A new study has revealed that taller trucks and SUVs have led to a significant increase in pedestrian deaths due to larger blind spots. Since 2009, the number of pedestrian fatalities has increased by almost 75%, partly due to the increasing use of SUVs and large trucks.
According to the study conducted by The New York Times and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 200 to 400 pedestrian deaths would not have occurred annually if vehicles had remained around the same size over the previous 25 years. “That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths,” the study claims.
Additionally, the study discovered that between 2016 and 2024, the transition to vehicles like SUVs and pickup trucks with larger hoods resulted in almost 3,000 pedestrian deaths. The Times believes the figure is probably conservative because the model excluded accidents in parking lots, driveways, and private roads, as federal crash records do not capture them.
“We see a lot of devastating collisions even at lower speeds because the pedestrian gets punted forward,” said Shawn Harrington, whose company, Forensic Rock, conducted crash tests for The Times. “Before the driver knows what’s happened, the pedestrian’s head is under the wheel.”
Case in point: In May in a parking lot in Florida, a woman in a lifted Chevrolet Silverado drove directly onto a Lamborghini Huracan with the driver inside.
More vehicles than ever have hoods higher than the average American’s center of gravity, according to the report. Today, the average passenger vehicle has a hood that is roughly three feet high. Approximately half of adult Americans, including most kids, are shorter than five feet six inches. As a result, these larger vehicles have frequently hit them without seeing the pedestrian.
Vehicles have developed much larger blind zones
The study also used a three-dimensional scanner to compare sightlines across four of today’s most common pickup trucks to the same models from the 1990s or early 2000s. What they discovered was that the Chevrolet Silverado blind zones had nearly doubled, the GMC Sierra and Toyota Tacoma blind zones had grown by about 60 percent, and the Ford F-150 blind zones had grown by about 25 percent.
The study also found that the likelihood of a pedestrian fatality increased by an estimated 2.8% for every inch that a vehicle’s hood height increased.
“It’s clear that the increasing size of the vehicles in the U.S. fleet is costing pedestrians their lives. We encourage automakers to consider these findings and take a hard look at the height and shape of their SUVs and pickups,” David Harkey, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said in a release shared in 2023.
Automakers claim that new pedestrian detection and avoidance technology, such as systems that automatically apply the brakes, will significantly increase safety.
“We view these technologies as the cornerstone of future mitigation strategies,” said National Highway Traffic Safety Administration spokesman Sean Rushton.