The Parable of the Chieftain Tank
How your opinions on the safety or otherwise of 4x4s/SUVs reveal a lot about how you view the world and the other people who live in it
So you’re reading a news story about a guy who takes a Chieftain tank out for a spin on the public roads one day, loses control, and drives over a mother and her three children coming back from school in a Fiat 500. The mother and her children are all killed; the bloke in the tank is completely unhurt.
Reading that, what your conclusion be?
That a Chieftain tank is an incredibly dangerous vehicle to be driving on public roads, given that this one’s just killed four people?
Or that a Chieftain tank is an incredibly safe vehicle to be driving on public roads, given that the bloke who was driving it walked away from a fatal accident without even a scratch?
Okay, that might sound daft. But let’s consider the following set of possible scenarios for a head-on crash at 50 miles an hour between two vehicles, with the two possible vehicles being:
A heavy SUV which isn’t so agile and takes a bit longer to stop.
A lighter city / regular car which is more agile and can stop quickly.
Let’s imagine the possible head to heads:
Basically, you’re only safer in an SUV if the other person isn’t driving one. If you’re both driving SUVs then you’ll both be worse off than if you were both driving regular cars. The reason is that although SUVs are tougher and have better crash protection, that’s more than outweighed by their greater weight (and thus greater momentum).
And this is before we get into the odds of pedestrian vs SUV rather than regular car. (Spoiler: it’s not good for the pedestrians).
(And no, I’m not going to provide a link to specific statistics here, because I’m talking about the general principles here and don’t want to get side-tracked on details. But if you Google it, you’ll find reams of information about how SUVs are more dangerous to everyone else.)
What Does This Mean?
A while back I made a social media post that said something like the following:
A “life-hack” is only a life-hack if it would still work even if everyone starting doing it. If it only works because most people have the decency to not do it, then it’s not a life-hack, it’s just metaphorical queue jumping.
This was inspired by morning happenings at my daughter’s primary school, where a handful of people save time by driving right down the driveway to the school gates, a move which only works because everyone else has the decency to park in the car park and walk down the driveway. And even with just a handful of people doing it, they cause real problems. (It’s not nice to have someone trying to drive their car through / past a flow of pedestrians, many of whom are children, and then they block the way into the gates, forcing everyone to file past them. And yes, the school has asked them to not do it, but they just do it anyway.)
Given that the majority of cars aren’t SUVs, then arguably if you drive an SUV then you and your kids are indeed safer - but only as long as everyone else isn’t driving an SUV.
And if you say that you drive an SUV because you are concerned about safety, I think that’s very revealing about the way you view the world, and the people who live in it. Because for you, “safety” means the option that’s least likely to result in harm to you and yours. Whilst for the rest of us, “safety” means the option that’s least likely to result in harm to people in general. Our definition of safety includes the other cars and pedestrians we might hit. Yours does not.
And I have a hunch that maybe this extends to things like voting.
When you vote, do you vote for what’s likely to be the best result for society and its people in general? Or do you vote purely for what’s likely to be the best result for you and yours?
What do you even mean by “safety”?
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