• antianarchist@sopuli.xyz
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    7 hours ago

    American cars cover more pavement than they ever have

    Then goes ahead and shows a change from 48.9 to 51.8

    Whoever made those charts wanted to make the change look bad, no matter what.

    Where is the chart of the average heavy injuries per passenger? Or the average energy efficiency of engines?

    • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      injuries per passenger

      The fact that you phrased this so specifically to not mention the corresponding increased danger to other road users and pedestrians, suggests you’re a shill pushing industry talking points.

    • Jiral@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      The graphs are terrible but come on, a 10% increase in weight in 10 years, doesn’t sound bad to you? Especially when the base value was anything but low to begin with? And an increased space consumption of 6% is a huge additional space consumption in absolute numbers, given the huge numbers of cars.

      • Atomic@sh.itjust.works
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        5 hours ago

        The weight gain could theoretically be explained by the simple fact that electric vehicles are heavier than their combustion counterpart.

        Though I’m well aware these are american cars so probably just means more bigger pickup trucks that will never ever be used to actually pick things up.

        • Jiral@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          Hardly, the EV adoption rate in the US is pretty poor and even if we ignore that, the share of EVs among existing vehicles on the road is way to small to be the dominating factor for the increase in weight. That said, yes, EVs will lead to an increase in weight, a necessary evil. However, that can be compensated by downscaling vehicles to actual needs. People are currently buying cars far larger than what they actually need for partly irrational and partly egoistic reasons (increasing threats to life and well being towards others in the hope to slightly decrease it towards oneself).

    • absquatulate@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      Yea this looks misleading as fuck. Weight graph starts at 3000lbs too. Also no mention of the cars polluting the nearby environment a lot less despite getting heavier. And why measure acceleration instead of measuring brake distance, or pedestrian survivability, or crashes per million miles etc.

      • Jiral@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        “A lot less” is something I’d like to have a source for, especially as the switch to SUVs and trucks is done to a large part to evade the much stricter emission norms for officially classified “cars”. Emissions could be a lot lower if the SUV loophole for many of the car norms had not been invented.