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RUCKERSVILLE, Va. — In a cavernous white room full of bright lights, video cameras and microphones, a driverless cart hurtles at 37 miles per hour into the side of a large SUV.
Researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have crash-tested thousands of cars and trucks like this one over the past three decades at their facility in central Virginia.
But a few years ago, they noticed that those vehicles were getting bigger and heavier. So they decided to make the cart that crashes into them larger, too.
“It was meant to represent a small pickup or a midsize SUV, and those vehicles have gotten heavier and heavier over time,” says Becky Mueller, a senior research engineer at IIHS. “So it's 500 kilograms more weight because that's what the vehicle fleet now reflects.”
Americans’ cars and trucks are getting bigger and taller, while roadway fatalities have also climbed sharply over the past decade.
Now lawmakers in Congress are expected to introduce a bill on Friday that would require federal standards for hood height and visibility to protect pedestrians and other vulnerable road users.
“We've seen these standards over time improve vehicle safety with a focus on the people in the vehicle,” said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.), the sponsor of the Pedestrian Protection Act, in an interview with NPR. “But this would sort of expand that to pedestrians, bicyclists and people outside the vehicle.”
Larger cars tend to be safer for the occupants. But for people outside the car, it’s a very different story.
Bigger and taller vehicles are more dangerous for pedestrians, according to an IIHS study of real-world crashes. Vehicles with higher front ends and blunt profiles are 45% more likely to cause fatalities in crashes with pedestrians than smaller cars and trucks, researchers found.
Safety advocates say that’s a big reason why annual pedestrian deaths in the U.S. are up more than 75% since reaching their lowest point in 2009.
“Pedestrians that are hit by trucks or SUVs are more likely to be killed,” said Angie Schmitt, the author of Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America.
“The vehicles are bigger. They hit people with a heavier force, but they're also hitting people higher on the body,” Schmitt said. “So a child may be more likely or a shorter person more likely to be struck in the head. That's more likely to be fatal for them.”
Over the past three decades, the average U.S. passenger vehicle has gotten about 10 inches longer, 8 inches taller and 1,000 pounds heavier, according to IIHS.
SUVs and pickup trucks now make up more than three-quarters of all vehicles on the road in the U.S., up from only 38% in 2009 — a phenomenon described as "car bloat" by David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative. The largest trucks and SUVs "create danger for everybody else on the street," Zipper said, "because of their mass because of their height, whether you're walking or biking or inside a smaller car."
But safety advocates hope that the right design modifications could make the impact of those vehicles a little smaller.
“I certainly like having an SUV,” said Scanlon, noting that she used to drive a Chevrolet Suburban to get her kids’ soccer teams and their gear to practice. “Having a good size vehicle is helpful. But it does appear that there are things we can do with respect to design that would reduce the blind zones on these larger vehicles.”
Scanlon’s bill would require regulators to set standards for hood height, and to make the driver’s visibility part of the agency’s safety assessment for new cars.
The responsibility for setting those standards would fall to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA. Safety advocates say the agency has known for years that bigger SUVs and trucks are more deadly for pedestrians — and has done little about it.
But the acting head of the agency, deputy administrator Sophie Shulman, disputes that.
“We are looking at all the tools at our disposal to save the lives on our roadways,” Shulman said in an interview last week.
NHTSA declined to comment on the pending pedestrian protection bill. So did the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an auto industry trade group.
“Automakers have voluntarily developed and introduced MANY crash avoidance technologies," the trade group said in a statement. "We’ve introduced these technologies to make roads safer for drivers and all road users without NHTSA or Congressional requirements and continue to innovate ahead of government requirements.”
This would not be the first time Congress has asked NHTSA to consider the safety of people outside of cars. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law directed the agency to expand its New Car Assessment Program to include pedestrians.
But the proposal for pedestrian crashworthiness testing that NHTSA put forward last year left many safety advocates disappointed.
That proposal would create a pass-fail rating for pedestrian impacts that would be available only through NHTSA’s website — separate, in other words, from the five-star safety rating system that’s displayed in car windows at dealerships, where safety advocates argue it could have a bigger influence on consumers. And the program would be voluntary, allowing carmakers to exclude vehicles that they might expect to fail.
“We would prefer to have some teeth,” said Jessica Cicchino, the senior vice president for research at IIHS. “We thought it wasn't strong enough to really encourage automakers to make those changes.”
Cicchino argues the vehicle design can have a profound effect on the safety of pedestrians and other road users, and says IIHS is working to develop new kinds of vehicle testing that could have help identify areas for improvement.
“We have this tension,” Cicchino said, between drivers who “want to be in SUVs and pickups because those are the kinds of vehicles that are out there, and trying to figure out how we can design them in ways that are safer for everybody that's on the road.”
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