this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
299 points (80.4% liked)
Fuck Cars
12562 readers
1428 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Cars are like tanks.. there I said it
Literally
I'm confused, how exactly is a size comparison of two vehicles meant to add anything to the conversation here? Size implies lethality?
A standard city bus is about twice as long as those tanks, so is a bus twice as problematic?
Weight matters more than size, but that’s omitted from this graphic. I suspect the tanks are much heavier.
But speed matters exponentially more than weight. (kinetic energy = 1/2 * mass * velocity squared) And I’d imagine that trucks regularly go much faster than tanks.
The height of the impact point also matters The higher the front grill/bumper, the more lethal the impact. The current fad for high vehicles with flat front grills has significantly increased pedestrian deaths.
These vehicles are unacceptable large for public spaces. The threshold for CDL style licensing needs to be lowered to make modern trucks/SUVs require the training their design deserves. Also tax the bajesus out of them when they're in city spaces. Either they're in the neighborhood for business reasons or get out.
The point I was snarkily trying to make is that lining up tanks and trucks is a nonsense comparison, any point such a comparison attempts to make is based entirely on a knee jerk emotional reaction, one worthy of r/circlejerk
Even comparing kinetic energy of different vehicles is pretty silly, tanks were never designed for nor get used as battering rams, they're a mobile armored gun meant to shoot shit far away. The typical truck on the road today is meant to give suburban dads a delusional sense of masculinity, to the point of sacrificing near vehicle visibility.
One was designed to kill people far away, one kills people nearby due to operator negligence