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The Paris Auto Show is full of interesting cars Americans can’t have (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Small EVs and efficient people carriers update familiar names for the modern age.

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[–] 28 points 1 week ago (18 children)

Tell me you have never been oversea's (let alone drove there) without telling me you have never been overseas.

Everywhere in the world people drive like ass hats. It part of the human condition.

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  • [–] 48 points 1 week ago* (5 children)

    Yes, but the problem in the US is we have several generations of cars built to be "safe" for the driver, which means more dangerous for everyone else, meaning drivers of large vehicles drive wrecklessly with absolutely no fear for their own lives and aren't removed from the gene pool.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 week ago

    I was driving from coast to coast in the US granted, a good while ago when there were still much fewer ass clown oversized trucks on the road (but still more than enough anyhow), in a Sedan. Didn't feel too stressed to be honest. Where it gets really dangerous real fast is if you dare to walk anywhere outside of the few somewhat pedestrian friendly areas in the country.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (3 children)

    I just sorta assumed this was true (in no small part because I accept xkcd as infallible gospel). But I was curious and just dug into it, and it appears that the fatality rate for accidents with injury in the US is among the lowest. And while the accident-with-injury rate is higher in the US than the combined EU + EFTA it's not so different as to change this relationship. I really didn't expect that, and I wish I could find more recent data to see how the trend has changed up to today (the best data I could find on this was from 2015 - which is well into the era of the US fixation on suburban combat vehicles, but as they may make up a higher % of all vehicles on the road now, I'm very curious to see what the current data shows)

    (Chart in spoiler because I don't want to clutter up the thread:)

    Source

    The report this is pulled from excludes non-injury MV accidents

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    This is heavily dependent on incident report rates. Incidents are underreported in countries where insurance doesn’t require police reports and/or litigation risk is much lower.

    Deaths are pretty well recorded, and there you see that the US is much higher in vehicle deaths per capita. Deaths per billion vehicle-km is also useful, as you can argue that per capita the US drives a lot more, so you will see more incidents due to the traffic exposure being higher.

    Summarizing: The US has well over twice as many traffic deaths per capita at 110+ vs 45 in the EU. The worst EU country is Romania with 78. The US is closer when you compare kms driven: about 7 deaths per billion km, still way higher than northern Europe (2-4) and about on par with Belgium (that’s unfortunately not something to be proud of). Quite a bit safer than the lower scoring countries though on that metric, like 14.4 for the Czech Republic.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    (I addressed per-captia deaths vs. distance driven in another comment earlier, I do quite agree)

    I think averaging the rates across the EU is a counterproductive, or outright obfuscating, metric. While it is a basis for comparison, the data varies so wildly from country to country it serves only to obscure the realities of the situation. The report I'm sourcing from does make it clear that countries may be underreporting their accident rates:

    The comparability of data is also subject to differences in road accident reporting standards. Notably, the number of accidents and the number of injuries may be underreported in some countries due to administrative or practical limitations.

    And the cited article from that section is quite interesting. In particular,

    For estimations of the real volumes it is not necessary to have all accidents reported by the police. By using other sources, such as cause of death statistics and medical and insurance databases, it is possible to get a more accurate assessment. These additional databases can also provide supplementary information on accidents or the outcome of an accident, including the types and severity of injuries.

    which does appear to be how CARE is sourcing their data (although their dashboard is some godawful Qlik thing so I was not able to determine sources for all of their metrics)

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    Taxi drivers take it to the next level tho. First time I rode a taxi in Tallinn was pretty white knuckle.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    Guangzhou, China takes the cake. I was there for a few weeks. Wrong side of the road, wrong way on one way streets, ON THE FUCKING SIDEWALKS w/ ped traffic. It was insane!

    Dominican Republic is a distant second, there was order to the chaos I could see after a few weeks... China it was pure entropy at its finest!

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    Guangzhou isn't that bad, have you been there recently?

    I learned to ride in Hanoi, I spent a year in various parts of vietnam and was very comfortable in SEA traffic on a bike.

    None of that prepared me for the chaos of HCMC. People going the wrong way, people visibly drunk on bikes, randomly finding yourself surrounded by semis on cracked and broken pavement, you and 20 other bikes making offroad detours to get around cars.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

    Not since Xi showed up, from what I heard China has really cracked down on the shenanigans plus they put up bollards to prevent it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (1 child)

    Probably, but I wouldn't overstate it, like there aren't cars driving at speed on sidewalks, but its not like western countries where cars simply don't drive or park in sidewalks. Bicycles and escooters still drive however they like, which imo is fine, since they're so much less dangerous than cars, but it is different from further north. Its a but of a transition when you go further north and remember you're not supposed to walk or ride your bike across moving traffic.

    Motorcycles are banned outright, which is bullshit.

    Heres a cat I saw last night:

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Twice as many road deaths in the US IIRC.

    FYI people drive wildly differently in the EU already.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Per capita yes - but as so often in statistics, per-capita measures are an oversimplification. By deaths/km driven, the US isn't a particular outlier (Top score is Mexico with 27.5 (!!!) deaths / 1bil km, then #2: Malaysia with 16.2 and #3: South Korea with 8.2. Other countries of interest are Belgium (7.3), New Zealand (7.2), US (6.9), France (5.8), Australia (4.9), Canada (4.3))

    ^(^^source^^)^

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