Chapter 5 Killer Cars

On a sunny day in October 2017, twenty-two-month-old Neallie Junior Saxon III, still in diapers, was playing in front of his grandmother’s house in Deerfield Beach, Florida. The street where he toddled with some neighbor children, NW Fourth Place, is a quiet, narrow residential one with speed humps—the kind of street that tens of thousands of people live on across Broward County. That day, it was full of children playing, as they often did, with parents and neighbors watching from their front porches.

Neallie’s mother, Jasmine Smith, was inside the house, when “they just said my baby got hit by a car. . . . I ran outside and he was laying there in so much blood, lifeless,” she told a local news station. She cradled the little boy in her arms and started begging him, “Come back to me please, come back to me.”1

Mirlande Mardice told investigators that she was distracted by watching other children near the street as she drove and that she never saw the one-year-old child. She struck little Neallie with her 2007 Hyundai Santa Fe and did not stop until she reached a stop sign a few hundred feet away. At that point, neighbors, who had witnessed the little boy being crushed, dragged Mardice out of her car and started beating her.

“People were hysterical,” the local newspaper reported. “The child’s aunt passed out in the street.”2

Mardice suffered broken facial and skull bones and was treated at a nearby hospital. “They beat her unmercifully,” a neighbor told the local news station WPLG. Mardice reportedly fought back, screaming, “No, I didn’t mean to! I wouldn’t do that to a child!”3

Neallie was airlifted to the hospital, where he died the following day.

Witnesses had mixed opinions about whether Mardice was trying to flee or simply unaware. His mother told the local news that she was certain the driver had seen the boy. The police investigating the case, however, were willing to give Mardice a pass.

“He was shorter than the bumper, and the driver—possibly distracted by the other children—probably couldn’t see him,” a spokeswoman for the Broward County Sheriff’s Office is paraphrased as telling the local newspaper.4

A teddy bear and a truck were placed at the spot of the crash as a memorial. More than two years later, Mardice has not been charged or cited in the case.

Could a standing, nearly two-year-old really be rendered invisible by the bumper of a midsized SUV, as police assumed in this case? If so, how did vehicles that have that kind of vulnerability end up on the roads?

The car Mardice was driving, a 2007 Santa Fe, is not a huge SUV by US standards. It weighs thirty-eight hundred pounds—about fifteen hundred pounds less than a 2007 Cadillac Escalade—but it is still about one thousand pounds heavier than a Honda Civic.

The Santa Fe belongs to a class of cars—crossover vehicles—that have experienced huge growth since the introduction of the first model, the Toyota RAV4, to the United States in 1996. In 2018, crossover SUVs topped cars (sedans) as the top-selling US vehicle type.5 It is hard to overemphasize just how suddenly and completely crossovers have come to dominate the auto market in recent years. When the economy was still recovering from a recession, in 2012, the vehicle mix was almost the opposite: 83 percent of vehicles sold in the United States were sedans.6

“The sedan segment is dying,” Tom McParland wrote on the auto news site Jalopnik in 2018. That year, for example, Ford was selling about half as many Fusions as it did just a few years earlier, in 2014, he noted. “Honda is struggling to sell the Accord. Think about that for a second—the Honda Accord is pretty much the car to beat for the mid-size sedan segment, and always has been, even when it constantly battled with the Toyota Camry to be number one. Now it’s sitting on the lot while the CR-Vs gobble up the sales.”7

Responding to the changing market, Fiat Chrysler announced that it would stop making sedans for US sales altogether in 2016. By 2018, the others of the Detroit-based “Big Three” automakers—Ford and GM—had also all shifted focus away from sedans to trucks and SUVs, laying off workers across the Rust Belt as they ended production of the Cruise, Focus, Taurus, Fiesta, and hybrid vehicles like the C-Max and Volt.8

Hyundai marketed the Santa Fe specifically to families with children as a carpool car and had great success, at times struggling to keep up with supply.9 Among crossovers, the vehicle is considered a safe one. In fact, U.S. News and World Report ranked it the cheapest car to insure in 2009.10

Riding High

For buyers of crossover SUVs, being higher off the ground is a big selling point. In a 2014 article for the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal wrote that in the 2010s, buyers “settled into the idea that they might not actually go off-roading with their vehicles. They would not climb mountains. But they liked riding high.”11

But with riding higher—as well as added weight—come some drawbacks in terms of visibility in addition to other risks to pedestrians, especially children. The top of a Hyundai Santa Fe’s bumper is two-and-a-half feet high.12 Compared to the Honda Civic, the top bumper height is nearly a foot higher, producing a bigger blind spot.

Is that height potentially enough to obscure a two-year-old child? It turns out that the answer is yes—easily.

Just how big are the blind spots around big vehicles? It varies a lot, depending on the type and the model, but they can be scandalously large.

In a special report in 2019, WTHR News in Indianapolis used a traffic cone approximating the height of a toddler to measure the blind zone in front of twenty-two vehicles. For the car that rated worst, a Cadillac Escalade, the cone was not visible to a five-foot, four-inch-tall woman sitting at a normal posture in the driver’s seat until the cone was ten feet two inches away. In a Dodge Ram, it was nine feet ten inches. In a Ford Explorer, it was eight feet five inches. The best performer, a Toyota Camry, on the other hand, was three feet three inches.13

Rear blind spots can also be massive. In 2011, the consumer safety group KidsandCars.org did an experiment to test out the blind spot behind an SUV. The organization found that it could place sixty-two children in a group behind the rear of the car and all sixty-two would be totally invisible in both the rear window and rearview mirrors.14

Children between ages one and two, like Neallie Saxon, are particularly vulnerable to what are known as frontovers and backovers, slow-speed collisions in which the driver slowly strikes or rolls over a child who is standing or sitting in the car’s blind spot. According to KidsandCars.org, an astounding fifty children per week are injured or killed in backover collisions—most in their own driveways. In 70 percent of the cases, the driver is a parent or close relative.15 These collisions are called “bye-bye crashes” because often a child will run to wave good-bye to a mom or dad, unaware that the driver cannot see them, before being crushed under the wheels.

Neallie’s case is more similar to a frontover. These collisions are rarer, but they have been rising as the number of Americans driving SUVs and pickup trucks has risen in recent years.

Between 2006 and 2010 in the United States, 358 children were killed in frontover collisions. By comparison, between 1996 and 2000, the number was just 24.16

“We can’t see over the hood like we used to be able to,” Amber Rollins, director of KidsandCars.org told the ABC news affiliate in Arizona. “And with the increase in popularity with big trucks and SUVs and we see a lot of people raising them and putting big tires on them, all of that stuff increases the blind zones.”17

These kinds of deaths—if they take place in driveways, as many do—are not included in official government traffic fatality reporting. Moreover, they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to pedestrian deaths involving SUVs in the United States.

In 2018, a team of investigative reporters at the Detroit Free Press and USA Today started investigating what was causing the rise in pedestrian deaths.18 “I think, like a lot of people, we started out with the assumption that maybe this is a crisis of distraction, especially distracted walking,” USA Today reporter Nathan Bomey, who was part of the investigative team, said.19

Instead, quite quickly their focus shifted to SUVs. Between 2009 and 2016, there was an 81 percent increase in the number of pedestrians killed in crashes with SUVs, according to a report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in 2018.20 As vehicles get larger and heavier, pedestrian crashes, when they do occur, are becoming more deadly. In just five years, from 2010 to 2015, holding the number of pedestrian crashes equal, the odds of dying in a pedestrian crash increased 29 percent.

It is not just that SUVs are heavier—although they are heavier—and that exerts greater force. Being taller, they also, critically, strike pedestrians higher on the body.

The heights of the front ends of cars and SUVs vary quite a bit, but this information is not publicly collected and made available anywhere by automakers or safety regulators. So, for research purposes, I went out and measured.

For sedans—a Volkswagen Jetta and a Ford Fiesta—the top of the front end was about two and a half feet high. A minivan, meanwhile—a Chrysler Town and Country—was a little bit higher: closer to three feet. Some crossover SUVs—a Ford Escape and a Buick Encore—are just a bit higher than that: slightly more than three feet. But there is a wide range. A Jeep Wrangler and a Jeep Grand Cherokee, for example, are about three-and-a-half-feet tall—a full foot higher than a sedan.

The Ford Expedition and the GMC Sierra—a full-size SUV and a pickup, respectively—are both nearly four feet high where the hood meets the front end.21 In addition, the shapes are important. The front end of a large pickup or SUVs is very boxy and flat compared to the sloping front end of the Ford Focus.

That high front end is very bad news for pedestrians because higher bumpers hit pedestrians higher on the body, where our vital organs live. To put it in perspective, the top of the front end of a Ford Focus would hit me, at five foot six, in the upper thigh. A crossover SUV, meanwhile, would strike me just above the waist. The top of the front end of the Sierra and Expedition would strike me right in the middle of the chest.

Getting struck by a car in the abdomen is much worse for survival odds than getting hit in the legs. A 2006 study comparing 526 pedestrian crashes involving SUVs and cars found that those struck by SUVs were at substantially higher risk for injuries to the abdomen.22

That is one reason the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that pedestrians struck by an SUV are two to three times more likely to be killed than those struck by a car. And for child pedestrians, who are more likely to be hit in the head, the risk is about quadrupled.23

Pedestrians who are hit low in the body—by a Ford Focus, for example—tend to fall forward and hit the front of a car, with their head hitting the windshield, which often cracks and warps. Often the motion of the car pins them to the windshield, where they remain until the car comes to a stop.

Meanwhile, not only might a child like Neallie Saxon be rendered invisible by the high profile of an SUV; he might then be struck in the head—the kind of injury most likely to be fatal—and then pushed under the tires and run over.

Auto safety researchers have been warning about this problem since the early 2000s. But the catastrophic impacts of SUVs for pedestrian safety had been forgotten—or ignored—at least until pedestrian deaths started their recent upward march.

One of the first to name the problem was university researcher Clay Gabler, who studies injury biomechanics. In the early 2000s, he conducted a study that found that large SUVs were causing about 110 deaths for every 1,000 collisions with pedestrians compared to about 45 deaths for sedans. When Gabler was interviewed for the science news site New Scientist in 2003, he said that there needed to be attention paid to the increased risk that SUVs presented to “the forgotten crash victims:” pedestrians. “Despite over 4000 pedestrian deaths a year, there are no pedestrian impact safety regulations under serious consideration in the US,” he said at the time, calling for “radical design changes” to SUVs, especially changes that would make the front ends more sloping and “car-like.”24 But those calls were obviously ignored.

High hoods may also present special risks to wheelchair users. In 2018, Neil Kelly was the subject of an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer with the headline “Dear Drivers: This Man Would Like You to Stop Hitting Him.”25 The twenty-eight-year-old Cincinnati resident, who has been partially paralyzed since birth, was struck by vehicles on three separate occasions during a ten-month period while trying to commute by bus to his downtown job as a social services worker.

Not every crash was serious, fortunately for Kelly. But even though he said in interviews, ironically, “I’ve been really lucky,” getting constantly hit by cars was nearly debilitating. The first time he was hit, in October 2017, he was trying to cross a downtown Cincinnati street on the way to his office. There were two right-turn lanes at the intersection where he crossed. The driver in the outside turn lane yielded, but the driver of an SUV in the inside lane did not see him and continued her turn.

Kelly missed three days of work after that first crash. But worse, he said, was the damage to his wheelchair. The special wheelchair he uses cost $50,000, and it was totaled. Nonetheless, Kelly was forced to continue using it for an additional ten months while he haggled with the insurance companies.

Visibility was likely a factor, he said. In each case, the vehicle was a large vehicle—two SUVs and one church van. “I think part of the problem was that I’m lower than most adults,” he said. “Not so low that I’m shorter than a kid. I measured it. I think I’m like four-foot-seven from the top of my head to the ground.”26

That is fifty-five inches, which is taller than any of the full-size SUVs and pickup trucks I measured, but not by a lot. It is only about eleven inches taller than the front end of a Ford Expedition and only ten inches higher than a GMC Sierra.

Wheelchair users like Kelly are already at increased risk for being hit by cars trying to cross the street. A 2015 study found that the pedestrian mortality rate for wheelchair users was 36 percent higher than that of the general population.27 These visibility issues are compounded by a range of other issues wheelchair users face in the pedestrian environment, from sidewalk obstructions to inaccessible curbs.

Trying to adapt, Kelly has since gotten an orange flag to make himself more visible. “I take a lot of time to cross the crosswalk now,” he said. “I really only have the use of one hand, so I really pay attention to my right side. Because I’d really be in trouble if something happened to my right arm.”28

Runaway Horsepower

Another vehicle trend may also be aggravating the pedestrian safety crisis. Research has shown that “overpowered cars”—cars with a high horsepower-to-weight ratio—promote speeding. A 2016 study found that drivers of vehicles in the top 10 percent in horsepower-compared-to-weight were 38 percent more likely to speed by more than 10 miles per hour than drivers of those in the bottom 10 percent.29

Unfortunately for pedestrians, vehicles have gotten much more powerful in recent years. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), the average vehicle power (horsepower per one hundred pounds) increased by 60 percent for cars, 65 percent for pickup trucks, and 66 percent for SUVs between model years 1985 and 2015.30

The IIHS reports that among 1981 model year vehicles, for example, 98 percent of vehicles had less than two hundred horsepower and 45 percent had less than one hundred by model year 2019, a majority had horsepower above two hundred. And fully 24 percent had horsepower above three hundred.

Officials at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sounded the alarm about this horsepower arms race in 2008 and called for an end to six-hundred-horsepower sports cars and four-hundred-horsepower pickup trucks,31 but that call has been unheeded. Since the mid-1980s, increases in horsepower have eaten away almost all the increases in fuel economy, EPA data show. “In the two decades before model year 2004, technology innovation was generally used to increase vehicle power, and weight increased due to changing vehicle design, increased vehicle size, and increased content,” the agency wrote in a summary of industry trends. “During this period, average new vehicle fuel economy steadily decreased and CO₂ emissions correspondingly increased.”32

Eric D. Lawrence, an auto writer for the Detroit Free Press, said that the motivation for carmakers is much the same as with SUVs: sales and hype. “Fiat Chrysler, for instance, got tremendous mileage, pardon the pun, by going all-in on horsepower,” he said. “A beast like the Dodge Demon”—840 horsepower—“was only a limited-run production, but the publicity helped move other high-horsepower Dodge offerings.”33

Dodge’s marketing for these vehicles also shamelessly targets the most dangerous group of drivers: young men. A 2010 Super Bowl ad aired to 106 million people for the Charger (horsepower 707) was called “Man’s Last Stand” and, according to one analysis, presented the car “as a last defense of manhood against the symbolic castration betokened by the encroaching forces of bureaucratization and empowered femininity.”34

Pedestrian Impact Safety Regulations

Even though the concept has been occasionally debated since the 1970s, US vehicle safety regulations have never imposed any standards on automakers specifically to protect people outside the vehicles: pedestrians or cyclists. The United Nations has recommended such regulations for all member countries since 2004,35 and the European Union imposed rules to protect pedestrians beginning in 2010.36

Europe’s New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) tests and scores vehicles on head impacts to pedestrians at 40 kilometers per hour (about 25 miles per hour) for both adults and children. To improve their scores, automakers have introduced safety features such as “active hood systems,” which raise the hood automatically during a collision with a pedestrian so as to soften the blow (Tesla uses these systems in Europe, and Buick uses them in China).37 Automakers have also adjusted by making their hoods slighter higher and more deformable so to soften the impact and have added such features as automatic emergency braking.

Passive safety features on the front ends of large vehicles have been shown effective. A study from Germany found that pedestrians struck by cars with some of the highest Euro-NCAP pedestrian safety ratings were 35 percent more likely to survive a collision than those hit with cars with some of the lowest.38

In 2015, the Obama administration made a move that would have been a major advancement. Citing SUV dangers specifically,39 the US Department of Transportation introduced a plan to add pedestrian safety scores to crash ratings that the NHTSA gives to cars. In its proposed rule-making, the NHTSA noted that efforts to regulate vehicles for pedestrian safety in Europe and Japan “have likely contributed to a downward trend in pedestrian fatalities.”40

This overdue step forward would not have specifically imposed any requirements on automakers in the name of pedestrian safety; it is just a rating system. Strong ratings in the new car assessment program are nevertheless very sought after by automakers, who use them for marketing, and the ratings would act as a strong enticement to challenge them to design safer vehicles.

Not all automakers were happy about the proposed new safety ratings, however. In its comments to regulators, General Motors, which is heavily invested in SUVs and pickups, objected to the creation of a separate category for pedestrian safety.41

Some foreign automakers appeared to be more receptive. In its comments, Toyota said that the pedestrian safety score would help promote “global harmonization” with standards in Europe and other countries.42 (Japan, where Toyota is headquartered, has regulated vehicle design for pedestrian safety since 2003.)

When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 on an antiregulation platform, the pedestrian safety ratings measure in the United States stalled. The NHTSA would not tell the Detroit Free Press, for example, during the newspaper’s investigation when the rule would move forward.

Finally, late in 2019, the NHTSA announced that it would be updating its five-star rating system to “consider new technologies tied to the safety of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users such as cyclists.”43 Exactly what is in the new rule will not be known until it is released, but according to the NHTSA news release, it seems that the agency will limit its ratings to whether or not cars include partially automated features like automatic emergency braking or automatic pedestrian detection. The NHTSA will likely stop short of evaluating how different body designs and different vehicle styles affect pedestrian safety.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, after Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, these kinds of improvements—passive safety features, features that protect someone from devastating injury even in the event of a crash—were added to the interior of cars. Additions like airbags, seat belts, and padded dashboards all help absorb the impact of the blow when someone seated inside a car is in a crash. (All were initially opposed as standard equipment by auto companies. Airbags, for example, did not become standard until thirty years after they were invented, a decision that was litigated all the way to the US Supreme Court.)44

To help save pedestrians, the front ends of cars need to be soft and collapsible. Hard internal parts, like engines, need to be moved away from the bumper. Hoods can be designed to pop up slightly and then give slightly like a cushion when they strike a person, experts say. “All these [are] things you see on the interior of the car—let’s get airbags to soften it up, remove sharp edges,” said Shaun Kildare, research director for the consumer safety group Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “So now we have to apply that to the outside of the vehicle.”45

Consumer advocate Clarence Ditlow told Automotive News before his death in 2016 that “pedestrian protection is one of the last frontiers of vehicle safety.” He added, “NHTSA has been reluctant to regulate it because it so closely relates to styling.”46

In part due to the soaring popularity of SUVs, even nongovernmental safety groups seem hesitant to impose any restraint on their sales or marketing. Lacking action by the federal government, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an independent, industry-funded safety group, moved in 2019 to add its own category to its influential safety rankings to incorporate pedestrian safety, but the ratings will only evaluate tech additions like pedestrian detection systems and automatic braking (discussed in chapter 8), not differences in vehicle shape or size and its impacts on pedestrian safety. In fact, the organization gave three of the four top safety ratings in its first round to SUVs.47 A spokesperson for the organization said that “SUVs and pickups are not going away. Forcing design changes to the front ends of vehicles is more of a challenge.”48

Big Cars, Big Profits

The unfortunate reality is that the big, blunt noses of SUVs that kill pedestrians also sell cars—and at a big markup for automakers. In 2017, the average selling price for a midsized crossover SUV was $37,800, according to a Kelley Blue Book analysis—or about $13,000 more than the average midsized sedan. The selling price for small crossovers averaged $28,350, almost $9,000 more than a compact car.49

That extra sales price becomes “margin builders for automakers,” a market analyst for Kelley Blue Book told Automotive News.50 “They cost more or less the same to build.”

But although consumers have clearly embraced SUVs, it has not been without encouragement from the auto industry. The auto industry spends a staggering amount of money trying to influence consumers. In 2018, the industry spent $34.5 billion on advertising. Outside of retail in general, no US industry spends more on advertising than the auto industry. These ads work, and they overwhelmingly pushed Americans toward SUVs and large trucks.

Nine of the ten top-advertised vehicles in late 2017 were SUVs or pickups, according to an analysis by CNBC.51 Ford, for example, spent $180 million in 2017 advertising its F-150 pickup, but only $10 million advertising its Fusion and C-Max (a hybrid sedan) combined. Chevy, meanwhile, spent a little over $100 million advertising its Silverado, compared to just over $10 million advertising the Volt, its hybrid vehicle, and practically nothing advertising the Bolt, its electric vehicle.52

As the market moves toward SUVs, even the cars that remain on the market have been growing in size. For its 2019 model, Kia added 3.2 inches in length to its Forte compact car. Volkswagen added 1.3 inches to its 2019 Jetta, and Toyota added 2 inches to its Avalon. A 2011 Fiesta, for example, before Ford killed it, was 14 percent wider, 10 percent longer, and 37 percent heavier than the Fiesta of the 1970s.53 “Passenger cars are attempting to compete with SUVs,” Cars.com editor Joe Wiesenfelder said, by getting bigger.54

The same bigger, wider, heavier trend is apparent in some of the oldest SUV models as well. The 2019 Toyota RAV4—one of the best-selling cars in the United States—weighs about one thousand pounds more than its 1999 version. The 2018 Jeep Cherokee weighs about eight hundred pounds more than its 1999 version.

The Dark Appeal of the SUV

One of the early critics of SUVs, former New York Times Detroit bureau chief Keith Bradsher, has said that the same features that kill pedestrians help automakers sell cars. Bradsher, author of the 2002 book High and Mighty, wrote that with SUVs, automakers tapped into primitive subconscious human impulses.55 Those were not always so magnanimous.

One of the pioneering minds of the SUV industry, Bradsher wrote, was marketing savant named Clotaire Rapaille. His ideas about Americans’ base desires helped shape marketing and vehicle design at Chrysler in the 1990s. Rapaille’s theory was that Americans are terrified of crime. He blamed this fear not on a rational assessment of crime risks but on exposure to violent television and video games and the aging of the US population in general.

“The archetype of a sport utility vehicle reflects the reptilian desire for survival,” Bradsher wrote.56 In other words, Americans liked the idea of being able to potentially crush whatever or whoever stood in their way. “I usually say, ‘If you put a machine gun on top of them, you will sell them better,’” Rapaille is quoted as saying. “Even going to the supermarket, you have to be ready to fight.”57

Although High and Mighty was published in 2002, in hindsight much of it looks prophetic. In 2014, for example, BMW unveiled a bulletproof version of its X5 sport utility vehicle, which it described as “AK-47 proof.”58 By late 2019, one newspaper reported that “the market for bulletproof vehicles is exploding.”59

Safety researchers call these kinds of features on a car or truck—how likely a particular model is to kill or injury occupants of other vehicles when there is a crash—aggressivity. In addition to killing pedestrians, some of the popular features in SUVs—such as high-riding front ends—also have horrifying impacts for drivers of sedans. An IIHS study analyzing crash statistics from 1989 to 2016 found that SUVs were 32 percent more likely to kill occupants of other cars in a crash,60 even though a great deal of energy has been invested by automakers to reduce “overlap” crash problems in recent years.

Without any pushback, there is no sign that SUV sales are slowing down. A more disturbing recent development, from a safety perspective, is the embrace of SUVs by police forces. About one hundred thousand police vehicles are sold in the United States annually, MotorTrend estimates,61 and the SUV is now the vehicle of choice.

The Police Interceptor Utility, a modified Ford Explorer, has been the highest-selling police vehicle since 2014.62 “The 2020 Ford Police Interceptor Utility is a beast,” Chris Terry, a Ford product communications spokesman, told the Detroit Free Press in 2018, bragging that it could go up to 150 miles per hour. “When a car blows past you at 120 miles an hour, you need to get that person off the road as quickly as possible in the interest of public safety.”63 (Police chases kill about 355 Americans annually, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. About one-third of those killed are innocent bystanders.64)

To make matters worse, police SUVs are often outfitted with so-called bull or push bars—steel or aluminum bars affixed to the grille. These add-on features add to the aggressivity of the front end of SUVs. The bars give these trucks a macho, intimidating look and can be seen as an example of the creeping militarization of police equipment.

Push bars or bull bars should probably not be allowed at all on vehicles that are used for city driving. Researchers reviewed nine studies in 2012 and found that these bars increase risks to pedestrians, especially child pedestrians, by concentrating the force of the blow as much as ten times. The international team of researchers urged regulators to take action.65 Bull bars have been banned in the United Kingdom for their deadly effects on pedestrians since 2010, but in the United States, the NHTSA has never been involved with regulating aftermarket vehicle modifications.

Unfortunately, under the Trump administration, that seems unlikely to change. “Under President Trump, the bureaucracy in Washington is being hollowed out,” USA Today’s Bomey said. “Career bureaucrats are leaving. When you have that lack of manpower in addition to the lack of resources to actually run NHTSA, there may not be enough people to handle it.”66

Even the antiregulation Trump administration might be forced to act if public pressure were really intense, he added. But there has not been much outcry on the public’s behalf. “People aren’t rising up and demanding this,” he said.

Meanwhile, as SUVs have gotten more fuel efficient in the last decade, “the liberal critique of the SUV has faded,” he added. “Americans are sort of culpable from a cultural perspective,” he said. “We don’t really think about this as a health crisis.”67