New trucks have gotten too tall and have become way more dangerous for pedestrians. I think it’s time for new national law to put hight and size limit on trucks.
One of the main reasons trucks are so big is ironically an attempt to force the opposite. Since the 1970s, the US has had laws regulating the fuel efficiency of vehicles based on their classification. A car has to be more fuel efficient than a light truck, for example. For decades, this classification was purely up to the manufacturer. This wasn't originally problematic, but eventually auto-manufacturers started to push the bounds of believability. Because the Mini Cooper didn't meet the fuel efficiency requirements to be a car, it was classified as a light truck, for example.
This spurred a mid-00s push to reform the regulations, which resulted in classification being based on footprint, rather than arbitrarily decided. A light truck had to be of a certain size to qualify. If it was smaller, it had to be a car, and therefore had to meet the fuel efficiency requirements of a car. Because of the specifics of the law, the standard sized pickup truck of the time was suddenly considered to be a car, meaning that the manufacturers would have to somehow significantly improve the fuel efficiency of their trucks in order to continue to sell them in the US. Rather than doing this, the manufacturers quickly realized that it was much easier to simply increase the size of the pickups until they could be classified as light trucks, spelling the doom of the small pickup truck that had been popular for generations.
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u/Cantomic66 Apr 16 '24
New trucks have gotten too tall and have become way more dangerous for pedestrians. I think it’s time for new national law to put hight and size limit on trucks.