What's truly maddening is how many of these vehicles which _do not_ meet European safety standards are _already_ in Europe. Walk around Hilversum in the Netherlands and you will see plenty of Dodge Rams (mostly 1500's, but there's even a 2500 Dually usually parked on the sidewalk ("pavement "for Brits) where my kids used to go to school). They're imported under "Individual Vehicle Approval" rules, exempting them from type safety requirements, and on top of that are almost always registered as "business vehicles" (you can tell from the V plate) which means they pay an absolute pittance in tax.
I moved here to get away from American kindercrushers (among other reasons) and I am profoundly concerned that Europe is being invaded by these machines.
(Edit)
Worth noting is that a lot of Dutch street design is based on the idea that people _can_ share space with cars in dense, low speed environments, but that assumption flies out the window when the vehicles are so large you can't even see a kid walking or biking to school.
> "Individual Vehicle Approval" rules, exempting them from type safety requirements
These rules need to start discriminating between "safe for the passenger who bought it" and "safe for everyone else sharing the public space". Let people easily import some old Model T or a cute kei truck but not something that will kill someone else's kids who they can't see.
I'll always catch hate for saying this, but the quickest way to get people into small more efficient vehicles is to eliminate public roads and make the fuckers pay whatever the market rate is for their super-sized diesel coal rolling environmental destruction machine to be on a road.
They'd quickly find out when they're not being subsidized by the general public and people actually have to pay their way to use their vehicles through tolls to people amortizing their road maintenance costs, that the smaller more pedestrian safe cars are the ones that make sense to operate.
Vehicle tax in the Netherlands is already weight-based. This is why the tax rate for EVs is higher than gas cars. The thing is that if you live in Hilversum and are able to import a car from the US, you don't mind the higher tax to begin with
No tax I've seen is anywhere remotely close to following "fourth power law" on axle weight[]. And especially so for gas taxes, as the gas/diesel cost tends to be closer to linear with weight.
Usually what happens is smaller cars subsidize everyone else due to paying a disproportionate tax vs axle weight^~(2-4 depending on fatigue pathway). Depending on tax structure possibly pedestrians/cyclists too but they are usually parasitic on tax basis.
Agreed, tax based on damage to road, and then tax fuel the amount it costs to clean up the pollution the fuel causes, and then use the money to clean up the pollution it causes. Then who cares if you fly your private jet, or giant car, you just pay for it.
Side effects include: reduced pollution, and cheaper ways to clean up pollution
1. I'm not a driver, much less in a country with toll roads. But is it common to have per-vehicle customized toll prices? I would expect to pay a fixed per-car, per-use fee.
2. How is this dependent on privatization? Every car is registered. So it seems pretty easy to enforce taxes on cars. And to do so based on model, weight, whatever you want.
In other words, from what I can tell, making people pay their fair share seems simpler in a public system, if anything. It certainly doesn't require privatization.
FWIW I have little skin in the game, as I said, not a driver, so I would probably benefit both by having to pay less tax and by reducing overall car usage.
Would be great if that was the case in the UK. Currently road tax, or Vehicle Excise Duty is related to CO2 emissions. Road upkeep is from general taxation. Road tax was abolished in 1937, I like to remind motorists of this fact when they say "cyclist should pay road tax". Although EVs now have to pay 3p per mile from 2028, which is a big change. Yeah the super-sized vehicles might pay more in fuel tax and have a higher VED rate, but nowhere near enough.
> Road upkeep is from general taxation. Road tax was abolished in 1937
I was skeptical of this being true since fuel duty is notoriously high in the UK, so I did a quick fact check.
Based on the change in 1937 you are "technically" correct, in that none of the motoring taxes are ring fenced for road funds since 1937.
However the opposite is true of what you are implying... income from fuel duty alone is generally around 3 times larger than all road maintenance spending (a fairly steady +25bn/yr [0] Vs -8bn/yr [1] over the last decade).
In other words, although it's officially one big tax pot, motoring taxes pay for road network expenditure more than 3 times over.
This is why they are introducing the per mile EV tax, because fuel duty provided a proportional tax to road use, but EVs skip that and electricity can't be so easily taxed for road use specifically.
TLDR, UK road users pay for far more than the road network.
> Although EVs now have to pay 3p per mile from 2028, which is a big change.
This is interesting, how is this accomplished?
Over here there was some proposal some years ago to move to a per-mile taxation, with higher tax in congested areas. All managed by some kind of GPS device in each car. There was much opposition as people didn't want the government spying on them via this GPS device, so the plan was eventually dropped.
A simpler approach would be to just record the mileage during annual inspections, but hey why make it simple when you can have some public-private grift making zillions on selling these GPS devices and running the infrastructure for them..
Part of me has also been thinking "let people drive their imported huge trucks but with the understanding that if they kill someone in an accident its not just an accident, its a murder charge for willingly driving such a dangerous vehicle on public roads".
Do you wonder why the world is drifting toward populism?
Because I read comments like that and I don't.
A murder charge for a crime without intent? In the rich west? There just isn't the political will for that. A policy like that is about as serious as luxury space communism.
Yeah there are always levels of risk we as a society have chosen to allow. My thinking was along the lines of how to self-regulate these imports of cars that do not follow the common safety standards our society has chosen if they are forced upon us by trade agreements or well-intentioned loopholes.
("murder" is a bit an extreme reaction but the more realistic idea may be to make harsher judgements the more pointlessly large and dangerous the vehicle is)
Presumably there's some level at which this can be solved in a purely monetary way.
If the average Dodge Ram causes X millimorts of deaths per year (per km? per km on suburban roads?) and every dollar spent on public healthcare (drug interventions? road safety? Fire departments?) saves Y lives, you can increase the tax by X/Y, trust the government to spend the extra revenue in the most effective way, and everyone comes out better off.
I don't think the idea is to have a market of roads to chose from. It is to make the existing car market more efficient by fixing the externality of other people paying for the damage you do to the roads by your choice of (heavy) vehicule.
Even though it may change with technological developments, are you aware that EVs are the heaviest vehicles on the market, by somewhere around 140% the weight of ICE vehicle equivalents?
That's weird because there's no public road near me for miles and I can get 90% of the way to "town" without them.
I've also connected my private roads to a couple other private roads so no one has a monopoly on my way to town.
As for the "barriers to entry" mentioned in that article, is absolutely wild. My road and most the ones in our grid network were made with little more than a dude and a tractor (I think you can get suitable one for $10k off craigslist). I initially made mine with an axe, a light truck, and a rope (to rip out small trees) and there's nothing stopping anyone adjacent from doing the same if I'd block the road.
It would work beautifully for the last 10% of my journey. The only reason why there are no private roads for the las 10% is the county tax funds that road, and only a complete and utter moron would build a road when their "competitor" has a price of zero at the point of use. People commonly ask why the public road has a monopoly; it's not that they are a natural monopoly but rather that it's literally impossible to compete with someone with zero costs (tax costs already sunk) so places with public roads have ~no competition.
The second that road gets defunded by the public coffers, guy with tractor would show back up.
Doesn't work in France with its huge number of toll roads, and in the UK where fuel duty is the largest single part of the price of fuel, it more than covers the cost of public roads, yet people still drive everywhere in increasingly large vehicles. It's not gonna reduce driving, though I do agree it should not be subsidized.
Public transport (especially trains) is very expensive in the UK. If you already have a car it's cheaper to use car even if you're traveling alone. For two it will be more than 2x cheaper than a train. If trains will be affordable I'm sure more people would use them. As to the size - during relatively good pre-COVID times SUV become popular but not many Brits can afford large vehicles today and on average cars in the UK are much smaller than in the US, I would not say it's a big problem.
The reason why British people are able to afford large and expensive vehicles is the heavy reliance on credit. 84% of new cars were bought on finance in 2024[1]
Road damage is exponential with weight, so heavy vehicles are still heavily subsidized in France even if the total revenue is correct.
There was an interesting court case where only giving tolls to 18 wheeler was problematic but the equivalent fee for cars would have literally worked out to under 1 cent.
You're getting downvoted because good enough quality roads are so cheap that market rate wouldn't really do anything. The government needs to be in the road business so it can stick its thumb on the scale.
There are many easier ways to effect this social change, if you’re willing to do basic legislation around the vehicle itself.
The easiest way to decrease unnecessary oversized vehicles, frankly, is to require them be painted pink and flowery. Many men in America pick big vehicles as they're perceived as masculine, and a basic paint job to attack this psychological would probably work.
Less jokingly, add mechanical speed limits to them. Big heavy vehicles are extremely dangerous, but that danger is closely related to speed.
Other options include adding excessive cameras and radar equipment, so the front of the vehicle isn’t a blind spot. Cars have plenty of cameras and mirrors already, so it’s not novel to drivers. It’s a missed opportunity already since this could really be implemented by major manufacturers within a year.
The danger is not just related to speed, it’s about them being sp large that you can’t physically see the old lady or child walking right in front of it
For the UK it is a problem that many of our roads were built for a horse and cart. People like the aesthetics of these narrow, hedge-lined roads, so they won't change. An F150 or Ram is a very large vehicle to be putting down these roads.
I would say that since ~2008 there have was a large increase in distractions for both drivers and pedestrians in the form of screens with a further additions in vehicles later aa well.
Add in the absolutely stupid design of larger passenger vehicles and you get the current trend.
Afaik the payout is determined by your insurance, not the opposing party if you are not the cause. They will usually just stick to the standards set by the companies and not argue.
They are all business vehicles as the premiums would be so insane no person would pay it (which is a hint why they should not be in the road). The problem comes when the crash out costs the business and then you get nothing due to type of insurance (pretty much we pay nothing you pay everything yourself), or the ability of companies to fight endless court battles which your insurance likely does not cover.
My way of middle fingering them is reporting them every time they are either on the curb when there is a parking spot (not legal, blocking pedestrian access is only partially legal when there is no parking pace nearby and you leave enough space), or when they overextend onto the road which is a judgement call and up to the enforcing officer.
You also need to keep notice of people trying to get the municipality to widen parking spots and block that.
As far as I'm aware, having any wheel on the footpath is illegal except in areas specifically signposted for it, but my experience has been that handhaving just didn't care
This spot used to drive me absolutely insane when walking to school with my kids - the gemeente even added marked parking spots and drivers just stole the footpath anyway, so we had to walk in the street, and the gemeente straight refused to issue tickets. The guy on the phone told me "it's not causing any trouble" because hey, it's not like _he's_ ever had to push a pram in the street.
The issue you're running into is that you're a crazy extremist and so the parking ticket people who are accountable to a government that has to at least pretend to care about public opinion aren't going to enforce the rules the way crazy extremists like you want, they're gonna enforce the rules in the way some approximation of the general public wants.
I might have it wrong in the inside/outside city limits with respect to parking on the curb as there are differences. There are also municipal rules but in general they are only for very specific locations afaik.
If you get injured because the municipality refused to act they are on the hook. Thell them you want it on paper they say they will do nothing to prevent this and you want them telling you specifically you have to walk on the street because they do not act on illegally parked cars.
Edit: where I live I have the option of specifically reporting a dangerous situation which in your case I would: near school zones with children involved it always is in my opinion but who am I to judge. It also helps if more people complain. We have a load of parking tourists here since the municipality mode the payed zones so more traffic and more annoyances. My first messages got impolitely unanswered but after a year of complaining by pretty much everyone they finally start doing things.
I have - or rather had, died - an uncle who had a very effective way of dealing with this. He just walked over the cars.
RIP Cor H., one of a kind. I'm pretty sure the fact that in that neighborhood even now people are religiously parking on the street and never on the sidewalk is a remnant of his presence in this world.
To be fair, parking illegally and/or disrespectfully is not a problem with the vehicle type but with the driver and lack of local enforcement. People also block footpaths, roads and parking spots in Polos and similar smaller vehicles, and plenty of workers cause issues with their regular european cans and pickup trucks. A favorite of mine being small roads with perpendicular parking spots, with an extended Mercedes Sprinter parked so that both footpath and road is restricted.
> To be fair, parking illegally and/or disrespectfully is not a problem with the vehicle type but with the driver and lack of local enforcement.
For cars that can be sold without having to get special approval, the obnoxious drivers are a minority (well, maybe BMWs excluded ;-P).
But what driving/parking manners would you expect from someone who went out of their way and paid extra to get e.g. a Ram or an F-150? They're almost guaranteed to disregard any inconvenience they cause with their driving.
Our regular local European vehicles are often larger, they're just safer. So no, nothing specific to the use of imported vehicles.
For example, a Mercedes Sprinter in the standard long box configuration (as is used by local grocery delivery services, plumbers and the likes where I live) is 7.4 meters long , way longer than even the longest American pickup trucks (for some of them, several meters longer!), and is just as wide as them.
In custom box or pickup bed configuration (used by e.g., gardeners), these vehicles get wider (and sharper).
Yes, but a Sprinter has a short nose and the driver's position is such they can see everything in front of them. Those ugly penis extension trucks have huge blind spots immediately in front of them.
Absolutely true but beside the current point of whether they are more or less in the way when parked in residential areas than our normal commercial vehicles.
> For example, a Mercedes Sprinter in the standard long box configuration (as is used by local grocery delivery services, plumbers and the likes where I live) is 7.4 meters long , way longer than even the longest American pickup trucks (for some of them, several meters longer!), and is just as wide as them.
Seems correct on relative length but not width; the F-450 Super Duty body is a bit wider without mirrors than a Sprinter with mirrors;
The Dodge RAM that was being discussed is according to the numbers i see 2020 mm wide without mirrors. The F150 SuperCab (representing the most common US pickup truck) is 2030 mm wide without mirrors. The F-450 Super Duty SRW is only 2032 wide without mirrors - it's just the DRW configuration that adds extra wheels and super wide wheel wells on the back.
A standard mercedes sprinter in van configuration is 2020 mm wide without mirrors, which is as wide as the RAM and just 10mm narrower than the f150. I suspect the sprinter has wider mirrors, but I don't have the F-150 numbers to compare to so I'll leave that unanswered. Pickup configurations of the sprinter go much wider (and have extended mirrors to fit) - a common compact pickup bed configuration has a 2030mm internal bed width for example.
Note that the F-450 Super Duty is not applicable to the discussion as it won't work in the EU: A standard vehicle (class B) has an upper weight limit of 3500 kg. The F-450 Super Duty would have to be registered as an actual truck (class C), which requires a different drivers license and the use of a tachograph to track all driving and adherence to resting period rules. We don't use those vehicle classes unless strictly necessary.
You rarely see Sprinters parked in pedestrian areas though, they are commercial vehicles. Whereas these RAMs are often used as standard personal vehicles for grocery shopping.
I can't speak for where you live of course, but they park in pedestrian areas where I live.
It's the norm in many businesses for employees to drive their work vehicle home and park it where they live, so they're everywhere. Not as many as regular passenger cars of course, but you'll see them on any residential road. Gardeners, plumbers, electricians, delivery services, this is the norm for all of them (a perk of sorts). Even big name-brand logistics companies, as it's common for the drivers to be independent contractors owning the van themselves so home is the only place to park.
They are also used for errands. They're legal for private use proportionate to the amount of VAT paid irrespective of registration type here, so you'll see them pick up/drop off kids, do groceries, recycle bottles, etc. in such vehicles too. Pretty sure that would be just as legal where you are given familiar EU rules.
> he problem comes when the crash out costs the business and then you get nothing due to type of insurance (pretty much we pay nothing you pay everything yourself), or the ability of companies to fight endless court battles which your insurance likely does not cover.
Business automobile insurance doesn't work any differently than consumer automobile insurance. Liability payouts don't usually (ever?) have deductibles. I was recently sideswiped by a guy driving a massive pickup truck for work and their insurance paid me promptly and fairly without any fuss at all. At least the state liability insurance laws I am familiar with do not change just because you're a business.
Absolutely the same with RAMs in Germany. Big toys for rich guys to compensate something small. Takes at least 2 parking spots and doesn’t fit anyway.
On other hand the RAMs are not relevant for the average citizen. Crazy fuel consumption is a showstopper. And the ones with some extra cash will continue to import with German „Individual Vehicle Approval“ equivalent. In my eyes it’s another useless European regulation. Let poor people import cheap Toyotas from overseas.
Would be the end different if it was another oversized car like X7, G-Klasse or Cayenne?
Edit: I am really curious why there is no real vehicle physical size tax in Germany. Let’s take reference as VW Golf. Smaller cars cost less, bigger more. I agree to pay more, but current insanity with RAMs and vans should be somehow regulated.
A lot could probably be done with a simple "a person 1.80m in length must be able to see a 50cm high object 1 metre in front of the car" or something like that. Just making up numbers here and don't know what would be reasonable, but it seems this doesn't need to be that hard?
Weight also matters of course. Hopefully this relatively simple ruling will fix some of that too.
But or course you are correct this is not only about American cars. Europeans can build big cars as well.
Cars are taxed by engine displacement in Germany. It's rather low compared to insurance and gas cost though. Indirectly larger cars are taxed through high gas tax.
G-klasse W465 is shorter than the equivalent medium sized sedan (E-klasse W214, and even shorter than my W212), and the hood is nowhere near as high as those overseas pickup trucks.
The monstrously large (5.8 meters) G63 6x6 is considerably rarer (i have never seen one in person).
This seems to be concerning but as a Dutch person who has lived in the UK for a long time the relatively recent home-grown 'fatbike' issue seems to be a much more pressing problem for Dutch road safety than this and isn't being dealt with effectively as far as I understand.
Having said that I think these American pick-ups (and large SUV's, they are part of the same problem) are a common sight here as well and should not be allowed on the road (unless maybe you can show you need one for work or business).
I see those in Sweden as well. But I also know that people are stupid. And I rather have a stupid person on a stupid bike than a stupid person in an SUV. Especially since in an accident, they will lose in any case because most are likely not street legal.
> This seems to be concerning but as a Dutch person who has lived in the UK for a long time the relatively recent home-grown 'fatbike' issue seems to be a much more pressing problem for Dutch road safety than this and isn't being dealt with effectively as far as I understand.
This is the appeal to worse problems fallacy. Both are problems, both need to be addressed.
They are routinely modified to exceed legal speed limits and owned by 10 year old or younger kids. Going nearly 30mph on a footpath whilst holding a mobile phone.
I think they are also unregistered.
Yes- in the Netherlands the term 'fatbike' is pretty much synonymous with the battery powered bikes only (I presume elsewhere this may be different). They are mini motorcycles really- but exempt from all the rules and regulations that would apply to regular motorcycles.
That doesn't look like rural road in the UK (yellow lines down each side). I drive down rural roads everyday and there are usually no road markings.
Honestly getting past people isn't that much of an issue. There are normally passing spots where you pull over to let people through.
"Chelsea Tractor" is more of a dig at people Range Rovers for the looks and it never been using off-road.
There is a brand in the UK that have decided to "own" the label. Not sure why you would want/need a Ineos Grenadier in London, but some people will buy one.
I don't see the issue with the driving standards in the photo. Road is quite wide too, and those yellow lines suggest some town area.
You do get problems in rural areas with idiots in Chelsea Tractors though. Leave them in the city -- there's no room for you in rural areas.
(For those whining about having to do the school run, just got back in my 1.6m wide car with 2 kids, 6 bags, skateboard and guitar, no problems on the 8 miles of single track road even when the lorries come the other way)
> I don't see the issue with the driving standards in the photo. Road is quite wide too, and those yellow lines suggest some town area.
It isn't the Rural Roads in the UK. Also the cars in the photo are kinda normal sized. The Volkwagen people carrier thing in the photo isn't that wide actually.
There is one driving around near where I live in Amsterdam as well.
I am quite tall, even for Dutch standards, but the hood reaches my shoulder easily. It also drives around quite a busy neighbourhood. So I expect this specific car to kill someone within the next 5 years or so.
That may be true, but on average I would expect them to be better drivers than the pick-up-in-the-inner-city crowd, whose choices are already off to a poor start before they turn the ignition key, after all, they picked the wrong vehicle for the surroundings.
That doesn't just seem selfish, it is selfish. And if it was a renovation crew or so carrying tools I would say they at least have some use for it (though a VW transporter would be just as effective, if not more so).
A Mercedes Vito, despite being nearly 1m shorter and normal car width, has 4-5x the carry capacity and a 3x longer bed than the RAM. These cars are just for show, you can probably find a Kei truck with similar capacity.
They're starting to become more common in Spain too, even in villages/towns where they definitely don't fit. Through the years I've seen two of them stuck because they tried to fit into small village roads where hardly normal passenger cars can fit.
> […] and on top of that are almost always registered as "business vehicles" (you can tell from the V plate) which means they pay an absolute pittance in tax.
In Ontario, Canada, (AIUI) you have to get a commercial car plate for pickup trucks.
I don't know whether there are hordes of bejaarden buying Dodges for nostalgic reasons, but that would mean the Dodge brand has some insane staying power. My guess would be that is absurd and unlikely.
I really dig your deadpan sprinkling of Nederlands. Some words have that etymological acuity that makes them irresistible to just deploy. I was always amazed by how many Yiddish and French words there are in Hollands.
Germanic languages share a massive amount of crossover. Just knowing English and a small amount of Afrikaans I saw cognates all over Western Europe from Netherlands, to Denmark, Sweden, Germany.
It should be illegal, but I do think you might just be living close to some people who really love trucks. 5k is not a lot across Europe, popular models sell 10x that.
They are heavily clustered around US military bases. If you life near one you will see a lot if oversized US vehicles, in most of the rest of Europe you can go months or years without seeing one
> They are heavily clustered around US military bases.
They’re clustered around areas of idiots with means. I’m nowhere near a us military base but there’s a bunch of these where I live, including two or three owned at houses I pass by on my way to work.
Honestly, local governments should just grow a pair and say no to this kind of shit.
If the US government wants to give its soldiers perks, they can rent or loan them a local car. Probably cheaper all round than flying/shipping in their financed Dodge RAM anyway.
Then again, American personnel being arseholes to the locals is well established from Okinawa to Croughton so it's probably endorsed as a power thing.
<facepalm>. This sort of breathless screeching rhetoric from people like you are is exactly why it's a difficult to solve social/political problem rather than a mundane technical optimization issue.
The common man hears your sort of rhetoric, knows he can't reasonably be an expert in the subject matter, but he can pattern match on how you're saying what you're saying and it matches up with a whole bunch of crap that's been bad for him.
I really hate the modern high hood truck styling. But I hate it a little less knowing it's followed the problem people to Europe.
Modern US trucks are an absolute atrocity. I am the demographic that thinks they look cool and might one day have bought one should I end up with more money than I knew what to do with if I hadn't learned that they're death traps.
The tall grill means impact to pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcycles is basically instant death as their head - the only thing above the grill - gets whiplashed onto the rigid tip of the hood. On a normal vehicle you get your legs swiped and rotate your whole body onto an intentionally flexible area of the hood for a much gentler impact.
The visibility from the driver seat is not only much worse than our actual semis, but also worse than actual tanks. You could have half a kindergarten and a small vehicle in front of your car without knowing.
As for the tax, eh - tbf these vehicles are mostly used for business purposes by sole proprietors and the likes, and while they're stupid vehicles they do still do the job. A fully decked Iveco Daily or Mercedes Sprinter is also expensive with little registration tax. Registration tax is a weird (and arguably stupid) system, this isn't really an outlier in that regard.
I roll my eyes more when I see a sports car attempted registered as a van.
Living in the US, what I find even more wild is just how many people purchase them here who have zero need to own a truck that size. It's got to be the most absurd parts of our modern cultural identity.
Even if the owner is using it as a rugged machine for hauling tools and supplies back and forth, they make for terrible work vehicles. A bed that's advertised as 6 foot actually measures about 5' 7" if you're lucky and the wheel wells eat into it so much that loading anything wider than maybe 4' just feels stupid. Nothing about it feels convenient or helpful when compared to a proper work van or a small flatbed. It's basically just a comfy exoskeleton for the driver to pickup groceries.
Meanwhile, I'm driving from site to site with a 4-cylinder hatchback full of tools in custom boxes I made getting twice the gas mileage. It gets some funny looks, but it gets the job done, which is more than I can say for most of the not-a-scratch-on-them trucks I see on the road, here.
I do empathize with those picking the vehicle not on practicality but cool factor - considering how common and accepted gadget cravings are in other areas, I would find it unfair to attack that aspect. I'm currently using ~5GB out of my laptops 64GB of RAM, pretty sure I could start a small fire with my flashlight, and my motorcycle has off-road suspension in a country where the most demanding obstacle is a curb. Other things would objectively fit my needs better while costing less, but be less fun - and fun can be hard to find these days.
As you say, they are absolutely terrible for work use as well - Japanese kei trucks famously have larger beds than some common US pickup trucks, and the size of the custom beds we use in the EU makes the US ones look like absolute kids toys - but that too I wouldn't mind too much if they were just forced to be safe and with decent emissions so the idiocy mainly affected the driver and their wallets.
I'm not too impressed with your vehicle only getting twice the gas mileage though. I'd expect more than that. :P
> I'm not too impressed with your vehicle only getting twice the gas mileage though. I'd expect more than that. :P
I'm going to blame the ham radio antennas and bike rack ;)
But in all seriousness, I was getting slightly better mileage when the car was new 6 years ago. It has declined a bit, despite my regular maintenance, but I'm still very pleased with it. It might be more than twice the mileage of the average truck on the road, to be honest, but I find it hard to get a clear number. I think some truck owners embellish the mileage they actually get, as does the dealer sticker on the new vehicles for sale since those numbers assume perfect terrain with no traffic, last I checked. Then I hop into a co-worker's 2020 truck and realize he's getting 12mpg on a good day and nearly have a heart attack.
My vehicle gets between 45 and 55mpg on average, depending if I'm on the highway a lot or more urban environments.
It's almost impossible to navigate parking garages if two such trucks park opposite each other. Or if one parks on an end that people need to navigate around.
People spend insane amounts of money buying these monstrosities too. It seems as a society we've normalized spending a year's salary on a vehicle, or rather getting a 7-year loan and making crazy monthly payments. I don't understand it. My then normal-sized, now smallish, 13-year old car, that I paid off 11 years ago, still runs great and I can park it easily.
> People spend insane amounts of money buying these monstrosities too
This is also another part of the whole truck-craze in the US that I do not understand. An F150, for example, starts around $40,000 USD for base models, not including taxes and hidden fees. I purchased my car (an HEV, mind you) back in 2019 for just over half that price, spend about $500 annually on regular maintenance that I'm not able to do myself to keep things tip top, and spend about half as much in fuel as my coworkers who travel about the same amount as me for our jobs. Accounting regularly double-checks that I turned in all my fuel receipts because they still don't quite grasp that my car gets far, far better gas mileage.
All that said, these guys make about the same money I do, some a little less since they're newbies, which is to say we are all very underpaid for what we do, wealthy by no standards. And yet, they made these massive purchases while struggling to pay bills or complaining that fuel is too expensive at the pump, etc. These are the same people who buy two paychecks worth of fireworks every July 4th just to watch it all burn in 15 minutes.
Makes me think part of our cultural identity includes regularly acting against our own interests.
I'm living in EU, thinking about getting some pickup. Just want to try this kind of vehicle (and I would love to transport my motorcycle, building materials etc). But I want something small - it looks like almost non-existent market here (there are cars like older f150, s10, etc - but very, very limited offers). Everyone gets the big modern trucks, that are unusable in our tight spaces.
I would love to transport my motorcycle, building materials
Something like a Peugeot Partner (just to name something) + a trailer does all of that. With the added benefit that without the trailer attached it's a fairly normal size.
My uncle got a Hilux for his gardening business. Seems to work well for driving around lawnmowers and other stuff, also for towing the large self-driving lawnmovers and other heavy equipment.
> The visibility from the driver seat is not only much worse than our actual semis, but also worse than actual tanks. You could have half a kindergarten and a small vehicle in front of your car without knowing.
Yeah, mentioned in a comment, driving a Ford Expedition on holiday in the US I almost hit a hit walking down the sidewalk.
It literally had better visibility going backwards in the rear view camera than it did going forwards.
> The tall grill means impact to pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcycles is basically instant death as their head - the only thing above the grill - gets whiplashed onto the rigid tip of the hood. On a normal vehicle you get your legs swiped and rotate your whole body onto an intentionally flexible area of the hood for a much gentler impact.
What's infuriating is the EuroNCAP safety tests refuse to acknowledge this. SUVs get the same bonnet impact test as small cars do and end up scoring highly due to have a large bonnet surface area despite the fact that actual impacts with pedestrians does not happen like that with SUVs.
And then (wrong) smug wanks on the internet talk about how much safer their SUVs are for pedestrians than small cars based on quoting NCAP scores.
Aren’t “bad fuel efficiency” and “can’t park in town” already their own priced-in disadvantages?
Fuel consumption itself is already taxed at the pump.
And I think “too heavy” already means higher tax in NL.
The weird thing is that the EU is really not shy about banning things, and yet here we are in a thread about American Monster Trucks taking over Amsterdam.
> Aren’t “bad fuel efficiency” and “can’t park in town” already their own priced-in disadvantages?
> Fuel consumption itself is already taxed at the pump.
yes to both, but that doesn't mean that extra incentives for high efficiency and extra discouragement nudges for low efficiency shouldn't be present. they're orthogonal features of the economy.
> And I think “too heavy” already means higher tax in NL.
looks like not high enough, judging by this whole thread :)
> The weird thing is that the EU is really not shy about banning things
yes, but it's also known for not moving fast, as all large committees are - and when they finally move, the policy response can be deployed for a market which doesn't exist anymore.
Luckily I haven't seen a single Cybertruck in the north/north-east of Spain. Pretty sure I'd call the police if I saw one as they're clearly illegal here.
These American trucks are driven by Dutch or by eastern Europeans (e.g. from construction industry)? The Dutch cycling culture and urban planning are adorable, but we are terrible selfish assholes especially regarding the cars.
It isn't algorithmically generated. I used to spend a lot of time in cyclist circles both IRL and online and there is a very vocal minority of cyclists that basically hate cars and motorists. The stereotype exists for a reason.
At some point he basically says: "I don't even love bikes, but they're useful. If I could choose, I would go by public transit everywhere, especially trams". And he has tons of videos where he explains exactly why:
0. Most of everything he publishes refers to urban areas.
1. Bikes are better for society.
2. Public transit is even better for society.
3. Trams are probably the best form of public transportation (again, for society).
He's not a recreational cyclist (light road bike, lycra - sports/racing), he's a utility cyclist (big heavy upright bike, regular clothes - take kids to school, commute, do grocery runs).
The reasoning is these trucks make no practical or economic sense in Europe. They are not allowed to be sold, because they are dangerous to bystanders, are polluting and oversized. Only through some loophole quite a few have been imported, which is very frustrating to all of us that are intimidated and appalled by seeing these on our roads.
These trucs signal that the driver does not care about other people, environment, climate, etc. Because they are dangerous, obnoxious and polluting. And instead of calling these things trucks, I think Kindercrusher is a perfectly apt description.
> Okay. But you've posted 12 times already in this thread that isn't even an hour old, mostly emotions and hyperbolics as quoted above. Kindercrushers?
FWIW, I am not him but I could have written exactly the same, just changing the location. Yes, we do tend to care when selfish arseholes ruin it for everyone, and put other people’s lives at risk for no good reason. And kindercrusher is a perfectly good description of these things.
So tired of current trend in Europe, the Goverment should solve every issue & every day everyone wants a new rule.
We have now so many rules either they are not enforced or they are making everythingn slow or expensive.
Now to solve those issues, they will call for new legislations, but again they will be enforced only for the first 2 weeks. And then again a call for new rules will be made.
Take for instance FAT bikes in Netherlands, these are e-bikes with big wheel that young kids like. They drive like madman, harrass women in parks & everybody wants to ban them. But there is already enough legislation to take care of these kids, they are just not enforcing them. And probably rightly so, because they have bigger issues to deal with.
Opening that video, American-style pickup trucks are about 40% more likely to kill a pedestrian 100% more likely to kill a child (the video argues that this mostly stems from the shape of the front). These cars also get into more crashes
Honestly, banning these things seems sensible when the only thing going for them for most buyers is seemingly an appreciation of their style
A fat bike is a bike with >3.8" tires and is not necessarily an e-bike nor an issue. Some people use them in the snow, sand or trail without issues to anyone and I have occasionally also used mine in the city because it was more comfortable to ride at slow speed than my road bike and stops on a dime thanks to the available grip.
There are a number of trendy aliexpress quality e-bikes that are also using fat tires and are ridden by idiots but the problem is not fat bikes per se. The problem is idiots on unrestricted/modded e-bikes. Ban fat bikes and they will use unrestricted e-bikes with different tires and the problem will be the same.
Yeah that's kind of the point, new rules will often not solve things, but will just move the issue. The underlying issue with certain groups in society & not enforcing will remain.
In theory many laws are based on good ideas, but in practice they dont or only partially accomplish what they set out to do. Few examples:
- Bureaucracy around clinical trials
The old Clinical Trials Directive (2001/20/EC) was meant to harmonise standards, but in practice it led to lots of extra admin and different interpretations in each country, which made multi-country trials slow and expensive.
EUR-Lex
You can see the effect in the numbers: Europe’s share of commercial clinical trials fell from ~22% in 2013 to about 12% in 2023, even while global trial numbers increased by ~38%.
- Medical Device Regulation (MDR & IVDR) bottleneck
Meant for safety, but has meant delays and uncertainty for new devices and even risks of shortages of older ones, which clearly affects innovation.
* https://www.meddeviceonline.com/doc/we-re-heading-toward-a-b...
- Data protection (GDPR) and health/science data
Complexity and fragmentation of implementation can definitely slow things down, especially for big pan-European projects or AI/“big data” medicine. In theory it's good, but researcher or not being helped on how they can compete worldwide while being GDPR compliant, meaning EU will get behind & certain research is done elsewhere
Many more examples in other fields then medicine. And there are clearly a lot of good laws, but our idea of running a country is just adding lots of new rules every year is just faulty.
>EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%
I didn't know this, but it is absolutely crazy. Every EU politician who tries to subvert car safety should be dismissed and tried for endangering public safety.
> Every EU politician who tries to subvert car safety should be dismissed and tried for endangering public safety.
The problem is coming from the other side, the Americans are threatening to start a new trade war if the EU doesn't permit their murdermobiles on the European roads.
IMO pedestrian safety should still come above all else, but this is not an initiative coming from some EU representatives who want to own a Cybertruck. Blocking these cars can have impact on the war against Ukraine and the prices of fuel and other import products on the short term.
As an European, I'd rather have a trade war, than bend 90 degrees.
But the EU commission will bend and sell us out, the same way it's selling european privacy to security and data companies lobbying it (just check how many times Thorn, Palantir et al have met with EU officials, lobbying is recorded and publicly accessible).
It's a tactic, agree to the deal, the US ignores us. Allow the deal to get destroyed in parliament and the courts and it has no effect. The deal was a means by which to get enough time to figure out the correct response. We've been doing this kind of thing for decades.
This is the way. The current US administration is a 2 year old with ADHD and shiny distractions abound. Agree to deals and let him claim wins, and then bury it in bureaucracy and common sense.
This is, essentially, how the US government survived Trump 1.0, and is why Trump 2.0 has been so concerned with gutting bureaucracy and placing vapid yes-men in the cabinet, but they can't really do that in Europe.
It's one of the few times where EU bureaucracy is a huge advantage.
I mean, the commission said it "intends to accept". Given the EC's legendary lightning-fast speed, that presumably puts the timeline long after ol' minihands is out of office, and thus irrelevant.
Even when the EC actually _wants_ to do something, it typically struggles to get it done in under a decade.
The EC is not that slow when it comes to the American trade wars. The timeline suddenly shrinks to months instead of years because this stuff could majorly disrupt the economy (and safety) across the European continent.
The EC may not fear the (mostly disinterested) European citizen body, but it does fear immediate actions by world powers.
> The EC is not that slow when it comes to the American trade wars. The timeline suddenly shrinks to months instead of years because this stuff could majorly disrupt the economy (and safety) across the European continent.
I dunno, like the last "deal" basically makes a load of promises that the EU has no legislative ability to enforce. So it's basically just performative.
And honestly, given that the US is gonna sell out Ukraine, then this (and most other) trade deals should be ripped up. This would hurt my country (and me) a lot, but it's probably still the right thing to do, as TACO is definitely a possibility if the US markets crash.
Yup, in general those "trade deals" are long on vague aspirational stuff, much of it totally outside the EC's power to grant, and short on promises. Notably the EU "trade deal" includes _private investment_ in the US; obviously the EU cannot direct or really influence private investment in the US, and indeed the figure quoted is about the amount of Europe-sourced private investment one would expect in US in the normal course of things.
Honestly I suspect Trump _knows_ this, too; the point of the trade deals is not to be substantive but to give Trump something with impressive numbers to boast about, and both sides are fully aware of this.
The problem with accepting yet another blackmail (or else trade war, or else NATO doesn't really exist anymore) is just a slippery slope. Not the first request that was made like this, not the last.
>lobbying is recorded and publicly accessible
As in the meeting dates or the actual talks? Mind dropping a link?
For each lobbying company/group you can download a pdf listing all their activities.
Of course, we don't know what happens beyond the official encounters, as there is no legal requirement to report "I bumped into X lobbyist in a restaurant and we had a chat".
Trade wars work both ways. So far the US export market is not doing so great. All those tariffs are raising the cost of exported goods as well. And those were already too expensive before the tariffs. If the US wants more US cars on EU roads, it needs to start making better cars. It's that simple. But in the EU, cars have to compete with domestic cheap cars and imported Korean and Chinese cars. It's a level playing field. Hence not a lot of US cars on the roads. A few Teslas (made in the EU mostly), a few Fords (some made on the VW platform), and a sprinkling of niche imports for things like muscle cars and pickup trucks. They are quite rare but you see one or two once in a while.
Maybe the legislation allowing their import should take their special status in to account.
I would suggest mandatory semi (or full) trailer truck drivers' license required for anyone who operates these. In addition, they should be indicated as a new category of "recreational trucks", with harsh penalties specific to them especially regarding road accidents.
For example, if found guilty of reckless driving, or causing accidents, the vehicle would be permanently confiscated. (On top of personal fines, loss of license etc as already sentenced by law.) Perhaps the law enforcement could then be given access to such confiscated vehicles, creating also some incentive to enforce the law.
> threatening to start a new trade war if the EU doesn't permit their murdermobiles on the European roads
The strange part is that those car can be sold in the EU markets already. They just have to comply with the same pollution and safety standards as other cars. What would justify an exception?
Fuck it. Let the Americans start another trade war then. This nonsense has been going on long enough, if times need to get tough so be it then, start earlier rather than in 5 years when these misery machines are everywhere and the car arms race is in full effect.
It doesn't matter how much is this repeated by politicians: it's a lie to suggest that the EU does not spend enough for defense.
We spend multitudes of times more than our only realistic threat. And that threat can't even wage war with Ukraine, you expect Russia to be able to fight Poland, yet alone the rest of the European countries?
Also, just a reminder: US servicemen have not been sent to fight a war for European souls since almost a century. Whereas European soldiers are actively deployed even now in the middle East for wars that Washington started.
Please start looking more at facts and less about propaganda. Of course Europe should step up in being more independent defense-wise, but you'd be a fool if you think the US does not enjoy and leverage the current status provides.
> Of course Europe should step up in being more independent defense-wise, but you'd be a fool if you think the US does not enjoy and leverage the current status provides.
> it's a lie to suggest that the EU does not spend enough for defense.
Which is it? Is Europe spending enough, or does American have influence because Europe is still cripplingly dependent on the US?
I wouldn’t argue that the US isn’t abusing that dependence at the moment.
What I would argue is that the US spent 20 years telling Europe to get its act together, and finally in the last 3 years that has started to change, but notably that was years after NATO was publicly declared braindead. So it was pretty irresponsible of the Europeans to leave themselves beholden to the US for so long.
> So it was pretty irresponsible of the Europeans to leave themselves beholden to the US for so long.
> Which is it?
The answer is complex.
Europe's dependence on US is not much on the military front (again, there are no realistic threats in a conventional war that European countries have) as it is on a political and diplomatic one.
Europe is made of 27+ countries that have different foreign policies, goals, and whose word in a war of real defence has never been tested.
Under that situation US is an absolutely critical reference as in times of difficulties even countries with different interests will still realistically rally around US guidance.
You can thus understand why the group of Baltics and Poland are absolutely much more leaning into playing friends with Washington than they are with Brussels.
Europe is absolutely dependent as of now, and likely will be forever for these very reasons, on US.
The answer is complex, but it should never read as "Europe does not have enough weapons or soldiers to defend itself", rather than "Europe is not taking their own defence under its own responsibility".
It is difficult to tell Italians: "stop producing your own rifles, tanks, mines, etc, let's all agree on a single design". It is hard to tell the Portuguese "look, you're gonna deploy two brigades in Estonia for the next 10 years". It is hard to tell the Belgians they have to follow the command of an Austrian in a war fought in Eastern Europe.
Europe is plagued by differences that the common alliance with the US flattens out. Without US, it's a borderline disaster. It's not a matter of money being spent.
> there are no realistic threats in a conventional war that European countries have
You underestimate russia and clearly only glance over war news over past few years, if at all. They are not sending their maximum potential, nor sending their best equipment like tanks, Ukraine is rather a minor operation for them. Its true their conventional warfare capabilities have been damaged to certain extent, in some cases severely but China has stepped up and covered many holes, no reason to think they won't continue testing their equipment further (US did & does the same, its basic realpolitik).
Do you think they ran out of rather modern tanks and thus are sending 60-70 year old models? Far from it, they keep them aside and send on Ukraine the oldest tanks that can still move around, ~100mm cannon on wheels with HEAT rounds works fine even if old. They still didn't introduce mandatory draft because they didn't need to, folks dying in Ukraine now are all volunteers who get a massive signing bonus high enough to buy a flat or some smaller/older house. Their current drone capabilities would decimate any western Europe army in few weeks to the cinder, even Poland is not be completely up to the game, only Ukraine realistically is right now. These days, war is fought with 2 ingredients - drones and enough boots on the ground with nontrivial attrition.
Can they conquer all Europe? Nope, but they could easily take baltics for example. Thus they also subvert via bribes and corrupt exploitable politicians - look at Orban, Fico and failed attempt in Romania. Those countries would not fight them nato or not, they would roll on their back and invite them themselves, in (maybe not vain) hope that their corrupt highly criminal regimes can continue and thrive under new&old rulers in same vein as in Belarus.
Don't underestimate them, they are by far the biggest threat Europe as a whole has, it has been like that for past 100+ years. Their inferiority complex runs deep and western democracies are a direct threat to their typical corrupt dictatorship way of life. 2025 is really not the year to have such misguided & naive ideas.
Also as a proper mafia state they only understand power. Demonstrate you have enough and you will be left alone. Otherwise not so much.
You think that if Europe spend "enough" America would have not influence? You think that Europe would be allowed to spend "enough" but only in Europe companies?
They like to talk about the bad Russians influencing politics and people in Europe, but compared to the Americans they are flies in the wall. This people that is taking decisions now in Europe, finish later working in the Atlantic Council or something like that. That is the root of the European independence problem.
This is a bogus statement. EU countries have met or surpassed defense budget goals, usually the ones that don't have the contracts in progress but the full payouts not done yet since they are still in progress. Percentage of GDP to military spending has been criticized as a bad way to measure how much military spending is done and needed.
Additionally, the European countries are paying for the war while the US is taking that money and the optics of providing certain military supplies. This whole situation is just exploitation of the EU with the benefit of the US' companies.
Only about a third of European defense spending goes to the US. Europes struggles to ramp up production have been an ongoing story for many years now.
There is still about a trillion dollars of NATO defense spending to replace if Europe does not want to be reliant on America. Doable, but spending a third of that on American equipment wouldn’t help matters.
Perhaps if Europeans got an earlier start, instead of ignoring nearly two decades of warnings and a clearly deteriorating security situation, they wouldn’t need to care so much about US policy. Better late than never.
Of course the economist would say that. Of course that a trillion dollars have to be replaced.
Who is that enemy Europe is going to fight? The Russians? Makes not sense at all.
No they did not. Just a handful of countries are spending close to 5% of their GDP on defense, the rest are doing everything in their power to pay as little as possible.
The 5% GDP deadline is 2035. The 2% by 2024 was met. Not even the US spends 5% of their GDP on defense. Again as I've stated, it's been criticized as a bad goal to use this metric. In actuality, people who push the narrative that Europe is being bankrolled by the US will never be satisfied by any percentage.
> Just a handful of countries are spending 5% of their GDP on defense
Have you even read the comment in full before responding? I'm talking about this part of it:
> Percentage of GDP to military spending has been criticized as a bad way to measure how much military spending is done and needed
But since you wouldn't get it anyways:
The "5% of GDP" is a number that US politicians came up with, seemingly out of nowhere, because they figured they want to boost their military industry.
EU countries are already spending that or even more - just look at Ukraine spending by EU countries - but since it's spent on their own domestic defense industry, US politicians don't like it. That's the point.
They don't want us spending 5% of the GDP on defense unless we buy their stuff. So here we are.
The 5% number is fudged, much of the increase over 2% comes from civic infrastructure investment. They’re fluffing the numbers.
Most EU defense spending isn’t on US equipment (only ~35%); I don’t get where the European victim mentality is coming from here - Europe can and is building up its own defense industry.
There’s some Trump nonsense more recently about buy American, but the demands to take security seriously have been going on for nearly 20 years, and have been largely ignored until Ukraine round two.
> I don’t get where the European victim mentality is coming from here
It’s coming from the fact that we’re already in a difficult time with a slowdown in economy and then get bullied into spending the money we could be using to help our own people on new US weapons.
All for Trump to then sign half of Ukraine off to Russia.
The World Bank and IMF are providing loans to Ukraine, tied to economic reforms as usual (removal of workers protection etc). It’s not like there is an actual dependency on any purported nicety of the US.
A correct statement would be that the Europe didn't want to pay for US equipment for its own defense.
The US has previously discouraged Europe from building out its own defense industry, the current situation is due to that a dovish view of Russia therefore less of a need to spend money on equipment and troops for a land war.
Not to mention it's going to be the EU that will partially bear the cost of rebuilding Ukraine after war and Trump will not even let them have a say in how the land should be split.
As an American, I have plenty of disappointment in government right now with my own. But it's also incredibly disappointing how many other world leaders are letting Trump roll over them.
The trade wars go both ways. Certainly it can be a bit of a collective action problem when it comes to individual countries that are smaller than the US, but the EU as a whole should be able to negotiate on even-enough footing with the US on these kinds of issues.
Any war goes both ways, but that's not the point. The point is: can you win a war against your adversary? Can the UK win a trade war against the US for example?
The thing is, nobody else wants trade wars. Both sides of a trade war lose in a system of otherwise free commerce, the "winning" party is the party that is willing to sacrifice the most to make a point. Everyone but maybe the super wealthy are worse off. Americans are paying the price for their government's idiotic tariff game, but the real cost will come over the following years, and in some cases decades.
The EU is trying to minimize the damage for its constituents, they're not interested in a stupid power play. Threats of reciprocating in trade wars are meaningless if the leadership you're threatening doesn't care if their people starve.
Playing tough doesn't matter anyway, the American voting public will just blame the EU for all the bad things that happen if the EU's actions do have an impact, laugh at the EU if a diplomatic solution is found, and the American leadership will repeat whatever the last guy to verbally jerk off Trump said for at least the coming three years.
In a way, it's kind of impressive. The EU was not ready for America to devolve into this level of clown politics this fast, and that left them unprepared.
Decisions are still made by our local polititians, not by Americans, who should take responsibility for those, especially in such a serious situation as this.
Pressure from Americans - who have no say in how we live in Europe -, remote or suspected, transient consequences on costs and conflics, all have lower, much lower priorities than keeping the population safe and healthy. Dead people need no cheap fuel, need no prompt conflict resolution, need no short term tariff settlements, and do not care what Americans think. Dead people are just dead! EU polititians should let people stay alive foremost of all! The rest come aftre that.
And all because these stupid huge trucks. Not even close in importance! Does not worth it.
> I said there was no way this truck would pass a pedestrian impact safety standard. Now, I wasn't wrong that the truck won't pass a pedestrian impact safety standard, it won't! And that's why they can't sell it in Europe. [...] But I didn't realise that America has no pedestrian impact standards. [...] America actually allows companies to self-certify a variety of aspects of safety.
See also: Boeing. It is the exact same kind of fuck-up. Regulators should not be in bed with the industries they regulate. That's a hard problem to solve, because where if not in industry would you get the expertise. But these kind of revolving door arrangements are extremely problematic.
And that is not counting in the fact that there far more pedestrians on the street in EU than in the USA. If there were the same amount of pedestrians in the USA as in the EU the statistics would be even worse.
When there are more obstacles and hazards on the road drivers tend to slow down and pay attention. Pedestrian deaths in my city peaked in 2025, but they didn't happen in the walkable central areas of the city where pedestrians are common, they happened out in the 'burbs where the roads are wide and pedestrians are few.
The general problem is the US are a bully and Europe just caves, always. We should put up a serious fight. Block all US imports, starting with tech, and see what happens. Who cares if we sell less champagne??!?
It’s not about champagne. It’s about us not making anything like the Patriot air defense system. Or us not having the capabilities to command our disparate militaries cohesively without US involvement in NATO. The whole Western order has been built on the premise of US being the corner stone that ties everything together.
Thank God the French have always been suspicious about it since the Suez crisis, hence we _do_ have at least some independent capabilities.
For those who don't know, the French (and British) instigated the Suez crisis. It was a highly illegal attempt at regime change in Egypt and the US along with the USSR and United Nations rightfully pressured the French to stop. Bizarre example to illustrate the need for military independence.
Unfortunately your assessment is based on the faulty premise that anyone in international politics does anything to be nice.
The US doesn't give one rats ass about Egypt. The US won and got their way in Suez and the international seas in general. Europe lost.
There is no right in geo politics - only might. It's completely machiavellian. This is because you don't get to elect your neighbors leaders, and so they aren't beholden to you. International politics fundamentally doesn't work like national politics because of this. You can't stop Putin, Trump, or Xi, from taking what is yours unless you have the steel and oil to stop them. You can't sue them or vote them out like in national politics.
The US is underwriting European security (and by extension various European welfare states).
Do you really want to block the import of arms and financial aid to Ukraine?
If Europeans were serious about their sovereignty they’d have made very different choices up until now.
It isn’t right that America has so much power in this circumstance, but going back decades the US has been asking for Europe to take defense seriously.
> It isn’t right that America has so much power in this circumstance, but going back decades the US has been asking for Europe to take defense seriously.
Funny because the last time I believe that it was the US that requested help in Iraq and Afghanistan and not the other way around.
Europe should certainly increase its defense spending (and actual capabilities). But the reason NATO exists isn't just to please Europe. The US have a direct interest in containing Russia; I don't think they can afford to simply stop caring about the rest of the world. And I'd be willing to test that theory.
> I don't think they can afford to simply stop caring about the rest of the world.
It seems that the policy of the current US government is to split the world between themselves, Russia and China. And I guess that's a legitimate policy, even though I think it's both impossible and incredibly misguided.
> Do you really want to block the import of arms and financial aid to Ukraine?
Umm... yes? Since this whole debacle started, the EU has been shooting itself in the foot with all the sanctions that hurts its industries.
On the other hand, the US did the smart thing and did not give out weapons for free, it charged for them.
In the end, the US will be the winner of this war and Europe will come out of it incredibly weak economically. And it will have to turn to the US for help. Again.
It's crazy because the numbers don't line up with the theory. If you look at US traffic deaths by year, they were basically flat in terms of vehicle miles traveled between 2010 and 2019 and then took a big jump from COVID which is only now starting to come back down.
Meanwhile in Europe road fatalities were also fairly flat up until 2019, and then went down significantly from COVID.
Now we have to guess why the responses to COVID had the opposite effect in each place, but it's pretty obvious that the difference was a primarily result of COVID rather than differences in vehicle safety regulations, unless the vehicle safety regulations all changed in 2020 and everyone immediately replaced the installed base of cars everywhere overnight.
2020 wasn't just the start of Covid, but also the start of BLM. The narrative I always see from the American right is that BLM caused many police forces across the US to radically reduce traffic enforcement, since:
1. traffic offenders are disproportionately black,
2. stops for minor traffic offences can sometimes spiral into violence in various ways, and some viral ones have involved absurdly bad use of force decisions by officers involved, and
3. no force wants to take the blame for another George Floyd
Per this narrative, a significant antisocial tranche of the public has responded to the effective suspension of traffic law in the way that you would expect them to, and that is why road deaths are up.
COVID happened in the year of the discontinuity and caused major changes to commuting behavior as a result of remote work, people afraid of infection avoided mass transit, many people moved out of cities or lost their jobs, people bought cars who didn't used to drive and now there are more new/inexperienced drivers with cars (and it's easier to get a license in the US than Europe), etc.
Also, the numbers for at least the US are apparently just wrong:
1.27 fatalities per 100M VMT in 2023 (the latest year with data), 1.11 in 2010, that's a difference of 14%, not 30%. Even the peak during COVID was only 24% above 2010. The only way I can see to get 30% is to use the during-COVID number for only the total number of motor vehicle fatalities without accounting for population growth or vehicle miles traveled, which is not a great metric for making comparisons.
The 30% figure is "correct" if you look at the absolute number of deaths instead of deaths per VMT. But I basically agree with you; that clearly the wrong stat to cite if you are attributing the change to vehicle safety regulations.
Keep in mind that the US stats are derived from cities that are designed around personal automobile transportation, so they're likely muted.
Europe on the other hand has a much higher level of intermingling between pedestrians and vehicles. This puts pedestrians more often in harms way, and likely will lead to out-sized dangers that aren't seen as frequently in the USA. Pedestrian safety is a key requirement for European car safety.
If the EU is politically forced into accepting the US standards: The slack will need to be picked up by European insurance companies, who should charge extreme premiums for unsafe designs, effectively blocking the sale of the vehicles from dangerous, young, or casual drivers and limiting those designs to those who truly need them (which I suspect is very few.)
This should also go a long way in addressing inexpensive Chinese vehicles that ape the American designs. Since that is more likely going to be what is on the roads.
I'm with you regarding the argument, but want to nitpick:
"dismissing" a politician sounds like an easy fix but we probably don't want hyper-polarized dismissal wars where politicians are "shot down" immediately after being elected. That's why there are other mechanisms such as not re-electing, public shaming, transparency fora etc. ... we need to work on strengthening those, the accountability and transparency.
Germany isn't the only economy dependent on the legacy auto sector. France, Italy, Romania, Czechia, Slovakia and Belgium also have a lot of jobs, or had, in the auto industry, before the mass layoff of the last 2-3 years.
True, France does too of course, but Germany has been particularly stubborn. There's infighting within Europe, for that matter - note Polestar opposing Merz's attempts to weaken Europe's phase out of combustion vehicles. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newsbirmingham/volvo-and-pole...
Stubbornness to change is part of Germany's national identity, more often than not towards its own detriment.
But also, Merz is not alone in this, but a lot of Eastern Europe can't afford EVs at current EU prices so the EU has to make some concessions. People in Romania or Bulgaria can't afford to buy a Polestar like people in Netherlands can.
EU leaders needs to account for the massive disparities of purchasing power between places like Nordics and Romania/Bulgaria for example when they make sweeping legislation like that.
Sure it would be nice if all of EU was like Norway with only EVs everywhere, but this way you'd basically be bankrupting and turning against you the people in the poorer countries of the union who are already disproportionately affected by the CoL crisis of the EU, who are effectively paying German energy and grocery prices but at Eastern EU salaries and pensions. This is not sustainable.
Not to mention the disparity in public transportation infrastructure where a car is basically mandatory for commuting outside big cities in place like Romania.
I doubt the average citizen in the Netherlands can afford EVs at current EU prices either.
And at the rate car prices are increasing for no good reason, I doubt the average EU citizen will be able to afford a car in the future.
The EU does need to find a middle ground between mandatory safety features that are unaffordable and free for all pedestrian killing machines.
And protectionism ain't it. It will only increase the prices for domestic cars until the likes of VW have to close up shop because no one can afford what they're peddling any more.
The average age of a car currently on the road in Romania, Bulgaria and Greece is about 16 years old. How do you think all those people with 16 year old beaters, will suddenly be able to afford the 20k cars?
The lifecycle of an EV is a lot less than mostly mechanical cars that are possible to independently repair. I drive a 30 year old van and it’s still possible to get replacement parts within a day or two. I doubt you will get service for a 10 year old EV.
Have you considered that many people in Eastern Europe might not be able to afford a new car at all? Where I live people are keeping their older cars for longer and buying used because everything else is getting more expensive and nobody wants to go in debt for something marginally better than what they already have.
Yes, lets hand over the one last big industry we have to China and hope for the best, we totally haven't learnt anything from the domestic electronics industry. And let the easterners drive shitty Chinese EVs instead of Skodas so that some elite in Brussels can feel good about themselves. As if East Europeans haven't been through enough yet.
Have you considered that you might be out of touch from your bubble of NL remote SW dev for US corpos?
Like your idea sounds good in principle, especially if you're from a country with no automotive jobs, but then what do you do then with tens of thousands of unemployed people of the auto sector being displaced by the Chinese? Will you agree to pay more income taxes to fund the increased unemployment deficits of the others? How do you think those people will vote? What about maintaining some national sovereignty? Shall we just become a vassal state to China on automotive as well?
You can't throw such oversimplified solutions to such complex issues that have very deep ramifications.
If you haven't noticed, the EU economy and jobs market in general is already bad as it is, it won't be able to absorb tens of thousands of unemployed career switchers into to other domains that aren't hiring right now anyway, or if they are hiring, they're very picky due to the increased supply of talent with domain experience.
Currently, the defense sector is absorbing some of the slack of automotive layoffs on the production/manufacturing side in some countries like Germany, but that won't last forever. If peace happens in Ukraine, that will dry out as well as the glut of orders will be scaled back.
Mate, I don't think you get it. You can make EVs instead of ICEs if you want, but who will buy them when your EVs are expensive and your consumers currently wage poor? You can't make Chinese priced EVs in Europe and still expect to stay profitable, and auto makers in Europe aren't gonna be forced by the government to change tune here if you expect them to lose money for some utopic greater good when they're accountable to their shareholders to increase profits so then they make whatever the consumers will currently buy, which tends to be quite a lot of ICEs. You can't turn this complex market around overnight.
To get where you want, you need the venn diagram where what the automakers want, aligns with what consumers want, to align with what the government wants, which isn't happening right now, and it's not something the government can force without massive repercussions. China has had 10+ years of focus exclusively on the EV and battery sector domestically, during good economic times to get to where they are.
And Chinese government can subsidize their industry longer than you can stay solvent, as long as they know they'll bankrupt your industry in the long run and then make you dependent on them for manufacturing. Competing with China can't be done on equal footing because they don't play fair and never had.
Not to take away from your argument, but German grocery prices are actually famously low. I know of eastern Europeans in border places who prefer shopping in Germany for that reason.
Yes, but in France Renault just made a new Twingo, to be electric, for 20,000 euro, and they're starting to make electric sports cars (A290, future electric A110), so I wouldn't call that 'legacy auto'.
Besides the whataboutism, this is 1200 premature deaths (of mostly frail people). As much as I'm sensible to the topic of air pollution, putting that number closer to the number of, I dunno, premature deaths attributable to Coal power plants will give a more realistic view of the problem
You can't really compare the two. Vehicle safety regulations might not be able to make up for the USA having stroads and in general bad design. For the same reasons trying to move safety standards over could make things even worse than the USA due to them not fitting the conditions.
If this were comparing absolute numbers I'd agree. But this is only the relative change over a few years, the road design hasn't seriously changed in that time. So those differences should affect these numbers directly.
Whether they like it or not, American cars have become a lot more European over the years. I wish I had figures to back it up but from my own anecdotal experience when we traveled to the US when I was young almost every car was different and, for me at least, this made it feel strange and exciting.
Taking my own kids back there this year, most of the normal cars were common, or at most variations of the ones from Europe. Even many of the vans and work vehicles are now common European shapes, occasionally with a different badge. Trucks and full size SUVs were the last hold outs of US specific models.
Which makes me wonder, are the pedestrian deaths really heavily weighted towards these models?
For what it's worth we hired a full sized SUV. There was one point where I was about to drive out of our Villa's driveway when my partner shouted "wait!" There was a 8ish year old kid walking down the sidewalk towards where I was about to cross it who was completely invisible from the driving position. It was actually safer to forward park that thing because the visibility in the reversing camera was much better than driving forward.
Large portions of it can be attributed to fuel economy and safety requirements (ironically the “dangerous” safety requirements are tied to people unwilling to wear seatbelts).
Fuel economy tends all vehicles to the same aerodynamic shape (similar to how all big planes look quite similar), and safety is requiring airbags (which protected unbuckled passengers) in the side pillars and elsewhere, making them larger and larger.
This was all an EU tactic, we do it a lot. Agree to the deal, Trump shuts up and ignores us, destroy the deal in the courts, no real effect of the deal.
At the risk of sounding contrarian, do we have any idea what the drivers of this are? Is this actually about car design, or is it other bits?
Just as a starter for ten, is that 30% increase distributed around the US or concentrated in certain states? I can't imagine we've seen the same increase in New York than in rural Alabama (and if that's the case, how much of it is really attributable to car designs)?
> Every EU politician who tries to subvert car safety should be dismissed and tried for endangering public safety.
Yeah, so that would be rampantly anti-Democratic authoritarianism... Peaceful transfer of power is pretty much at the core of why democracy works in the first place, and once you start engaging in political persecution because you don't like some trade-off involving safety ... yeah, that's no longer a democracy but something else.
Yes, and? Are they tried for making politician decisions someone (e.g. the next people in power) didn't like? This doesn't engage at all with what I talked about, and I already explicitly acknowledged that peaceful transition of power is important. What is the point of this comment? Why rebuke something I never even remotely said?
> Every EU politician who tries to subvert car safety should be dismissed and tried for endangering public safety.
No. Every EU politician who doesn't support BANNING all cars should be dismissed and tried and executed! Look, I'm even tougher on pedestrian safety than you are!
I think it's hard to say for sure that it's only the safety regulations on the car that that have resulted in these reductions, and by contrast those increases in the US. There are so many other things not related to the regulations on the car. My guess for example is that us have a lot less bike roads than europe does and traffic rules are not affected by the regulations on the cars and so on. for sure European European car regulations are probably better than American ones from a safety perspective. but I think it's hard to to say that without them we would have an increase, it would have a smaller reduction.
I kind of agree but this is missing a big part in my opinion. How can we quantify the penalty faced by consumers in EU with to increased costs due to regulation?
There might be certain number of deaths we can accept for increased cost but how is it so obvious that this tradeoff was worth it?
What if cars got 2x costlier in EU due to the regulations to give you a .01% increased chance in safety?
Edit: here are some back of envelope numbers from chatgpt
A single, ordinary car ride carries an extremely small chance of death:
USA: ~1 in 7.7 million
EU: ~1 in 20 million
Its not super clear that optimising these numbers is obviously worth the increased costs.
Edit2: people can make the choice to buy Volvo cars that are ~40% safer. Why isn't every car buyer buying only Volvo?
The assumption you have to make is that regulation would make it much cheaper to buy a safe car than just buying Volvo. It is somewhat true but not sure on the extent.
I think that's a little bit of a weird way to look at the probabilities. Sure, for a one-off activity I might look at 1 in 7,700,000 and decide that's an acceptable risk. But many people in the US take several car rides per day.
At, say, 4 rides per day, that's about a 1 in 5300 chance of death over a single year. That's still small, but not that small. Someone in a decent-sized town or city could expect to lose someone they know once every few years with those odds.
We know what the rate of deaths are: 1 in 8000; roughly 40,000 over 320,000,000.
Slightly less than the rate of suicide; and slightly more than half the number of fentanyl deaths. And a smaller fraction of medical mistake deaths. (Of course, none of the risk is evenly distributed.)
As a systemic problem, I’m not convinced that cars are the worst. Or outside what we accept in several areas.
The non-even distribution is a key part of it. Fentanyl deaths don’t affect me if I don’t drug, and if 80% (made up number as example) of car fatalities involve drunk driving, it also factors out for most people.
If cars had a random chance to simply explode equivalent to the mortality rate in crashes, people
would treat them Very Differently.
I think if you want to make this argument you can go look at the stats. Look at the relative cost of vehicles in the EU over the past 25 years, compare to the cost of vehicles in the US over the past 25 years.
Obviously the lack of difference there wouldn't prove much (if I had to bet I'd bet cars in the US have gotten way more expensive faster than in the EU, just from labor costs), but the lack of a major difference would complicate the theory that new regulations in the past 15 years have massively improved costs, absent a theory that some other thing the EU is doing but the US is not doing is also kicking in to similarly counteract that.
The numbers exist, this isn't in the abstract. Just a question of doing the legwork
I think we should not compare EU vs US costs but rather predict what would be the decrease in costs (relative to EU itself) due to reduced regulations in EU.
Huh, but this is a terrible comparison.. the cars in both unions have been made the same, of course they cost similarly. In other words the US buyers partially pay for the R&D cost to keep to EU standards. And the US population also get the EU regulated-safety requirements (although only partially, since the US also allows Cybertrucks to drive around).
A comparison would be comparing a car that can ensure the survival of their passengers, proven with test crashes, vs e.g. Chinese-made cara for the local market that have terrible crumpling when crash-tested..
> the cars in both unions have been made the same, of course they cost similarly
I'm really not sure what you mean, many of the most popular cars in the EU aren't even sold in the US (Renault, Dacia, Opel, Peugeot/Citroën although they have taken quite a hit in the last few years) and they are generally cheaper than US cars.
And quite a few US cars aren't available in the EU either (although they can sometimes be imported privately, which bypasses the regulations somewhat) which is the very topic we're discussing.
As for Chinese cars, the recent ones are performing adequately in crash-tests.
A bit off-topic, but lots of the top ranked Euro NCAP crash tests have been chinese-built cars for a few years now. Their industry has evolved insanely fast, that perception of low standards is long gone.
Zero pedestrian or cyclist deaths are acceptable just for someone to get a cheaper (or much worse, larger) car. Zero.
There is a vast number of reasons why we need and must reduce private car modality share as much as possible. Making cars more expensive is a feature, not a bug.
And how exactly fixes that pedestrian deaths? But I know your answer; put people not driving a car into jail too, right? Eliminate sidewalks too, use the space for an additional lane. Exiting your car anywhere except in parking lots and private property should be prohibited!
It’s not some mystical thing, but a matter of smart urban design. Oslo and Helsinki have managed to achieve zero road deaths in a year without eliminating vehicles. You don’t need to accept a certain amount of deaths as some sort inevitability or a necessary sacrifice.
What a strange question. The answer is of course 'rather not'. But those are for the most part unavoidable without society paying a (potentially) much higher price. So we have decided to accept those risks.
In this case it is another country trying to impose their 'way of life' on the rest of the world, or in this case, the EU, which has a different set of values.
That doesn't really have anything to do with having buses or trains vs cyclists, it is not a personal decision and there are many alternatives compared to US vehicles that were never designed for European (or Asian, for that matter) traffic in the first place. The USA is very car centric to the point that walking is frowned upon (I got picked up by the police in North Dakota for walking). The EU is simply not like that, and that's fine. The USA should set their own standards for car safety and so should the EU, if that leads to incompatible products I think the mantra is 'let the market sort it out'. The Japanese seem to have figured out how to make vehicles for different markets, there is no reason the USA can not do the same thing.
And most city buses have much better overview of their environments than a random american truck. The bus driver is sitting low down with big windows in all directions and will see cyclists and pedestrians on their side or kids walking in front.
Buses and trains decrease the number of cars on the road by pooling travellers. Ambulances and fire trucks serve a purpose beyond making individuals travel comfortably. This is a straw man.
> EU officials must revisit the hastily agreed trade deal with the US, where the EU stated that it “intends to accept” lower US vehicle standards, say cities – including Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, and more than 75 civil society organisations. In a letter to European lawmakers, the signatories warn that aligning European standards with laxer rules in the US would undermine the EU’s global leadership in road safety, public health, climate policy and competitiveness.
They point to many things and not only the size of cars - like fewer approvals, lower pollution controls, fewer safety measures.
Some of them increase utility (like people might prefer bigger cars) and others decrease cost.
> penalty faced by consumers in EU with to increased costs due to regulation?
The question works both ways. How can we quantify the penalty faced by consumers in the US due to lax regulation? How much is each toddler ran over worth, exactly?
That’s the same flawed reasoning Kirk flaunted when discussing gun laws. It ultimately proved to be wrong; as in it’s all fine and “Vulcanian Logical” until you or your close ones become the statistic
Making cars 2x as expensive would massively improve safety simply by reducing the number of cars. And it would make cities much nicer places to exist in general.
The problem with these sorts of things is that they discriminate against lower-income folks. In cities with good public transit and affordable housing (such that people can live near their jobs) this is maybe not such a problem, but that unfortunately describes precious little of the US. I bet it could work in many places in the EU, though.
A better solution would be to make taxes and parking cost relative to vehicle size/weight. Want a big SUV? Pay 4x the taxes and hefty parking fees. Drive a small, electric commuter vehicle? Half the tax, reduced parking.
Why not just ban cars in the cities instead? The problem is those who need cars the most are those who can't afford to live in the city centers, so it often ends up being an extra tax in the less affluent.
For some reason we decided to put a great deal of jobs in the city centers. Commuting to the edge of a city and then taking public transport to office doesn't really work, unless massive amounts of money are pumped into trains, busses and trams.
There's this weird perception that Europe has excellent public transport, while in reality it only works, sort of, in a few larger cities. Everywhere else functioning in society really requires a car or assumes that you're living within biking distance of work and daycare.
People that need cars don't tend to have large cars, unless there's some tax benefits (someone in the village has one of those 5 seater dumper trucks because they can write it off as a business expense but can't write off a Toyota Aygo or Citroen C1 which would far more sensible)
That doesn't align with my experience. I grew up in Belgium, in a place where you'd be lucky to have a bus an hour. The closest place to get groceries, by foot, was half an hour away, most of it 5% uphill on the way back.
If you need a car, then you need it for everything. You need to be able to fit the two kids you picked at school, the gear for the sport activity you'll drop them at, the mom you picked at the train station after work, and the weekly groceries you picked from the supermarket on your way back. From experience, you aren't doing all of that in a Hyundai i10.
Now I live in the Randstad. Groceries get delivered, mom rides the bus for 8 minutes to come back home, and I pick the kid by bike. The car is optional and pure convenience, so I can get away with a small one.
With the huge hoods these things have the driver has a hard time seeing what is right in front of them, and when they hit a pedestrian (kid or adult) they are much more likely to die.
> How can we quantify the penalty faced by consumers in EU with to increased costs due to regulation?
I really hate that everything has to be seen from the consumers' lens, especially the consumer of luxury goods (I'm talking SUVs and the like, cheap cars exist in Europe).
What if we didn't just look at it from the POV from people who buy or want cars? I don't own a car, nor do I plan to. I have to pay for roads, which I understand to an extent. But why should my life be at risk from people wanting to buy SUVs cheaper?
Edit: Also, looking at "cars" without distinction really just obfuscates the real issue. The most dangerous cars (for pedestrians) are the biggest (and sometimes the fastest) ones. Plus most pedestrians die in cities, not on a Highway. So yeah, if you want to drive an SUV in a dense city, then I'm all for making it 10x more expensive for you, because it makes no sense (to me) and puts me in danger :)
If the ball point pen was responsible for ~40,000 deaths per year (in the USA), and reducing its size by half did not meaningfully diminish its function as a pen for most users… I’d rather not kill an extra 20,000 people a year just to have a bigger pen.
But how many of the 40k deaths are directly attributable to the characteristics being discussed? We can’t go from “twice as likely to kill a kid” to “half of the 40k deaths are kids killed by this thing” without examining the evidence.
(Apparently 30% of th fatalities involve alcohol but we already tried banning that once …)
I'm not sure why you're responding to a measured, factual rate of death with some random weird thing that you just made up.
So ok, I'll do it too: what if reducing the size of a ball point pen by half reduces the rate of death by ball point pens by 0.01%? (Answer: you don't do it, because the benefit to doing so is low, and that measured effect could be well within the margin of error anyway.)
(And my weird made-up number sounds a lot more likely than your weird made-up number.)
The reason I brought it up was because it is not meaningful to only compare relative decrease of deaths without understanding the extent of how many deaths they are responsible for.
If only a few people die due to car accidents and one is much more likely to die of other causes than cars, is it worth making cars that much more expensive to decrease the deaths by a bit?
The regulations in my opinion add up to 20-30% of the car price. And likelihood of death due to a car at an individual level decreases by .01% (maybe).
Imagine you were given two options:
- Car A at $45k USD
- Car B at $35k USD
And you are less likely to die with Car A. Is it super obvious that you will buy Car A? If so why doesn't everyone flock to Volvo cars which lead to ~45% fewer fatalities?
Why is this so obvious to you that this regulation is a good thing? The sibling is implying that I'm trolling or whatever but this is a legitimate question.
Makes sense. And I'm glad I don't have to make that choice. But as mentioned in my edit, I think that the "low hanging fruit" are still plentiful, so we won't have to think about this for a while (talking about pedestrian deaths).
It's worth the cost if it's your child or relative being killed by a car, these regulations don't make a car 2x costlier than the USA so it's ludicrous to start with that assumption.
Numbers of km driven in the US has increased by circa 10% [1] over that period while decreased in the EU by circa 10% [2]. Add to that in european cities the multiplication of bike lanes, and the permanent manufactured congestion of certain cities. There are many reasons that can explain the movement, and car design is probably a small factor among many small factors.
That probably is doing a lot of work here. A truck with a driver sitting so high above the street they can't physically see a child or bicycle in front of them is just an inherent risk to pedestrians and cyclists, no matter how you twist it. And don't even get me started on Cybertrucks, which are pretty much designed to cause accidents with casualties.
Even if the causal link is more complex than the numbers make it seem, acting like putting heavier and bigger vehicles with less restrictions on streets won't cause accidents is just plain dishonest.
I once rented a small Kia (cheapest car I could get), drove from Houston to New Orleans and back. Apart from my eye balls popping at the sight of all the weapons on people and in shops, seeing some of the most obese people ever in my life (even in commercials it's ok to be obese), the 3x portions of all the food, and the variety of [drive-through-x for x in [ATM, pharmacy, funeral, etc]], I was in constant fear of someone not noticing my tiny Kia and driving over me.
I was stopped by police while taking a walk and shouted at and treated like a criminal when walking in to a Wendy's drive through (even though only the drive through was open at that hour!) But, other than that, the people were incredibly kind! The culture shock though... It is very hard to imagine if you've never been there. I think as someone from western Europe I have more in common with people from Thailand.
Cars are really a must-have in the US, biking is just a hobby. It's more the other way around here. Everybody is a "cyclist" (not even a word we use here) some of the time. It means "carists" have respect and understanding of how it is on a bike, and drive carefully around people on bikes (in general, there are always exceptions). Our infrastructure and law demands it (ie, a car-owner is always financially responsible in an accident with a pedestrian or person on a bike here, insurance for this is mandatory).
Here people in massive US sized cars are really seen as anti-social, in general I'd say. Hope it stays that way. For now I think some of those cars can't even fit into city-center parking garages here (ie [0], btw if you look around there you see separated bike lanes, crossings where pedestrians always have priority (ignoring that is instant fine), very narrow lanes for cars. Go forward in time and you see they added "statues" that look like they are about to cross the street to make drivers aware of this.)
> as someone from western Europe I have more in common with people from Thailand
As someone with experience in the US, Europe and Thailand, I feel qualified to say: nope, you most definitely do not, at least not on that basis.
Actually, truck culture is one of the points on which Thailand and the USA share a lot of values. That notwithstanding, I’m afraid you’re stuck with your New World cousins just as they are stuck with you, there’s nobody closer.
Was my experience too. Chunks of US is functionally unusable without car. Intersections with literally no accommodation for pedestrians - presumably everyone either has a car or has evolved the ability to teleport
> I was stopped by police while taking a walk and shouted at and treated like a criminal when walking in to a Wendy's drive through
I live in a very bike friendly country, so culturally closer to Europe in terms of transport, but if you walked into a drive through you may well be stopped by police.
Drive throughs have long since stopped serving pedestrians.
I worked at the local McD as a teenager and it was always funny to see a horse ordering something (the camera does not pick up the rider). Ours was near the end of a trail often used by people on horseback.
And since horse riders are legally equivalent to vehicles it's pretty much a "fine as long as you don't shit in the driveway" situation.
It's odd, on one side the USA is very car-centric, and western Europe is very bike centric, and then stuck in-between is the UK which has no idea which one it is.
Local governments here try to encourage cycling by putting in as many dedicated bike lanes as they can, but they never seem to get much use (where I live they're used almost exclusively by bike delivery people and a few people like myself).
The roads can be lethal and many drivers have a great deal of animosity towards cyclists (probably helped to no good degree by the likes of people like Jeremy Clarkson / Top Gear which spent a decade joking about and belittling cyclists).
Right?! Also on many online forums. I get why and how, but it remains pretty weird to see/read from a country where everyone is "a cyclist". It just comes across as very low IQ. It's like making fun of people that have breakfast or something.
> Local governments here try to encourage cycling by putting in as many dedicated bike lanes as they can, but they never seem to get much use
Might be a regional or urban/rural thing? In Ireland bike lanes in central and near-central Dublin are often very heavily used these days, especially since covid (to the point that I think they're going to have to rethink traffic control for some of them), but bike lanes in outer suburbs seem to be mostly empty.
Bike usage is relatively low, hardly comparable to the amount of cars. Maybe more popular than USA, but definitely far from it being bike-centric. Just a handful of cities (such as Amsterdam) have more people commuting via bicycles than cars.
"The roads can be lethal and many drivers have a great deal of animosity towards cyclists" --- which is why bike lanes don't get much use: sooner or later you will have to share the road with cars for a while, and I personally don't feel safe at all doing that.
Where I live in London, and in many other cities, cycling to get around is massively popular and growing fast.
But other towns and cities are much more like you describe.
Anecdotally this seems like somewhat of a demographic thing and places that skew younger, university educated[/ing], and dare I say left wing tend toward much higher rates of cycling vs other forms of transport.
Perhaps. But I also found it of note that while traveling Vietnam, many hotels had bikes for rent (about 2 usd a day [2010 so ymmv] or sometimes for free) to go places. And it would generally be a nice way to get around. Although the situation is very different there I have to admit.
US car regulations are weirdly inconsistent. Sometimes they are incredibly strict. You can't have a convex left side mirror and the right one has to carry a stupid warning label. Importing non-antique foreign cars is practically impossible. But then, some obviously unsafe features, such as indicators in the same color as the rear lights, are perfectly legal.
> such as indicators in the same color as the rear lights, are perfectly legal.
I saw some of those on some US army vehicles on the German autobahn. And what perfectly illustrated their danger was when they almost got rear-ended while entering the left-lane in front of a passing Audi at mild autobahn speed.
Had it been a yellow blinking light, the left-lane driver would have been better alerted to the fact that someone was about to go left. Instead, it was a muted blinking red, at the same intensity as the car's tired red back lights, that looked like nothing more than a defective back light.
Less lights is less cost. On European streets the easiest way to detect an American-designed car is that they only have one reverse light, the bare minimum. Only suitable as an indicator to the driver behind you. Ever considered trying to reverse into a parking spot without any streetlight nearby? Reversing blind is awesome!
In any European car you get two lights, not in the center but in the corners so you can actually see stuff in your side mirrors while parking.
For a long time many German made car like from Audi, Seat, VW, BMW hat just one reverse light. On the left side is the fog light and on the right side is the reversing light.
This is correct, though wat probably is meant is that US cars (or dual designed cars) have two spots with only the right one filled in the EU and a separate fog light with only the left one filled. I had a Ford Fiesta with only one reverse light and put in another to get a bit more light when reversing and my assumption is this is more common on US designed vehicles (though the Fiesta was designed in either the UK or Germany but you get the jist).
I think the indicator color laxness is dumb, but I don't really get when people are so up in arms about it (and yes, I've heard Alec from Technology Connections rant about this many times, and usually agree with the things he says). I have literally never been confused by this. A blinking red light is very different from a solid red light, at least to my eyes.
It's got to be a nightmare to drive these large American cars in Europe. The streets really aren't the most accommodating for them. I rented a Mercedes V-class minivan for my family and friends to drive to a wedding in the UK and that was such a pain in London. I've never driven such a large vehicle in London before and I probably never will again. Should've just taken the train out to some far off spot before renting the car.
We also had a wedding to go to in France where we drove a Citroen C4. To be honest, if these weddings weren't so far from railway stations and we didn't have to transport so many people together I'd never have done it. And both these cars were tiny compared to the GMC Sierras or Cadillac Escalades you see on San Francisco streets.
I can only conclude that anyone who drives an American-size vehicle in these places is a masochist. It cannot be fun. No, not even to ride in while someone else drives.
The way these imported cars are parked and driven don't really seem to indicate any masochism. The drivers mostly seem to make their oversized car everyone else's problem, not taking lanes too seriously, double parking by default, and of course blocking both the road and the sidewalk with the overhang of their trucks.
They did not have this kind of vehicle available there. I had to use Hertz "Dream Collection" and go to a location where an appropriate vehicle was available.
Some municipalities are also working to enforce a limit on the size of cars that can get into the city. Good luck diriving those American cars in Europe.
This is not masochism. This is rectified pure egoism and dominance. Usurping the public space and pushing others aside, making one's ego everyone's problem.
Europeans need to just stall for may be 1 or 2 years. The current admin is honestly going to collapse when the rather ill president won't be able to govern anymore, which given recent reporting, is rather soon.
"Yet, EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%"
I thought this stark difference might be partially explained by US population increasing more quickly than EU. However it turns out in the 2010-2024 period, US population increased by +10% while EU27 pop increased +2%. So although there is a minor 8% difference, this is far, very far, from explaining the stark difference even if we compared per capita. The EU is certainly doing something right here.
There's a lot going on there, and it's not just vehicle design. Many countries have brought in reduced speed limits in urban areas, usually 30km/h, for instance. Your chances of dying if hit by a car at 30km/h are dramatically lower than 60km/h. Many countries also took the opportunity of COVID (roads not busy, construction industries in need of life-support) to improve cycling infrastructure. And rush-hour traffic is usually not as bad as it was, due to WFH.
In Ireland, public transport usage now is also much bigger share of commutes than pre-covid, particularly in Dublin, though I'm not sure if that's due to local factors or if it's replicated across Europe.
Minor nitpick, it seems the report is dealing mainly with the period up until 2020, not 2024. Not sure if it makes a significant difference for your numbers, but maybe adjust them?
Having visited the US recently I was shocked how tall the cars could be. They were essentially trucks/lorries with civilian drivers. There should be a special category of licence for those who want to do it. Or just bundle them in with the class of driver that drives a high/heavy load.
Dutch car taxes are based on CO2 emissions and weight, these 'cars' from the US will be pricing themselves out of market anyway.
> Yet, EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%.
The F150 has an EV variant that will probably be affordable by Dutch road standards, given the general price of the average EV.
It's time to also take into account area when it comes to vehicle tax in my opinion, even European "cars" (SUVs) are bulging out of normal parking spaces these days.
For reference: A RAM 1500 would pay 383 Euro in Utrecht as a person and 183 as a business (quarterly). And as a bonus you pay no BPM (aquisition tax) as a business, which is in the 12000-15000 (15k) range. The BPM hole has been fixed as of 2025 but there are enough already on the road.
I personally like the wanktank since it's more internationial.
You cannot use a "grijs" plate as a personal vehicle unless you pay "bijtelling" which starts at 500km yearly for private usage, but I guess the milage administration will be on the same order as the driving style.
Road deaths are up in the US mostly because traffic laws arent enforced in the US. Surely the massive trucks have an effect, but literally everyone breaking the speed limit and running reds definitely has a bigger effect.
"Yet, EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%."
They seem to think that the two are correlated, they are definitely not. The US is like the wild west compared to the EU, especially as it pertains to traffic. Americans take laws as mere suggestions, where in Europe the law is the law and you follow the rules, especially in Germany / Austria / Switzerland. We also allow people to drive on the roads with super old, broke down, and unserviced cars with missing bumpers or things clearly falling off, like its no big deal. Again, they are grasping at straws suggesting their auto build quality has lowered their death rate while increasing ours, its ridiculous.
This depends upon the discretion of the patrol officer. One can certainly get citations for crossing lines, failing to maintain a vehicle, and so on. The issue is, those tickets are not as lucrative for the municipality as drug enforcement. Typically, those laws are enforced to allow an officer to search a vehicle for contraband and/or apprehend someone who was suspected of a more serious offense.
Compelling arguments, particularly regarding the proliferation of oversized American trucks - such as the Tesla Cybertruck monstrosity - which are predominantly used in urban areas and designed less for practicality and more to assert dominance on the road, at the expense of other users.
Adopting such standards in Europe risks accelerating the "bulkinzation" and "truckification" of our roads. This would not only strain already limited space for essential transportation and parking, but also severely increase risks to pedestrian and standard vehicle safety, and in general bring a more hostile road/societal environment a la American "predator capitalism" exemplified.
Agree with your points. Trucks are a tragedy of the commons kindof thing. I just dislike that you’re singling out Cybertruck. It’s not bigger than the Doge Ram, F150 or a Hummer.
Big trucks happen to be a popular market in the US. If you build cars in the US, you’ll have to serve that market. Even more so if your goal is to prove that an EV can be anything that an ICE can be, and more.
I used to have no worries about my kids playing in the street here (Norway), but I've noticed a few of these big trucks lately – I cannot understand how their drivers can be able to see a five year old running around it?
It is crazy and sad.
I spend a lot of time on a bike on public roads and those are absolutely scary.
In general my impression is that the older the car the safer it is for everyone around. People in modern cars go too fast too easily, see less (huge pillars in front). They are also wider so when passing it's more difficult for them to go around or fit in between whatever they think they need to fit which is sadly often you and the line on the road.
The safest areas are the ones where people can't afford modern cars yet and with no tourists that rent them. It's sad state of affairs, the space is shrinking every year.
It makes sense in US but not in Europe where public transport infra is good. There are so many places where robotaxis would just be stuck on narrow European roads. Why would I even use a robotaxi when I can get one with the actual person who understands roads better.
This whole discussion is weird. The ETSC-linked sources do not make any statements regarding vehicle size or US American car standards. It just claims that European standards 'supported' fewer deaths.
I am European, I don't think big trucks are particularly well supported by our road systems but I don't think we need to look at American car standards to get the next 10x reduction in traffic-related deaths.
IMHO it is not explainable how in 2025 there are still cars sold without LIDAR-based anti-collision systems, how are these still extra? Systems to warn of objects in the blind spot areas are available yet not mandatory.
This reads like the classic western world strawman to me. Instead of looking at how to improve things we just make sure things are not getting worse. By burning a strawman, in this case trucks from the US. Which are best described as a niche market over here, but now that we have a newly defined enemy, we do not have to confront our shitty carmakers about technological advancements.
These people do not care about human lives, they care about politics.
One of the points was that European manufacturers will start making more cars in US purely because it is cheaper to do so due to the lower bar. Why would we want that? Our market is quite big anyway and this agreement is an attempt to shoulder their way into the market without the sacrifices that local manufacturers are subjected to. Besides cars from US can already be bought and imported.
The US has been like that for a long time. But Western European and American interests were well aligned for a couple decades. First the whole WW2 business. Then Western Europe needed funds for rebuilding and a strong deterance against further expansion of the Soviet Union, while the US felt threatened by the idea of communism. Then in the early 90s we had a couple years where we had common ground in commercializing and integrating post-Soviet states.
During the Bush and Obama eras Europe was at least important as a staging ground for war in the Middle East, but the US wants to get away from putting boots on the ground there.
But now most of the common ground is gone, and the gloves are coming off
You talk about Europe as it were a single country. I live in Switzerland and basically nothing of what you say is or was true here. What you describe is losing the few allies you had here, not "Europe". Trump is using these words so wrongly it hurts. There never was a common Europe on Americas side to begin with.
Quick question: where you are from, what percentage of GDP did you spend on the military in the last 10 years?
Why isn't Switzerland, the very rich and developed and human-rights-protecting country, fighting Russia right now? Oh, right, your country loves profiting off of misery.
Not even a fifth. However other than the cold trading war with the US we haven't been in any war situation for a while.
And we don't exactly need military against you guys. We attack with rolex and suited super rich
Edit:// if Russia is such an easy problem? How comes orange man did nothing so far even thought he spends days talking about how he did?
We are also actually the main sponsor for America by capita. (As in owning state papers and your dept) So essentially we finance you guys to do the dirty stuff!?
Nobody's under any illusion that this was a good decision, including the people that made this decision. It was just a means to an end, the end being lowering tarrifs on the EU.
There's still quite a few steps between the current state and the dominance of US cars on European streets. It's still an empty promise from the EU side.
Are you German by change? There is barely any America positive sentiment in our media anymore as far as I can tell, since the last time orange man won (which been a while).
From the media I can see it's only Germany who has a really weird relationship with the US. Switzerland, Italy, France, .. are pretty clear in what they think and how they will act.
No I'm French, and we always had mixed feelings with the Americans. But for anyone following the topic, it's pretty clear that most other European governments are still pretty convinced that they just need to brace for the next three years and appease Trump.
See the debates about how the European funds (ReArm Europe) should be spent, and whether or not it should be allowed to be used to buy US equipment. Or the recent procurement of additional F35 (at least Belgium, Netherlands, Italy and Germany have ordered more).
Also, none of the re-arming plans seem to consider the assumption that the US logistics (airlift & tankers) could not be relied on.
Guaranteed new deaths everyday instead of possibly, maybe, USA president will not back out from a conflict on a whim or by getting offended and go full sulky kid due to some remarks on his patheticly idiotic personality (I hope he will never get here, I do not want to be carpet bombed because of a comment).
I'd say keep everyday life better and buy some stupid US military airplanes instead, to keep this deteriorated stupid smug child satisfied!
The article says road deaths in USA are up 30% over last 15 years and links to https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2024-02/2.... That doc talks a lot about initiatives but what is the normal American's sense of what's going on on the street?
European living in the US here. Around my mostly suburban area, I see mainly SUVs and crossovers with a few vans and pickups sprinkled in. Outside the urban areas, pickups and other monsters like nine seaters seem more common.
I also see a lot - and I mean a lot - of people holding a phone while driving, even in dense city traffic. Add to that non-walkable streets in some places and unsafe rules like legal right turns on a red light. Cyclists often have to squeeze into a narrow bike lane that is level with the car lanes instead of raised onto the sidewalk. That adds up to a much higher amount of latent dangers than in Europe.
There's something you can learn from the broad scale, but SF has pretty decent tracking and perhaps there's something you can learn from looking at one city too. SF has a Collisions Report[0] and also traffic citations data is open data[1] so you can see how enforcement has changed. Subjectively, I notice a lot more red-light running, and objectively the red-light camera near my apartment illuminates the ceiling of my home office every day.
I'm now a father so one cannot discount the amount to which my tolerance of bad actors has changed, but my experience has been that the lack of enforcement for violations (right-turn red lights in SF are rarely obeyed) is definitely taken advantage of by many drivers. However, the collisions report does make it somewhat clear that a non-trivial amount of the new fatalities are due to new traffic modalities: people now have the stand up OneWheels, and there are many more food delivery drivers on e-bikes.
But one gratifying thing is that the newer parts of town where people are having children have a lot more safety construction. I was walking home from the gym here in Mission Bay when I saw a group of kids between 6 and 12 on their little scooters.
I dunno about the last 15 years, but my sense is there is a fairly widespread perception that drivers have become more reckless and oblivious since COVID. This isn't just about car standards (although there is probably a connection terms of things like touchscreens becoming more and more prevalent in cars) but it's a thing.
I'm an American that doesn't drive. I've lived across multiple states across multiple coasts, so I can speak a bit to the issues here as someone that is primarily a pedestrian. There's a bunch of different things that add up into an absolute mess.
The first thing and the most obvious is that for 99% of people, you need a car to live. I've been able to work around that issue, but you simply cannot exist anywhere without a car. Our public transit networks are terrible, our roads are terrible and our commutes are even worse. Half-hour to an hour commutes are normalized among a lot of people. I don't see a need to hammer this point any further as I'm sure almost everyone who has tangential knowledge of the US knows.
The more insidious problem is that Americans are also incredibly afraid and incredibly self-serving, and our law system is set up to benefit that. Drivers can very easily get away with vehicular manslaughter because our system is tilted in favor of drivers. This is why we see larger and larger cars, because people want to protect themselves at the cost of everyone else. And if they do hit a kid or murder a pedestrian it was an accident and not their fault. This is also why Americans drive like absolute maniacs. Our police also rarely enforce traffic laws and drivers have only gotten worse as a result.
So we have a bunch of people that should not be allowed to drive on the road because they have to drive, where they rarely get punished for breaking the law and where the law is set up to benefit them when they do break it. This has been a universal constant across every state I've lived in, though notably Virginia was worse than both Texas and Washington in terms of drivers.
People driving "Brodozers(tm)" can't see shit near the vehicle due to both the big hood and being super high up, while the gigantic, flat front grille kills people rather than crumpling them over the hood.
And while I call them "Brodozers" to be derogatory, a significant number of really tiny females are driving them as well in the name of "safety". And they REALLY can't see anything over the hood.
The combination of gigantic blind spots and complete energy transfer is good at killing unarmored people.
Images like that evoke feelings but you have to evaluate each on what would have occurred with other vehicles - even a bike hitting a child at speed is likely to be tragic.
No, because we're talking about the physical laws of nature here. A vehicle of that size hitting a child even at a low speed is going to impart much more force than a bike hitting a child at even high speeds. And that's before you get into the other physical design issues of modern cars pulling people under the vehicle in collisions.
The answer you get will depend on how much a person has to travel or has traveled in the US. If someone lives, works, and never travels outside (for example) a 100 KM radius then what they do every day will play a big part. Frequent road travel for work, family, or other reasons probably will look towards the smallest or most efficiant car that can fit their need.
The average weather pattern of the region a person lives in plays a part, the amount of public transportation avaliable plays a part, how densely packed cities near you are plays a part. What car is avaliable is obviously a big part. All that stuff will be probably be considered before the "overall safety" of the car you want (and can afford) to get.
The people who can afford to think about safety will most likely be considering "passanger safety" rather than at the societial level. The more big cars around them the more someone concerned about safety will feel the need to own and drive in a big car. Sometimes you need the bigger car for the larger range a bigger gas tank allows. There are still places where you can find around 400 km between gas stations, especially if you are driving outside normal buisness hours.
One topic for the American car market has been how the "mid-sized" or "mid-range value" car space has been vanishing. That the options are increasingly moving towards either minimal passanger/storage Eco-Cars or the larger Trucks and SUVs. That plays a part, the used car market plays a part, and other world events play a part.
So at least from one point of view here all that leads to a lot of topics like this where there are people who have only lived in the US (and often not even moved around to other parts of the US) pushing their world view on others. You also have people who "have been to the US" claiming qualified expertiese based off their point(s) of reference, valid or not. The "US needs better public transportation" crowd will usually come out as well with sometimes more militant views against car use and ownership.
But all this circles back to the idea that the "normal American" has time to think about this or try to act on any of this. Some do, some don't, most won't really think about this unless a headline prompts something from their brain. The hard thing for the "normal European" to understand is the economics of distance and scale at play in the US given just how much space between cities and towns there can be.
People can blame the "American Dream" or the auto-industry, or whatever else you might want to imagine has contributed to the damage done in the last century of road construction and sprawl. The end result is that most Americans don't have a choice but to own a car, and may be far too tired to be trusted at the wheel of a vehicle. Multiple people driving less than a few miles to work may be involved in an accident with someone who had driven hundreds. Miles driven in a year is part of insurance calculations for a reason.
This was much more comment than I intended to give.
American regulations created a dichotomy where there's no middle ground. Big car or sour cream dollop with no space and no power.
Americans want big because big means "safety". An SUV feels safer next to the semi than a Smart car. They also want big to haul the occasional furniture between moves, go on the occasional road trip, bring all the gear when camping, or bring back a massive shopping haul.
American housing is way less dense outside the cities. There's no reason for a compact car if you live in the burbs apart from gas mileage.
At the same time, more and more people want to build bike lanes and people infra near roads. "Strong Towns" movement, etc.
We're putting more bicyclists on the roads next to big cars now.
That is not the only reason for a big car. You have to find special forward facing child seats to put 3 wide in a Tesla model 3 rear row, then do yoga to try to insert the children into them. To run the child seats facing backwards as long as possible, you need to be something like 5’4” or less to be comfortable with 2 seats in the back. That’s pretty standard in the “normal” sized car market, having a SUV or a minivan makes sense considering that.
I know. Sold my Tesla, now drive a Land Cruiser. A small car is just an exercise in pain when you have kids and need a car to get everywhere. If I had safe bike lanes to get the kids to school and practice and the grocery store, I’d just have an urban arrow… but I’m not contending with the aforementioned kindercrushers that aren’t looking for cyclists and risking my kids with the way our streets are designed. I would happily support changes that fix this, but this is the world we’re in as parents.
I once had a Volvo wagon with a rear-facing third row, but I don't think anything like that has been made for over 30 years.
You're right though, if we hadn't moved to the Netherlands, we'd have bought something like that too, to make sure we'd win in any crash. Luckily we do, indeed, use an Urban Arrow instead.
Ironically I can hold more kids on the Urban Arrow than I could in my last car - 4 small kids can ride on the bike (3 in bucket, one on a seat on the back), plus the rider of course.
As an American living in the Netherlands with a larger family (especially by EU standards, with 4 children!), I think I see a slightly different perspective.
Here, owning a car is extremely expensive - perhaps one of the most expensive in Europe. This price goes up considerably when you get a larger vehicle, both because fuel costs are very high but also because you are taxed quarterly for CO2/weight of the vehicle.
With a larger family, you are squeezed into an uncomfortable position since you are outside of the <= 2 child norm. Many 7+ seater vehicles (French cars, etc) are extremely impractical to the point of me thinking that they are not actually designed for more than 5 seats in use, as there is comically low cargo room and the 3rd row is extremely cramped (try fitting a stroller or anything besides people...ha!).
I ended up picking up a Chrysler Town & Country import from the USA for my family, because it was the only vehicle that I could find for a reasonable price that checked all of the boxes, and am paying dearly for it (400+ euros every quarter just to have the privilege of registering it!).
Before you say anything about us having a "kindercrusher" we also have 2 bakfiets cargo bikes and use them regularly, but public transit and bikes don't scale well to large families for anything more than a short distance ride (school, groceries, etc).
Large families are being squeezed out of existence here.
I can agree with the most of this, but the large families being pushed out of existence is plainly wrong. How much the school is costing you? Healthcare? How much do you save by being able to cycle with 4 kids to short distances, where most of your daily travel comprised of?
Sure, car ownership is expensive here, but this is necessary to discourage car-centric culture.
Oh, I would have bought a VW transporter in your case, but that's a personal preference matter.
> I can agree with the most of this, but the large families being pushed out of existence is plainly wrong. How much the school is costing you? Healthcare? How much do you save by being able to cycle with 4 kids to short distances, where most of your daily travel comprised of?
Oh I love cycling. I know it's hard to find even remotely comparable cycling-friendly locations in the States, even if growing up (also in a large family) we were fortunate enough to live walking distance to schools in a suburban area.
But for education and health, health care isn't "free" in the Netherlands. We pay hundreds per month for the whole family for health insurance on top of the high taxes that support the "system". Public education is also tax-supported in the USA for K-12, although indeed higher education is more expensive.
I'm more referencing policy that is intentionally "squeezing" everything to make it all smaller and more frugal in a way that makes a <5 family size far more practical. It is not the same in the States.
I looked at transporters, they are about the same size (although less space in the "trunk"/back) but much more expensive to purchase. Almost exclusively diesels are available (with some rare exceptions), and their taxes are even higher than mine! Don't get me started on the VW Multivan or similar - beautiful cars, but extremely expensive.
VW Caddy we looked at and almost bought, but we had many bad encounters with dealers and instead bought from the private market.
The Kia Carnival was our weapon of choice in the USA, but that’s partially because at five kids (we’re winning!) you really want that eighth seat, and the Chrysler fold in floor (really nice) isn’t available on the hybrid.
From there you have to go to transit van or other commercial offering, but then nobody cares about you anymore because they assume you’re a private bus.
* roads will be damaged faster
* risk of hitting and killing more people
* because roads damaged more tax money spent on fixing them
* more CO2
I think EU should go back to build good relationships with Russia, take its cheaper gas & energy and support its own economy, instead of propping up the US economy and opening the market for its ugly huge cars.
Just come to Amsterdam and see if you can drive those cars in the middle of Amsterdam. Even trams from 2 opposite direction share same line in some areas.
The EU was bending over backwards for Russia until they invaded a neighboring country for being too friendly to them. The fact that relationships aren't good there is entirely on Russia.
Build good relationships with Russia? That's a call to Russia, not the EU! First and foremost, Russia has to stop going to war with its neighbours.
In any case, Europe doesn't need Russian gas for much longer.
You think EU should go back to building good relationships with Russia when there is an ongoing war of aggression started by them? If you really believe that and you're an EU citizen I can't help viewing you as traitorous to very foundational values the EU was created for. Absolutely disgusting.
Every point you mentioned is just parroting the Russian narrative.
There's no such thing as "good trade relationships with Russia", as those that were there existed only thanks to planted agents like Gerhard Schröder.
What most likely triggered this war was Putin's ambition to stay in power, as Russia never actually recovered from the 2008 crisis, so he let Medvedev handle the popularity hit associated with the first years post that.
Russian agents are sabotaging European businesses as we speak - there's no getting back to whatever level of friendly relations there were before the invasion.
Gerhard Schröder was no planted agent, he acted out of a belief in what he did. The german left have always had a strong connection to russia.
I live in northeast Germany and the cost of living increase and industrial cost of the nord stream & oil pipeline changeover has been immense.
I am not advocating a "friendly" relationship w russia but it's also wrong to over simplify the relationships. The nord stream sabotage was a HUGE gut punch for former east german states.
And yet NATO expands most readily when Russia invades another country. I wonder why nations might want in that alliance? You're just repeating Russia's justifications for their actions, which have never made sense.
NATO expansion was because countries begged to become members of NATO, out of fear of Russia invading them. The only reason Russia minds NATO expansion is that it prevents them from starting easy wars.
> I think EU should go back to build good relationships with Russia
This is horribly naïve at best. You're suggesting building good relationships with a country waging a war of aggression with a neighbour it shares with the EU. A country that's committing genocide against that neighbour. A country that has been rather consistently stepping up its attacks against European infrastructure over the past several years.
I'm not saying that you are an idiot. But I am saying that you would have to be an idiot to sincerely believe what you just said.
Gasoline cars will be banned in 2035 and there ought to be some kind of on ramp so these giant American trucks probably won't meet emission limits anyway, right?
Cars are so expensive I'm happy if somebody brings cheaper cars to Europe. EU regulation is probably a factor in making cars too expensive and it's time to stop and think, how to find a better balance.
What rhymes with US is boycott, not adopt. Ah, but what else can a vassal state and "freeloaders" do, right? Gunboat diplomacy works, albeit in a different way.
Yeah the GLS is almost the size of an Escalade now.
I honestly don't understand why SUVs are outselling wagons at such an insane rate.
Heavier, uglier, worse aerodynamics with the same practicality and a worse ride because they need to make up for the higher center of gravity with a stiffer suspension.
I see no positives, other than better ground clearance, which, let's be honest, most people never need because they only ever drive on paved roads.
Easier to run over children and bikes though, if that's your thing.
Even Volvo has made the newer XC models have a much more obstructive, flat, high bonnet. I drove one as a rental and it was disconcerting how little you could see. You can't see anything in front of the car, whereas the old style was still a (stupid, IMO) crossover, but the front was basically like a normal car-shaped car with a down-sloped front.
I don't know why anyone who isn't a complete psycho would actually prefer being more limited in forward vision (though I imagine it allowed more space for dual-motor engines).
Honestly if I were the government, I'd require a downward sightline such that you can see, with your own two eyes, a child of a certain height standing against the front bumper. No visibility, no sales, no imports, no excuses. Let the car manufacturers figure out how to build a car that meets it or settle for "only" being able to sell car-shaped estate cars.
I drive a 2014 Ford Fiesta. Every car feels huge in comparison. I had a Nissan Qashqai parked next to my car, it looked like a tank. I had a look inside, it didn't seem particularly spacious.
Same when I flew to Bilbao. I booked late, the only rentals left were in the luxury segment. I drove off in a mild-hybrid Lexus NX, where I struggled to fit the luggage that fit reasonably well in the boot of my car on the way to Schiphol.
Despite all the bs you’ll read here, Europeans also want bigger cars. For me the proof is that poor people car brands like Dacia no longer sell sedans.
I think the reason you don’t see many big cars is that we are generally so poor that we can’t afford what we would like to buy. At least where I live… Also our streets are old and narrow which makes it impractical.
Regarding the giant trucks specific: one pragmatic lever we could pull here is just m parking enforcement. The EU says we have to allow sale of dangerous vehicles to keep Trump happy. But cities can just say "you can't park there mate" (where "there" means, for example, the Paris metropolitan area). They are already too big for existing parking spaces. We can forbid construction of larger spaces and require privately-owned car parks to enforce size limits.
You'r giving sales number, that doesn't means that it's what people are looking for, it's a representation of what manufacturer provides.
Most people buy laptops with copilot AI, that doesn't mean they want it.
If there is a significant mismatch between what people are looking for and what manufacturers provide, why would some other manufacturer not jump in to capture the underserved demand? It doesn't seem like there's only a very small number of car (or laptop) manufacturers.
"EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%."
Everyone rightfully highlights this striking statistic. But I notice a sleight of hand ("have supported" = correlation) and would like to see a breakdown of the factors that may have contributed to this divergence.
I think it's more of a comfort thing than a safety thing in many cases. Definitely in my case.
If you've never experienced it, I think you should at least understand what you are up against. Most people aren't buying these things to be evil to each other in some big dick safety war. Go visit an FCA dealership and see for yourself. Have a sales guy drive you down the freeway in that Ram 1500 Lonestar Edition. Observe how quiet your conversation can be at 80mph. It might change your perspective a bit.
The extra dumb thing about it is that I don't believe the numbers in the US really even strongly support that preference. Yes, you're less likely to die in a big SUV than in a sedan if you get into a crash, but the difference isn't that large, and the risk of death in general is low enough that it's not worth worrying about.
I drive a sedan, but I'm only really worried about getting killed by one of these monster vehicles when I'm out walking, as a pedestrian, or while I'm on a bicycle.
Honestly US standards can go to hell. I absolutely abhor these monstrosities. They should be outright banned except if specific need can be shown. They are dangerous, take up way too much space, and excessively damage the road.
Your freedom to do stuff stops where my freedom to walk & cycle around without undue fear of death begins.
Attributing "monstrosities" only to the US as a "US standards" doesn't make sense since the consumer trend towards bigger cars is global. It's a consumer trend, not a standard.
In NL, for example, I see plenty of large EU cars driving around with only a very occasional US "monstrosity" like a pickup truck, and I don't even live in the city.
US pedestrian deaths increased almost 100% the last decade or so... and the Cybertruck is the most hilarious car, a representation of bad US car standards.
With its pointy edges, even in a very slow accident hitting a pedestrian, the outcome will make any Tarantino movie look soft, in terms of blood being spilled around.
Don't even get me started on those huge American cars, they are the absolute terror in terms of pedestrian safety.
I mean, I think in EC-speak, "intends to accept" means "no way in a million years", in any case. In general, if they say they'll definitely do something, that means "within 20 years, assuming it's convenient". Anything less than that, not happening.
"EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%."
Of course, we are talking about two completely different sets of traffic cultures here (urban design, laws etc.) but I wouldn't be surprised if this gets accepted fully as part of a trade deal. EU isn't a strong negotiator, caves easily under American pressure and Trump has a firm hand and knows how to get the best deal for himself.
The only place on the entire continent where I've seen American cars being driven is the Netherlands and they stick out like a sore thumb. They are too big, too loud, too heavy, emit massively more CO2, usually don't have good acceleration (which you need into/out of roundabouts). Just not a good fit for European roads and streets. God forbid you crash into a pedestrian or a cyclists, you kill them instantly. They are built like a tank whereas European cars will self-destroy to preserve pedestrian life.
There are several "American" cars interesting for our market they talk about when they talk about importing American cars (ex. Toyotas) it's usually not the kind of car you Americans think about, and not much to worry for us ...
yet another idiotic EU nanny-state bedwetting episode.
EU leaders are bankrupting their continent, lying to their citizens, marching into a war they'll NEVER win... but pedantic auto safety standards - this is important? this is news?
europe deserves it's little seat @ the kid's table.
All the cities you listed end up using the common EU standards for deciding emissions requirements, they just draw a different line as to what is allowed and from when. So maybe in one European city you need at least Euro 4 Petrol since 2024 and in another it was Euro 3 by 2025, but all you need to know as an owner or driver is that you're driving say a Euro 6 Petrol car or that the second hand car you just bought your teenage daughter is only Euro 4.
France has a layer where they translate from the Euro standards to their own system, but that's no different from having to mentally translate temperature units or distances.
It's not protectionism when all you require is that products which compete should be held to the same standards. Or do you mean that it's fine for US companies to undercut other companies by lowering standards and costs, and only enforcing the standards on said competing companies?
Free trade. Any products that fulfil local safety standards should be allowed to be sold. Just because USA doesn't want to make cars that fulfil European standard does not mean they should be able to get away with those.
EU legislation requires a number of design considerations for pedestrian and cyclist collisions, like specific energy absorption requirements for front-impact and side-impact protection, restrictions on sharp corners/steep angles that could concentrate impact forces, minimum clearance around hard internal structures, mandatory ADAS (automated emergency braking, lane departure warnings) etc. Not saying that US cars are "not safe" in a binary fashion but for the most part these things are either optional or unregulated in the US.
Yeah, not a fan of cyclists. And it's kind of braindead to have my car break because if I hit a pedestrian somehow it is its job to absorb the impact. Maybe cyclists and pedestrians should be more mindful of their surroundings.
The EU regulations have killed all the nice things about cars: straight lines, retractable headlights and so on.
Sure you can. I'm not even sure why I need to support this statement. You can have any kind of trade you want.
In the longer term, these sorts of things are governed more by demand than anything else. Sure, some governments might sometimes enact protectionist policies, but if most people in a country think the cars made by their domestic car companies are garbage, they're going to end up with a government that allows cars from other countries in.
If region X happily produces and sells rotten meat, no other region is obligated to trade with them. But region X might choose to import non-rotten meat if they want.
If the EU cars aren't "safe enough" for the US then sure. Some of it is political silly buggers and protectionism but at the end of the day countries (or unions of countries) can set their own rules.
If the US wants to sell cars to the EU, they can. Plenty of countries export cars to the EU just fine. It's not the EU's fault that American car manufacturers make dangerous vehicles. It's also not American car manufacturer's fault that European cities and roads are often smaller and Europeans have less appetite for road deaths. But it is their fault if they want to export to that market without making any effort to design suitable cars for it. American exporters aren't granted a God-given right to inflict American standards in the rest of the world.
If they don't meet EU safety standards, they are, by definition, legally unsafe for sale in the EU.
Front sightlines are a common example given for larger pickups and SUVs. Pedestrian outcomes in collisions are also given more weight in the EU standards (which is why you can't buy a Cybertruck).
American semi trucks are also generally considered unsafe for that reason plus overall length - nearly all EU and UK HGVs are cabover models.
There's no rule againt US-made vehicles. It's just that many vehicle models that happen to be made and sold in the US don't meet safety requirements in other places.
You can well argue that EU vehicle standards are excessively strict (many EU residents may agree or disagree on various aspects), but coming at it from "very unfair trade, it's a huge deficit, sad!" angle seems more like simping for car manufacturers then reasonable public safety policy tuning.
It isn't. Quite the opposite. It's about a level playing field. There are standards for allowing products to market, some of them are more costly to implement. US car makers want to sell at lower standards than competitors, that's not a level playing field.
The customer has no right to deside on issues that affect _others_. A customer can decide on what affects the customer. If car A is more dangerous for other people than car B, then it's for somebody else than the car customer to decide what should be allowed. A car owner can't decide that "it's fine to drive this car which will kill other people because of its design".
It feels very much like a self-inflicted problem that manufacturers made by lobbying for domestic rules that they knew to be incompatible with foreign markets, followed by inability to innovate sufficiently to supply both markets economically.
I have no sympathy with this plight. They should take responsibility for their past choices. They have agency, they're not victims.
It's not even that you can't see big pickups in the EU, there are plenty of Hiluxen and even Chinese brands like Maxus (SAIC) could figure out how make an EU-compliant vehicle (much as I think even such models are undesirable to share roads with).
It's also not there are no US imports - there are, when the models comply with local regulation.
It is strange that road deaths have been compared in the past, but protection from air pollution has been discussed since 2026. It is noteworthy that, according to IQAir, the air in the United States is less polluted than in most EU countries.
Actually if you're standing next to people the air you breathe in also has some of their exhaust gases in it, in this case slightly elevated CO2. If there's a dozen people in a small meeting room with the windows closed and no AC the air quality is significantly worse in that room than it would be say, stood on the roof... unless you're in the middle of a major city where maybe the air on the roof is full of exhaust from motor vehicles, hence legislation to restrict vehicle exhaust.
Air in populated cities or air in general? Air quality seems a bit harder to compare across countries than road deaths, considering the US has so much sparsely populated land.
I am not an expert on car safety standards in either US or EU. Nitpicking this quote: “ Europe currently has mandatory requirements for life-saving technologies, such as pedestrian protection, automated emergency braking and lane-keeping assistance”
My cheap, Chevy Trax has some of these features. Lane keeping assistance is there. It will tell me if there is a pedestrian in front of me. If it sees someone’s brake lights then it will flash a red light on the windshield to warn me that I am too close.
It doesn’t have emergency braking but my Wife’s 2019 Honda Odyssey had all those things except the pedestrian protection. All US vehicles.
What standards are we really talking about?
This is one of these articles that feels more like clickbait and judging on the emotional responses I see in this comment section it worked. The top comment is railing against Dodge Rams which wasn’t mentioned in the article.
One of these features is "Active Hood" or "Pop Up Hood" which uses pyrotechnic to pop the hood of the car in case of a frontal collision with a pedestrian, thus making the front hood of the car acting as some kind of stiff airbag for the pedestrian. This helps reducing the risk of life-threatening injuries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4zfwUL3joI
The US, at least at the state level, has often adopted standards far earlier than Europe. Seat belts, the latch system (called ISOFix in Europe) for car seats, and airbags come to mind.
Agreed that this feels like click/rage bait mostly against US pickup trucks, which many people in the States express frustration with too!
That’s why the US vehicles focus on occupant safety since the US does not have a pedestrian centric culture - it is now built around cars. Some places in small pockets are trying to change that but it’s slow and unlikely to be widespread. Other roadway safety features for pedestrians by cities or counties have been enacted. But these lessons are learned in blood. Recently there was a case a couple years ago in a beach town in Florida where a girl died crossing A1A. That town put in a bunch of safety devices after aggressively lobbying the State. But the vehicles weren’t modified.
>EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%
There might be something in those stats other than anecdotal vibes.
How do we really know that? If people walk more and drive less one could argue that road deaths go down too. US has a lot more cars and roads than EU. And we have this massive Interstate system.
Reject US car imports, instead let China flood the EU and UK with cheap and dangerous cars like BYD, Maxxus, Jaecoo, Chery etc.
It seems myopic for this group to go after American vehicles and the size of their market share in the EU and UK, whilst China guts our car market with a thousand cuts from the other side.
I could not find one negative article about China on their website, maybe it's not an area of focus for them (or they're bought out already)
As a Brit I am less worried about my VW Passat blowing up or having some wiretap back to Beijing, or locking me out of the car when the firmware defaults back to Mandarin.
NotJustBikes just put out a video about this issue - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--832LV9a3I
A couple years ago he also made a video about these trucks more broadly - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo
What's truly maddening is how many of these vehicles which _do not_ meet European safety standards are _already_ in Europe. Walk around Hilversum in the Netherlands and you will see plenty of Dodge Rams (mostly 1500's, but there's even a 2500 Dually usually parked on the sidewalk ("pavement "for Brits) where my kids used to go to school). They're imported under "Individual Vehicle Approval" rules, exempting them from type safety requirements, and on top of that are almost always registered as "business vehicles" (you can tell from the V plate) which means they pay an absolute pittance in tax.
I moved here to get away from American kindercrushers (among other reasons) and I am profoundly concerned that Europe is being invaded by these machines.
(Edit) Worth noting is that a lot of Dutch street design is based on the idea that people _can_ share space with cars in dense, low speed environments, but that assumption flies out the window when the vehicles are so large you can't even see a kid walking or biking to school.
Further edit - source - https://www.motorfinanceonline.com/news/dodge-ram-registrati... 5,000 Dodge Rams imported in to Europe in 2023 alone.
> "Individual Vehicle Approval" rules, exempting them from type safety requirements
These rules need to start discriminating between "safe for the passenger who bought it" and "safe for everyone else sharing the public space". Let people easily import some old Model T or a cute kei truck but not something that will kill someone else's kids who they can't see.
I'll always catch hate for saying this, but the quickest way to get people into small more efficient vehicles is to eliminate public roads and make the fuckers pay whatever the market rate is for their super-sized diesel coal rolling environmental destruction machine to be on a road.
They'd quickly find out when they're not being subsidized by the general public and people actually have to pay their way to use their vehicles through tolls to people amortizing their road maintenance costs, that the smaller more pedestrian safe cars are the ones that make sense to operate.
Vehicle tax in the Netherlands is already weight-based. This is why the tax rate for EVs is higher than gas cars. The thing is that if you live in Hilversum and are able to import a car from the US, you don't mind the higher tax to begin with
"The thing is that if you live in Hilversum and are able to import a car from the US, you don't mind the higher tax to begin with"
That can be fixed. Starting with removing business tax exemptions for such cars.
This is why they’re registered as business vehicles. Also the roads aren’t tolled, oddly.
No tax I've seen is anywhere remotely close to following "fourth power law" on axle weight[]. And especially so for gas taxes, as the gas/diesel cost tends to be closer to linear with weight.
Usually what happens is smaller cars subsidize everyone else due to paying a disproportionate tax vs axle weight^~(2-4 depending on fatigue pathway). Depending on tax structure possibly pedestrians/cyclists too but they are usually parasitic on tax basis.
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
I don't disagree that large cars create externalities, but what proportion of costs scale with axle weight?
In the UK the most recent budget allocates £1.6 billion for maintenance. According to statista £13 billion was spent on roads last year.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/298675/united-kingdom-uk...
Basically, it’s well known that fully laden 44 tonne articulated lorries making sharp turns do a lot of damage to roads.
That’s who in industrial estates you’ll often find concrete roads, instead of tarmac, for lorries making 90 degree turns.
American style trucks might be big, but presumably they’re nowhere near 44 tonnes.
Of course, articulated lorries only drive on major roads; your average residential road gets no lorries, so all the wear is from smaller vehicles.
Agreed, tax based on damage to road, and then tax fuel the amount it costs to clean up the pollution the fuel causes, and then use the money to clean up the pollution it causes. Then who cares if you fly your private jet, or giant car, you just pay for it.
Side effects include: reduced pollution, and cheaper ways to clean up pollution
I think those Dodge Rams are on a different tax rate for commercial vehicles.
Why on earth you would want a pickup truck instead of a van is beyond me. This ain't Oklahoma.
1. I'm not a driver, much less in a country with toll roads. But is it common to have per-vehicle customized toll prices? I would expect to pay a fixed per-car, per-use fee.
2. How is this dependent on privatization? Every car is registered. So it seems pretty easy to enforce taxes on cars. And to do so based on model, weight, whatever you want.
In other words, from what I can tell, making people pay their fair share seems simpler in a public system, if anything. It certainly doesn't require privatization.
FWIW I have little skin in the game, as I said, not a driver, so I would probably benefit both by having to pay less tax and by reducing overall car usage.
Would be great if that was the case in the UK. Currently road tax, or Vehicle Excise Duty is related to CO2 emissions. Road upkeep is from general taxation. Road tax was abolished in 1937, I like to remind motorists of this fact when they say "cyclist should pay road tax". Although EVs now have to pay 3p per mile from 2028, which is a big change. Yeah the super-sized vehicles might pay more in fuel tax and have a higher VED rate, but nowhere near enough.
> Road upkeep is from general taxation. Road tax was abolished in 1937
I was skeptical of this being true since fuel duty is notoriously high in the UK, so I did a quick fact check.
Based on the change in 1937 you are "technically" correct, in that none of the motoring taxes are ring fenced for road funds since 1937.
However the opposite is true of what you are implying... income from fuel duty alone is generally around 3 times larger than all road maintenance spending (a fairly steady +25bn/yr [0] Vs -8bn/yr [1] over the last decade).
In other words, although it's officially one big tax pot, motoring taxes pay for road network expenditure more than 3 times over.
This is why they are introducing the per mile EV tax, because fuel duty provided a proportional tax to road use, but EVs skip that and electricity can't be so easily taxed for road use specifically.
TLDR, UK road users pay for far more than the road network.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/284323/united-kingdom-hm...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/533171/annual-road-trans...
> Although EVs now have to pay 3p per mile from 2028, which is a big change.
This is interesting, how is this accomplished?
Over here there was some proposal some years ago to move to a per-mile taxation, with higher tax in congested areas. All managed by some kind of GPS device in each car. There was much opposition as people didn't want the government spying on them via this GPS device, so the plan was eventually dropped.
A simpler approach would be to just record the mileage during annual inspections, but hey why make it simple when you can have some public-private grift making zillions on selling these GPS devices and running the infrastructure for them..
Part of me has also been thinking "let people drive their imported huge trucks but with the understanding that if they kill someone in an accident its not just an accident, its a murder charge for willingly driving such a dangerous vehicle on public roads".
I'm not sure the type of person who imports such a vehicle would have the appropriate amount of foresight to let such a law affect their behaviour.
That’s putting unnecessary burden on the victim.
If you want a silly huge car you should pay silly huge fees for it. You must compensate the public for your nuisance vehicle.
Do you wonder why the world is drifting toward populism?
Because I read comments like that and I don't.
A murder charge for a crime without intent? In the rich west? There just isn't the political will for that. A policy like that is about as serious as luxury space communism.
You could argue this for any car as moving such a heavy object at such speeds close to people is inherently high risk.
Yeah there are always levels of risk we as a society have chosen to allow. My thinking was along the lines of how to self-regulate these imports of cars that do not follow the common safety standards our society has chosen if they are forced upon us by trade agreements or well-intentioned loopholes.
("murder" is a bit an extreme reaction but the more realistic idea may be to make harsher judgements the more pointlessly large and dangerous the vehicle is)
Presumably there's some level at which this can be solved in a purely monetary way.
If the average Dodge Ram causes X millimorts of deaths per year (per km? per km on suburban roads?) and every dollar spent on public healthcare (drug interventions? road safety? Fire departments?) saves Y lives, you can increase the tax by X/Y, trust the government to spend the extra revenue in the most effective way, and everyone comes out better off.
Easier might be to just not give exemptions when public safety is the tradeoff?
I share your feeling. However
> pay whatever the market rate
would only work if there is a market. And infrastructures like roads are a natural monopoly[0], so there could be no market.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
I don't think the idea is to have a market of roads to chose from. It is to make the existing car market more efficient by fixing the externality of other people paying for the damage you do to the roads by your choice of (heavy) vehicule.
Heavy semi-trailer trucks disproportionally damage the roads, if they'll pay a fair share groceries could become unaffordable.
Then switch to subsidizing groceries instead of the the delivery method.
Even though it may change with technological developments, are you aware that EVs are the heaviest vehicles on the market, by somewhere around 140% the weight of ICE vehicle equivalents?
That's weird because there's no public road near me for miles and I can get 90% of the way to "town" without them.
I've also connected my private roads to a couple other private roads so no one has a monopoly on my way to town.
As for the "barriers to entry" mentioned in that article, is absolutely wild. My road and most the ones in our grid network were made with little more than a dude and a tractor (I think you can get suitable one for $10k off craigslist). I initially made mine with an axe, a light truck, and a rope (to rip out small trees) and there's nothing stopping anyone adjacent from doing the same if I'd block the road.
Do you understand why this isn't a workable solution for everyone, and likely not even for the last 10% of your journey?
It would work beautifully for the last 10% of my journey. The only reason why there are no private roads for the las 10% is the county tax funds that road, and only a complete and utter moron would build a road when their "competitor" has a price of zero at the point of use. People commonly ask why the public road has a monopoly; it's not that they are a natural monopoly but rather that it's literally impossible to compete with someone with zero costs (tax costs already sunk) so places with public roads have ~no competition.
The second that road gets defunded by the public coffers, guy with tractor would show back up.
Doesn't work in France with its huge number of toll roads, and in the UK where fuel duty is the largest single part of the price of fuel, it more than covers the cost of public roads, yet people still drive everywhere in increasingly large vehicles. It's not gonna reduce driving, though I do agree it should not be subsidized.
Public transport (especially trains) is very expensive in the UK. If you already have a car it's cheaper to use car even if you're traveling alone. For two it will be more than 2x cheaper than a train. If trains will be affordable I'm sure more people would use them. As to the size - during relatively good pre-COVID times SUV become popular but not many Brits can afford large vehicles today and on average cars in the UK are much smaller than in the US, I would not say it's a big problem.
The reason why British people are able to afford large and expensive vehicles is the heavy reliance on credit. 84% of new cars were bought on finance in 2024[1]
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6781339100e3d...
Road damage is exponential with weight, so heavy vehicles are still heavily subsidized in France even if the total revenue is correct.
There was an interesting court case where only giving tolls to 18 wheeler was problematic but the equivalent fee for cars would have literally worked out to under 1 cent.
You're getting downvoted because good enough quality roads are so cheap that market rate wouldn't really do anything. The government needs to be in the road business so it can stick its thumb on the scale.
There are many easier ways to effect this social change, if you’re willing to do basic legislation around the vehicle itself.
The easiest way to decrease unnecessary oversized vehicles, frankly, is to require them be painted pink and flowery. Many men in America pick big vehicles as they're perceived as masculine, and a basic paint job to attack this psychological would probably work.
Less jokingly, add mechanical speed limits to them. Big heavy vehicles are extremely dangerous, but that danger is closely related to speed.
Other options include adding excessive cameras and radar equipment, so the front of the vehicle isn’t a blind spot. Cars have plenty of cameras and mirrors already, so it’s not novel to drivers. It’s a missed opportunity already since this could really be implemented by major manufacturers within a year.
The danger is not just related to speed, it’s about them being sp large that you can’t physically see the old lady or child walking right in front of it
Why do they need to do this? Is this a real problem in Europe? Are lots of people being killed by these imported trucks?
Implicitly you appear to be saying that we need to reach that point before action is taken?
For the UK it is a problem that many of our roads were built for a horse and cart. People like the aesthetics of these narrow, hedge-lined roads, so they won't change. An F150 or Ram is a very large vehicle to be putting down these roads.
As the article states, US pedestrian deaths are UP 80% since 2010, while EU deaths are DOWN.
You can’t probably blame 100% of that difference on the design standards of US vehicles. But probably a high proportion of them!
I would say that since ~2008 there have was a large increase in distractions for both drivers and pedestrians in the form of screens with a further additions in vehicles later aa well.
Add in the absolutely stupid design of larger passenger vehicles and you get the current trend.
Afaik the payout is determined by your insurance, not the opposing party if you are not the cause. They will usually just stick to the standards set by the companies and not argue.
They are all business vehicles as the premiums would be so insane no person would pay it (which is a hint why they should not be in the road). The problem comes when the crash out costs the business and then you get nothing due to type of insurance (pretty much we pay nothing you pay everything yourself), or the ability of companies to fight endless court battles which your insurance likely does not cover.
My way of middle fingering them is reporting them every time they are either on the curb when there is a parking spot (not legal, blocking pedestrian access is only partially legal when there is no parking pace nearby and you leave enough space), or when they overextend onto the road which is a judgement call and up to the enforcing officer.
You also need to keep notice of people trying to get the municipality to widen parking spots and block that.
As far as I'm aware, having any wheel on the footpath is illegal except in areas specifically signposted for it, but my experience has been that handhaving just didn't care
https://www.parkeerbord.nl/wetgeving/is-parkeren-op-de-stoep...
This spot used to drive me absolutely insane when walking to school with my kids - the gemeente even added marked parking spots and drivers just stole the footpath anyway, so we had to walk in the street, and the gemeente straight refused to issue tickets. The guy on the phone told me "it's not causing any trouble" because hey, it's not like _he's_ ever had to push a pram in the street.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/YD5w84R19TGQgPX78
The issue you're running into is that you're a crazy extremist and so the parking ticket people who are accountable to a government that has to at least pretend to care about public opinion aren't going to enforce the rules the way crazy extremists like you want, they're gonna enforce the rules in the way some approximation of the general public wants.
I might have it wrong in the inside/outside city limits with respect to parking on the curb as there are differences. There are also municipal rules but in general they are only for very specific locations afaik.
If you get injured because the municipality refused to act they are on the hook. Thell them you want it on paper they say they will do nothing to prevent this and you want them telling you specifically you have to walk on the street because they do not act on illegally parked cars.
Edit: where I live I have the option of specifically reporting a dangerous situation which in your case I would: near school zones with children involved it always is in my opinion but who am I to judge. It also helps if more people complain. We have a load of parking tourists here since the municipality mode the payed zones so more traffic and more annoyances. My first messages got impolitely unanswered but after a year of complaining by pretty much everyone they finally start doing things.
I have - or rather had, died - an uncle who had a very effective way of dealing with this. He just walked over the cars.
RIP Cor H., one of a kind. I'm pretty sure the fact that in that neighborhood even now people are religiously parking on the street and never on the sidewalk is a remnant of his presence in this world.
To be fair, parking illegally and/or disrespectfully is not a problem with the vehicle type but with the driver and lack of local enforcement. People also block footpaths, roads and parking spots in Polos and similar smaller vehicles, and plenty of workers cause issues with their regular european cans and pickup trucks. A favorite of mine being small roads with perpendicular parking spots, with an extended Mercedes Sprinter parked so that both footpath and road is restricted.
> To be fair, parking illegally and/or disrespectfully is not a problem with the vehicle type but with the driver and lack of local enforcement.
For cars that can be sold without having to get special approval, the obnoxious drivers are a minority (well, maybe BMWs excluded ;-P).
But what driving/parking manners would you expect from someone who went out of their way and paid extra to get e.g. a Ram or an F-150? They're almost guaranteed to disregard any inconvenience they cause with their driving.
Rude drivers and lack of enforcement are issues, of course, but bigger vehicles make it even harder to walk around a vehicle on the footpath.
Our regular local European vehicles are often larger, they're just safer. So no, nothing specific to the use of imported vehicles.
For example, a Mercedes Sprinter in the standard long box configuration (as is used by local grocery delivery services, plumbers and the likes where I live) is 7.4 meters long , way longer than even the longest American pickup trucks (for some of them, several meters longer!), and is just as wide as them.
In custom box or pickup bed configuration (used by e.g., gardeners), these vehicles get wider (and sharper).
Yes, but a Sprinter has a short nose and the driver's position is such they can see everything in front of them. Those ugly penis extension trucks have huge blind spots immediately in front of them.
Absolutely true but beside the current point of whether they are more or less in the way when parked in residential areas than our normal commercial vehicles.
> For example, a Mercedes Sprinter in the standard long box configuration (as is used by local grocery delivery services, plumbers and the likes where I live) is 7.4 meters long , way longer than even the longest American pickup trucks (for some of them, several meters longer!), and is just as wide as them.
Seems correct on relative length but not width; the F-450 Super Duty body is a bit wider without mirrors than a Sprinter with mirrors;
The Dodge RAM that was being discussed is according to the numbers i see 2020 mm wide without mirrors. The F150 SuperCab (representing the most common US pickup truck) is 2030 mm wide without mirrors. The F-450 Super Duty SRW is only 2032 wide without mirrors - it's just the DRW configuration that adds extra wheels and super wide wheel wells on the back.
A standard mercedes sprinter in van configuration is 2020 mm wide without mirrors, which is as wide as the RAM and just 10mm narrower than the f150. I suspect the sprinter has wider mirrors, but I don't have the F-150 numbers to compare to so I'll leave that unanswered. Pickup configurations of the sprinter go much wider (and have extended mirrors to fit) - a common compact pickup bed configuration has a 2030mm internal bed width for example.
Note that the F-450 Super Duty is not applicable to the discussion as it won't work in the EU: A standard vehicle (class B) has an upper weight limit of 3500 kg. The F-450 Super Duty would have to be registered as an actual truck (class C), which requires a different drivers license and the use of a tachograph to track all driving and adherence to resting period rules. We don't use those vehicle classes unless strictly necessary.
You rarely see Sprinters parked in pedestrian areas though, they are commercial vehicles. Whereas these RAMs are often used as standard personal vehicles for grocery shopping.
I can't speak for where you live of course, but they park in pedestrian areas where I live.
It's the norm in many businesses for employees to drive their work vehicle home and park it where they live, so they're everywhere. Not as many as regular passenger cars of course, but you'll see them on any residential road. Gardeners, plumbers, electricians, delivery services, this is the norm for all of them (a perk of sorts). Even big name-brand logistics companies, as it's common for the drivers to be independent contractors owning the van themselves so home is the only place to park.
They are also used for errands. They're legal for private use proportionate to the amount of VAT paid irrespective of registration type here, so you'll see them pick up/drop off kids, do groceries, recycle bottles, etc. in such vehicles too. Pretty sure that would be just as legal where you are given familiar EU rules.
> he problem comes when the crash out costs the business and then you get nothing due to type of insurance (pretty much we pay nothing you pay everything yourself), or the ability of companies to fight endless court battles which your insurance likely does not cover.
Business automobile insurance doesn't work any differently than consumer automobile insurance. Liability payouts don't usually (ever?) have deductibles. I was recently sideswiped by a guy driving a massive pickup truck for work and their insurance paid me promptly and fairly without any fuss at all. At least the state liability insurance laws I am familiar with do not change just because you're a business.
Absolutely the same with RAMs in Germany. Big toys for rich guys to compensate something small. Takes at least 2 parking spots and doesn’t fit anyway.
On other hand the RAMs are not relevant for the average citizen. Crazy fuel consumption is a showstopper. And the ones with some extra cash will continue to import with German „Individual Vehicle Approval“ equivalent. In my eyes it’s another useless European regulation. Let poor people import cheap Toyotas from overseas.
They're relevant for the average citizen because they're killing average citizens.
A Ram was certainly relevant for this dead woman - https://www.rtl.nl/nieuws/binnenland/artikel/5521908/rouveen...
Would be the end different if it was another oversized car like X7, G-Klasse or Cayenne?
Edit: I am really curious why there is no real vehicle physical size tax in Germany. Let’s take reference as VW Golf. Smaller cars cost less, bigger more. I agree to pay more, but current insanity with RAMs and vans should be somehow regulated.
It’s possible. Visibility for pedestrians and bicyclists in these trucks is horrendous.
It’s so ridiculously bad that even an M1 Abrams tank has less blind spots: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/140dgn8/many_popu...
A lot could probably be done with a simple "a person 1.80m in length must be able to see a 50cm high object 1 metre in front of the car" or something like that. Just making up numbers here and don't know what would be reasonable, but it seems this doesn't need to be that hard?
Weight also matters of course. Hopefully this relatively simple ruling will fix some of that too.
They are not even in the same ballpark size wise
https://www.carsized.com/en-us/cars/compare/porsche-cayenne-...
But or course you are correct this is not only about American cars. Europeans can build big cars as well.
Cars are taxed by engine displacement in Germany. It's rather low compared to insurance and gas cost though. Indirectly larger cars are taxed through high gas tax.
> Would be the end different if it was another oversized car like X7, G-Klasse or Cayenne?
For one, typical pickup trucks seems to have much worse forward visibility than most SUVs. To the point that even an M1 tank sees forward better:
* https://carbuzz.com/news/the-abrams-m1-tank-has-better-visib...
G-klasse W465 is shorter than the equivalent medium sized sedan (E-klasse W214, and even shorter than my W212), and the hood is nowhere near as high as those overseas pickup trucks.
The monstrously large (5.8 meters) G63 6x6 is considerably rarer (i have never seen one in person).
Yes. Just take a look at this picture of the accident. You can instantly see where the proportions go wrong. Not survivable, even at low speeds.
https://cldnr.prod.webx.talpa.digital/talpa-network/image/fe...
This seems to be concerning but as a Dutch person who has lived in the UK for a long time the relatively recent home-grown 'fatbike' issue seems to be a much more pressing problem for Dutch road safety than this and isn't being dealt with effectively as far as I understand.
Having said that I think these American pick-ups (and large SUV's, they are part of the same problem) are a common sight here as well and should not be allowed on the road (unless maybe you can show you need one for work or business).
I see those in Sweden as well. But I also know that people are stupid. And I rather have a stupid person on a stupid bike than a stupid person in an SUV. Especially since in an accident, they will lose in any case because most are likely not street legal.
> This seems to be concerning but as a Dutch person who has lived in the UK for a long time the relatively recent home-grown 'fatbike' issue seems to be a much more pressing problem for Dutch road safety than this and isn't being dealt with effectively as far as I understand.
This is the appeal to worse problems fallacy. Both are problems, both need to be addressed.
What's wrong with fatbikes? They look stupid for sure, but otherwise?
They are routinely modified to exceed legal speed limits and owned by 10 year old or younger kids. Going nearly 30mph on a footpath whilst holding a mobile phone. I think they are also unregistered.
Oh, you mean they're powered, right?
Yes- in the Netherlands the term 'fatbike' is pretty much synonymous with the battery powered bikes only (I presume elsewhere this may be different). They are mini motorcycles really- but exempt from all the rules and regulations that would apply to regular motorcycles.
This morning in Amsterdam a dog got struck and was killed by one of these vehicles, happend right in front of me. Poor doggo
What idiot would drive one of these in Amsterdam to begin with? It just doesn't fit the way traffic is organized there.
Here's an example of driving "standard" historic UK rural roads:
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/b2ad/live/a20a6d...
from: 'Carspreading' is on the rise - and not everyone is happy about it - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7vdvl2531o
Throws in the term "Chelsea Tractor", in Australia in the 1980's they were called Toorak Tractors or simply Yank Tanks.
That doesn't look like rural road in the UK (yellow lines down each side). I drive down rural roads everyday and there are usually no road markings.
Honestly getting past people isn't that much of an issue. There are normally passing spots where you pull over to let people through.
"Chelsea Tractor" is more of a dig at people Range Rovers for the looks and it never been using off-road.
There is a brand in the UK that have decided to "own" the label. Not sure why you would want/need a Ineos Grenadier in London, but some people will buy one.
https://www.chelseatruckcompany.com/
I don't see the issue with the driving standards in the photo. Road is quite wide too, and those yellow lines suggest some town area.
You do get problems in rural areas with idiots in Chelsea Tractors though. Leave them in the city -- there's no room for you in rural areas.
(For those whining about having to do the school run, just got back in my 1.6m wide car with 2 kids, 6 bags, skateboard and guitar, no problems on the 8 miles of single track road even when the lorries come the other way)
> I don't see the issue with the driving standards in the photo. Road is quite wide too, and those yellow lines suggest some town area.
It isn't the Rural Roads in the UK. Also the cars in the photo are kinda normal sized. The Volkwagen people carrier thing in the photo isn't that wide actually.
It doesn't, but people do it.
Here's one in Utrecht https://urbanists.social/@Fuzzbizz/109608802470660144
There is one driving around near where I live in Amsterdam as well.
I am quite tall, even for Dutch standards, but the hood reaches my shoulder easily. It also drives around quite a busy neighbourhood. So I expect this specific car to kill someone within the next 5 years or so.
There are much more dangerous vehicles around on European roads, such as most buses, trams and lorries.
Those tend to have no bonnets. So there are some risks and accidents still, but in general they do have better visibility.
And professional drivers.
They get paid for what they do, their "profession". Most of them are not particularly good ;)
Don't they also need special driver licences, which can have more stringent rules?
Yes, but that is mostly "one time you get it" and then some courses every now and then. You do have more stringent medical rules at every renewal.
That may be true, but on average I would expect them to be better drivers than the pick-up-in-the-inner-city crowd, whose choices are already off to a poor start before they turn the ignition key, after all, they picked the wrong vehicle for the surroundings.
That doesn't just seem selfish, it is selfish. And if it was a renovation crew or so carrying tools I would say they at least have some use for it (though a VW transporter would be just as effective, if not more so).
A Mercedes Vito, despite being nearly 1m shorter and normal car width, has 4-5x the carry capacity and a 3x longer bed than the RAM. These cars are just for show, you can probably find a Kei truck with similar capacity.
They're starting to become more common in Spain too, even in villages/towns where they definitely don't fit. Through the years I've seen two of them stuck because they tried to fit into small village roads where hardly normal passenger cars can fit.
I saw a Ferrari trying to navigate speed bumps and a roundabout once.
People are strange.
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> […] and on top of that are almost always registered as "business vehicles" (you can tell from the V plate) which means they pay an absolute pittance in tax.
In Ontario, Canada, (AIUI) you have to get a commercial car plate for pickup trucks.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...
If you want personal / non-commercial plates you have to get inspections done:
* https://forms.mgcs.gov.on.ca/en/dataset/on00719
> Walk around Hilversum in the Netherlands and you will see plenty of Dodge Rams
Which confirms the old adage: "Money does not come with taste".
That is a lot of Dodge Rams. It's a ponderous trend, it'd be interesting to see what is the driver. Is it a particular demographic, or subculture?
My mom who is originally from Bergschenhoek claims her elder brother taught her to drive, in a Dodge truck, probably post WW2 in a model like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_T-,_V-,_W-Series
I don't know whether there are hordes of bejaarden buying Dodges for nostalgic reasons, but that would mean the Dodge brand has some insane staying power. My guess would be that is absurd and unlikely.
I really dig your deadpan sprinkling of Nederlands. Some words have that etymological acuity that makes them irresistible to just deploy. I was always amazed by how many Yiddish and French words there are in Hollands.
Germanic languages share a massive amount of crossover. Just knowing English and a small amount of Afrikaans I saw cognates all over Western Europe from Netherlands, to Denmark, Sweden, Germany.
It should be illegal, but I do think you might just be living close to some people who really love trucks. 5k is not a lot across Europe, popular models sell 10x that.
They are heavily clustered around US military bases. If you life near one you will see a lot if oversized US vehicles, in most of the rest of Europe you can go months or years without seeing one
> They are heavily clustered around US military bases.
They’re clustered around areas of idiots with means. I’m nowhere near a us military base but there’s a bunch of these where I live, including two or three owned at houses I pass by on my way to work.
Honestly, local governments should just grow a pair and say no to this kind of shit.
If the US government wants to give its soldiers perks, they can rent or loan them a local car. Probably cheaper all round than flying/shipping in their financed Dodge RAM anyway.
Then again, American personnel being arseholes to the locals is well established from Okinawa to Croughton so it's probably endorsed as a power thing.
<facepalm>. This sort of breathless screeching rhetoric from people like you are is exactly why it's a difficult to solve social/political problem rather than a mundane technical optimization issue.
The common man hears your sort of rhetoric, knows he can't reasonably be an expert in the subject matter, but he can pattern match on how you're saying what you're saying and it matches up with a whole bunch of crap that's been bad for him.
I really hate the modern high hood truck styling. But I hate it a little less knowing it's followed the problem people to Europe.
Monster trucks are becoming increasingly popular in Australia too
I've seen that movie!
Modern US trucks are an absolute atrocity. I am the demographic that thinks they look cool and might one day have bought one should I end up with more money than I knew what to do with if I hadn't learned that they're death traps.
The tall grill means impact to pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcycles is basically instant death as their head - the only thing above the grill - gets whiplashed onto the rigid tip of the hood. On a normal vehicle you get your legs swiped and rotate your whole body onto an intentionally flexible area of the hood for a much gentler impact.
The visibility from the driver seat is not only much worse than our actual semis, but also worse than actual tanks. You could have half a kindergarten and a small vehicle in front of your car without knowing.
As for the tax, eh - tbf these vehicles are mostly used for business purposes by sole proprietors and the likes, and while they're stupid vehicles they do still do the job. A fully decked Iveco Daily or Mercedes Sprinter is also expensive with little registration tax. Registration tax is a weird (and arguably stupid) system, this isn't really an outlier in that regard.
I roll my eyes more when I see a sports car attempted registered as a van.
Living in the US, what I find even more wild is just how many people purchase them here who have zero need to own a truck that size. It's got to be the most absurd parts of our modern cultural identity.
Even if the owner is using it as a rugged machine for hauling tools and supplies back and forth, they make for terrible work vehicles. A bed that's advertised as 6 foot actually measures about 5' 7" if you're lucky and the wheel wells eat into it so much that loading anything wider than maybe 4' just feels stupid. Nothing about it feels convenient or helpful when compared to a proper work van or a small flatbed. It's basically just a comfy exoskeleton for the driver to pickup groceries.
Meanwhile, I'm driving from site to site with a 4-cylinder hatchback full of tools in custom boxes I made getting twice the gas mileage. It gets some funny looks, but it gets the job done, which is more than I can say for most of the not-a-scratch-on-them trucks I see on the road, here.
I do empathize with those picking the vehicle not on practicality but cool factor - considering how common and accepted gadget cravings are in other areas, I would find it unfair to attack that aspect. I'm currently using ~5GB out of my laptops 64GB of RAM, pretty sure I could start a small fire with my flashlight, and my motorcycle has off-road suspension in a country where the most demanding obstacle is a curb. Other things would objectively fit my needs better while costing less, but be less fun - and fun can be hard to find these days.
As you say, they are absolutely terrible for work use as well - Japanese kei trucks famously have larger beds than some common US pickup trucks, and the size of the custom beds we use in the EU makes the US ones look like absolute kids toys - but that too I wouldn't mind too much if they were just forced to be safe and with decent emissions so the idiocy mainly affected the driver and their wallets.
I'm not too impressed with your vehicle only getting twice the gas mileage though. I'd expect more than that. :P
> I'm not too impressed with your vehicle only getting twice the gas mileage though. I'd expect more than that. :P
I'm going to blame the ham radio antennas and bike rack ;)
But in all seriousness, I was getting slightly better mileage when the car was new 6 years ago. It has declined a bit, despite my regular maintenance, but I'm still very pleased with it. It might be more than twice the mileage of the average truck on the road, to be honest, but I find it hard to get a clear number. I think some truck owners embellish the mileage they actually get, as does the dealer sticker on the new vehicles for sale since those numbers assume perfect terrain with no traffic, last I checked. Then I hop into a co-worker's 2020 truck and realize he's getting 12mpg on a good day and nearly have a heart attack.
My vehicle gets between 45 and 55mpg on average, depending if I'm on the highway a lot or more urban environments.
It's almost impossible to navigate parking garages if two such trucks park opposite each other. Or if one parks on an end that people need to navigate around.
People spend insane amounts of money buying these monstrosities too. It seems as a society we've normalized spending a year's salary on a vehicle, or rather getting a 7-year loan and making crazy monthly payments. I don't understand it. My then normal-sized, now smallish, 13-year old car, that I paid off 11 years ago, still runs great and I can park it easily.
> People spend insane amounts of money buying these monstrosities too
This is also another part of the whole truck-craze in the US that I do not understand. An F150, for example, starts around $40,000 USD for base models, not including taxes and hidden fees. I purchased my car (an HEV, mind you) back in 2019 for just over half that price, spend about $500 annually on regular maintenance that I'm not able to do myself to keep things tip top, and spend about half as much in fuel as my coworkers who travel about the same amount as me for our jobs. Accounting regularly double-checks that I turned in all my fuel receipts because they still don't quite grasp that my car gets far, far better gas mileage.
All that said, these guys make about the same money I do, some a little less since they're newbies, which is to say we are all very underpaid for what we do, wealthy by no standards. And yet, they made these massive purchases while struggling to pay bills or complaining that fuel is too expensive at the pump, etc. These are the same people who buy two paychecks worth of fireworks every July 4th just to watch it all burn in 15 minutes.
Makes me think part of our cultural identity includes regularly acting against our own interests.
> Modern US trucks are an absolute atrocity
This.
I'm living in EU, thinking about getting some pickup. Just want to try this kind of vehicle (and I would love to transport my motorcycle, building materials etc). But I want something small - it looks like almost non-existent market here (there are cars like older f150, s10, etc - but very, very limited offers). Everyone gets the big modern trucks, that are unusable in our tight spaces.
I would love to transport my motorcycle, building materials
Something like a Peugeot Partner (just to name something) + a trailer does all of that. With the added benefit that without the trailer attached it's a fairly normal size.
> I would love to transport my motorcycle, building materials etc
Just get a Renault Traffic or equivalent. I don't see any advantage pickup trucks would have against a white van when transporting anything.
My uncle got a Hilux for his gardening business. Seems to work well for driving around lawnmowers and other stuff, also for towing the large self-driving lawnmovers and other heavy equipment.
> The visibility from the driver seat is not only much worse than our actual semis, but also worse than actual tanks. You could have half a kindergarten and a small vehicle in front of your car without knowing.
Yeah, mentioned in a comment, driving a Ford Expedition on holiday in the US I almost hit a hit walking down the sidewalk.
It literally had better visibility going backwards in the rear view camera than it did going forwards.
> The tall grill means impact to pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcycles is basically instant death as their head - the only thing above the grill - gets whiplashed onto the rigid tip of the hood. On a normal vehicle you get your legs swiped and rotate your whole body onto an intentionally flexible area of the hood for a much gentler impact.
What's infuriating is the EuroNCAP safety tests refuse to acknowledge this. SUVs get the same bonnet impact test as small cars do and end up scoring highly due to have a large bonnet surface area despite the fact that actual impacts with pedestrians does not happen like that with SUVs.
And then (wrong) smug wanks on the internet talk about how much safer their SUVs are for pedestrians than small cars based on quoting NCAP scores.
> they pay an absolute pittance in tax
What would be the appropriate tax for them to pay? I suppose it’s based on weight?
tax should be applied to things we want less of:
- low visibility of little people directly in front of the car: huge tax
- low visibility in the rear: tax (yes, rear camera = no tax)
- too big to comfortably fit a standard parking space: tax
- too big to fit a standard parking space at all: huge tax
- too heavy: tax
- way too heavy: huge tax
- not fuel efficient: tax
- emits lots of dark/smelly/toxic smoke: tax/tax more/huge tax
etc.
Aren’t “bad fuel efficiency” and “can’t park in town” already their own priced-in disadvantages?
Fuel consumption itself is already taxed at the pump.
And I think “too heavy” already means higher tax in NL.
The weird thing is that the EU is really not shy about banning things, and yet here we are in a thread about American Monster Trucks taking over Amsterdam.
> Aren’t “bad fuel efficiency” and “can’t park in town” already their own priced-in disadvantages?
> Fuel consumption itself is already taxed at the pump.
yes to both, but that doesn't mean that extra incentives for high efficiency and extra discouragement nudges for low efficiency shouldn't be present. they're orthogonal features of the economy.
> And I think “too heavy” already means higher tax in NL.
looks like not high enough, judging by this whole thread :)
> The weird thing is that the EU is really not shy about banning things
yes, but it's also known for not moving fast, as all large committees are - and when they finally move, the policy response can be deployed for a market which doesn't exist anymore.
And don't even mention the Cybertrucks cruising around who knows where. Granted, I've not seen any parked at the Albert Heijn quite yet.
Luckily I haven't seen a single Cybertruck in the north/north-east of Spain. Pretty sure I'd call the police if I saw one as they're clearly illegal here.
These American trucks are driven by Dutch or by eastern Europeans (e.g. from construction industry)? The Dutch cycling culture and urban planning are adorable, but we are terrible selfish assholes especially regarding the cars.
i'm always suprised by the amount of SUVs on Dutch highways. in that regard you are not that different to us Germans.
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Most people with bikes also own cars.
Don't fall into the algorithmically generated "it's them v us"
It isn't algorithmically generated. I used to spend a lot of time in cyclist circles both IRL and online and there is a very vocal minority of cyclists that basically hate cars and motorists. The stereotype exists for a reason.
It is. It's only able to drive the engagement that only hatred generates by pitching artificial dichotomies.
Watch his videos.
At some point he basically says: "I don't even love bikes, but they're useful. If I could choose, I would go by public transit everywhere, especially trams". And he has tons of videos where he explains exactly why:
0. Most of everything he publishes refers to urban areas.
1. Bikes are better for society.
2. Public transit is even better for society.
3. Trams are probably the best form of public transportation (again, for society).
He's not a recreational cyclist (light road bike, lycra - sports/racing), he's a utility cyclist (big heavy upright bike, regular clothes - take kids to school, commute, do grocery runs).
He’s a prominent urbanism commentator- what would the conflict even be?
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The reasoning is these trucks make no practical or economic sense in Europe. They are not allowed to be sold, because they are dangerous to bystanders, are polluting and oversized. Only through some loophole quite a few have been imported, which is very frustrating to all of us that are intimidated and appalled by seeing these on our roads.
These trucs signal that the driver does not care about other people, environment, climate, etc. Because they are dangerous, obnoxious and polluting. And instead of calling these things trucks, I think Kindercrusher is a perfectly apt description.
> Okay. But you've posted 12 times already in this thread that isn't even an hour old, mostly emotions and hyperbolics as quoted above. Kindercrushers?
FWIW, I am not him but I could have written exactly the same, just changing the location. Yes, we do tend to care when selfish arseholes ruin it for everyone, and put other people’s lives at risk for no good reason. And kindercrusher is a perfectly good description of these things.
I have two young children and they are endangered by vehicles like this so I agree that I do have emotions regarding this.
So tired of current trend in Europe, the Goverment should solve every issue & every day everyone wants a new rule.
We have now so many rules either they are not enforced or they are making everythingn slow or expensive.
Now to solve those issues, they will call for new legislations, but again they will be enforced only for the first 2 weeks. And then again a call for new rules will be made.
Take for instance FAT bikes in Netherlands, these are e-bikes with big wheel that young kids like. They drive like madman, harrass women in parks & everybody wants to ban them. But there is already enough legislation to take care of these kids, they are just not enforcing them. And probably rightly so, because they have bigger issues to deal with.
Not everything can be solved with a pill.
Opening that video, American-style pickup trucks are about 40% more likely to kill a pedestrian 100% more likely to kill a child (the video argues that this mostly stems from the shape of the front). These cars also get into more crashes
Honestly, banning these things seems sensible when the only thing going for them for most buyers is seemingly an appreciation of their style
Yeah there is always a reason for a rule that makes sense, but there is also a price for making a new rule everytime something doesnt work.
A fat bike is a bike with >3.8" tires and is not necessarily an e-bike nor an issue. Some people use them in the snow, sand or trail without issues to anyone and I have occasionally also used mine in the city because it was more comfortable to ride at slow speed than my road bike and stops on a dime thanks to the available grip.
There are a number of trendy aliexpress quality e-bikes that are also using fat tires and are ridden by idiots but the problem is not fat bikes per se. The problem is idiots on unrestricted/modded e-bikes. Ban fat bikes and they will use unrestricted e-bikes with different tires and the problem will be the same.
Note that the term fatbike means a mountain bike in America but essentially a small electric motorcycle in the Netherlands, UK, etc
Yeah that's kind of the point, new rules will often not solve things, but will just move the issue. The underlying issue with certain groups in society & not enforcing will remain.
> We have now so many rules either they are not enforced or they are making everythingn slow or expensive.
What exactly is so slow or expensive that you're prevented to do because of some regulation or law?
In theory many laws are based on good ideas, but in practice they dont or only partially accomplish what they set out to do. Few examples:
- Bureaucracy around clinical trials The old Clinical Trials Directive (2001/20/EC) was meant to harmonise standards, but in practice it led to lots of extra admin and different interpretations in each country, which made multi-country trials slow and expensive. EUR-Lex You can see the effect in the numbers: Europe’s share of commercial clinical trials fell from ~22% in 2013 to about 12% in 2023, even while global trial numbers increased by ~38%.
- Medical Device Regulation (MDR & IVDR) bottleneck Meant for safety, but has meant delays and uncertainty for new devices and even risks of shortages of older ones, which clearly affects innovation. * https://www.meddeviceonline.com/doc/we-re-heading-toward-a-b...
- Data protection (GDPR) and health/science data Complexity and fragmentation of implementation can definitely slow things down, especially for big pan-European projects or AI/“big data” medicine. In theory it's good, but researcher or not being helped on how they can compete worldwide while being GDPR compliant, meaning EU will get behind & certain research is done elsewhere
Many more examples in other fields then medicine. And there are clearly a lot of good laws, but our idea of running a country is just adding lots of new rules every year is just faulty.
>EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%
I didn't know this, but it is absolutely crazy. Every EU politician who tries to subvert car safety should be dismissed and tried for endangering public safety.
> Every EU politician who tries to subvert car safety should be dismissed and tried for endangering public safety.
The problem is coming from the other side, the Americans are threatening to start a new trade war if the EU doesn't permit their murdermobiles on the European roads.
IMO pedestrian safety should still come above all else, but this is not an initiative coming from some EU representatives who want to own a Cybertruck. Blocking these cars can have impact on the war against Ukraine and the prices of fuel and other import products on the short term.
As an European, I'd rather have a trade war, than bend 90 degrees.
But the EU commission will bend and sell us out, the same way it's selling european privacy to security and data companies lobbying it (just check how many times Thorn, Palantir et al have met with EU officials, lobbying is recorded and publicly accessible).
It's a tactic, agree to the deal, the US ignores us. Allow the deal to get destroyed in parliament and the courts and it has no effect. The deal was a means by which to get enough time to figure out the correct response. We've been doing this kind of thing for decades.
This is the way. The current US administration is a 2 year old with ADHD and shiny distractions abound. Agree to deals and let him claim wins, and then bury it in bureaucracy and common sense.
This is, essentially, how the US government survived Trump 1.0, and is why Trump 2.0 has been so concerned with gutting bureaucracy and placing vapid yes-men in the cabinet, but they can't really do that in Europe.
It's one of the few times where EU bureaucracy is a huge advantage.
While this is true, be ware of lobbying using it for other means.
I mean, the commission said it "intends to accept". Given the EC's legendary lightning-fast speed, that presumably puts the timeline long after ol' minihands is out of office, and thus irrelevant.
Even when the EC actually _wants_ to do something, it typically struggles to get it done in under a decade.
> long after ol' minihands is out of office
The EC is not that slow when it comes to the American trade wars. The timeline suddenly shrinks to months instead of years because this stuff could majorly disrupt the economy (and safety) across the European continent.
The EC may not fear the (mostly disinterested) European citizen body, but it does fear immediate actions by world powers.
> The EC is not that slow when it comes to the American trade wars. The timeline suddenly shrinks to months instead of years because this stuff could majorly disrupt the economy (and safety) across the European continent.
I dunno, like the last "deal" basically makes a load of promises that the EU has no legislative ability to enforce. So it's basically just performative.
And honestly, given that the US is gonna sell out Ukraine, then this (and most other) trade deals should be ripped up. This would hurt my country (and me) a lot, but it's probably still the right thing to do, as TACO is definitely a possibility if the US markets crash.
Yup, in general those "trade deals" are long on vague aspirational stuff, much of it totally outside the EC's power to grant, and short on promises. Notably the EU "trade deal" includes _private investment_ in the US; obviously the EU cannot direct or really influence private investment in the US, and indeed the figure quoted is about the amount of Europe-sourced private investment one would expect in US in the normal course of things.
Honestly I suspect Trump _knows_ this, too; the point of the trade deals is not to be substantive but to give Trump something with impressive numbers to boast about, and both sides are fully aware of this.
The problem with accepting yet another blackmail (or else trade war, or else NATO doesn't really exist anymore) is just a slippery slope. Not the first request that was made like this, not the last.
>lobbying is recorded and publicly accessible
As in the meeting dates or the actual talks? Mind dropping a link?
https://transparency-register.europa.eu/search-register-or-u...
For each lobbying company/group you can download a pdf listing all their activities.
Of course, we don't know what happens beyond the official encounters, as there is no legal requirement to report "I bumped into X lobbyist in a restaurant and we had a chat".
I see, interesting, thank you. Yeah, sadly this could be just transparency theater, glad it's there, it's a start.
Trade wars work both ways. So far the US export market is not doing so great. All those tariffs are raising the cost of exported goods as well. And those were already too expensive before the tariffs. If the US wants more US cars on EU roads, it needs to start making better cars. It's that simple. But in the EU, cars have to compete with domestic cheap cars and imported Korean and Chinese cars. It's a level playing field. Hence not a lot of US cars on the roads. A few Teslas (made in the EU mostly), a few Fords (some made on the VW platform), and a sprinkling of niche imports for things like muscle cars and pickup trucks. They are quite rare but you see one or two once in a while.
Maybe the legislation allowing their import should take their special status in to account.
I would suggest mandatory semi (or full) trailer truck drivers' license required for anyone who operates these. In addition, they should be indicated as a new category of "recreational trucks", with harsh penalties specific to them especially regarding road accidents.
For example, if found guilty of reckless driving, or causing accidents, the vehicle would be permanently confiscated. (On top of personal fines, loss of license etc as already sentenced by law.) Perhaps the law enforcement could then be given access to such confiscated vehicles, creating also some incentive to enforce the law.
> threatening to start a new trade war if the EU doesn't permit their murdermobiles on the European roads
The strange part is that those car can be sold in the EU markets already. They just have to comply with the same pollution and safety standards as other cars. What would justify an exception?
Fuck it. Let the Americans start another trade war then. This nonsense has been going on long enough, if times need to get tough so be it then, start earlier rather than in 5 years when these misery machines are everywhere and the car arms race is in full effect.
It’s tough when there’s a war going on and the EU countries don’t really want to pay the true cost for their defense.
It doesn't matter how much is this repeated by politicians: it's a lie to suggest that the EU does not spend enough for defense.
We spend multitudes of times more than our only realistic threat. And that threat can't even wage war with Ukraine, you expect Russia to be able to fight Poland, yet alone the rest of the European countries?
Also, just a reminder: US servicemen have not been sent to fight a war for European souls since almost a century. Whereas European soldiers are actively deployed even now in the middle East for wars that Washington started.
Please start looking more at facts and less about propaganda. Of course Europe should step up in being more independent defense-wise, but you'd be a fool if you think the US does not enjoy and leverage the current status provides.
> Of course Europe should step up in being more independent defense-wise, but you'd be a fool if you think the US does not enjoy and leverage the current status provides.
> it's a lie to suggest that the EU does not spend enough for defense.
Which is it? Is Europe spending enough, or does American have influence because Europe is still cripplingly dependent on the US?
I wouldn’t argue that the US isn’t abusing that dependence at the moment.
What I would argue is that the US spent 20 years telling Europe to get its act together, and finally in the last 3 years that has started to change, but notably that was years after NATO was publicly declared braindead. So it was pretty irresponsible of the Europeans to leave themselves beholden to the US for so long.
> So it was pretty irresponsible of the Europeans to leave themselves beholden to the US for so long.
> Which is it?
The answer is complex.
Europe's dependence on US is not much on the military front (again, there are no realistic threats in a conventional war that European countries have) as it is on a political and diplomatic one.
Europe is made of 27+ countries that have different foreign policies, goals, and whose word in a war of real defence has never been tested.
Under that situation US is an absolutely critical reference as in times of difficulties even countries with different interests will still realistically rally around US guidance.
You can thus understand why the group of Baltics and Poland are absolutely much more leaning into playing friends with Washington than they are with Brussels.
Europe is absolutely dependent as of now, and likely will be forever for these very reasons, on US.
The answer is complex, but it should never read as "Europe does not have enough weapons or soldiers to defend itself", rather than "Europe is not taking their own defence under its own responsibility".
It is difficult to tell Italians: "stop producing your own rifles, tanks, mines, etc, let's all agree on a single design". It is hard to tell the Portuguese "look, you're gonna deploy two brigades in Estonia for the next 10 years". It is hard to tell the Belgians they have to follow the command of an Austrian in a war fought in Eastern Europe.
Europe is plagued by differences that the common alliance with the US flattens out. Without US, it's a borderline disaster. It's not a matter of money being spent.
> there are no realistic threats in a conventional war that European countries have
You underestimate russia and clearly only glance over war news over past few years, if at all. They are not sending their maximum potential, nor sending their best equipment like tanks, Ukraine is rather a minor operation for them. Its true their conventional warfare capabilities have been damaged to certain extent, in some cases severely but China has stepped up and covered many holes, no reason to think they won't continue testing their equipment further (US did & does the same, its basic realpolitik).
Do you think they ran out of rather modern tanks and thus are sending 60-70 year old models? Far from it, they keep them aside and send on Ukraine the oldest tanks that can still move around, ~100mm cannon on wheels with HEAT rounds works fine even if old. They still didn't introduce mandatory draft because they didn't need to, folks dying in Ukraine now are all volunteers who get a massive signing bonus high enough to buy a flat or some smaller/older house. Their current drone capabilities would decimate any western Europe army in few weeks to the cinder, even Poland is not be completely up to the game, only Ukraine realistically is right now. These days, war is fought with 2 ingredients - drones and enough boots on the ground with nontrivial attrition.
Can they conquer all Europe? Nope, but they could easily take baltics for example. Thus they also subvert via bribes and corrupt exploitable politicians - look at Orban, Fico and failed attempt in Romania. Those countries would not fight them nato or not, they would roll on their back and invite them themselves, in (maybe not vain) hope that their corrupt highly criminal regimes can continue and thrive under new&old rulers in same vein as in Belarus.
Don't underestimate them, they are by far the biggest threat Europe as a whole has, it has been like that for past 100+ years. Their inferiority complex runs deep and western democracies are a direct threat to their typical corrupt dictatorship way of life. 2025 is really not the year to have such misguided & naive ideas.
Also as a proper mafia state they only understand power. Demonstrate you have enough and you will be left alone. Otherwise not so much.
I regularly follow the ISW reports and I'm quite sure I have a comprehensive view of Russia's ability to wage war.
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian...
You think that if Europe spend "enough" America would have not influence? You think that Europe would be allowed to spend "enough" but only in Europe companies?
They like to talk about the bad Russians influencing politics and people in Europe, but compared to the Americans they are flies in the wall. This people that is taking decisions now in Europe, finish later working in the Atlantic Council or something like that. That is the root of the European independence problem.
This is a bogus statement. EU countries have met or surpassed defense budget goals, usually the ones that don't have the contracts in progress but the full payouts not done yet since they are still in progress. Percentage of GDP to military spending has been criticized as a bad way to measure how much military spending is done and needed. Additionally, the European countries are paying for the war while the US is taking that money and the optics of providing certain military supplies. This whole situation is just exploitation of the EU with the benefit of the US' companies.
Only about a third of European defense spending goes to the US. Europes struggles to ramp up production have been an ongoing story for many years now.
There is still about a trillion dollars of NATO defense spending to replace if Europe does not want to be reliant on America. Doable, but spending a third of that on American equipment wouldn’t help matters.
Perhaps if Europeans got an earlier start, instead of ignoring nearly two decades of warnings and a clearly deteriorating security situation, they wouldn’t need to care so much about US policy. Better late than never.
https://economist.com/europe/2025/12/01/europe-is-going-on-a... from The Economist
Of course the economist would say that. Of course that a trillion dollars have to be replaced. Who is that enemy Europe is going to fight? The Russians? Makes not sense at all.
No they did not. Just a handful of countries are spending close to 5% of their GDP on defense, the rest are doing everything in their power to pay as little as possible.
The 5% GDP deadline is 2035. The 2% by 2024 was met. Not even the US spends 5% of their GDP on defense. Again as I've stated, it's been criticized as a bad goal to use this metric. In actuality, people who push the narrative that Europe is being bankrolled by the US will never be satisfied by any percentage.
> Just a handful of countries are spending 5% of their GDP on defense
And the US is not one of them
> Just a handful of countries are spending 5% of their GDP on defense
Have you even read the comment in full before responding? I'm talking about this part of it:
> Percentage of GDP to military spending has been criticized as a bad way to measure how much military spending is done and needed
But since you wouldn't get it anyways:
The "5% of GDP" is a number that US politicians came up with, seemingly out of nowhere, because they figured they want to boost their military industry.
EU countries are already spending that or even more - just look at Ukraine spending by EU countries - but since it's spent on their own domestic defense industry, US politicians don't like it. That's the point.
They don't want us spending 5% of the GDP on defense unless we buy their stuff. So here we are.
Here, so you get it, as I was a bit wrong: https://www.nato.int/content/dam/nato/webready/documents/fin... - page 3.
Poland spends 4.5% and that is the highest number, the rest are spending much much less.
Tell me again how they're spending more???
By sending stuff and people to Ukraine. But that doesn’t end up in the Nato GDP spendings, because it goes through their governments not NATO.
The 5% number is fudged, much of the increase over 2% comes from civic infrastructure investment. They’re fluffing the numbers.
Most EU defense spending isn’t on US equipment (only ~35%); I don’t get where the European victim mentality is coming from here - Europe can and is building up its own defense industry.
There’s some Trump nonsense more recently about buy American, but the demands to take security seriously have been going on for nearly 20 years, and have been largely ignored until Ukraine round two.
> I don’t get where the European victim mentality is coming from here
It’s coming from the fact that we’re already in a difficult time with a slowdown in economy and then get bullied into spending the money we could be using to help our own people on new US weapons.
All for Trump to then sign half of Ukraine off to Russia.
Like it or not, the US will the war. They want to do business with Russia, not squabble over a country no one knew existed until 4 years ago.
> not squabble over a country no one knew existed until 4 years ago.
I think you're really not qualified to say anything about Europe if you didn't know Ukraine existed until 4 years ago.
The World Bank and IMF are providing loans to Ukraine, tied to economic reforms as usual (removal of workers protection etc). It’s not like there is an actual dependency on any purported nicety of the US.
A correct statement would be that the Europe didn't want to pay for US equipment for its own defense.
The US has previously discouraged Europe from building out its own defense industry, the current situation is due to that a dovish view of Russia therefore less of a need to spend money on equipment and troops for a land war.
America doesn't want Europe paying for its own defence. It wants Europe paying American defence contractors.
The entire strategy for the last 80 years has been built around this edict.
Not only defense may I add.
The European countries are already paying more than the US, both in therms of money and lives.
It is even tougher when America is helping the enemy as much as it can. Like, Trump is literally helping Putin at this point.
Not to mention it's going to be the EU that will partially bear the cost of rebuilding Ukraine after war and Trump will not even let them have a say in how the land should be split.
As an American, I have plenty of disappointment in government right now with my own. But it's also incredibly disappointing how many other world leaders are letting Trump roll over them.
The trade wars go both ways. Certainly it can be a bit of a collective action problem when it comes to individual countries that are smaller than the US, but the EU as a whole should be able to negotiate on even-enough footing with the US on these kinds of issues.
Any war goes both ways, but that's not the point. The point is: can you win a war against your adversary? Can the UK win a trade war against the US for example?
The thing is, nobody else wants trade wars. Both sides of a trade war lose in a system of otherwise free commerce, the "winning" party is the party that is willing to sacrifice the most to make a point. Everyone but maybe the super wealthy are worse off. Americans are paying the price for their government's idiotic tariff game, but the real cost will come over the following years, and in some cases decades.
The EU is trying to minimize the damage for its constituents, they're not interested in a stupid power play. Threats of reciprocating in trade wars are meaningless if the leadership you're threatening doesn't care if their people starve.
Playing tough doesn't matter anyway, the American voting public will just blame the EU for all the bad things that happen if the EU's actions do have an impact, laugh at the EU if a diplomatic solution is found, and the American leadership will repeat whatever the last guy to verbally jerk off Trump said for at least the coming three years.
In a way, it's kind of impressive. The EU was not ready for America to devolve into this level of clown politics this fast, and that left them unprepared.
Decisions are still made by our local polititians, not by Americans, who should take responsibility for those, especially in such a serious situation as this.
Pressure from Americans - who have no say in how we live in Europe -, remote or suspected, transient consequences on costs and conflics, all have lower, much lower priorities than keeping the population safe and healthy. Dead people need no cheap fuel, need no prompt conflict resolution, need no short term tariff settlements, and do not care what Americans think. Dead people are just dead! EU polititians should let people stay alive foremost of all! The rest come aftre that.
And all because these stupid huge trucks. Not even close in importance! Does not worth it.
> with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC9a3GR1HJY&t=371s
> I said there was no way this truck would pass a pedestrian impact safety standard. Now, I wasn't wrong that the truck won't pass a pedestrian impact safety standard, it won't! And that's why they can't sell it in Europe. [...] But I didn't realise that America has no pedestrian impact standards. [...] America actually allows companies to self-certify a variety of aspects of safety.
See also: Boeing. It is the exact same kind of fuck-up. Regulators should not be in bed with the industries they regulate. That's a hard problem to solve, because where if not in industry would you get the expertise. But these kind of revolving door arrangements are extremely problematic.
And that is not counting in the fact that there far more pedestrians on the street in EU than in the USA. If there were the same amount of pedestrians in the USA as in the EU the statistics would be even worse.
When there are more obstacles and hazards on the road drivers tend to slow down and pay attention. Pedestrian deaths in my city peaked in 2025, but they didn't happen in the walkable central areas of the city where pedestrians are common, they happened out in the 'burbs where the roads are wide and pedestrians are few.
The general problem is the US are a bully and Europe just caves, always. We should put up a serious fight. Block all US imports, starting with tech, and see what happens. Who cares if we sell less champagne??!?
It’s not about champagne. It’s about us not making anything like the Patriot air defense system. Or us not having the capabilities to command our disparate militaries cohesively without US involvement in NATO. The whole Western order has been built on the premise of US being the corner stone that ties everything together.
Thank God the French have always been suspicious about it since the Suez crisis, hence we _do_ have at least some independent capabilities.
For those who don't know, the French (and British) instigated the Suez crisis. It was a highly illegal attempt at regime change in Egypt and the US along with the USSR and United Nations rightfully pressured the French to stop. Bizarre example to illustrate the need for military independence.
This is entirely true, but it's still good that as a result of this, the French prioritised independent defence policies for the last 60+ years.
Unfortunately your assessment is based on the faulty premise that anyone in international politics does anything to be nice.
The US doesn't give one rats ass about Egypt. The US won and got their way in Suez and the international seas in general. Europe lost.
There is no right in geo politics - only might. It's completely machiavellian. This is because you don't get to elect your neighbors leaders, and so they aren't beholden to you. International politics fundamentally doesn't work like national politics because of this. You can't stop Putin, Trump, or Xi, from taking what is yours unless you have the steel and oil to stop them. You can't sue them or vote them out like in national politics.
[delayed]
SAMP/T is quite good.
> Who cares if we sell less champagne??!?
Nobody, but it seems a lot of people care if we sell less german cars.
> Who cares if we sell less champagne??!?
Those whos relatives freeze when their country can no longer get LNG imports
The US is underwriting European security (and by extension various European welfare states).
Do you really want to block the import of arms and financial aid to Ukraine?
If Europeans were serious about their sovereignty they’d have made very different choices up until now.
It isn’t right that America has so much power in this circumstance, but going back decades the US has been asking for Europe to take defense seriously.
> It isn’t right that America has so much power in this circumstance, but going back decades the US has been asking for Europe to take defense seriously.
Funny because the last time I believe that it was the US that requested help in Iraq and Afghanistan and not the other way around.
Europe should certainly increase its defense spending (and actual capabilities). But the reason NATO exists isn't just to please Europe. The US have a direct interest in containing Russia; I don't think they can afford to simply stop caring about the rest of the world. And I'd be willing to test that theory.
> I don't think they can afford to simply stop caring about the rest of the world.
It seems that the policy of the current US government is to split the world between themselves, Russia and China. And I guess that's a legitimate policy, even though I think it's both impossible and incredibly misguided.
> Do you really want to block the import of arms and financial aid to Ukraine?
Umm... yes? Since this whole debacle started, the EU has been shooting itself in the foot with all the sanctions that hurts its industries.
On the other hand, the US did the smart thing and did not give out weapons for free, it charged for them.
In the end, the US will be the winner of this war and Europe will come out of it incredibly weak economically. And it will have to turn to the US for help. Again.
> I didn't know this, but it is absolutely crazy.
It's crazy because the numbers don't line up with the theory. If you look at US traffic deaths by year, they were basically flat in terms of vehicle miles traveled between 2010 and 2019 and then took a big jump from COVID which is only now starting to come back down.
Meanwhile in Europe road fatalities were also fairly flat up until 2019, and then went down significantly from COVID.
Now we have to guess why the responses to COVID had the opposite effect in each place, but it's pretty obvious that the difference was a primarily result of COVID rather than differences in vehicle safety regulations, unless the vehicle safety regulations all changed in 2020 and everyone immediately replaced the installed base of cars everywhere overnight.
2020 wasn't just the start of Covid, but also the start of BLM. The narrative I always see from the American right is that BLM caused many police forces across the US to radically reduce traffic enforcement, since: 1. traffic offenders are disproportionately black, 2. stops for minor traffic offences can sometimes spiral into violence in various ways, and some viral ones have involved absurdly bad use of force decisions by officers involved, and 3. no force wants to take the blame for another George Floyd
Per this narrative, a significant antisocial tranche of the public has responded to the effective suspension of traffic law in the way that you would expect them to, and that is why road deaths are up.
It’s likely it can be studied - but anyone interested in studying it likely already has a conclusion they want to reach one way or another.
Why do you think COVID is relevant aside from being a placeholder for the year 2020?
COVID happened in the year of the discontinuity and caused major changes to commuting behavior as a result of remote work, people afraid of infection avoided mass transit, many people moved out of cities or lost their jobs, people bought cars who didn't used to drive and now there are more new/inexperienced drivers with cars (and it's easier to get a license in the US than Europe), etc.
Also, the numbers for at least the US are apparently just wrong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
1.27 fatalities per 100M VMT in 2023 (the latest year with data), 1.11 in 2010, that's a difference of 14%, not 30%. Even the peak during COVID was only 24% above 2010. The only way I can see to get 30% is to use the during-COVID number for only the total number of motor vehicle fatalities without accounting for population growth or vehicle miles traveled, which is not a great metric for making comparisons.
The 30% figure is "correct" if you look at the absolute number of deaths instead of deaths per VMT. But I basically agree with you; that clearly the wrong stat to cite if you are attributing the change to vehicle safety regulations.
Because a lot of people stopped driving and leaving their home so much during that time.
Cybertrucks init (/s)
Keep in mind that the US stats are derived from cities that are designed around personal automobile transportation, so they're likely muted.
Europe on the other hand has a much higher level of intermingling between pedestrians and vehicles. This puts pedestrians more often in harms way, and likely will lead to out-sized dangers that aren't seen as frequently in the USA. Pedestrian safety is a key requirement for European car safety.
If the EU is politically forced into accepting the US standards: The slack will need to be picked up by European insurance companies, who should charge extreme premiums for unsafe designs, effectively blocking the sale of the vehicles from dangerous, young, or casual drivers and limiting those designs to those who truly need them (which I suspect is very few.)
This should also go a long way in addressing inexpensive Chinese vehicles that ape the American designs. Since that is more likely going to be what is on the roads.
I'm with you regarding the argument, but want to nitpick:
"dismissing" a politician sounds like an easy fix but we probably don't want hyper-polarized dismissal wars where politicians are "shot down" immediately after being elected. That's why there are other mechanisms such as not re-electing, public shaming, transparency fora etc. ... we need to work on strengthening those, the accountability and transparency.
They need to prop up dying German car companies, and are OK with using European lives as collateral.
So why would they allow easy imports of US cars?
>They need to prop up dying German car companies
Germany isn't the only economy dependent on the legacy auto sector. France, Italy, Romania, Czechia, Slovakia and Belgium also have a lot of jobs, or had, in the auto industry, before the mass layoff of the last 2-3 years.
True, France does too of course, but Germany has been particularly stubborn. There's infighting within Europe, for that matter - note Polestar opposing Merz's attempts to weaken Europe's phase out of combustion vehicles. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newsbirmingham/volvo-and-pole...
Stubbornness to change is part of Germany's national identity, more often than not towards its own detriment.
But also, Merz is not alone in this, but a lot of Eastern Europe can't afford EVs at current EU prices so the EU has to make some concessions. People in Romania or Bulgaria can't afford to buy a Polestar like people in Netherlands can.
EU leaders needs to account for the massive disparities of purchasing power between places like Nordics and Romania/Bulgaria for example when they make sweeping legislation like that.
Sure it would be nice if all of EU was like Norway with only EVs everywhere, but this way you'd basically be bankrupting and turning against you the people in the poorer countries of the union who are already disproportionately affected by the CoL crisis of the EU, who are effectively paying German energy and grocery prices but at Eastern EU salaries and pensions. This is not sustainable.
Not to mention the disparity in public transportation infrastructure where a car is basically mandatory for commuting outside big cities in place like Romania.
I doubt the average citizen in the Netherlands can afford EVs at current EU prices either.
And at the rate car prices are increasing for no good reason, I doubt the average EU citizen will be able to afford a car in the future.
The EU does need to find a middle ground between mandatory safety features that are unaffordable and free for all pedestrian killing machines.
And protectionism ain't it. It will only increase the prices for domestic cars until the likes of VW have to close up shop because no one can afford what they're peddling any more.
I think Eastern Europe can afford EVs now. 20,000 euros for the Twingo, 15,000 euros for Dacia Spring. This is cheaper than most petrol cars.
The average age of a car currently on the road in Romania, Bulgaria and Greece is about 16 years old. How do you think all those people with 16 year old beaters, will suddenly be able to afford the 20k cars?
I don't think they will. I think they'll keep driving these old cars, and that these EVs will eventually become old cars.
The lifecycle of an EV is a lot less than mostly mechanical cars that are possible to independently repair. I drive a 30 year old van and it’s still possible to get replacement parts within a day or two. I doubt you will get service for a 10 year old EV.
The original Nissan Leaf was launched in 2010 and you can still get whole replacement batteries or even just cell replacements for them.
They can also be upgraded to increase their range using after market batteries.
So we’re already at 15 years and counting.
No one has to suddenly be able to afford a new car. The phase-out of combustion vehicles is for new vehicles. Old cars can still be driven.
Have you considered that many people in Eastern Europe might not be able to afford a new car at all? Where I live people are keeping their older cars for longer and buying used because everything else is getting more expensive and nobody wants to go in debt for something marginally better than what they already have.
Yes, but that's also the case in Sweden and France and Spain etc. But these new things are obviously competing with other new things.
Maybe Europe should allow cheap BYD's to be imported for the poor eastern Europeans them.
Fossil fuels need to be eliminated. Europe is the fastest warming continent.
Yes, lets hand over the one last big industry we have to China and hope for the best, we totally haven't learnt anything from the domestic electronics industry. And let the easterners drive shitty Chinese EVs instead of Skodas so that some elite in Brussels can feel good about themselves. As if East Europeans haven't been through enough yet.
Extending the ban on combustion engines -is- handing the industry to China.
Have you considered that you might be out of touch from your bubble of NL remote SW dev for US corpos?
Like your idea sounds good in principle, especially if you're from a country with no automotive jobs, but then what do you do then with tens of thousands of unemployed people of the auto sector being displaced by the Chinese? Will you agree to pay more income taxes to fund the increased unemployment deficits of the others? How do you think those people will vote? What about maintaining some national sovereignty? Shall we just become a vassal state to China on automotive as well?
You can't throw such oversimplified solutions to such complex issues that have very deep ramifications.
If you haven't noticed, the EU economy and jobs market in general is already bad as it is, it won't be able to absorb tens of thousands of unemployed career switchers into to other domains that aren't hiring right now anyway, or if they are hiring, they're very picky due to the increased supply of talent with domain experience.
Currently, the defense sector is absorbing some of the slack of automotive layoffs on the production/manufacturing side in some countries like Germany, but that won't last forever. If peace happens in Ukraine, that will dry out as well as the glut of orders will be scaled back.
If the only way to stay competitive is to make combustion cars then why do we see new Chinese manufacturers being all electric?
I don’t want those people to lose their jobs, which is one reason why their bosses need to be dragged in to the 21st century.
Mate, I don't think you get it. You can make EVs instead of ICEs if you want, but who will buy them when your EVs are expensive and your consumers currently wage poor? You can't make Chinese priced EVs in Europe and still expect to stay profitable, and auto makers in Europe aren't gonna be forced by the government to change tune here if you expect them to lose money for some utopic greater good when they're accountable to their shareholders to increase profits so then they make whatever the consumers will currently buy, which tends to be quite a lot of ICEs. You can't turn this complex market around overnight.
To get where you want, you need the venn diagram where what the automakers want, aligns with what consumers want, to align with what the government wants, which isn't happening right now, and it's not something the government can force without massive repercussions. China has had 10+ years of focus exclusively on the EV and battery sector domestically, during good economic times to get to where they are.
And Chinese government can subsidize their industry longer than you can stay solvent, as long as they know they'll bankrupt your industry in the long run and then make you dependent on them for manufacturing. Competing with China can't be done on equal footing because they don't play fair and never had.
Not to take away from your argument, but German grocery prices are actually famously low. I know of eastern Europeans in border places who prefer shopping in Germany for that reason.
Yes, but in France Renault just made a new Twingo, to be electric, for 20,000 euro, and they're starting to make electric sports cars (A290, future electric A110), so I wouldn't call that 'legacy auto'.
As much as German car companies suck it's not them that are road killers
Among other issues, Volkswagen killed roughly 1200 people by cheating on their emissions tests.
https://lae.mit.edu/2024/06/28/study-quantifies-premature-de...
Besides the whataboutism, this is 1200 premature deaths (of mostly frail people). As much as I'm sensible to the topic of air pollution, putting that number closer to the number of, I dunno, premature deaths attributable to Coal power plants will give a more realistic view of the problem
You can't really compare the two. Vehicle safety regulations might not be able to make up for the USA having stroads and in general bad design. For the same reasons trying to move safety standards over could make things even worse than the USA due to them not fitting the conditions.
If this were comparing absolute numbers I'd agree. But this is only the relative change over a few years, the road design hasn't seriously changed in that time. So those differences should affect these numbers directly.
Many places in Europe has bad design as well. This is not a uniquely american thing.
What you are saying is true, but it isn't the whole truth.
In Europe, some stroads exist. The rest are streets or roads.
In the US, some streets exist. The rest are stroads or roads.
Do you actually think that is the case? Because you have big streets and cars, small cars and actual safety standards would make it less safe?
That's the most American sentiment I've heard today
Whether they like it or not, American cars have become a lot more European over the years. I wish I had figures to back it up but from my own anecdotal experience when we traveled to the US when I was young almost every car was different and, for me at least, this made it feel strange and exciting.
Taking my own kids back there this year, most of the normal cars were common, or at most variations of the ones from Europe. Even many of the vans and work vehicles are now common European shapes, occasionally with a different badge. Trucks and full size SUVs were the last hold outs of US specific models.
Which makes me wonder, are the pedestrian deaths really heavily weighted towards these models?
For what it's worth we hired a full sized SUV. There was one point where I was about to drive out of our Villa's driveway when my partner shouted "wait!" There was a 8ish year old kid walking down the sidewalk towards where I was about to cross it who was completely invisible from the driving position. It was actually safer to forward park that thing because the visibility in the reversing camera was much better than driving forward.
Large portions of it can be attributed to fuel economy and safety requirements (ironically the “dangerous” safety requirements are tied to people unwilling to wear seatbelts).
Fuel economy tends all vehicles to the same aerodynamic shape (similar to how all big planes look quite similar), and safety is requiring airbags (which protected unbuckled passengers) in the side pillars and elsewhere, making them larger and larger.
As an American who sometimes travels to Europe and sees and rents cars there, my experience has not matched with yours.
The problem of poor visibility due to fat A-pillars is not limited to large SUVs, it's a problem on normal cars too.
Anecdotally you got a different impression of the cars than 10 or 20 years ago.
Yes. Congratulations, it appears you can read.
This was all an EU tactic, we do it a lot. Agree to the deal, Trump shuts up and ignores us, destroy the deal in the courts, no real effect of the deal.
At the risk of sounding contrarian, do we have any idea what the drivers of this are? Is this actually about car design, or is it other bits?
Just as a starter for ten, is that 30% increase distributed around the US or concentrated in certain states? I can't imagine we've seen the same increase in New York than in rural Alabama (and if that's the case, how much of it is really attributable to car designs)?
> Every EU politician who tries to subvert car safety should be dismissed and tried for endangering public safety.
Yeah, so that would be rampantly anti-Democratic authoritarianism... Peaceful transfer of power is pretty much at the core of why democracy works in the first place, and once you start engaging in political persecution because you don't like some trade-off involving safety ... yeah, that's no longer a democracy but something else.
Dismissing a politician because you don't like them is the entire point of elections.
Yes, and? Are they tried for making politician decisions someone (e.g. the next people in power) didn't like? This doesn't engage at all with what I talked about, and I already explicitly acknowledged that peaceful transition of power is important. What is the point of this comment? Why rebuke something I never even remotely said?
I second that!
> Every EU politician who tries to subvert car safety should be dismissed and tried for endangering public safety.
No. Every EU politician who doesn't support BANNING all cars should be dismissed and tried and executed! Look, I'm even tougher on pedestrian safety than you are!
I think it's hard to say for sure that it's only the safety regulations on the car that that have resulted in these reductions, and by contrast those increases in the US. There are so many other things not related to the regulations on the car. My guess for example is that us have a lot less bike roads than europe does and traffic rules are not affected by the regulations on the cars and so on. for sure European European car regulations are probably better than American ones from a safety perspective. but I think it's hard to to say that without them we would have an increase, it would have a smaller reduction.
I kind of agree but this is missing a big part in my opinion. How can we quantify the penalty faced by consumers in EU with to increased costs due to regulation?
There might be certain number of deaths we can accept for increased cost but how is it so obvious that this tradeoff was worth it?
What if cars got 2x costlier in EU due to the regulations to give you a .01% increased chance in safety?
Edit: here are some back of envelope numbers from chatgpt
A single, ordinary car ride carries an extremely small chance of death:
USA: ~1 in 7.7 million
EU: ~1 in 20 million
Its not super clear that optimising these numbers is obviously worth the increased costs.
Edit2: people can make the choice to buy Volvo cars that are ~40% safer. Why isn't every car buyer buying only Volvo?
The assumption you have to make is that regulation would make it much cheaper to buy a safe car than just buying Volvo. It is somewhat true but not sure on the extent.
I think that's a little bit of a weird way to look at the probabilities. Sure, for a one-off activity I might look at 1 in 7,700,000 and decide that's an acceptable risk. But many people in the US take several car rides per day.
At, say, 4 rides per day, that's about a 1 in 5300 chance of death over a single year. That's still small, but not that small. Someone in a decent-sized town or city could expect to lose someone they know once every few years with those odds.
We know what the rate of deaths are: 1 in 8000; roughly 40,000 over 320,000,000.
Slightly less than the rate of suicide; and slightly more than half the number of fentanyl deaths. And a smaller fraction of medical mistake deaths. (Of course, none of the risk is evenly distributed.)
As a systemic problem, I’m not convinced that cars are the worst. Or outside what we accept in several areas.
The non-even distribution is a key part of it. Fentanyl deaths don’t affect me if I don’t drug, and if 80% (made up number as example) of car fatalities involve drunk driving, it also factors out for most people.
If cars had a random chance to simply explode equivalent to the mortality rate in crashes, people would treat them Very Differently.
I think if you want to make this argument you can go look at the stats. Look at the relative cost of vehicles in the EU over the past 25 years, compare to the cost of vehicles in the US over the past 25 years.
Obviously the lack of difference there wouldn't prove much (if I had to bet I'd bet cars in the US have gotten way more expensive faster than in the EU, just from labor costs), but the lack of a major difference would complicate the theory that new regulations in the past 15 years have massively improved costs, absent a theory that some other thing the EU is doing but the US is not doing is also kicking in to similarly counteract that.
The numbers exist, this isn't in the abstract. Just a question of doing the legwork
I think we should not compare EU vs US costs but rather predict what would be the decrease in costs (relative to EU itself) due to reduced regulations in EU.
Huh, but this is a terrible comparison.. the cars in both unions have been made the same, of course they cost similarly. In other words the US buyers partially pay for the R&D cost to keep to EU standards. And the US population also get the EU regulated-safety requirements (although only partially, since the US also allows Cybertrucks to drive around).
A comparison would be comparing a car that can ensure the survival of their passengers, proven with test crashes, vs e.g. Chinese-made cara for the local market that have terrible crumpling when crash-tested..
> the cars in both unions have been made the same, of course they cost similarly
I'm really not sure what you mean, many of the most popular cars in the EU aren't even sold in the US (Renault, Dacia, Opel, Peugeot/Citroën although they have taken quite a hit in the last few years) and they are generally cheaper than US cars.
And quite a few US cars aren't available in the EU either (although they can sometimes be imported privately, which bypasses the regulations somewhat) which is the very topic we're discussing.
As for Chinese cars, the recent ones are performing adequately in crash-tests.
A bit off-topic, but lots of the top ranked Euro NCAP crash tests have been chinese-built cars for a few years now. Their industry has evolved insanely fast, that perception of low standards is long gone.
Zero pedestrian or cyclist deaths are acceptable just for someone to get a cheaper (or much worse, larger) car. Zero.
There is a vast number of reasons why we need and must reduce private car modality share as much as possible. Making cars more expensive is a feature, not a bug.
Easy to fix. Ban bikes and start throwing people caught riding a bike into jail.
And how exactly fixes that pedestrian deaths? But I know your answer; put people not driving a car into jail too, right? Eliminate sidewalks too, use the space for an additional lane. Exiting your car anywhere except in parking lots and private property should be prohibited!
Sounds like a lovely place for sure.
To get to zero you must eliminate cars completely and I don't buy into that kind of logic.
It’s not some mystical thing, but a matter of smart urban design. Oslo and Helsinki have managed to achieve zero road deaths in a year without eliminating vehicles. You don’t need to accept a certain amount of deaths as some sort inevitability or a necessary sacrifice.
That's not what GP said. Zero deaths caused by cheap/large vehicles.
You can eliminate deaths by that cause by eliminating those types of vehicles, not by eliminating all cars.
Not saying that's feasible, but let's not argue against something that nobody said in the first place.
Is it ever acceptable to have pedestrian or cyclist deaths to have buses, trains, ambulances, fire trucks?
What a strange question. The answer is of course 'rather not'. But those are for the most part unavoidable without society paying a (potentially) much higher price. So we have decided to accept those risks.
In this case it is another country trying to impose their 'way of life' on the rest of the world, or in this case, the EU, which has a different set of values.
That doesn't really have anything to do with having buses or trains vs cyclists, it is not a personal decision and there are many alternatives compared to US vehicles that were never designed for European (or Asian, for that matter) traffic in the first place. The USA is very car centric to the point that walking is frowned upon (I got picked up by the police in North Dakota for walking). The EU is simply not like that, and that's fine. The USA should set their own standards for car safety and so should the EU, if that leads to incompatible products I think the mantra is 'let the market sort it out'. The Japanese seem to have figured out how to make vehicles for different markets, there is no reason the USA can not do the same thing.
And most city buses have much better overview of their environments than a random american truck. The bus driver is sitting low down with big windows in all directions and will see cyclists and pedestrians on their side or kids walking in front.
Buses and trains decrease the number of cars on the road by pooling travellers. Ambulances and fire trucks serve a purpose beyond making individuals travel comfortably. This is a straw man.
The Americans didn’t get cheap cars, they just got very large cars which is obviously detrimental to anyone but perhaps the driver.
The specific regulations here
> EU officials must revisit the hastily agreed trade deal with the US, where the EU stated that it “intends to accept” lower US vehicle standards, say cities – including Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, and more than 75 civil society organisations. In a letter to European lawmakers, the signatories warn that aligning European standards with laxer rules in the US would undermine the EU’s global leadership in road safety, public health, climate policy and competitiveness.
They point to many things and not only the size of cars - like fewer approvals, lower pollution controls, fewer safety measures.
Some of them increase utility (like people might prefer bigger cars) and others decrease cost.
Have you ever heard of the term "negative externalities"?
yes i'm questioning the extent of the externalities
> penalty faced by consumers in EU with to increased costs due to regulation?
The question works both ways. How can we quantify the penalty faced by consumers in the US due to lax regulation? How much is each toddler ran over worth, exactly?
That’s the same flawed reasoning Kirk flaunted when discussing gun laws. It ultimately proved to be wrong; as in it’s all fine and “Vulcanian Logical” until you or your close ones become the statistic
Making cars 2x as expensive would massively improve safety simply by reducing the number of cars. And it would make cities much nicer places to exist in general.
The problem with these sorts of things is that they discriminate against lower-income folks. In cities with good public transit and affordable housing (such that people can live near their jobs) this is maybe not such a problem, but that unfortunately describes precious little of the US. I bet it could work in many places in the EU, though.
Getting rid of lower income folks would ALSO improve most statistics.
But we’ve seen where that leads.
A better solution would be to make taxes and parking cost relative to vehicle size/weight. Want a big SUV? Pay 4x the taxes and hefty parking fees. Drive a small, electric commuter vehicle? Half the tax, reduced parking.
Why not just ban cars in the cities instead? The problem is those who need cars the most are those who can't afford to live in the city centers, so it often ends up being an extra tax in the less affluent.
For some reason we decided to put a great deal of jobs in the city centers. Commuting to the edge of a city and then taking public transport to office doesn't really work, unless massive amounts of money are pumped into trains, busses and trams.
There's this weird perception that Europe has excellent public transport, while in reality it only works, sort of, in a few larger cities. Everywhere else functioning in society really requires a car or assumes that you're living within biking distance of work and daycare.
People that need cars don't tend to have large cars, unless there's some tax benefits (someone in the village has one of those 5 seater dumper trucks because they can write it off as a business expense but can't write off a Toyota Aygo or Citroen C1 which would far more sensible)
That doesn't align with my experience. I grew up in Belgium, in a place where you'd be lucky to have a bus an hour. The closest place to get groceries, by foot, was half an hour away, most of it 5% uphill on the way back.
If you need a car, then you need it for everything. You need to be able to fit the two kids you picked at school, the gear for the sport activity you'll drop them at, the mom you picked at the train station after work, and the weekly groceries you picked from the supermarket on your way back. From experience, you aren't doing all of that in a Hyundai i10.
Now I live in the Randstad. Groceries get delivered, mom rides the bus for 8 minutes to come back home, and I pick the kid by bike. The car is optional and pure convenience, so I can get away with a small one.
A bus an hour, surely you mean a bus a week?
We have two cars, one 1.6m, one 1.7m, and handle all that. A Hyundai i10 is 1.68m wide.
A Range Rover is 2 metres wide. Ridiculous size and completely unnecessary in rural areas, I assume they are needed in towns.
With the huge hoods these things have the driver has a hard time seeing what is right in front of them, and when they hit a pedestrian (kid or adult) they are much more likely to die.
https://www.carscoops.com/2024/12/suvs-and-pickup-trucks-2-3...
> How can we quantify the penalty faced by consumers in EU with to increased costs due to regulation?
I really hate that everything has to be seen from the consumers' lens, especially the consumer of luxury goods (I'm talking SUVs and the like, cheap cars exist in Europe).
What if we didn't just look at it from the POV from people who buy or want cars? I don't own a car, nor do I plan to. I have to pay for roads, which I understand to an extent. But why should my life be at risk from people wanting to buy SUVs cheaper?
Edit: Also, looking at "cars" without distinction really just obfuscates the real issue. The most dangerous cars (for pedestrians) are the biggest (and sometimes the fastest) ones. Plus most pedestrians die in cities, not on a Highway. So yeah, if you want to drive an SUV in a dense city, then I'm all for making it 10x more expensive for you, because it makes no sense (to me) and puts me in danger :)
I agree with everything you said but
> But why should my life be at risk from people wanting to buy SUVs cheaper?
What if the risk is not that much greater? That's what I'm questioning.
But it is much greater - more than double the odds of killing a kid in a collision, for instance.
what if reducing the size of a ball point pen by half reduces the rate of death by ball point pens by 50%.
If the ball point pen was responsible for ~40,000 deaths per year (in the USA), and reducing its size by half did not meaningfully diminish its function as a pen for most users… I’d rather not kill an extra 20,000 people a year just to have a bigger pen.
But how many of the 40k deaths are directly attributable to the characteristics being discussed? We can’t go from “twice as likely to kill a kid” to “half of the 40k deaths are kids killed by this thing” without examining the evidence.
(Apparently 30% of th fatalities involve alcohol but we already tried banning that once …)
I agree if this is true
> and reducing its size by half did not meaningfully diminish its function as a pen for most users
I'm not sure why you're responding to a measured, factual rate of death with some random weird thing that you just made up.
So ok, I'll do it too: what if reducing the size of a ball point pen by half reduces the rate of death by ball point pens by 0.01%? (Answer: you don't do it, because the benefit to doing so is low, and that measured effect could be well within the margin of error anyway.)
(And my weird made-up number sounds a lot more likely than your weird made-up number.)
The reason I brought it up was because it is not meaningful to only compare relative decrease of deaths without understanding the extent of how many deaths they are responsible for.
If only a few people die due to car accidents and one is much more likely to die of other causes than cars, is it worth making cars that much more expensive to decrease the deaths by a bit?
The regulations in my opinion add up to 20-30% of the car price. And likelihood of death due to a car at an individual level decreases by .01% (maybe).
Imagine you were given two options:
- Car A at $45k USD
- Car B at $35k USD
And you are less likely to die with Car A. Is it super obvious that you will buy Car A? If so why doesn't everyone flock to Volvo cars which lead to ~45% fewer fatalities?
Why is this so obvious to you that this regulation is a good thing? The sibling is implying that I'm trolling or whatever but this is a legitimate question.
“ And likelihood of death due to a car at an individual level decreases by .01% (maybe).”
This is made up out of thin air.
Maybe I'm wrong but can you explain why people don't flock and buy only Volvo cars when (I fact checked this) they are 40% more safe than other cars?
They're doing that all the time, check comment history.
Makes sense. And I'm glad I don't have to make that choice. But as mentioned in my edit, I think that the "low hanging fruit" are still plentiful, so we won't have to think about this for a while (talking about pedestrian deaths).
> What if cars got 2x costlier in EU due to the regulations to give you a .01% increased chance in safety?
Ah, yes, the old "what if [totally absurd scenario]" argument. That's not what anyone is talking about.
Why isn't everyone buying Volvo cars if they are 40% more safe?
Those numbers are for occupants. Not bystanders. And also do not include the injury adjusted lifetime rates as they say a lot more.
I'm not going to argue the cost numbers are they are so far out of the ballpark it's not even funny.
Making cars more expensive disincentives car use, which is a good thing.
The fewer cars, the better.
It's worth the cost if it's your child or relative being killed by a car, these regulations don't make a car 2x costlier than the USA so it's ludicrous to start with that assumption.
Volvo cars are 40% safer. Then why don't people buy only those cars and choose to buy more unsafe cars at the same price?
Numbers of km driven in the US has increased by circa 10% [1] over that period while decreased in the EU by circa 10% [2]. Add to that in european cities the multiplication of bike lanes, and the permanent manufactured congestion of certain cities. There are many reasons that can explain the movement, and car design is probably a small factor among many small factors.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-kilometers-0
[2] https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publications/efficiency-by-secto...
> car design is probably a small factor
That probably is doing a lot of work here. A truck with a driver sitting so high above the street they can't physically see a child or bicycle in front of them is just an inherent risk to pedestrians and cyclists, no matter how you twist it. And don't even get me started on Cybertrucks, which are pretty much designed to cause accidents with casualties.
Even if the causal link is more complex than the numbers make it seem, acting like putting heavier and bigger vehicles with less restrictions on streets won't cause accidents is just plain dishonest.
> acting like putting heavier and bigger vehicles with less restrictions on streets won't cause accidents is just plain dishonest
Implying that I said it has no impact is plain dishonest
I once rented a small Kia (cheapest car I could get), drove from Houston to New Orleans and back. Apart from my eye balls popping at the sight of all the weapons on people and in shops, seeing some of the most obese people ever in my life (even in commercials it's ok to be obese), the 3x portions of all the food, and the variety of [drive-through-x for x in [ATM, pharmacy, funeral, etc]], I was in constant fear of someone not noticing my tiny Kia and driving over me.
I was stopped by police while taking a walk and shouted at and treated like a criminal when walking in to a Wendy's drive through (even though only the drive through was open at that hour!) But, other than that, the people were incredibly kind! The culture shock though... It is very hard to imagine if you've never been there. I think as someone from western Europe I have more in common with people from Thailand.
Cars are really a must-have in the US, biking is just a hobby. It's more the other way around here. Everybody is a "cyclist" (not even a word we use here) some of the time. It means "carists" have respect and understanding of how it is on a bike, and drive carefully around people on bikes (in general, there are always exceptions). Our infrastructure and law demands it (ie, a car-owner is always financially responsible in an accident with a pedestrian or person on a bike here, insurance for this is mandatory).
Here people in massive US sized cars are really seen as anti-social, in general I'd say. Hope it stays that way. For now I think some of those cars can't even fit into city-center parking garages here (ie [0], btw if you look around there you see separated bike lanes, crossings where pedestrians always have priority (ignoring that is instant fine), very narrow lanes for cars. Go forward in time and you see they added "statues" that look like they are about to cross the street to make drivers aware of this.)
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/tVaeHa4SNAz3iQ4x9
> as someone from western Europe I have more in common with people from Thailand
As someone with experience in the US, Europe and Thailand, I feel qualified to say: nope, you most definitely do not, at least not on that basis.
Actually, truck culture is one of the points on which Thailand and the USA share a lot of values. That notwithstanding, I’m afraid you’re stuck with your New World cousins just as they are stuck with you, there’s nobody closer.
I think the point was not about truck culture, but anti-social behaviours
Was my experience too. Chunks of US is functionally unusable without car. Intersections with literally no accommodation for pedestrians - presumably everyone either has a car or has evolved the ability to teleport
> I was stopped by police while taking a walk and shouted at and treated like a criminal when walking in to a Wendy's drive through
I live in a very bike friendly country, so culturally closer to Europe in terms of transport, but if you walked into a drive through you may well be stopped by police.
Drive throughs have long since stopped serving pedestrians.
Generally anyone trying this is inebriated.
As a kid I used to skate (roller blade?) through our local MC Donalds drive through, did give the personnel a little chuckle every time we did it.
I worked at the local McD as a teenager and it was always funny to see a horse ordering something (the camera does not pick up the rider). Ours was near the end of a trail often used by people on horseback.
And since horse riders are legally equivalent to vehicles it's pretty much a "fine as long as you don't shit in the driveway" situation.
The “cars only in the drive thru” was mainly driven by insurance requirements; cars aren’t expecting pedestrians there.
It's odd, on one side the USA is very car-centric, and western Europe is very bike centric, and then stuck in-between is the UK which has no idea which one it is.
Local governments here try to encourage cycling by putting in as many dedicated bike lanes as they can, but they never seem to get much use (where I live they're used almost exclusively by bike delivery people and a few people like myself).
The roads can be lethal and many drivers have a great deal of animosity towards cyclists (probably helped to no good degree by the likes of people like Jeremy Clarkson / Top Gear which spent a decade joking about and belittling cyclists).
Right?! Also on many online forums. I get why and how, but it remains pretty weird to see/read from a country where everyone is "a cyclist". It just comes across as very low IQ. It's like making fun of people that have breakfast or something.
> Local governments here try to encourage cycling by putting in as many dedicated bike lanes as they can, but they never seem to get much use
Might be a regional or urban/rural thing? In Ireland bike lanes in central and near-central Dublin are often very heavily used these days, especially since covid (to the point that I think they're going to have to rethink traffic control for some of them), but bike lanes in outer suburbs seem to be mostly empty.
> western Europe is very bike centric
Bike usage is relatively low, hardly comparable to the amount of cars. Maybe more popular than USA, but definitely far from it being bike-centric. Just a handful of cities (such as Amsterdam) have more people commuting via bicycles than cars.
"The roads can be lethal and many drivers have a great deal of animosity towards cyclists" --- which is why bike lanes don't get much use: sooner or later you will have to share the road with cars for a while, and I personally don't feel safe at all doing that.
It varies massively from place to place.
Where I live in London, and in many other cities, cycling to get around is massively popular and growing fast.
But other towns and cities are much more like you describe.
Anecdotally this seems like somewhat of a demographic thing and places that skew younger, university educated[/ing], and dare I say left wing tend toward much higher rates of cycling vs other forms of transport.
I think it's worth pointing out that a lot of the things you mentioned are specific to the Netherlands.
Perhaps. But I also found it of note that while traveling Vietnam, many hotels had bikes for rent (about 2 usd a day [2010 so ymmv] or sometimes for free) to go places. And it would generally be a nice way to get around. Although the situation is very different there I have to admit.
Most northern US cities have bike share programs.
US car regulations are weirdly inconsistent. Sometimes they are incredibly strict. You can't have a convex left side mirror and the right one has to carry a stupid warning label. Importing non-antique foreign cars is practically impossible. But then, some obviously unsafe features, such as indicators in the same color as the rear lights, are perfectly legal.
> such as indicators in the same color as the rear lights, are perfectly legal.
I saw some of those on some US army vehicles on the German autobahn. And what perfectly illustrated their danger was when they almost got rear-ended while entering the left-lane in front of a passing Audi at mild autobahn speed.
Had it been a yellow blinking light, the left-lane driver would have been better alerted to the fact that someone was about to go left. Instead, it was a muted blinking red, at the same intensity as the car's tired red back lights, that looked like nothing more than a defective back light.
Such a stupidly dumb design.
The non-convex side mirror almost got me into an accident the first rental car I drove in the US. I was expecting to see more of the road than I did.
Less lights is less cost. On European streets the easiest way to detect an American-designed car is that they only have one reverse light, the bare minimum. Only suitable as an indicator to the driver behind you. Ever considered trying to reverse into a parking spot without any streetlight nearby? Reversing blind is awesome!
In any European car you get two lights, not in the center but in the corners so you can actually see stuff in your side mirrors while parking.
For a long time many German made car like from Audi, Seat, VW, BMW hat just one reverse light. On the left side is the fog light and on the right side is the reversing light.
This is correct, though wat probably is meant is that US cars (or dual designed cars) have two spots with only the right one filled in the EU and a separate fog light with only the left one filled. I had a Ford Fiesta with only one reverse light and put in another to get a bit more light when reversing and my assumption is this is more common on US designed vehicles (though the Fiesta was designed in either the UK or Germany but you get the jist).
Of course now it’s basically a non-issue as all new cars have a night-vision camera when in reverse.
These regulations are very odd as the third/center break-light is a US thing that come into Europe.
I think the indicator color laxness is dumb, but I don't really get when people are so up in arms about it (and yes, I've heard Alec from Technology Connections rant about this many times, and usually agree with the things he says). I have literally never been confused by this. A blinking red light is very different from a solid red light, at least to my eyes.
Blinking vs. solid also works for the colorblind, right?
It's got to be a nightmare to drive these large American cars in Europe. The streets really aren't the most accommodating for them. I rented a Mercedes V-class minivan for my family and friends to drive to a wedding in the UK and that was such a pain in London. I've never driven such a large vehicle in London before and I probably never will again. Should've just taken the train out to some far off spot before renting the car.
We also had a wedding to go to in France where we drove a Citroen C4. To be honest, if these weddings weren't so far from railway stations and we didn't have to transport so many people together I'd never have done it. And both these cars were tiny compared to the GMC Sierras or Cadillac Escalades you see on San Francisco streets.
I can only conclude that anyone who drives an American-size vehicle in these places is a masochist. It cannot be fun. No, not even to ride in while someone else drives.
The way these imported cars are parked and driven don't really seem to indicate any masochism. The drivers mostly seem to make their oversized car everyone else's problem, not taking lanes too seriously, double parking by default, and of course blocking both the road and the sidewalk with the overhang of their trucks.
There are a few such imported cars in my neighborhood and seeing them makes me grateful that I have an underground parking spot.
They're not the only ones to double park, but the only ones to exclusively double park.
Chances are you landed at Heathrow or Gatwick, and thus would rent a car and be on a motorway straight away, no need to go to London.
Why were you even driving in London?
They did not have this kind of vehicle available there. I had to use Hertz "Dream Collection" and go to a location where an appropriate vehicle was available.
Some municipalities are also working to enforce a limit on the size of cars that can get into the city. Good luck diriving those American cars in Europe.
But still, I wish they would ban them.
This is not masochism. This is rectified pure egoism and dominance. Usurping the public space and pushing others aside, making one's ego everyone's problem.
> I can only conclude that anyone who drives an American-size vehicle in these places is a masochist. It cannot be fun.
US soldiers/DOD etc PCS'd to EU manage (not always well).
And, us EUians get the advantage of seeing just how disgracefully oversized US cars and trucks are.
Aside: No yellow indicators? I'd rather US red ones than the 1"x3" mini-yellow-indicators that are becoming more common.
Europeans need to just stall for may be 1 or 2 years. The current admin is honestly going to collapse when the rather ill president won't be able to govern anymore, which given recent reporting, is rather soon.
Nothing indicates that the replacement is any slight bit more competent than the senile fool in command right now.
"Yet, EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%"
I thought this stark difference might be partially explained by US population increasing more quickly than EU. However it turns out in the 2010-2024 period, US population increased by +10% while EU27 pop increased +2%. So although there is a minor 8% difference, this is far, very far, from explaining the stark difference even if we compared per capita. The EU is certainly doing something right here.
There's a lot going on there, and it's not just vehicle design. Many countries have brought in reduced speed limits in urban areas, usually 30km/h, for instance. Your chances of dying if hit by a car at 30km/h are dramatically lower than 60km/h. Many countries also took the opportunity of COVID (roads not busy, construction industries in need of life-support) to improve cycling infrastructure. And rush-hour traffic is usually not as bad as it was, due to WFH.
In Ireland, public transport usage now is also much bigger share of commutes than pre-covid, particularly in Dublin, though I'm not sure if that's due to local factors or if it's replicated across Europe.
Minor nitpick, it seems the report is dealing mainly with the period up until 2020, not 2024. Not sure if it makes a significant difference for your numbers, but maybe adjust them?
See page 12 on https://etsc.eu/wp-content/uploads/15-PIN-annual-report-FINA...
Quite the opposite: Given how few people actually walk in the US these numbers are even crazier...
Does road death mean car accident death or pedestrians or both?
Having visited the US recently I was shocked how tall the cars could be. They were essentially trucks/lorries with civilian drivers. There should be a special category of licence for those who want to do it. Or just bundle them in with the class of driver that drives a high/heavy load.
Wait until you learn a 16 year old with a still-wet license can drive a bus-sized RV in most states.
Dutch car taxes are based on CO2 emissions and weight, these 'cars' from the US will be pricing themselves out of market anyway.
> Yet, EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%.
WOW! That's massive
In France those asshole put those cars on a company books to avoid paying the CO2 overcharge and the VAT.
The Dutch ones do the exact same..
The F150 has an EV variant that will probably be affordable by Dutch road standards, given the general price of the average EV.
It's time to also take into account area when it comes to vehicle tax in my opinion, even European "cars" (SUVs) are bulging out of normal parking spaces these days.
> Dutch car taxes are based on CO2 emissions and weight, these 'cars' from the US will be pricing themselves out of market anyway.
Look at the license plates of these "tokkie tanks": they all start with a "V" (https://www.anwb.nl/auto/autokosten/grijs-kenteken) meaning the owner pays reduced tax.
For reference: A RAM 1500 would pay 383 Euro in Utrecht as a person and 183 as a business (quarterly). And as a bonus you pay no BPM (aquisition tax) as a business, which is in the 12000-15000 (15k) range. The BPM hole has been fixed as of 2025 but there are enough already on the road.
I personally like the wanktank since it's more internationial.
You cannot use a "grijs" plate as a personal vehicle unless you pay "bijtelling" which starts at 500km yearly for private usage, but I guess the milage administration will be on the same order as the driving style.
Road deaths are up in the US mostly because traffic laws arent enforced in the US. Surely the massive trucks have an effect, but literally everyone breaking the speed limit and running reds definitely has a bigger effect.
"Yet, EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%." They seem to think that the two are correlated, they are definitely not. The US is like the wild west compared to the EU, especially as it pertains to traffic. Americans take laws as mere suggestions, where in Europe the law is the law and you follow the rules, especially in Germany / Austria / Switzerland. We also allow people to drive on the roads with super old, broke down, and unserviced cars with missing bumpers or things clearly falling off, like its no big deal. Again, they are grasping at straws suggesting their auto build quality has lowered their death rate while increasing ours, its ridiculous.
This depends upon the discretion of the patrol officer. One can certainly get citations for crossing lines, failing to maintain a vehicle, and so on. The issue is, those tickets are not as lucrative for the municipality as drug enforcement. Typically, those laws are enforced to allow an officer to search a vehicle for contraband and/or apprehend someone who was suspected of a more serious offense.
Compelling arguments, particularly regarding the proliferation of oversized American trucks - such as the Tesla Cybertruck monstrosity - which are predominantly used in urban areas and designed less for practicality and more to assert dominance on the road, at the expense of other users.
Adopting such standards in Europe risks accelerating the "bulkinzation" and "truckification" of our roads. This would not only strain already limited space for essential transportation and parking, but also severely increase risks to pedestrian and standard vehicle safety, and in general bring a more hostile road/societal environment a la American "predator capitalism" exemplified.
Agree with your points. Trucks are a tragedy of the commons kindof thing. I just dislike that you’re singling out Cybertruck. It’s not bigger than the Doge Ram, F150 or a Hummer.
Big trucks happen to be a popular market in the US. If you build cars in the US, you’ll have to serve that market. Even more so if your goal is to prove that an EV can be anything that an ICE can be, and more.
I used to have no worries about my kids playing in the street here (Norway), but I've noticed a few of these big trucks lately – I cannot understand how their drivers can be able to see a five year old running around it?
The five year old just needs to stay at least 2.5m [1] away from the driver and there aren't any problems!
[1]: Based on the chart in this old meme https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/140dgn8/many_popu...
They don't. In the US, most children killed by cars had even been run over in the family's own driveway — because the SUV/truck had poor visibility.
They can't.
For the pollution side, just align with the Californa Auto standards which would be more in line with EU standards
Do these laws do anything to limit the sales of these gas-guzzlers in California then?
It is crazy and sad. I spend a lot of time on a bike on public roads and those are absolutely scary. In general my impression is that the older the car the safer it is for everyone around. People in modern cars go too fast too easily, see less (huge pillars in front). They are also wider so when passing it's more difficult for them to go around or fit in between whatever they think they need to fit which is sadly often you and the line on the road.
The safest areas are the ones where people can't afford modern cars yet and with no tourists that rent them. It's sad state of affairs, the space is shrinking every year.
It’s all patchwork . Robotaxis are coming anyways . That safety framework will be totally different.
It makes sense in US but not in Europe where public transport infra is good. There are so many places where robotaxis would just be stuck on narrow European roads. Why would I even use a robotaxi when I can get one with the actual person who understands roads better.
This whole discussion is weird. The ETSC-linked sources do not make any statements regarding vehicle size or US American car standards. It just claims that European standards 'supported' fewer deaths.
I am European, I don't think big trucks are particularly well supported by our road systems but I don't think we need to look at American car standards to get the next 10x reduction in traffic-related deaths.
IMHO it is not explainable how in 2025 there are still cars sold without LIDAR-based anti-collision systems, how are these still extra? Systems to warn of objects in the blind spot areas are available yet not mandatory.
This reads like the classic western world strawman to me. Instead of looking at how to improve things we just make sure things are not getting worse. By burning a strawman, in this case trucks from the US. Which are best described as a niche market over here, but now that we have a newly defined enemy, we do not have to confront our shitty carmakers about technological advancements.
These people do not care about human lives, they care about politics.
One of the points was that European manufacturers will start making more cars in US purely because it is cheaper to do so due to the lower bar. Why would we want that? Our market is quite big anyway and this agreement is an attempt to shoulder their way into the market without the sacrifices that local manufacturers are subjected to. Besides cars from US can already be bought and imported.
You can take one sides complaints about “trucks” or “immigrants”, swap the word, and sell it directly to the other side.
It’s 95% a political football; the other 5% is people actually concerned about the issue.
And then you can get back more European lives by accepting US self driving.
Obviously. Have you seen the Cybertruck? But I guess this is the price of the US remaining in NATO.
I would guess it is a tariff thing rather than NATO. Is anyone in Europe really believing the USA still has our back?
Definitely no. At least not where I am from. America is just as bad s China, Russia or all the other freaks terrorising our world.
Edit:// I also don't know when this believe ever should have existed. Or why it would have existed in the first place
The US has been like that for a long time. But Western European and American interests were well aligned for a couple decades. First the whole WW2 business. Then Western Europe needed funds for rebuilding and a strong deterance against further expansion of the Soviet Union, while the US felt threatened by the idea of communism. Then in the early 90s we had a couple years where we had common ground in commercializing and integrating post-Soviet states.
During the Bush and Obama eras Europe was at least important as a staging ground for war in the Middle East, but the US wants to get away from putting boots on the ground there.
But now most of the common ground is gone, and the gloves are coming off
You talk about Europe as it were a single country. I live in Switzerland and basically nothing of what you say is or was true here. What you describe is losing the few allies you had here, not "Europe". Trump is using these words so wrongly it hurts. There never was a common Europe on Americas side to begin with.
Wow. Shocking.
Quick question: where you are from, what percentage of GDP did you spend on the military in the last 10 years?
Why isn't Switzerland, the very rich and developed and human-rights-protecting country, fighting Russia right now? Oh, right, your country loves profiting off of misery.
Not even a fifth. However other than the cold trading war with the US we haven't been in any war situation for a while.
And we don't exactly need military against you guys. We attack with rolex and suited super rich
Edit:// if Russia is such an easy problem? How comes orange man did nothing so far even thought he spends days talking about how he did?
We are also actually the main sponsor for America by capita. (As in owning state papers and your dept) So essentially we finance you guys to do the dirty stuff!?
It is a tariff thing.
Nobody's under any illusion that this was a good decision, including the people that made this decision. It was just a means to an end, the end being lowering tarrifs on the EU.
There's still quite a few steps between the current state and the dominance of US cars on European streets. It's still an empty promise from the EU side.
Maybe. Maybe not. The uncertainty has value in and of itself, assuming Russia et al. experience the same uncertainty.
> Is anyone in Europe really believing the USA still has our back?
Pretty much every government unfortunately.
Are you German by change? There is barely any America positive sentiment in our media anymore as far as I can tell, since the last time orange man won (which been a while).
From the media I can see it's only Germany who has a really weird relationship with the US. Switzerland, Italy, France, .. are pretty clear in what they think and how they will act.
No I'm French, and we always had mixed feelings with the Americans. But for anyone following the topic, it's pretty clear that most other European governments are still pretty convinced that they just need to brace for the next three years and appease Trump.
See the debates about how the European funds (ReArm Europe) should be spent, and whether or not it should be allowed to be used to buy US equipment. Or the recent procurement of additional F35 (at least Belgium, Netherlands, Italy and Germany have ordered more).
Also, none of the re-arming plans seem to consider the assumption that the US logistics (airlift & tankers) could not be relied on.
I think they're just looking 3 years ahead.
The cybertruck is not approved in Europe. Some people manage to use individual loopholes to import them but Tesla doesn't sell them here.
Guaranteed new deaths everyday instead of possibly, maybe, USA president will not back out from a conflict on a whim or by getting offended and go full sulky kid due to some remarks on his patheticly idiotic personality (I hope he will never get here, I do not want to be carpet bombed because of a comment).
I'd say keep everyday life better and buy some stupid US military airplanes instead, to keep this deteriorated stupid smug child satisfied!
The EU representatives shall remain adults!!
The article says road deaths in USA are up 30% over last 15 years and links to https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2024-02/2.... That doc talks a lot about initiatives but what is the normal American's sense of what's going on on the street?
European living in the US here. Around my mostly suburban area, I see mainly SUVs and crossovers with a few vans and pickups sprinkled in. Outside the urban areas, pickups and other monsters like nine seaters seem more common.
I also see a lot - and I mean a lot - of people holding a phone while driving, even in dense city traffic. Add to that non-walkable streets in some places and unsafe rules like legal right turns on a red light. Cyclists often have to squeeze into a narrow bike lane that is level with the car lanes instead of raised onto the sidewalk. That adds up to a much higher amount of latent dangers than in Europe.
There's something you can learn from the broad scale, but SF has pretty decent tracking and perhaps there's something you can learn from looking at one city too. SF has a Collisions Report[0] and also traffic citations data is open data[1] so you can see how enforcement has changed. Subjectively, I notice a lot more red-light running, and objectively the red-light camera near my apartment illuminates the ceiling of my home office every day.
I'm now a father so one cannot discount the amount to which my tolerance of bad actors has changed, but my experience has been that the lack of enforcement for violations (right-turn red lights in SF are rarely obeyed) is definitely taken advantage of by many drivers. However, the collisions report does make it somewhat clear that a non-trivial amount of the new fatalities are due to new traffic modalities: people now have the stand up OneWheels, and there are many more food delivery drivers on e-bikes.
But one gratifying thing is that the newer parts of town where people are having children have a lot more safety construction. I was walking home from the gym here in Mission Bay when I saw a group of kids between 6 and 12 on their little scooters.
[0] https://www.visionzerosf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/San-...
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/car-traffic-pede...
Lack of enforcement of existing laws is a huge contributing factor, and discussing why enforcement has dropped causes political strife.
We had the political will to solve it around schoolbusses so we could enforce more, but we don’t.
I dunno about the last 15 years, but my sense is there is a fairly widespread perception that drivers have become more reckless and oblivious since COVID. This isn't just about car standards (although there is probably a connection terms of things like touchscreens becoming more and more prevalent in cars) but it's a thing.
I'm an American that doesn't drive. I've lived across multiple states across multiple coasts, so I can speak a bit to the issues here as someone that is primarily a pedestrian. There's a bunch of different things that add up into an absolute mess.
The first thing and the most obvious is that for 99% of people, you need a car to live. I've been able to work around that issue, but you simply cannot exist anywhere without a car. Our public transit networks are terrible, our roads are terrible and our commutes are even worse. Half-hour to an hour commutes are normalized among a lot of people. I don't see a need to hammer this point any further as I'm sure almost everyone who has tangential knowledge of the US knows.
The more insidious problem is that Americans are also incredibly afraid and incredibly self-serving, and our law system is set up to benefit that. Drivers can very easily get away with vehicular manslaughter because our system is tilted in favor of drivers. This is why we see larger and larger cars, because people want to protect themselves at the cost of everyone else. And if they do hit a kid or murder a pedestrian it was an accident and not their fault. This is also why Americans drive like absolute maniacs. Our police also rarely enforce traffic laws and drivers have only gotten worse as a result.
So we have a bunch of people that should not be allowed to drive on the road because they have to drive, where they rarely get punished for breaking the law and where the law is set up to benefit them when they do break it. This has been a universal constant across every state I've lived in, though notably Virginia was worse than both Texas and Washington in terms of drivers.
People driving "Brodozers(tm)" can't see shit near the vehicle due to both the big hood and being super high up, while the gigantic, flat front grille kills people rather than crumpling them over the hood.
And while I call them "Brodozers" to be derogatory, a significant number of really tiny females are driving them as well in the name of "safety". And they REALLY can't see anything over the hood.
The combination of gigantic blind spots and complete energy transfer is good at killing unarmored people.
I hope large cars will get good safety systems. Powerful image of a very tragic case from 2023 (Actually European car in Europe):
https://images.sanoma-sndp.fi/98ad49728452bf5d3e1c9d1d90d899...
Images like that evoke feelings but you have to evaluate each on what would have occurred with other vehicles - even a bike hitting a child at speed is likely to be tragic.
No, because we're talking about the physical laws of nature here. A vehicle of that size hitting a child even at a low speed is going to impart much more force than a bike hitting a child at even high speeds. And that's before you get into the other physical design issues of modern cars pulling people under the vehicle in collisions.
The answer you get will depend on how much a person has to travel or has traveled in the US. If someone lives, works, and never travels outside (for example) a 100 KM radius then what they do every day will play a big part. Frequent road travel for work, family, or other reasons probably will look towards the smallest or most efficiant car that can fit their need.
The average weather pattern of the region a person lives in plays a part, the amount of public transportation avaliable plays a part, how densely packed cities near you are plays a part. What car is avaliable is obviously a big part. All that stuff will be probably be considered before the "overall safety" of the car you want (and can afford) to get.
The people who can afford to think about safety will most likely be considering "passanger safety" rather than at the societial level. The more big cars around them the more someone concerned about safety will feel the need to own and drive in a big car. Sometimes you need the bigger car for the larger range a bigger gas tank allows. There are still places where you can find around 400 km between gas stations, especially if you are driving outside normal buisness hours.
One topic for the American car market has been how the "mid-sized" or "mid-range value" car space has been vanishing. That the options are increasingly moving towards either minimal passanger/storage Eco-Cars or the larger Trucks and SUVs. That plays a part, the used car market plays a part, and other world events play a part.
So at least from one point of view here all that leads to a lot of topics like this where there are people who have only lived in the US (and often not even moved around to other parts of the US) pushing their world view on others. You also have people who "have been to the US" claiming qualified expertiese based off their point(s) of reference, valid or not. The "US needs better public transportation" crowd will usually come out as well with sometimes more militant views against car use and ownership.
But all this circles back to the idea that the "normal American" has time to think about this or try to act on any of this. Some do, some don't, most won't really think about this unless a headline prompts something from their brain. The hard thing for the "normal European" to understand is the economics of distance and scale at play in the US given just how much space between cities and towns there can be.
People can blame the "American Dream" or the auto-industry, or whatever else you might want to imagine has contributed to the damage done in the last century of road construction and sprawl. The end result is that most Americans don't have a choice but to own a car, and may be far too tired to be trusted at the wheel of a vehicle. Multiple people driving less than a few miles to work may be involved in an accident with someone who had driven hundreds. Miles driven in a year is part of insurance calculations for a reason.
This was much more comment than I intended to give.
Americans want big cars.
American regulations created a dichotomy where there's no middle ground. Big car or sour cream dollop with no space and no power.
Americans want big because big means "safety". An SUV feels safer next to the semi than a Smart car. They also want big to haul the occasional furniture between moves, go on the occasional road trip, bring all the gear when camping, or bring back a massive shopping haul.
American housing is way less dense outside the cities. There's no reason for a compact car if you live in the burbs apart from gas mileage.
At the same time, more and more people want to build bike lanes and people infra near roads. "Strong Towns" movement, etc.
We're putting more bicyclists on the roads next to big cars now.
That is not the only reason for a big car. You have to find special forward facing child seats to put 3 wide in a Tesla model 3 rear row, then do yoga to try to insert the children into them. To run the child seats facing backwards as long as possible, you need to be something like 5’4” or less to be comfortable with 2 seats in the back. That’s pretty standard in the “normal” sized car market, having a SUV or a minivan makes sense considering that.
I know. Sold my Tesla, now drive a Land Cruiser. A small car is just an exercise in pain when you have kids and need a car to get everywhere. If I had safe bike lanes to get the kids to school and practice and the grocery store, I’d just have an urban arrow… but I’m not contending with the aforementioned kindercrushers that aren’t looking for cyclists and risking my kids with the way our streets are designed. I would happily support changes that fix this, but this is the world we’re in as parents.
There’s a reason minivans are “mom wagons” and it’s mainly on kid access.
And even a minivan is quite large (usually SUV size without the height).
I once had a Volvo wagon with a rear-facing third row, but I don't think anything like that has been made for over 30 years.
You're right though, if we hadn't moved to the Netherlands, we'd have bought something like that too, to make sure we'd win in any crash. Luckily we do, indeed, use an Urban Arrow instead.
Ironically I can hold more kids on the Urban Arrow than I could in my last car - 4 small kids can ride on the bike (3 in bucket, one on a seat on the back), plus the rider of course.
I think this is just not true. You can already easily import, register and drive all of these cars in the EU.
There’s simply approximately zero demand for F150s in the EU regardless of if Ford sells them directly or not.
As an American living in the Netherlands with a larger family (especially by EU standards, with 4 children!), I think I see a slightly different perspective.
Here, owning a car is extremely expensive - perhaps one of the most expensive in Europe. This price goes up considerably when you get a larger vehicle, both because fuel costs are very high but also because you are taxed quarterly for CO2/weight of the vehicle.
With a larger family, you are squeezed into an uncomfortable position since you are outside of the <= 2 child norm. Many 7+ seater vehicles (French cars, etc) are extremely impractical to the point of me thinking that they are not actually designed for more than 5 seats in use, as there is comically low cargo room and the 3rd row is extremely cramped (try fitting a stroller or anything besides people...ha!).
I ended up picking up a Chrysler Town & Country import from the USA for my family, because it was the only vehicle that I could find for a reasonable price that checked all of the boxes, and am paying dearly for it (400+ euros every quarter just to have the privilege of registering it!).
Before you say anything about us having a "kindercrusher" we also have 2 bakfiets cargo bikes and use them regularly, but public transit and bikes don't scale well to large families for anything more than a short distance ride (school, groceries, etc).
Large families are being squeezed out of existence here.
I can agree with the most of this, but the large families being pushed out of existence is plainly wrong. How much the school is costing you? Healthcare? How much do you save by being able to cycle with 4 kids to short distances, where most of your daily travel comprised of?
Sure, car ownership is expensive here, but this is necessary to discourage car-centric culture.
Oh, I would have bought a VW transporter in your case, but that's a personal preference matter.
> I can agree with the most of this, but the large families being pushed out of existence is plainly wrong. How much the school is costing you? Healthcare? How much do you save by being able to cycle with 4 kids to short distances, where most of your daily travel comprised of?
Oh I love cycling. I know it's hard to find even remotely comparable cycling-friendly locations in the States, even if growing up (also in a large family) we were fortunate enough to live walking distance to schools in a suburban area.
But for education and health, health care isn't "free" in the Netherlands. We pay hundreds per month for the whole family for health insurance on top of the high taxes that support the "system". Public education is also tax-supported in the USA for K-12, although indeed higher education is more expensive.
I'm more referencing policy that is intentionally "squeezing" everything to make it all smaller and more frugal in a way that makes a <5 family size far more practical. It is not the same in the States.
I feel like a vw transporter 7 seater would suit your use case, maybe a vw caddy if you want something physically smaller.
I looked at transporters, they are about the same size (although less space in the "trunk"/back) but much more expensive to purchase. Almost exclusively diesels are available (with some rare exceptions), and their taxes are even higher than mine! Don't get me started on the VW Multivan or similar - beautiful cars, but extremely expensive.
VW Caddy we looked at and almost bought, but we had many bad encounters with dealers and instead bought from the private market.
The Kia Carnival was our weapon of choice in the USA, but that’s partially because at five kids (we’re winning!) you really want that eighth seat, and the Chrysler fold in floor (really nice) isn’t available on the hybrid.
From there you have to go to transit van or other commercial offering, but then nobody cares about you anymore because they assume you’re a private bus.
Who is the beneficiary from this?
I don't think its EU citizens, because:
I think EU should go back to build good relationships with Russia, take its cheaper gas & energy and support its own economy, instead of propping up the US economy and opening the market for its ugly huge cars.Just come to Amsterdam and see if you can drive those cars in the middle of Amsterdam. Even trams from 2 opposite direction share same line in some areas.
The EU was bending over backwards for Russia until they invaded a neighboring country for being too friendly to them. The fact that relationships aren't good there is entirely on Russia.
Build good relationships with Russia? That's a call to Russia, not the EU! First and foremost, Russia has to stop going to war with its neighbours. In any case, Europe doesn't need Russian gas for much longer.
You think EU should go back to building good relationships with Russia when there is an ongoing war of aggression started by them? If you really believe that and you're an EU citizen I can't help viewing you as traitorous to very foundational values the EU was created for. Absolutely disgusting.
[flagged]
Every point you mentioned is just parroting the Russian narrative.
There's no such thing as "good trade relationships with Russia", as those that were there existed only thanks to planted agents like Gerhard Schröder.
What most likely triggered this war was Putin's ambition to stay in power, as Russia never actually recovered from the 2008 crisis, so he let Medvedev handle the popularity hit associated with the first years post that.
Russian agents are sabotaging European businesses as we speak - there's no getting back to whatever level of friendly relations there were before the invasion.
Gerhard Schröder was no planted agent, he acted out of a belief in what he did. The german left have always had a strong connection to russia.
I live in northeast Germany and the cost of living increase and industrial cost of the nord stream & oil pipeline changeover has been immense.
I am not advocating a "friendly" relationship w russia but it's also wrong to over simplify the relationships. The nord stream sabotage was a HUGE gut punch for former east german states.
And yet NATO expands most readily when Russia invades another country. I wonder why nations might want in that alliance? You're just repeating Russia's justifications for their actions, which have never made sense.
NATO expansion was because countries begged to become members of NATO, out of fear of Russia invading them. The only reason Russia minds NATO expansion is that it prevents them from starting easy wars.
You forgot the bio weapon labs! /s
> I think EU should go back to build good relationships with Russia
This is horribly naïve at best. You're suggesting building good relationships with a country waging a war of aggression with a neighbour it shares with the EU. A country that's committing genocide against that neighbour. A country that has been rather consistently stepping up its attacks against European infrastructure over the past several years.
I'm not saying that you are an idiot. But I am saying that you would have to be an idiot to sincerely believe what you just said.
> I think EU should go back to build good relationships with Russia
Kinda hard with someone trying to expand, starting wars and engaging with genocide. Literally.
Being accommodating to Russia is how we got here.
Why don't US car companies just improve their safety standards?
"When Congress passes new emission standards, [Honda] hires 50 more engineers and GM hires 50 more lawyers."
The quote is attributed to Soichiro Honda, in the book Driving Honda: Inside the World's Most Innovative Car Company by Jeffrey Rothfeder
Why solve hard problems when you can just lobby your way out of it?
Expensive
Gasoline cars will be banned in 2035 and there ought to be some kind of on ramp so these giant American trucks probably won't meet emission limits anyway, right?
This is not directly related to Gasoline cars. See Cybertruck.
Sales of that have been low, I understand.
Cars are so expensive I'm happy if somebody brings cheaper cars to Europe. EU regulation is probably a factor in making cars too expensive and it's time to stop and think, how to find a better balance.
Cars being expensive reduces car use, which is a good thing.
What rhymes with US is boycott, not adopt. Ah, but what else can a vassal state and "freeloaders" do, right? Gunboat diplomacy works, albeit in a different way.
Anyone seen the recent Mercedes SUVs? They are just huge, so European manufacturers are to blame as well.
Yeah the GLS is almost the size of an Escalade now. I honestly don't understand why SUVs are outselling wagons at such an insane rate. Heavier, uglier, worse aerodynamics with the same practicality and a worse ride because they need to make up for the higher center of gravity with a stiffer suspension. I see no positives, other than better ground clearance, which, let's be honest, most people never need because they only ever drive on paved roads. Easier to run over children and bikes though, if that's your thing.
Even Volvo has made the newer XC models have a much more obstructive, flat, high bonnet. I drove one as a rental and it was disconcerting how little you could see. You can't see anything in front of the car, whereas the old style was still a (stupid, IMO) crossover, but the front was basically like a normal car-shaped car with a down-sloped front.
I don't know why anyone who isn't a complete psycho would actually prefer being more limited in forward vision (though I imagine it allowed more space for dual-motor engines).
Honestly if I were the government, I'd require a downward sightline such that you can see, with your own two eyes, a child of a certain height standing against the front bumper. No visibility, no sales, no imports, no excuses. Let the car manufacturers figure out how to build a car that meets it or settle for "only" being able to sell car-shaped estate cars.
https://ibb.co/dw7QmTTr
I drive a 2014 Ford Fiesta. Every car feels huge in comparison. I had a Nissan Qashqai parked next to my car, it looked like a tank. I had a look inside, it didn't seem particularly spacious.
Same when I flew to Bilbao. I booked late, the only rentals left were in the luxury segment. I drove off in a mild-hybrid Lexus NX, where I struggled to fit the luggage that fit reasonably well in the boot of my car on the way to Schiphol.
Yeah, it’s a big topic in France too. I just saw the current pinacle of this stupidity: a camera in the grille at the front of a Peugeot car.
Despite all the bs you’ll read here, Europeans also want bigger cars. For me the proof is that poor people car brands like Dacia no longer sell sedans.
I think the reason you don’t see many big cars is that we are generally so poor that we can’t afford what we would like to buy. At least where I live… Also our streets are old and narrow which makes it impractical.
A topical piece from the BBC… https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy7vdvl2531o
Regarding the giant trucks specific: one pragmatic lever we could pull here is just m parking enforcement. The EU says we have to allow sale of dangerous vehicles to keep Trump happy. But cities can just say "you can't park there mate" (where "there" means, for example, the Paris metropolitan area). They are already too big for existing parking spaces. We can forbid construction of larger spaces and require privately-owned car parks to enforce size limits.
Has anyone found petitions against this that we can sign?
IMHO - not “would risk”, but “will definitely increase road deaths”.
Tesla's losing the sales war against Renault in France and UK thanks to Renault's R5.
European consumers want livable cities with smaller (and more affordable) cars. Thanks.
>European consumers want livable cities with smaller (and more affordable) cars. Thanks.
Provably false.
https://www.acea.auto/figure/new-passenger-cars-by-segment-i...
Retract your statement. Thanks.
You'r giving sales number, that doesn't means that it's what people are looking for, it's a representation of what manufacturer provides. Most people buy laptops with copilot AI, that doesn't mean they want it.
If there is a significant mismatch between what people are looking for and what manufacturers provide, why would some other manufacturer not jump in to capture the underserved demand? It doesn't seem like there's only a very small number of car (or laptop) manufacturers.
"EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%."
Everyone rightfully highlights this striking statistic. But I notice a sleight of hand ("have supported" = correlation) and would like to see a breakdown of the factors that may have contributed to this divergence.
First they have to fit on our roads, and medieval streets, where even "tiny" European cars can be a challege do drive.
It's interesting that Americans seems to justify the purchase because of personal safety, leading to preference for larger cars.
This is fine in isolation but at scale it leads to a race where everyone, especially pedestrians, loses.
I think it's more of a comfort thing than a safety thing in many cases. Definitely in my case.
If you've never experienced it, I think you should at least understand what you are up against. Most people aren't buying these things to be evil to each other in some big dick safety war. Go visit an FCA dealership and see for yourself. Have a sales guy drive you down the freeway in that Ram 1500 Lonestar Edition. Observe how quiet your conversation can be at 80mph. It might change your perspective a bit.
> Observe how quiet your conversation can be at 80mph. It might change your perspective a bit.
Take a train some time. It might change yours.
Yes, it's infuriating.
The extra dumb thing about it is that I don't believe the numbers in the US really even strongly support that preference. Yes, you're less likely to die in a big SUV than in a sedan if you get into a crash, but the difference isn't that large, and the risk of death in general is low enough that it's not worth worrying about.
I drive a sedan, but I'm only really worried about getting killed by one of these monster vehicles when I'm out walking, as a pedestrian, or while I'm on a bicycle.
Tragedy of commons.
Honestly US standards can go to hell. I absolutely abhor these monstrosities. They should be outright banned except if specific need can be shown. They are dangerous, take up way too much space, and excessively damage the road.
Your freedom to do stuff stops where my freedom to walk & cycle around without undue fear of death begins.
Attributing "monstrosities" only to the US as a "US standards" doesn't make sense since the consumer trend towards bigger cars is global. It's a consumer trend, not a standard.
In NL, for example, I see plenty of large EU cars driving around with only a very occasional US "monstrosity" like a pickup truck, and I don't even live in the city.
US pedestrian deaths increased almost 100% the last decade or so... and the Cybertruck is the most hilarious car, a representation of bad US car standards.
With its pointy edges, even in a very slow accident hitting a pedestrian, the outcome will make any Tarantino movie look soft, in terms of blood being spilled around.
Don't even get me started on those huge American cars, they are the absolute terror in terms of pedestrian safety.
No
I mean, I think in EC-speak, "intends to accept" means "no way in a million years", in any case. In general, if they say they'll definitely do something, that means "within 20 years, assuming it's convenient". Anything less than that, not happening.
Did I hear that right, dream car vs. asshole bucket?
This has got to be propaganda from big auto. No one would benefit from more regulation as much as they would
"EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%."
Of course, we are talking about two completely different sets of traffic cultures here (urban design, laws etc.) but I wouldn't be surprised if this gets accepted fully as part of a trade deal. EU isn't a strong negotiator, caves easily under American pressure and Trump has a firm hand and knows how to get the best deal for himself.
The only place on the entire continent where I've seen American cars being driven is the Netherlands and they stick out like a sore thumb. They are too big, too loud, too heavy, emit massively more CO2, usually don't have good acceleration (which you need into/out of roundabouts). Just not a good fit for European roads and streets. God forbid you crash into a pedestrian or a cyclists, you kill them instantly. They are built like a tank whereas European cars will self-destroy to preserve pedestrian life.
> EU isn't a strong negotiator
The EU is a strong negotiator, we just prefer that everyone works with the carrot because the stick is uncivilised and hurts a lot.
What has this got to do with "hacking"?
"Since 2010, EU cardeaths decreased with -36%, US cardeaths increased by +30%"
What a time to be alive!
(For Europeans)
Well not for long, if the US pressures Europe to go back on these
There are several "American" cars interesting for our market they talk about when they talk about importing American cars (ex. Toyotas) it's usually not the kind of car you Americans think about, and not much to worry for us ...
yet another idiotic EU nanny-state bedwetting episode.
EU leaders are bankrupting their continent, lying to their citizens, marching into a war they'll NEVER win... but pedantic auto safety standards - this is important? this is news?
europe deserves it's little seat @ the kid's table.
If Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam don’t like it they can probably do something about it
Every euro city seems to be able to set their own regulation on car exhausts
So why not limit the sizes of cars or prohibit specific cars into the city?
I’m frankly surprised Amsterdam didn’t ban some of these huge machines yet
I detest how each city has different rules on exhausts but it might be the only way
All the cities you listed end up using the common EU standards for deciding emissions requirements, they just draw a different line as to what is allowed and from when. So maybe in one European city you need at least Euro 4 Petrol since 2024 and in another it was Euro 3 by 2025, but all you need to know as an owner or driver is that you're driving say a Euro 6 Petrol car or that the second hand car you just bought your teenage daughter is only Euro 4.
France has a layer where they translate from the Euro standards to their own system, but that's no different from having to mentally translate temperature units or distances.
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It's not protectionism when all you require is that products which compete should be held to the same standards. Or do you mean that it's fine for US companies to undercut other companies by lowering standards and costs, and only enforcing the standards on said competing companies?
It is how Europe plays the protectionism game, see their protectionist moves against stuff coming from Africa (agricultural but not only).
Come on, please reply to the questions. How is it protectionism to hold the competitors to the same standards? Please explain.
Wow, that's a false equivalency if ever there was one. Stricter safety standards != starting a trade war because of "hurr durr trade deficit".
See how Europe has been using the same “but standards!” to protect its agricultural industry from African agricultural imports.
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Free trade. Any products that fulfil local safety standards should be allowed to be sold. Just because USA doesn't want to make cars that fulfil European standard does not mean they should be able to get away with those.
If the US can build safer cars for everyone, the EU will have no objections.
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EU legislation requires a number of design considerations for pedestrian and cyclist collisions, like specific energy absorption requirements for front-impact and side-impact protection, restrictions on sharp corners/steep angles that could concentrate impact forces, minimum clearance around hard internal structures, mandatory ADAS (automated emergency braking, lane departure warnings) etc. Not saying that US cars are "not safe" in a binary fashion but for the most part these things are either optional or unregulated in the US.
Yeah, not a fan of cyclists. And it's kind of braindead to have my car break because if I hit a pedestrian somehow it is its job to absorb the impact. Maybe cyclists and pedestrians should be more mindful of their surroundings.
The EU regulations have killed all the nice things about cars: straight lines, retractable headlights and so on.
The two ton deadly weapon is definitely the one at fault, not the person just living life.
There is no nice things about cars.
Did you even read the article?
Sure you can. I'm not even sure why I need to support this statement. You can have any kind of trade you want.
In the longer term, these sorts of things are governed more by demand than anything else. Sure, some governments might sometimes enact protectionist policies, but if most people in a country think the cars made by their domestic car companies are garbage, they're going to end up with a government that allows cars from other countries in.
This is nothing to do with trade.
If region X happily produces and sells rotten meat, no other region is obligated to trade with them. But region X might choose to import non-rotten meat if they want.
Because of safety standards? It’s the whole point of the article.
You can absolutely have unidirectional trade, countries produce a different array of goods and these are not bartering deals.
If the EU cars aren't "safe enough" for the US then sure. Some of it is political silly buggers and protectionism but at the end of the day countries (or unions of countries) can set their own rules.
If the US wants to sell cars to the EU, they can. Plenty of countries export cars to the EU just fine. It's not the EU's fault that American car manufacturers make dangerous vehicles. It's also not American car manufacturer's fault that European cities and roads are often smaller and Europeans have less appetite for road deaths. But it is their fault if they want to export to that market without making any effort to design suitable cars for it. American exporters aren't granted a God-given right to inflict American standards in the rest of the world.
How are US made vehicles dangerous?
If they don't meet EU safety standards, they are, by definition, legally unsafe for sale in the EU.
Front sightlines are a common example given for larger pickups and SUVs. Pedestrian outcomes in collisions are also given more weight in the EU standards (which is why you can't buy a Cybertruck).
American semi trucks are also generally considered unsafe for that reason plus overall length - nearly all EU and UK HGVs are cabover models.
There's no rule againt US-made vehicles. It's just that many vehicle models that happen to be made and sold in the US don't meet safety requirements in other places.
You can well argue that EU vehicle standards are excessively strict (many EU residents may agree or disagree on various aspects), but coming at it from "very unfair trade, it's a huge deficit, sad!" angle seems more like simping for car manufacturers then reasonable public safety policy tuning.
> nearly all EU and UK HGVs are cabover models
and
> There's no rule against US-made vehicles.
It feels very much an anti-US rule to me.
"It feels very much an anti-US rule to me."
It isn't. Quite the opposite. It's about a level playing field. There are standards for allowing products to market, some of them are more costly to implement. US car makers want to sell at lower standards than competitors, that's not a level playing field.
The would be customers should decide that. If they want a car that is bigger, harder to park, has poor fuel consumption and so on.
The customer has no right to deside on issues that affect _others_. A customer can decide on what affects the customer. If car A is more dangerous for other people than car B, then it's for somebody else than the car customer to decide what should be allowed. A car owner can't decide that "it's fine to drive this car which will kill other people because of its design".
So if I want to, I should be able to drive a literal tank? What a poorly thought out argument.
Cars are a danger to others, that's why your own choices shouldn't be the only thing that matters.
Yes, like in the US - you can get a permit to drive one around.
On public roads?
It feels very much like a self-inflicted problem that manufacturers made by lobbying for domestic rules that they knew to be incompatible with foreign markets, followed by inability to innovate sufficiently to supply both markets economically.
I have no sympathy with this plight. They should take responsibility for their past choices. They have agency, they're not victims.
It's not even that you can't see big pickups in the EU, there are plenty of Hiluxen and even Chinese brands like Maxus (SAIC) could figure out how make an EU-compliant vehicle (much as I think even such models are undesirable to share roads with).
It's also not there are no US imports - there are, when the models comply with local regulation.
Let's not pretend we care while motorbikes are still legal in Europe...
As would accepting any car standards.
It is strange that road deaths have been compared in the past, but protection from air pollution has been discussed since 2026. It is noteworthy that, according to IQAir, the air in the United States is less polluted than in most EU countries.
Yes but that is due to the vastly different population density.
The USA has 34 people per square km while Germany has 234. So pollution per capita would be a better metric.
The air you breathe is the same regardless of how many people stand next to you also breathing it.
Actually if you're standing next to people the air you breathe in also has some of their exhaust gases in it, in this case slightly elevated CO2. If there's a dozen people in a small meeting room with the windows closed and no AC the air quality is significantly worse in that room than it would be say, stood on the roof... unless you're in the middle of a major city where maybe the air on the roof is full of exhaust from motor vehicles, hence legislation to restrict vehicle exhaust.
But only if they stand.
If they start driving, the situation changes dramatically!
Air in populated cities or air in general? Air quality seems a bit harder to compare across countries than road deaths, considering the US has so much sparsely populated land.
The average air quality in all of the US is not as bad as in some European countries?
Most. Not some. Reading comprehension is important. Don't they teach that in Switzerland?
You compare a continent to countries? Without any corrections for density or anything? And you ask me about my comprehension skills?
I am not an expert on car safety standards in either US or EU. Nitpicking this quote: “ Europe currently has mandatory requirements for life-saving technologies, such as pedestrian protection, automated emergency braking and lane-keeping assistance”
My cheap, Chevy Trax has some of these features. Lane keeping assistance is there. It will tell me if there is a pedestrian in front of me. If it sees someone’s brake lights then it will flash a red light on the windshield to warn me that I am too close.
It doesn’t have emergency braking but my Wife’s 2019 Honda Odyssey had all those things except the pedestrian protection. All US vehicles.
What standards are we really talking about?
This is one of these articles that feels more like clickbait and judging on the emotional responses I see in this comment section it worked. The top comment is railing against Dodge Rams which wasn’t mentioned in the article.
One of these features is "Active Hood" or "Pop Up Hood" which uses pyrotechnic to pop the hood of the car in case of a frontal collision with a pedestrian, thus making the front hood of the car acting as some kind of stiff airbag for the pedestrian. This helps reducing the risk of life-threatening injuries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4zfwUL3joI
NotJustBikes on youtube has a video listing more of these features which don't exist in cars sold in the US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--832LV9a3I
The US, at least at the state level, has often adopted standards far earlier than Europe. Seat belts, the latch system (called ISOFix in Europe) for car seats, and airbags come to mind.
Agreed that this feels like click/rage bait mostly against US pickup trucks, which many people in the States express frustration with too!
NotJustBikes cover's this in the latest video, starting here:
https://youtu.be/--832LV9a3I?si=HpfmA8mFIsJJ_Uhp&t=333
Of course, I think if a company is targeting both markets, you may benefit from some features.
And it's not just about you, but the other people driving around you who pose a danger to you.
That’s why the US vehicles focus on occupant safety since the US does not have a pedestrian centric culture - it is now built around cars. Some places in small pockets are trying to change that but it’s slow and unlikely to be widespread. Other roadway safety features for pedestrians by cities or counties have been enacted. But these lessons are learned in blood. Recently there was a case a couple years ago in a beach town in Florida where a girl died crossing A1A. That town put in a bunch of safety devices after aggressively lobbying the State. But the vehicles weren’t modified.
[1] https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2020/02/26/driver-wh...
[2] https://www.wesh.com/article/calls-for-crosswalk-changes-aft...
>EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%
There might be something in those stats other than anecdotal vibes.
Devils advocate
How do we really know that? If people walk more and drive less one could argue that road deaths go down too. US has a lot more cars and roads than EU. And we have this massive Interstate system.
Reject US car imports, instead let China flood the EU and UK with cheap and dangerous cars like BYD, Maxxus, Jaecoo, Chery etc.
It seems myopic for this group to go after American vehicles and the size of their market share in the EU and UK, whilst China guts our car market with a thousand cuts from the other side.
I could not find one negative article about China on their website, maybe it's not an area of focus for them (or they're bought out already)
https://etsc.eu/?s=china&submit=
As a Brit I am less worried about my VW Passat blowing up or having some wiretap back to Beijing, or locking me out of the car when the firmware defaults back to Mandarin.