Unfortunately I feel much less safe in a Fiat 500 when a significant portion of cars in the road weigh nearly 3 tonnes and perhaps can't even see me. I suspect most people are in SUVs because they're the pragmatic trade off between safety and convenience, not because they were hoping for excellent performance.
But small cars are only unsafe because of that discrepancy between the largest and smallest cars, and it's not just weight, but height difference. It's possible to survive crashes at very extreme speeds in very light cars if they are designed to work that way (see: F1 crash g-force). Not so much if you literally get run over.
The culture needs to change. A vehicle is not a living room. The driver's seat is not a sofa. You don't need a TV in the dashboard. You don't need 8 seats when 7 of them are unoccupied 90% of the time. You don't need to go into debt to buy a land yacht.
So yeah... you're right, but it's a bummer that we've arrived at this situation.
Americans’ Love Affair with Big Cars is Killing Them (https://www.economist.com/interactive/united-states/2024/08/...) - The Economist.
> In a crash, the fatality rate of the occupants of the heavy pickup truck is about half that of the compact car. But they are also far more dangerous to the fatality rate of people in other cars.
> The fatality rate is roughly seven times higher when colliding with a heavy pickup truck than with a compact car. As the weight of your car increases, the risk of killing others increases dramatically. For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles.
Unfortunately car safety is only evaluated in terms of safety for the occupants. Not safety of society.
There is another small vehicle around, which usually has a lower stopping distance, and a smaller blind spot in front of the vehicle at around 7-9 meters under somewhat more adverse conditions than regular highway traffic. That's the Leopard 2 tank.
That vehicle also has less problems to find a parking spot.
Everyone who can will naturally choose "defect" unless there's some sort of external coordination mechanism.
[1] which no SUV's nor trucks used as passenger cars, do because they are classed as 'utility vehicles' and have lower safety/fuel economy standards -- which is why the auto-makers went whole-hog on making/selling them, it got their CAFE averages down artificially.
In states of Australia registration is more expensive depending on the amount of doors and cylinders your car has. This doesn't seem to stop big cars being popular though, the #1 selling car in Australia is the Ford Ranger (which is BIG in Australian car standards). We're working on getting F150s sized vehicles even more heavily taxed, they aren't seeing wide adoption here and they're pretty highly criticised.
In cities like Rome you can see many small cars due to the nature of their streets and parking.
For highway driving these cars are a bit less comfortable but honestly modern Kei cars aren't even that bad. The Fiat 500 isn't a Kei sized car but it is also a very reasonable highway and city car, it can happily do both.
I also think it's odd that people don't already choose other options w/o a tax in place, considering the price of a bigger vehicle is almost always just going to be higher because of materials and a bunch of other factors.
Which two cars? I've gone from a 911 to a BMW X5 and the X5 was just as fun for what it was. They are completely different cars, I'm not sure what you would expect and why you judge others.
You take a defensive driving course, I’ll let you drive a tank down the road. But my neighbor’s kids should not be behind the wheel of a death dealer. Those vehicles were meant for skilled laborers, not Sally who is on her phone while driving.
