In the early 2000s, more than half of the passenger vehicles on American roads were traditional cars like sedans. Their hoods were low to the ground.

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By the 2010s, larger vehicles like compact SUVs had eclipsed cars.

Today, SUVs and pickup trucks dominate the roads. Many are bigger than ever.

And far deadlier, a New York Times investigation found.

They are killing thousands of pedestrians who otherwise might have survived.

For decades, American roads were steadily getting safer for pedestrians. But around 2009, the trend reversed. Since then, the number of pedestrians killed each year has risen by about 75%.

The surge in pedestrian deaths has baffled researchers. Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story.

Other likely causes of deadly crashes, such as drunken and distracted driving, have attracted immense attention from the public and policymakers. But the trend toward ever-larger vehicles has received much less scrutiny, even after federal researchers in 2022 cautioned regulators that it was endangering pedestrians.

After analyzing federal and industry records, including never-before-examined data on vehicle dimensions, an investigation by the Times found that the rise of large pickups and SUVs is an important factor.

Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained about the same size over the past quarter-century. That represents about 10% of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.

There are two reasons bigger vehicles are deadlier: They have taller hoods. And they tend to have larger blind zones.

“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 us. “Before the driver knows what’s happened, the pedestrian’s head is under the wheel.”

More vehicles than ever have hoods that exceed the average American’s center of gravity, which is generally around the belly button.

The hood of an average passenger vehicle today is about 3 feet high. Anyone shorter than 5-foot-6 — about half of American adults — would frequently be rammed to the pavement. So would most children.

Not only are the high hoods on larger vehicles more lethal, but their bulkier frames can also block drivers’ views of pedestrians.

To analyze how these blind zones have changed, we used a three-dimensional scanner to compare sight lines in four of the most common pickups today — the Chevrolet Silverado, Ford F-150, GMC Sierra and Toyota Tacoma — with their counterparts from the 1990s or early 2000s.

The Silverado’s blind zones have nearly doubled.

The Sierra’s and the Tacoma’s grew by about 60%.

The smallest increase was the F-150’s. Its blind zones grew by about 25%.

Our overall findings match what we found in court records and heard from dozens of experts who reconstruct crashes for police and lawyers.

One morning last year, Charlene McAlister, 76, set out for work at a childcare center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “See you tonight,” she called to her daughter as she left their home.

As McAlister was crossing the street, a Ram 1500 TRX — a pickup marketed for its off-road capabilities and fierce-looking design — was turning left.

McAlister was not quite 5 feet tall. The pickup’s hood was at least 4 feet high. It hit her, throwing her to the pavement.

The driver later said he hadn’t seen McAlister, according to court records. They show that the truck’s large hood and side mirrors may have impeded his view.

When McAlister’s daughter, Serena, arrived at the scene, she saw her mother’s hedgehog-themed backpack and red purse in the road, spattered with blood. Emergency workers had draped a white sheet over her body.

The size of vehicles is far from the only reason that more pedestrians are dying, according to independent experts and industry officials.

“While vehicle safety is critical, blaming larger vehicles for pedestrian deaths overlooks systemic issues” including the design of roads, said Mike Levine, a spokesperson for Ford.

Automakers say that new technology designed to detect and avoid pedestrians — including systems that automatically apply the brakes — would dramatically improve safety. For example, Bill Grotz, a spokesperson for General Motors, pointed to a recent study that found that GM vehicles with so-called front pedestrian braking reduced the frequency of injuries by 35%.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is pinning its hopes on automated collision-avoidance systems. Such technologies “are actively reducing the occurrence of these crashes and fundamentally shifting the risk landscape,” said Sean Rushton, an agency spokesperson. “We view these technologies as the cornerstone of future mitigation strategies.”

But many experts say that technology is not a perfect substitute for drivers’ being able to view their surroundings directly. And tests by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which studies ways to make driving less dangerous, have shown that many large vehicles’ automatic braking systems do not consistently prevent collisions.

Owners’ manuals for some of the most popular vehicles caution that safety technology can fail in a variety of common situations: in bad weather; at high speeds; if there are shadows on the road or its surface is uneven; or if a pedestrian is running, pushing a stroller, not standing upright or the size of a small child.

‘King of
the road’

Today’s SUVs and pickups promise more: more seats, more space, more safety, more power, more domination, more prestige.

And, for automakers, more money.

They are the source of virtually all of the U.S. auto industry’s profits, said Mark Wakefield, an industry expert at the consulting firm AlixPartners. For nearly a decade, Ford and GM have said in their annual reports that their earnings depend on larger SUVs and pickups.

The cost of making bigger vehicles is usually not much higher than it is for cars, because they are often built in automakers’ most efficient factories, and the extra raw materials are relatively cheap.

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Yet customers are willing to pay much more for them. The average sticker price for a full-size pickup is $70,000, double that of a sedan, according to Cox Automotive. (Some people pay more to soup up their trucks with “lift kits” that raise their suspensions.)

It is no coincidence that automakers have significantly scaled back their production of sedans and other passenger cars in the United States. Ford, for example, went from selling more than 1 million in 2017 to fewer than 100,000 five years later.

What used to be utilitarian vehicles for construction workers are now marketed to the American masses, with messages tailored to specific audiences.

One common pitch centers on machismo. Automakers trumpet how some of their trucks have an “aggressive appearance” or a “piercing glare.”

Other approaches emphasize the perceived safety of being the biggest vehicle around. “You’re the king of the road,” said Frank Hanley, a director at the automotive research firm JD Power.

Unintended
consequence

In 2009, after a spate of fatal incidents in which drivers were crushed in rollovers, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration required roofs to be strong enough to support three times the weight of a vehicle. Many automakers responded by installing thicker A-pillars.

James Forbes, who was a longtime engineering manager at Ford, said that after the company began installing the fatter A-pillars, he and his colleagues noticed that they were reducing drivers’ visibility.

The drivers were safer, but pedestrians were in greater peril. “We were very much biasing safety toward the owner of the vehicle,” Forbes said.

Those potential dangers began attracting attention, with articles in The Detroit Free Press and Consumer Reports.

By 2022, the lack of visibility in large vehicles had become a concern for researchers at the Transportation Department’s Volpe Center, whose mission is to identify and address problems in the transportation system.

That November, the researchers met with leaders at the department and NHTSA. They delivered a stark message: Large vehicles, with their big blind zones, were increasingly deadly. They were killing hundreds of pedestrians and cyclists every year and injuring thousands more, the researchers estimated, according to attendees and meeting materials we reviewed.

The researchers hoped that their warning would spur regulators to consider how to address the problem.

But a senior NHTSA official disputed the data and argued that new pedestrian-sensing technologies were already improving safety.

“There was just zero acknowledgment of the problem,” said Angie Byrne, a former Volpe Center employee who was involved with the research and attended the meeting.

The meeting ended with no plan for action.

The U.S. government has paid scant attention to how the size of vehicles affects the safety of pedestrians.

Federal regulators don’t collect much data about the heights of vehicles’ hoods. But we found one service that does: Expert AutoStats.

Our analysis shows a radical change in the makeup of American vehicles over the past two decades.

Not only have many drivers abandoned traditional cars in favor of SUVs and pickups. But millions have flocked to vehicles with hoods that are more than 50 inches tall — like the Ford F-250 and Chevrolet Silverado 2500 — whose ranks have increased more than fivefold since 2002.

To understand how a vehicle’s size affects a crash’s lethality, we built a statistical model. Our goal was to estimate how many fewer pedestrians, if any, would have died in a world in which vehicles had remained roughly the same size since 2002.

We started with a federal database that contains a nationally representative sample of crashes reported to police from 2016-24. We narrowed that down to those involving a single vehicle and a single pedestrian. And we added the data on hood heights, which wasn’t included in the federal database.

Our model then analyzed the degree to which different factors — such as hood height, weather conditions, time of day and whether alcohol was involved — affected whether pedestrians died.

Crashes are complex events, and the data we fed into our model doesn’t capture everything about each incident. And, of course, there is no way to definitively say what would have happened in an alternate reality where vehicles had not continued to grow larger.

But based on the best available data, the model reached a sobering estimate: The shift toward vehicles with higher hoods caused about 3,000 deaths from 2016-24.

The estimate is conservative in many ways.

For example, it doesn’t include collisions that occur in places like parking lots, driveways or private roads, which are not part of the federal database. Hundreds of pedestrians a year are estimated to die in such crashes, a number that has been increasing.

Only in the past several years have researchers started exploring whether and how larger vehicles threaten pedestrians.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, for example, found last year that vehicles with larger blind zones were substantially more likely to hit pedestrians when turning left.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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