A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us.

Hmm, these huge trucks are killing pedestrians, causing worse crashes due to crash incompatibility, destroying the climate, and now smashing through guard rails and flying off cliffs. We'd better change our entire country's infrastructure to accommodate them.

Tax the heavy cars much more, they cause more dammage in crashes and way more wear and tear in general.

The current version of MGS was developed to withstand cars weighing a maximum of 5,000 pounds

Seems like yet another case of a flawed study or a flawed article based on a misunderstanding of the study.

Statements like the quote above make no sense as "withstanding a 5,000lb vehicle" makes no sense. A 5k lb vehicle traveling at 70MPH is carrying several orders of magnitude more energy than a 5k lb vehicle traveling at 5MPH. Likewise a direct, perpendicular hit will impart more energy than a glancing parallel blow, so what are they really rated for?

In any case, these guardrails are used in places where 100k lb semis are traveling at highway speeds, and there have never been any other doom and gloom articles written about that. I don't think we need to completely rebuild our highway system simply because heavier cars exist.

Maybe car sales taxes should scale by vehicle weight.

If you consume more of the road, you pay more

we obviously need to take money from Amtrak and public transport grants to rebuild the interstate system. Guardrails upgraded everywhere, new lanes would be added to reduce congestion

I know America has an obesity epidemic, but did it really have to be extended to our cars?

The current version of MGS was developed to withstand cars weighing a maximum of 5,000 pounds, but many of today’s SUVs and trucks exceed that threshold.

MGS being what I've known as W beam guardrail.

But he noted that in the real world, a guardrail is much more likely to be placed next to a steep [drop-off] than a concrete barrier.

Thankfully it was a test, but there's probably already instances where an over-weight vehicle has smashed through safety devices.

Guardrails, much like the crumple zones of cars, are designed to give way to dissipate energy. This is a safety feature which saves lives. There isn't going to be a one-size-fits-all-traffic guardrail. It's about statistically improving outcomes, but unfortunately they aren't going to help in all cases. Maybe they need to be updated, but it's going to take time to adjust to changing average vehicle weights.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/guardrailsafety/guardrail101.pdf

Velomobiles weight 35kg (77 pounds) and offer very good protection compared to normal bicycles. Theoretically you could design single seat cars not much heavier. Of course for higher speeds you'd want more protection and a little bit wider.

I imagine the ideal self driving car or robo-taxi to be two seats that face each other, so when you get one alone you have plenty of space to stretch your feet or put your groceries. It could be totally luxurious, simple to call and use and fast too. And the embodied energy would be very small and the "mpg" would be insane.

It's just sad how badly we are tackling climate change by just letting the free market run wild.

Eh, non-issue. Just slap a surgeon general warning that the car will go through guardrails if it is over 5k lbs. And put a big roadway improvement tax on pointless large SUVs, minivans, and massive trucks, which nobody actually needs. We've had smaller variants of vehicles for decades. Even kei vans can hold many grown ass adult men.

All this aside, we have ultra heavy truckers whose trucks already would and do go through guardrails. We should be de-emphasizing car and highway investment anyways, putting more funding towards rapid mass transit and rezoning metro areas to be walkable. Fuck $30 / hr street parking.

new vehicle weight tax to fund the new guardrails

EVs are extremely heavy too.

They should regulate the weight of cars. There's no reason passenger vehicles should be as heavy as they are. For EVs they honestly shouldn't have as much range as they do. 150 miles and improved charging infrastructure, make charging easier for folks who park on the street, is a better way to go. Folks who need to drive more than that a day should have a hybrid or ICE vehicle. Ideally a small fuel efficient one. Folks who need pickups for work should be able to buy the small European versions or work vans.

It's not like heavy work trucks didn't exist back then, was it just that there weren't enough of them to care?

NGL - my last car was pretty big, but Google assures me it was only 4,100 lbs. My current car is the same size and is just under 5,000 pounds.

In a better world roads would be closed for cars which exceed the capacity of those guard rails. Just put up a sign, do some enforcement and people will start buying smaller cars when they can't use them.

Sounds like a you problem -Car Ceo's

well it's a good thing the heavy as fuck electric vehicles are not flying off the lots because most of us couldn't afford one even if we wanted to.

That’s at least 500 stone.

For the trucks and land boats that weight more. Lol, that's is all.

For the 97% of the planet -

7000lbs is about 3200kg.

To put that into perspective, a big old Volvo XC90 is about 2400kg

That's how fuckin stupidly wasteful, childish and insecure Americans are when choosing their vehicles