Interesting video on why these large SUVs have become the most popular new vehicle to buy, using clever marketing tricks to convince people they need the more impractical and unsafe option.
Interesting video on why these large SUVs have become the most popular new vehicle to buy, using clever marketing tricks to convince people they need the more impractical and unsafe option.
I agree that the guy is putting a lot of emphasis on attacking SUV drivers and spends comparatively little time taking about how capitalism brought us here… but you do know those types of drivers exist, right? I mean the arrogant, selfish, boastful people that use their vehicle as a status symbol and couldn’t care less about whatever harm they’re causing. Not every SUV or truck driver is like this, but they’re definitely out there, it’s not a strawman.
Anyway, are you seriously advocating for SUVs as a safety precaution? You know what’s safer than SUVs? Vehicles that are less massive and less rigid. And yeah driving in the snow is easier with 4x4 but most of the USA isn’t snowy and the parts that are are only like that for a few months. And keep in mind that northern Europe gets just as much snow as the US, but they don’t have the same SUV usage as America does.
Also no one is saying that we should get rid of personal vehicles that can haul loads. Farmers and tradesmen need them, no contest, but the type of trucks that this guy takes issue with aren’t the type of trucks that workers want. They’re big and expensive with small beds and poor fuel economy, a far cry from the trucks that were commonly produced a few decades ago and hardly representative of what manual laborers need.
And what gave you the impression that he wants to stop all SUV usage right this second? Of course it’s going to take time to move away from them and alternatives need to be put in place to facilitate the transition away from not just SUVs, but driving in general. You and me and him are all in agreement on this.
I feel like because you dislike this guy, you’re taking contrarian positions just to dunk on him. Cool your jets, dude.
“but you do know those types of drivers exist, right? I mean the arrogant, selfish, boastful people that use their vehicle as a status symbol”
Yes: “in rural America is to address viable needs (such as hauling and defeating weather conditions) not for social stature as it may be in cities.”
“Anyway, are you seriously advocating for SUVs as a safety precaution? You know what’s safer than SUVs? Vehicles that are less massive and less rigid.”
^ This falls into the idea that the conditions of the cities are the conditions of America. As I explained, outside of urban and suburban areas these vehicles are necessitated, as if they must exist then within that same enviroment smaller less rigid vehicles are not safer for the reasons both I and the entertainer explained.
“And yeah driving in the snow is easier with 4x4 but most of the USA isn’t snowy and the parts that are are only like that for a few months.”
^ The top northern states not including Alaska are snowy for an average of 5-6 months, winter is much longer than in places such as southern Illinois, Virginina, Tennessee, etc… This argument does not address mud and lack of paved roads as a road obstacle however.
“Also no one is saying that we should get rid of personal vehicles that can haul loads.”
^ This is good and should be explicitly stated however the line-blurring jumping around nature of the entertainer’s arguments left me with an uncertainty of his views in this regard. He came off as idealistic, which is why I felt the need to address this point outright.
“They’re big and expensive with small beds and poor fuel economy, a far cry from the trucks that were commonly produced a few decades ago and hardly representative of what manual laborers need.”
^ This is an interesting argument. Currently in rural America, there is a splice between the ‘tried and true’ old vehicles such as the Dodge D-series pickups, 80’s F-150s, Broncos, Blazers, Gimmys, and the Tahoes and Suburbans before 2005.
Then there are the new aluminum so-called “super trucks” such as the new (post 05’) Ford F-series, Toyota Tundras, Chevy Silverados, Tahoes, and Suburbans, as well as these poorly made remakes of the above forementioned Blazers and Broncos.
All of which are as you have said, they do not represent the interests of the rural American worker. They are cheap, they fall apart, they are make of untried (by fire, known to be reliable and bugs worked out) technologies which are still glitchy and tend to fail such as vehicles with advanced computer systems and countless sensors which as well are predicated upon the import of microprocessors which China has a near monopoly on and we are aware of the contradiction between our comrades in the PRC and the bourgeois here.
When you say these are not the trucks targeted again this was unclear and so I addressed this too outright.
“And what gave you the impression that he wants to stop all SUV usage right this second?”
The fact that he did not explicitly state this while aggressively criticizing these vehicles from seemingly every angle based or not. This urgency and over the top tempo eludes to an interest in urgency. He did not even explicitly state (as far as I watched) that he advocates for this to happen in a logical manner.
“I feel like because you dislike this guy, you’re taking contrarian positions just to dunk on him”
^ I dislike his arguments and so I criticize his position, any feelings I developed from this individual were derived from his content. I had not even heard of this person prior to this post. What is of concern to me is his arguments and intentions. The specific interests of which he aims to assert (solutions and what things specifically are seen as problems for him, not financial or class interests) were not clear to me.
I find your criticisms strange because this video began by explicitly framing the issue of SUV ownership around building walkable cities. So I’m honestly not sure what your point is. Large vehicles have use cases in rural areas? Yeah man, I agree.
I think you should work on your listening skills because you’re arguing against no one. Here’s a quote from the video that illustrates my point:
“And if you do live in a rural area, you might need to drive a light truck and obviously that’s fine and I don’t care. But we’re talking about suburbia here and come on. You know as well as I do that the vast, vast, vaaast majority of drivers in these light trucks are carrying exactly 2 things: their briefcase and their fat ass. And most people don’t use a briefcase anymore.” (quote starts at 14:22)
My points were nuance, not being arrogant and disrespectful because it isolates rural workers from these policies, and planning out such large action not simply beginning without such a plan and fail to the detriment of those who advocated it. With a heavy emphasis on the second and third. There were many facts he was incorrect on and nuances he had not considered (the sub-points I made on large vehicles) not specifically that he treated cities as America which yes he did explicitly say this at the time you pointed to (I was mistaken) however the fact that I overlooked it and that this point of nuance came at the 15min mark after 14 mins of implying his conflation of the two this does little to improve the structure of his video IMO
I wasn’t referring to you as arrogant in my previous comment, I was talking about asshole SUV drivers. Sorry for being unclear.
I still don’t understand what you’re talking about though. The only policy proposals I see in this video are to 1) reduce/eliminate the import tax on light trucks 2) reclassify which vehicles count as light trucks 3) tighten regulations on the emissions of these vehicles 4) increase the visibility of the front-end of these vehicles 5) make these vehicles conform to the same safety standards as regular cars 6) restrict the use of these vehicles within cities.
I’m sincerely baffled by what you’re taking away from this. Rural America isn’t within the scope of this video or this channel and that was made clear by the very first sentence. You’re making it sound like he wants to purge all large vehicles from the country right this instant but that’s not what he’s saying. At all. 😵💫
“I wasn’t referring to you as arrogant in my previous comment, I was talking about asshole SUV drivers.” No I understood, you were fine. There are some asshole drivers, I think he inflated that into totality. That was my impression anyway.
Some of the regulations are problematic even if they do not include “in rural spaces”. For example tightening emissions is again deflecting the issue of pollution onto workers, consumers, and the pette bourgeois when in reality vehicle emissions are a much smaller issue than factory farms, factories, and misc production facilities which are driven directly by capitalism and it’s aspect of consumerism. This perpetuates that deflection. No that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue such policies but it’s the context in which it’s applied and of course the planning.
Wanting trucks to conform to car safety standards would force SUVs and trucks to become smaller and lighter, would allow them to be easier to integrate into neoliberal manufacturing (lower quality, higher quantity) thus assisting the bourgeois in making more profit as well as undermining the use value of these trucks as they would become less reliable and able to haul less. Most of the SUVs and trucks used in rural America aren’t modern, they’re pre-2005 models. Reliability is an issue as well as affordability which is creating this lag between the classically used models and newer ones.
As well it is my opinion based on what we know about capitalism and specifically it’s neoliberal form that it’s only a matter of time before propaganda is produced to assert that “4x4 is basically the same as all-wheel drive just more expensive. No one really needs 4x4” and then that is removed so they can make more money and have more liquidity of capital. It would be cheaper to have all 4x4 become all-wheel, it would be cheapest if we simply walked everywhere. So you see how our interests overlap but they do split, namely at the point of pragmatism in this case but in others they go in opposite directions.
It’s cheapest if we choose to believe Tylenol is equivalent to morphine and simply treat surgeries with that as the cost of production is lower. They tried this at the beginning of the revelation of mass addiction to opiates dubbed “the opioid epidemic” but it fell flat because the material necessity of morphine’s use value was evident. I believe this will happen here too, but the point is to not back the wrong horse. It is detrimental to the movement.
The only thing the capitalists care about is capital, they do not care how society functions under these decisions. When they shift towards electric buses we cheer. When they run Chinese factories to the point that it looks like coal is being used in China en mass to power production we gasp in horror. But the pursuit of profit does not care, it does this and will continue to do more horrors. Obviously the loss of 4x4 is not the same scale as air pollution, I am using hyperbole to demonstrate my point. Sometimes neoliberal decisions are beneficial to us, other times its to the detriment to us. As I’ve stated I believe we must first further develop these areas so as to make the removal of SUVs and trucks non-detrimental but beneficial.
These proposed regulations wouldn’t be a problem if they were confined to cities but that is not how regulations have been formed or used historically in the US. It will be uniform.
#6 infers that #'s 1-5 apply across the board. If we are to simply ban SUVs and small trucks from cities what is the point of the first 5 regulations? Who are they referencing, which SUVs and trucks? The only ones left by process of elimination. I’m not sure if this was your structuring of what the entertainer said or his words exactly so I won’t draw a conclusion from that I simply wanted to point it out.
SUVs are the second largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions since 2010. We don’t have the time to pick and choose which polluters to target, we need to be targeting all of them. And SUVs are a growing problem that we need to address before they become even more of an issue.
And because I’m confident that you didn’t watch much of this video, THESE are the vehicles that he and I take issue with:
This picture compares an SUV to a station wagon, a cheaper, smaller, safer vehicle with more space. What use value does an SUV have that station wagons don’t? Besides running over pedestrians.
Also, if you’re concerned about pickup trucks then it’s in your interest to regulate them too. Because they have gotten larger and more expensive with much smaller beds, the thing people ostensibly buy them for.
I’ve said enough already and I don’t want to continue this conversation anymore. If you don’t see the issue with people driving tank-sized cars for everyday travel then there’s nothing I can tell you to convince you otherwise.
The initial link I provided linked to multiple sources, the primary of which was broken however I have found it (https://climateaccountability.org/carbonmajors.html).
The key word is increase, not total. They are not the second overall contributors to pollution, only the second highest contributors to the increase of emissions. The highest overall contributors to pollution are still industry, however even if it were SUVs #1, the person to target is the bourgeoisie. The entertainer’s argument seems to be to shame and/or harass consumers, but this is also ultra left as it fails to address the cause of why these vehicles are purchased as well as taking into account economic inter-connectivity. Just telling people to not drive them isn’t an answer.
Yes station wagons are a more reasonable vehicle to drive in terms of size but not necessarily in terms of usability. However, this is again addressing the issue in the country side and not in the cities which is likely insecurity exacerbated by the police state in them as well as the bolstering crime rates of which the police do nothing to solve as that is not their function…“If you can’t have a gun why not an SUV” some may be thinking. This is speculation. It is also likely status-based which is directly linked to the economy and the extravagance portrayed by the labor aristocracy and pette bourgeois.
As well, how are these machines created? In a factory. How is power produced? Via gas and oil production. So even if SUVs are a mechanism for this pollution, it again should be accounted towards the owners of these means of production and those who craft and direct the economy (their tools) not the workers who work on these mechanisms or use them to make ends meet. That entire argument is liberal. The issue with pollution is overproduction for the sake of commodity production to make insane profits to off-set a constantly falling rate of profit. It’s systemic, if all we had to do was just stop buying SUVs and the problem would be solved, such a problem wouldn’t exist in the first place as it’s immeasurably smaller than such a problem of mass pollution in the first place. It is such a threat because it is systemic, otherwise it could never get this big is what I’m saying. So not only is this barking up the wrong tree, it’s blaming the kid with matches for starting the fire as opposed to the conditions which necessitated such deviant behavior in the first place. Do you understand what I’m trying to say here?
I get what you’re saying and I agree, the people who direct industry are by far the most responsible for SUV usage.
I wasn’t arguing against that, I was arguing against the notion that SUVs and pickups (the humongous modern ones) are reasonable things for urban and suburban people to drive.
And though the guy spent a lot of time mocking the stereotypical macho man, his policy proposals were focused on regulating industry to move production back towards smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles & making existing light trucks safer and more practical. He didn’t propose for everyone to “just stop buying SUVs” as a solution. The cogent historical overview he gave for how current SUV production came to be suggests he has a solid understanding of economics from a systemic perspective.
I don’t want to sound like I’m his pr manager because I’m not and I don’t care what your opinion of him is. I’m just taken aback by how you received someone who was making salient points, albeit in a less-than-communist way. And yes I know the devil is in the details and actual laws will need to implement these ideas with much more specificity and rigor, but this was a YouTube video, not a board meeting.