The Grille Trend that Kills 509 People per Year
The Grille Trend that Kills 509 People per Year
I really enjoyed the well researched video Fortnine put together on how grille height is the greatest predictor of pedestrian collision fatality.
Fortnine is a channel whose videos I would watch instantly. You don't need to own a bike to appreciate the quality of the videos Ryan and his team produces.
One of the 8 channels I'm actually subscribed to.
Absolutely agree, I'm a big fan 😊
Here's the paper he references that specifically studied the relationship between the height of the front end of the vehicle, and the likelihood of fatality for those who are interested :)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212012224000017
This was surprisingly informative, I came in fully expecting just "haha big american cars are dumb and here's the slightest smattering of data to back it up" but this went so far as to explain what the specific problem was and how to fix it. Thanks for sharing!
Fortnine episodes are usually well researched and nicely edited, also the host is a physics mayor so he likes to throw some science here and there
I thought this was about barbeque grills...
I gotch you fam
https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v11i1.pdf
Is it really a problem with the grille? Or is it more vehicle size and bumper height?
It's the latter, the video is titled in a way to describe it simply, and I could have done a better job of describing it when making the post 🤷
Though the reason the bumper and front of the car is so high is generally to accommodate a larger grille for aesthetic reasons, so to some extent its kinda true to say the grille is causing the problem
My favorite car grille story comes from Lexus.
You might remember when they changed to their current iconic grille:
And people started joking "By your command!"
But the aggressive styling was 100% intentional.
They had found that when a Lexus came up behind someone in traffic, they often would get stuck behind other cars. The grille change was made specifically to intimidate other drivers and get them to move out of the way.
It's worth noting that one reason grills can get so large is to have better cooling for larger engines.
With a larger grill you get more air flowing through the radiator which allows the engine to be more efficient.
Electric vehicles don't need the same kind of cooling that ICE engines do, so having an electric Truck/SUV would allow for different designs which could be beneficial for pedestrians if they were struck.
They literally show in the video that the majority of the surface area on the RAM truck they filmed was blocked off by plastic paneling because it's not needed to actually cool the motor. A large part of the point is that these grills don't have any actual utility and are killing people for purely aesthetic reasons.
There are plenty of good arguments in favor of EVs; this specific issue is not one of them.
Also PCAM should be required by law in all new cars.
What is pcam?