Sociopathic Design, Part 1: A Car Crash in Massachusetts
Yesterday, while we were driving on I-95, an enormous SUV slammed into the back of my partner’s car. The impact was sudden and terrifying. My son was thrown forward in the back seat; my partner and I in the front, and for a split second I panicked, not knowing how bad this crash was going to be, as the glass from the back window rained through the interior and our car was sent flying into the bumper of the pickup truck in front of us.
We managed to pull over to the side of the road and begin to assess the damage. While my back was already starting to hurt, fortunately neither my son nor my partner had serious injuries. The same could not be said for the car. The rear end of my partner’s 2010 Toyota Yaris, a modest hatchback, was compressed by about a foot or more. It had been crushed by the four-foot high grill of the massive black GMC (from the picture it appears to be a Denali Yukon), and the rear window was obliterated.
Behind us, another family dismounted from the SUV; a man, a woman, and a child. While we all exchanged insurance information, the driver of the Behemoth responded to my disapproving glare by arguing that he had also been hit from behind, which had caused his car to slam into ours. You never know if such stories are the truth or an attempt to avoid liability — or at least to dodge responsibility for driving too close — but there were three other vehicles pulled over behind us, and it was clear that several had hit each other.
After the state police arrived and we waited for a tow, the drivers of the other vehicles all gave their information and then, still shaken, began to slowly drive off. None of the other vehicles were significantly damaged — including the GMC, which did have a fair amount of the glass from our back window sprayed over its hood.
What was a minor fender-bender for the other vehicles will likely result in the Yaris being totaled by the insurance adjustor. Both rear lights were smashed, making them unusable, the front hood was bent, making it impossible to assess the condition of the engine, and there are likely alignment issues now as well — not to mention the severe damage to the rear of the car and the gaping hole where rear window had been.
Undoubtedly a factor in all of this was simply mass. The GMC Denali Yukon weighs in at between 5,490 lbs. and 6,088 lbs., depending on the model. Whereas a 2010 Toyota Yaris is 2,346 lbs. It doesn’t take a physicist to know that when you hit a vehicle with another vehicle that has more than twice its weight, the lighter car is likely to bear the brunt of the damage. This is also likely why we are all recovering from whiplash today.
Another factor was the height. Instead of merely hitting the fender — which a normal-sized sedan would do, the elevated front grill on this SUV meant that it crumpled the hatchback on our Yaris like an old beer can.
We were lucky to be able to walk away from this. I can’t imagine what might have happened if the GMC had been moving faster.
Lethal odds
My son has grown up in Cambridge and Providence, almost exclusively using mass transit, walking, and being carried as a passenger on bicycles. I am fortunate that it has taken him until the age of 12 to experience his first car crash.
This is very unlike how my partner grew up in Nebraska and I grew up in California and Oregon. I can’t say how many car crashes I’ve been in or when the first happened. Like many Americans, I have been socialized to experience car crashes not as aberrations, but as something that just happens sooner or later.
Some of the crashes have been minor; others have been really bad like the time I hit black ice and flipped my brother’s pickup truck three times. I was lucky to walk away from that one. Growing up, I had one friend whose face was covered in scars from a car crash that nearly killed her family; another friend died on a head-on crash while riding his motorcycles.
Car crashes are not only inevitable, but common in America. Of the 253 million light-duty vehicles (cars, trucks, and SUVs) on the road in America in 2020, 8.5 million were involved in crashes. At that rate, each car has a 3.3% chance of being in a car crash each year. Nearly 43,000 people died in these crashes each year in both 2021 and 2022 — after the number of deaths rose sharply both in 2020 and in 2021.
As long as we build our infrastructure so that personal automobiles are the most practical — and sometimes, the only practical — option for people to get around in outside of the central parts of a few select U.S. cities, we will continue to have high rates of car crashes. Meaning that we, and our children, can all expect to be in one sooner or later.
The size and weight of vehicles has a major impact on how severe these crashes are. The National Bureau of Economic Research has found that for every 1,000 lbs. that is added to gross vehicle weight, the probability of someone being killed when it is involved (again, inevitably) in a crash goes up 47%.
This means that the GMC Denali Yukon is more than twice as lethal as a regular old four-door sedan. And this is why I am less concerned about how the guy behind the wheel of the GMC was driving. To me, his first and most problematic decision that endangered my family was his choice to buy a three-ton passenger vehicle with a four-foot front grill and to drive it on our shared public roads.
It is true that many people need large, heavy vehicles as part of their jobs. I formerly drove both an F-150 and an F-250 pickup when I worked as a carpenter. I needed a pickup to transport lumber to job sites. Many tradespeople and handypersons have similar needs.
But a GMC Yukon Denali is not a work truck, and the truck that hit us had a family in it and the exterior showed no signs of the scuffing and wear that work trucks get. The GMC that hit us was not even an off-road vehicle, for use in accessing rural locations on dirt roads — of which we have few in this part of New England. The clearance on this particular vehicle was too low for that sort of use, and the back has carpet, not a truck bed. It is instead a suburban assault vehicle.
Death by Design
Too much of a focus on individual decisions — whether individual driving, or the choice to buy and drive a 3-ton passenger tank — tends to obscure the role of design in outcomes. The Yukon Denali’s size, weight, and lack of visibility is the result of design choices made by GMC to increase sales and maximize profits — at the expense of human lives.
While GMC is notable for its distinction of being the automaker that literally sells repurposed military vehicles to cosplaying suburbanites, the truth is that most major car-makers show the same lethal preference for larger, heavier SUVs.
Which is why the drivers of large SUVs — as irresponsible as they are — are not the ones who should shoulder all of the blame. These poor suckers are likely suffering from a lack of meaning in their lives and are trying vainly to reconnect with nature buy shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for oversized vehicles, so they can, in the words of GMC’s own commercials, “conquer” the wilderness. The man who hit us was driving on I-95 in the suburbs of Boston, but GMC sold him the experience of driving through the trackless deserts of Nevada and across the Golden Gate Bridge on a clear, starry night. It can be hard not to fall for these fantasies when you’re only going to Dunkin’ after picking your kid up from a soccer match.
Because it is all a lie. These vehicles are likely to saddle you with debt, but they won’t help you get any closer to nature. There is an irony that my family was hit by this wanna-be mountain man while on our way to go camping and whitewater rafting in our Yaris, as this is an activity that does not require a monster truck or an SUV.
And this bogus fantasy has been carefully crafted by an entire industrial army — from the production teams making the commercials, to the designers of massive SUVs like the Denali Yukon. These in turn were hired by product managers — the architects of this false dream. They in turn answer to others in the GMC corporate hierarchy who have one aim: sell more, bigger, and more profitable vehicles, so that they can appease the shareholders who are the deities of our economic system and perhaps get a fat bonus this year.
The defenders of these vehicles will tell you that they are safer. In fact, along with selling you a wilderness experience (it is not an accident that this vehicle driving through suburban Massachusetts was named after places in Alaska and Northern Canada), they are also selling you safety. Safety for you and your family.
The problem is that the mass that provides increased safety for families inside super-sized SUVs comes at the expense of everyone outside of SUVs. Including children, who are eight times more likely to die when struck by an SUV. And if you aren’t careful, it could be your own child who you run over when you can’t see them under your oversized front end.
Incidentally, these vehicles are also terrible for the climate. But don’t take my word for it — this is the finding of the International Energy Agency, which states that despite sluggish new car sales, “the shift towards heavier and less fuel-efficient conventional vehicles increases growth in both oil demand and CO2 emissions.”
Unfortunately, these bigger picture concerns tend to get forgotten in the arms race of vehicles that we find ourselves in. When there are larger, heavier, and more dangerous vehicles on the road, our natural response to a very real danger is to buy larger, heavier, vehicles so as to keep ourselves and our families safe — even if it raises the danger to others.
There is only one winner in this arms race — the sociopaths who run the United States’ major automakers. And it is high time that we begin to see the trend towards larger, heavier SUVs and monster pickups as what it is: sociopathic design.
We are a long way from being able to fix this problem. The federal government and its toothless regulatory agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, have shown that they are unlikely to do anything meaningful about these un-necessary and extremely dangerous vehicles. So we have to change culture. This starts with changing the public discourse and cutting through the distractions to get to the root of the problem. We must raise awareness that increased road deaths are the inevitable result of design choices that disregard human safety.
Unfortunately, monster SUVs are not the only physical manifestation of sociopathic design on our roads that is killing people. In my next piece, I will deal with a case study of sociopathic, car-centric design that killed one of my neighbors last week — and the people behind it.
