exmarx posted:

quote:

The sidelining of the environmental benefits of EVs aligns with the role Hummer and other gigantic SUVs have played in our environmental challenges. The Hummer, in all its militaristic aggressiveness, is the very embodiment of the wasteful excess that contributed to the climate crisis in the first place. Cars are inherently about projecting a self-image, and hundreds of thousands of Americans chose to project one of profound, pathological selfishness. The electrification of the Hummer is not a signal of climate progress. It is a declaration that it’s still OK to be an rear end in a top hat.

Bradsher’s book is a thorough examination of how the auto industry convinced millions of Americans to buy vehicles that were more dangerous (for themselves and other people on the road), got worse gas mileage, were worse for the environment, and got them to pay a premium for the privilege of doing so.

Car companies managed this remarkable feat because they ran—and continue to run—quite possibly the most sophisticated marketing operations on the planet. They knew what people really wanted: to project an image of selfish superiority. And then they sold it to them at a markup.

The picture they painted of prospective SUV buyers was perhaps the most unflattering portrait of the American way of life ever devised. It doubled as a profound and lucid critique of the American ethos, one that has only gained sharper focus in the years since. And that portrait is largely the result of one consultant who worked for Chrysler, Ford, and GM during the SUV boom: Clotaire Rapaille.

Rapaille, a French emigree, believed the SUV appealed—at the time to mostly upper-middle class suburbanites—to a fundamental subconscious animalistic state, our “reptilian desire for survival,” as relayed by Bradsher. (“We don’t believe what people say,” the website for Rapaille’s consulting firm declares. Instead, they use “a unique blend of biology, cultural anthropology and psychology to discover the hidden cultural forces that pre-organize the way people behave towards a product, service or concept”). Americans were afraid, Rapaille found through his exhaustive market research, and they were mostly afraid of crime even though crime was actually falling and at near-record lows. As Bradsher wrote, “People buy SUVs, he tells auto executives, because they are trying to look as menacing as possible to allay their fears of crime and other violence.” They, quite literally, bought SUVs to run over “gang members” with, Rapaille found.

Perhaps this sounds farfetched, but the auto industry’s own studies agreed with this general portrait of SUV buyers. Bradsher described that portrait, comprised of marketing reports from the major automakers, as follows:

Who has been buying SUVs since automakers turned them into family vehicles? They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities.

The evolution of the SUV from rugged military cosplay to the vehicle for everyone can be seen in its most potent form with the H2, which sanded down the H1's rough edges while retaining the hulking figure and bestial attributes.

This was a stark contrast with, say, minivan buyers. Those same studies found minivan drivers considered themselves parents of the neighborhood and not just their own children. They thought about how the design of the vehicle would enable them to do the things they did most frequently, such as transport lots of children or help senior citizens in and out of the vehicle.

But that’s not how SUV buyers thought. Bradsher quotes a Honda marketing executive as saying, “They are buying the image of the SUV first, then the functionality,” because, according to their research, SUV-buyers were “very concerned with how other people see them, rather than worrying about what is practical.”

Car companies marketed SUVs towards these people with advertisements featuring SUVs dominating roads, climbing boulders, and other extreme feats even though, by the auto industry’s own research, somewhere between one and 13 percent of SUV owners actually drove their vehicles off-road, and most of those who said they did considered flat dirt roads “off-roading.” In other words, auto companies spent billions of dollars on marketing every year to nudge people to buy over-engineered, inefficient, and expensive vehicles in order to allay irrational fears far out of touch with the lives they actually had.

This cynical marketing worked stunningly well. In 2019, the seven best-selling vehicles in the U.S., and 13 of the top 20, were either pickup trucks or SUVs (pickups, of course, now incorporate many of the same marketing tropes as SUVs from the early 2000s). According to the Detroit Free Press, pickups and SUVs now account for 60 percent of new vehicle sales.

Perhaps no vehicle exemplified this trend more than Hummer. Owned by AM General until GM bought the brand in 1999, Hummer embodied a specific time and place in the American psyche that embellished the SUV persona of overcompensation for insecurity and fear.

Michael DiGiovanni, a GM market researcher who persuaded GM to buy Hummer and ended up running its Hummer operations, told Bradsher the $100,000 vehicle was marketed to “rugged individualists” who were “people who really seek out peer approval,” a delicious irony considering how much other road users loathe Hummers. Like their general SUV-owning brethren, few used the vehicle for actual off-roading.

The H1’s successor and slightly smaller variant, the $50,000 H2, was similarly designed for “successful achievers” who are “daring in the sense they may take a big stock market position…but it’s really important for them that people tell them how successful they are.” These people are, DiGiovanni added, “teenaged boys at heart” who never performed military service but wish they had. To wit, DiGiovanni said prototypes had the word “FIRE” on the push-to-start ignition button, but GM’s lawyers made them take it off.

*

This would all be harmless fun if it was indeed harmless. Unfortunately, it was not. SUVs are worse for the world than smaller cars. The proliferation of SUVs has made our streets more congested, our roads more dangerous, and our environment more polluted for no good reason.

In 2000, several researchers used a video camera and a stopwatch to time how long it took thousands of vehicles to get through stop lights at two large intersections. They found, as the New York Times reported, people followed SUVs, pickups, and minivans at a greater distance than cars. As a result, a large SUV took the same amount of road space as 1.41 cars. The article quotes Professor Kara Kockelman of the University of Texas, one of the study’s authors, predicting traffic jams will get worse as more people switch to SUVs.

She was right. Traffic in virtually every American city has gotten worse, especially since the introduction of Uber and Lyft (both of which allow you to hail an SUV specifically as part of an upscale offering).

“Big cars are cumbersome,” Kockelman told Motherboard. “They do lumber through intersections and they cost everybody time.”

SUVs don't just cost society time. They cost lives. At the height of the original SUV boom in 2004, SUV occupants were 11 percent more likely to die in a crash than people in cars, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, despite the common conception that people in bigger vehicles are safer. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, from 1993-2003, car and SUV occupants in vehicles between one and three years old died at roughly similar rates; Bradsher explains in great detail this was because SUVs were inherently more dangerous due largely to deadly rollovers, but the higher position and stiffer frame of SUVs made them more dangerous to other road users, especially those in smaller cars, which evened out the death rate.

SUVs are more deadly for pedestrians, too. Last year, the Detroit Free Press revealed “the SUV revolution is a key, leading cause of escalating pedestrian deaths nationwide, which are up 46 percent since 2009,” affecting minorities in urban areas at a disproportionately high rate. And that’s without the threat of a silent Hummer accelerating to 60 miles per hour in three seconds.

Since then, SUVs have become safer for the people inside of them thanks to better design and a lower risk of rollovers. But they’re still dangerous to others. Starting in 2004 and continuing through 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, car occupants die at more than double the rate of SUV occupants. In other words, buying an SUV makes you more likely to kill other people, and yet people buy them in ever-increasing numbers. Rapaille’s reptilian brain concept has surpassed marketing theory and become a real-world experiment about how much Americans value the lives of others: not very much.

Equally profound has been the giant step back SUVs represented in CO2 emissions. A recent International Energy Agency (IEA) report found “SUVs were the second-largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions since 2010” other than the power sector.

Even though cars got much more fuel efficient over the last two decades—some small, cheap gas cars now get fuel economy on par with the first and second generation Priuses—the actual fuel economy of cars on the road has gotten worse because people are driving more SUVs. And SUVs get worse gas mileage because they’re heavier and taller, which makes them less aerodynamic.

According to the IEA, efficiency improvements saved some two million barrels of oil a day, but the rise of SUVs more than canceled those efficiencies out. Instead, SUVs were “responsible for all of the 3.3 million barrels a day growth in oil demand from passenger cars between 2010 and 2018.” The rise of SUVs in lieu of far more fuel efficient cars is a cautionary tale for those who hope we will innovate our way out of the climate crisis. The innovation occurred, but people opted out.

Leroy Diplowski posted:

gently caress you

Also the only good car

Dr. VooDoo posted:

car companies conspired to literally make public transportation hell to make people buy cars in the streetcar conspiracy, were caught, and the powers in charge just shrugged their shoulders and it’s the reason to this day we have the lovely bus systems we have

Sphyre posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aTViwJWmCY

actionjackson posted:

the entire infrastructure of the US was designed for cars, you can't blame people for that, it's the loving government and auto industry

you have a car so it takes 20 minutes to get to work instead of three hours via five buses! gently caress you!!!! ???

actionjackson posted:

what kind of suv do you drive

Leroy Diplowski posted:

Didn't die and only had one driver yell at me. Not bad for 220km. Still hate cars tho.

Filthy Hans posted:

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/how-i-built-a-fetish-empire-of-car-stuck-girls

quote:

But since the launch of his website Car Stuck Girls in 2002, enough people have paid to download Goebbels’s clips to move him and Michelle (now his wife) from Ardennes to Las Vegas

skewetoo posted:

$1 to fart

the bitcoin of weed posted:

The Netherlands in particular was on track to surpass the US in deaths caused by automobiles a few decades back but then some environmentalists and people whose kids had been hit and killed by cars started a movement literally called "Stop Killing Children" to pressure the government to rebuild their cities with fewer cars, and it loving worked. The difference here is we openly do not care when children are killed

e: further reading https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bicycle-capital-world-transport-cycling-kindermoord

Polo-Rican posted:

"All Vehicles Matter" I post from behind the wheel of my chevy tahoe as I vaporize a dozen kindergartners crossing at a crosswalk I couldn't even see

lobster shirt posted:

reminder: it is legal to kill someone with your car https://sports.yahoo.com/driver-in-crash-that-killed-jets-coach-greg-knapp-will-not-be-charged-135022018.html

LonsomeSon posted:

it’s not like I was unaware of size creep in pickups over the years, that’s just hilariously stark with the bed-size fact laid out

Beached Whale posted:

I loving loathe the giant truck morons. Parking where I'm at is pretty tight because all the streets were designed before cars and most of them are going up ridiculously steep hills, so I get that there might be a little bit of vehicle on the sidewalk, just comes with the territory. However there's this ridiculous douchebag down the street from me who goes by the name of "Robbie" who has a giant lifted red RAM pickup truck that's as long as can be. For some reason it needs to be parked RIGHT BY HIS HOUSE and he refuses to park it anywhere else. The problem with this is that his house is right at the drop of a very, very steep street. It's so steep that you cannot possibly see another vehicle coming up it if you're going down, and vice-versa if you're coming up. The way he parks his car he manages to not only take up the whole sidewalk, but effectively turn the road itself into a one car wide choke point when normally two cars could pass through.

When I asked Robbie why he didn't just park like 30 feet away where there's abundant and ample street parking that wouldn't turn the road into a death trap he got very upset and claimed that it was his legal right to park there, and that I can park in front of my house and no one complains. I tried to explain to him the difference between me parking my tiny beater Honda civic that did not block the road versus his giant brodozer but it was fruitless so I've since accepted that I'll be honking every time I go up and down this road just to avoid a major head on collision because this lead brain can't walk a couple feet.

Vomik posted:

i think i mentioned it in this thread but i was walking to the subway on 23rd st & 6th when i saw a massive crowd formed ahead as i walked by i looked over and saw like 30 people staring at some medics with a bicyclist who was laying completely flat - absolutely no more muscle firing - in the street with a massive blood circle around their head and the driver of the truck was nowhere to be seen.

turns out they just "didn't notice" and they werent' charged

indigi posted:

cities should institute a max decibel limit for vehicles and gradually lower it

AnimeIsTrash posted:

Big truck owners are the most pathetic types of people.

actionjackson posted:

hahahahahahahaha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehh8ZdIMMj4

SKULL.GIF posted:

car! give me car! car! fatphobe!!! give car! car now y'all!

https://twitter.com/molliekatie/status/1451074392646107140

duomo posted:

https://twitter.com/UrbLivLab/status/564405969825071107

Suplex Liberace posted:

Just throw your bike on people yakuza style if they go in the back and grab something and hide it in their shirt. Its why bikes are aluminum now.

ArmZ posted:

car makers determined to make cars the worst possible thing

Polo-Rican posted:

What the gently caress dozens?? Unless you're exaggerating by a factor of 10 you might be a world record holder on this one

Milo and POTUS posted:

One of the riders will have flipped him off and he'll walk because he was afraid for his life

actionjackson posted:

let's get the "millennial mom's" review of the SUV version

https://www.thewhig.com/reviews/road-test/millennial-moms-review-2021-gmc-yukon-denali

lobster shirt posted:

another fun story from my neck of the woods, road rage is on the rise: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/11/19/road-rage-incidents-on-the-rise-in-houston-area-officials-confirm/

i just love how matter of fact, gee whiz, what are ya gonna do oh well the tone of the article is.

man that sucks, what do officials have to say about it

wow people get insanely violent and aggro when they're driving, oh well, let's keep building more roads

mazzi Chart Czar posted:

gently caress the car. gently caress the car. gently caress the car. Choo Chooo!

quote:

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one. That is how in both conception and original purpose the car is a luxury good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratized. If everyone can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it. On the contrary, everyone diddles, cheats, and frustrates everyone else, and is diddled, cheated, and frustrated in return.

quote:

When the car was invented, it was to provide a few of the very rich with a completely unprecedented privilege: that of traveling much faster than everyone else. No one up to then had ever dreamt of it. The speed of all coaches was essentially the same, whether you were rich or poor. The carriages of the rich didn’t go any faster than the carts of the peasants, and trains carried everyone at the same speed (they didn’t begin to have different speeds until they began to compete with the automobile and the airplane). Thus, until the turn of the century, the elite did not travel at a different speed from the people. The motorcar was going to change all that. For the first time class differences were to be extended to speed and to the means of transportation.

quote:

Here is the paradox of the automobile: it appears to confer on its owners limitless freedom, allowing them to travel when and where they choose at a speed equal to or greater than that of the train. But actually, this seeming independence has for its underside a radical dependency. Unlike the horse rider, the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was going to depend for the fuel supply, as well as for the smallest kind of repair, on dealers and specialists in engines, lubrication, and ignition, and on the interchangeability of parts. Unlike all previous owners of a means of locomotion, the motorist’s relationship to his or her vehicle was to be that of user and consumer-and not owner and master. This vehicle, in other words, would oblige the owner to consume and use a host of commercial services and industrial products that could only be provided by some third party. The apparent independence of the automobile owner was only concealing the actual radical dependency.

quote:

People rushed to buy cars until, as the working class began to buy them as well, defrauded motorists realized they had been had. They had been promised a bourgeois privilege, they had gone into debt to acquire it, and now they saw that everyone else could also get one. What good is a privilege if everyone can have it? It’s a fool’s game. Worse, it pits everyone against everyone else. General paralysis is brought on by a general clash. For when everyone claims the right to drive at the privileged speed of the bourgeoisie, everything comes to a halt, and the speed of city traffic plummets—in Boston as in Paris, Rome, or London—to below that of the horsecar; at rush hours the average speed on the open road falls below the speed of a bicyclist.

Nothing helps. All the solutions have been tried. They all end up making things worse.

quote:

Maybe you are saying, “But at least in this way you can escape the hell of the city once the workday is over.” There we are, now we know: “the city,” the great city which for generations was considered a marvel, the only place worth living, is now considered to be a “hell.” Everyone wants to escape from it, to live in the country. Why this reversal? For only one reason. The car has made the big city uninhabitable. It has made it stinking, noisy, suffocating, dusty, so congested that nobody wants to go out in the evening anymore. Thus, since cars have killed the city, we need faster cars to escape on superhighways to suburbs that are even farther away. What an impeccable circular argument: give us more cars so that we can escape the destruction caused by cars.

quote:

The truth is, no one really has any choice. You aren’t free to have a car or not because the suburban world is designed to be a function of the car and, more and more, so is the city world. That is why the ideal revolutionary solution, which is to do away with the car in favour of the bicycle, the streetcar, the bus, and the driverless taxi, is not even applicable any longer in the big commuter cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston, Trappes, or even Brussels, which are built by and for the automobile. These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil.” In some American cities the act of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime.

So, the jig is up? No, but the alternative to the car will have to be comprehensive. For in order for people to be able to give up their cars, it won’t be enough to offer them more comfortable mass transportation. They will have to be able to do without transportation altogether because they’ll feel at home in their neighborhoods, their community, their human-sized cities, and they will take pleasure in walking from work to home-on foot, or if need be by bicycle. No means of fast transportation and escape will ever compensate for the vexation of living in an uninhabitable city in which no one feels at home or the irritation of only going into the city to work or, on the other hand, to be alone and sleep.

“People,” writes Illich, “will break the chains of overpowering transportation when they come once again to love as their own territory their own particular beat, and to dread getting too far away from it.”

Sphyre posted:

my local. looks like an opportunity for direct action

AnimeIsTrash posted:

actionjackson posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPVJzi7Ta9w