs deemed way more effective at finishing the job when hunting peds
Big vehicles better at hitting the peds in the first place
There's all the fun videos, like the guy who
can't see an entire Corvette, or perhaps a
bunch of kids sitting on the ground is more your bag.
I was wondering how Europe, which implemented a ton of regulations including actually raised hood heights to create clearance from the engine to the hood for pedestrian safety, was dealing with producing large SUVs and still complying.
I found a cool site that lets you
compare car sizes.
Big Euro SUV (Volvo V90) vs. Big American SUV (Cadillac Escalade), look at the hood heights:
Wow, ok, that's not even close. What about the Escalade vs. what we used to consider a behemoth, the Hummer H1?
What if we grab something small by today's standards and see how it stacks up against the Escalade, like a 911?
All crash/safety regulation seems to revolve around the person in a vehicle surviving a crash, which creates a race to the bottom of bigger and higher behemoths.
What if we focused on avoiding crashes? An easy one to pick out is the massively high belt lines of cars to protect getting T-Boned by the army of huge, high vehicles out there. This comes at the expense of visibility. What if this was solved with bumper/hood heights calming down a bit?
We can still have vehicles that store tons of stuff, and have upright seating positions and lots of comfort without the current insanity.