"It's easy to want to drive one of these cute kei cars. It's another thing to put your family in them and travel down the highway at 70 mph," one expert said.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40818280

If there’s anything we should take from Japan, it’s treating cars like second class citizens behind transit instead of the other way around. The cute tiny cars are more a side effect of that.

  • TonyOstrich@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    I fucking hate when people say they prefer an SUV or a truck because they feel safer or because of the “increased visibility”. It especially bugs me coming from people who generally hold more progressive views because one of the reasons driving is so dangerous is due to the proliferation of large vehicles, so what they are essentially saying is very analogous to “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun”.

    • AA5B@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      22 hours ago

      Different visibility though. When I was younger and everyone drove similar sized cars, you had much better visibility while driving since you could see through or around everything. Now too many vehicles are just huge blocks of steel: cant see beyond the car in front of you, can’t see next to you, can’t see behind you past that wall of steel. It’s an “arms race” to prevent others from blocking your view.

      Consider driving up to an intersection, then a huge truck pulls up in the other lane: now you can’t see and may have to wait for him to go just to be able to see. And of course if you still can’t turn, there may be another huge truck pulling up to block your sight linesagain. Very frustrating. UCertainly the fact that stop lines are ignored is part of the problem, but if my car were the same height as yours, at least I’d behave a partial view