But she's making everyone else less safe by driving in her tank-mobile. Those are much more deadly to pedestrians, cyclists, and those in smaller vehicles.

It's also an arms race where everyone buys bigger cars to see over all the other giant cars on the road. SUVs have been shown many times to be less safe, even for their drivers, but they give a feeling of safety which matters more than actual safety to buyers.

And for every comment screeching about pedestrians and rollover safety there's another one screeching about occupant safety. You can't really fault people for picking the one that benefits them when confronted with roughly equal screeching in both directions.

You absolutely can fault people for taking the choice that makes them safer at the expense of others' safety. I don't know how it became such a popular idea that a moral imperative is only valid if it carries no personal cost.

It may be small in the grand scheme of things but it is wrong to do this, in exactly the same way, but a much smaller degree, it is wrong to shove a child out of your way to escape a burning building.

Exactly what I was getting at.

There are several ways to view the story.

Another commenter mentioned failing to design cars for women (totally fair! Volvo famously had a botched attempt at this)

What I have come to appreciate is how vulnerable women feel in the world. It is hard to appreciate how that plays into car choice if you are a man. Most men will never be able to understand, imo.

Only 20 years ago used to be the "hairdresser car" meant a tiny little sporty coupe or convertible like a miata. I guess the marketing changed and cultivated a new generation with a new mindset.

20yr ago was 2005 and the "hairdresser and nurse" demographic were all driving Jeep Libertys.

Why does designing cars for women mean we need to turn them into main battle tanks? That's a false dichotomy. Women in cars are just as vulnerable as men in cars, just as female pedestrians are just as vulnerable as male pedestrians.

For a while, women in cars were more vulnerable than men in cars, in part because crash test dummies were sized to typical male proportions, and cars are built to pass crash tests rather than be as safe as possible for all occupants while still passing crash tests. This sometimes led to things like airbags being placed in locations that worked great for average height men but not as well for average height women.

I don't know if it's fair to say that women in cars are just as vulnerable as men in cars, the same goes for the pedestrian argument.

It seems like you're using "women" as a proxy for "smaller people". Children and small-statured men are just vulnerable as women in crashes. Regardless, we now do crash tests with a variety of body types.

A 5-foot man is just as vulnerable when being hit by a car as a 5-foot woman, and obviously children are much more vulnerable than grown women when being hit by giant vehicles.

Some people are selfish. It's not illegal to be selfish.

It can be morally wrong, however.

That's a problem of the legislators: identifying which immoral activities should be made illegal.

You don't think that we as individuals have any moral choices to make, and we should defer to legislation? That's certainly a view, but I don't think it's the majority view.

I don't think you get it. And also this is an universal response from all women I ever talked about exactly this topic (and several guys too who had no idea about cars in general but knew about those famous football players or other celebrities who had suvs so they also needed one).

The root cause is plain and simple - your wife just needs to learn to drive better, then she wouldn't be scared regardless of her seating position. No amount of high position can compensate for overall crappy driving style and corresponding fear of driving and thus the 'need' for high SUVs. To keep her distance from car in front of her (which is basically why she feels the need to be sitting so high so she can anticipate braking earlier), and quick reflexes on the brake while 100% focusing on situation around her (which she should have anyway since there are other bad situations where higher positions doesn't give any advantage, in contrary).

I went the other way - very low-positioned bmws, with correspondingly much better and quicker handling, of course much lower consumption and much more rolling resistance. Its wagon so trunk space is massive and if not enough I can put on biggest Thule roof rack and still fit in our garage and low entry points like store garages (1.9m is the limit with it, never saw entry limiter lower than that). My wife learned to drive properly over time and has exactly same opinion, aka suv never ever because why.

Suvs and variants, at least those who don't go offroad (so most of them) should be reserved for physically challenged people due to easier entry/exit to/from vehicle. And that's about it for real objective advantages, the rest are just emotions which adults should manage to their advantage, not the opposite.

One thing I noticed as soon as I bought my large, offroady SUV (never having driven an SUV before) is that other traffic treated me much more respectfully. When I was in a compact sedan, traffic would swerve in front of me much more often, people would refuse to let me merge, drivers would ride my bumper, and so on. All of those things still happen, but much, much less frequently. For inattentive drivers, it's more difficult to ignore an SUV, and for angry drivers, it's more difficult to bully me around. And yeah, many of these bad drivers are in SUVs themselves, where it's easier to miss a nearby sedan.

Am I fixing the problem by driving an SUV myself? No, but I totally understand why people feel safer in them.

> The root cause is plain and simple - your wife just needs to learn to drive better, then she wouldn't be scared regardless of her seating position.

Correct, but unfortunately such arguments are like shouting into the wind. Bike helmets are the same. People just cannot be convinced that improving one's safety is 99% down to one's riding style and not a thin piece of padding on their head.

It doesn't matter how good a driver I, or your wife, or any woman, or any man is. That drunk driver who's also texting and just had a stroke and passed out from fentanyl could plow into you while you're innocently stopped at a stop light and you're being as defensive as possible. I don't see any way to change that calculus for the paranoid, unfortunately.

True, but false. Accidents that you can do nothing about are vanishingly rare. Even the situation you bring up is not one of them. When stopped/stopping you should be checking your mirrors to make sure the car behind you is at least slowing down.

On the other hand, the parent brings up a great example - following distance from the car in front. One of the most basic concepts of operating any vehicle and his wife is apparently incapable of applying it.

The overall point holds - people are irrationally worried about the 0.0000001% edge cases they can do nothing about anyway instead of trying to improve their chances in the 99.999999% of cases where it's their actions that matter.

It doesn't matter how rare the scenario is in reality, fear often isn't rational, but it makes us do things and we have no control over it. My point isn't that the fear is rational, it isn't. But unless you have a method to prevent people from assuaging their irrational fear by buying a certain vehicle, (or voting a certain way, for that matter), what is your proposal?

The method is obvious - adjusting the law so that such vehicles become way more expensive than the more reasonable ones. Don't ask me how to get that pushed through though.

I'm curious about what the peak potential is and how close (or far) we are from there, because even if all things were 100% equal somehow, in a serious crash women will always fair significantly worse due to less musculature, lower bone density, thinner bones, and so on.

Well at the moment we don't even try, so any improvement will have massive impact.