Buy a Truck If You Want One

I t’s not uncommon to hear gun-rights advocates emphasize that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. To further illustrate the point, they’ll sometimes add other examples, such as saying that spoons don’t make people fat and cars don’t drive drunk.

The weakness of reductio ad absurdum arguments is that sometimes the opponent just accepts the absurd argument, too. That seems to be happening with cars. Cars themselves are becoming a boogeyman for some on the left.

“Killer Truck, Dude” is the headline of a recent piece by Slate’s Dan Kois, which makes an argument that’s gaining popularity among some progressives: Large vehicles are senselessly dangerous, and purchasing one constitutes a grave moral failure. Kois writes that when you buy a pickup truck or large SUV, “you’ve announced, very clearly, that you don’t care if you accidentally kill a stranger. . . . I’m not saying you’re a murderer if you own a gigantic truck. I’m saying you’re a manslaughterer” (italics in original).

He goes on to cite research that shows heavier cars are more likely to kill pedestrians who are struck by them than lighter cars, as if we needed peer-reviewed studies to confirm Newton’s laws of motion. It is pretty obviously true that a heavier vehicle with larger blind spots is going to be marginally more dangerous than a lighter vehicle with smaller blind spots. That’s something car buyers should keep in mind, and if that were the entirety of Kois’s argument, it would be fair enough.

But Kois goes beyond that, suggesting a connection between Americans’ buying larger vehicles and an overall increase in traffic deaths:

One out of every 6 new vehicles sold in America is a full- or midsize truck. Meanwhile, sales of plain old sedans are falling off a cliff. And surprise, surprise, our roads are getting more and more dangerous: U.S. traffic deaths are skyrocketing. How long until your new truck adds to the total?

The answer to that last question, of course, is that the vast majority of drivers will never kill anyone. And as for the relationship Kois implies between Americans’ buying larger vehicles and “skyrocketing” traffic deaths, well . . . it simply doesn’t exist.

The trend of purchasing larger vehicles began after the Great Recession and has continued steadily since then. As the New York Times noted in 2020, SUVs outsold sedans in the U.S. for the first time in 2015, and they outsold them two-to-one by 2019. The motor-vehicle-fatality rate remained flat for that entire period, only increasing in 2020, most likely due to the pandemic.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis categorizes minivans, SUVs, and pickups as “light trucks.” It categorizes cars, including station wagons, as “autos.” Plotting the trend in purchasing and comparing it with motor-vehicle fatalities shows no relationship between the two:

As you can see from the bottom graph, Kois’s description of traffic deaths as “skyrocketing” is a bit dramatic. That increase in 2020 is noteworthy, but it’s not a crisis or an emergency. The belief in skyrocketing traffic deaths has prompted other insanity from the left. Secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, for example, believes traffic deaths can be eliminated — not reduced, but eliminated — through a federal “zero-fatality road safety strategy.”

Kois, for his part, proposes a compromise in which people who want to buy pickups buy midsize SUVs instead. “Look, it’s still way bigger than most people need, and still dangerous,” he writes. “But I’m willing to allow it as a somewhat lighter, smaller, and less deadly middle ground in the size wars.”

“Wars” generally involve at least two sides fighting each other, but it’s hard to imagine that most car buyers are aware that a small segment of the online Left vociferously objects to their consumer preferences. When Kois writes of what “most people need,” he never explains why he gets to decide what most people need. I don’t drive a big truck, and I don’t really want one. I agree with Kois that trucks are too expensive, and I don’t have much use for the amenities a truck provides, but other people think differently. Here’s my compromise: Kois and I don’t buy trucks, those who want to buy trucks do, and no one gets accused of manslaughter for their vehicular preference.

Kois steps up the rhetoric by saying people shouldn’t buy trucks for the sake of America’s children, since children are more likely to disappear in a vehicle’s forward blind spot due to their height. “Maybe you think that if you do run over a kid, it at least won’t be yours?” Kois writes, seemingly unaware that every normal person is horrified by the thought of running over another person, much less a child. “It probably will be your kid, though. In 70 percent of those fatal frontovers, it’s a parent or close relative behind the wheel.”

Being killed by a car is a very low-probability event in general: The fatality rate in 2020 was 1.37 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. Kois’s reasoning is not readily applied to other low-probability events. Take being a victim of violent crime, for example. Kois bemoans America’s suburban sprawl and the car dependency it creates. But urban areas have higher rates of violent crime than suburban areas. There are countless stories from across the country of children in urban areas being killed by criminals unintentionally, which is more of a concern than usual with the number of shootings increasing in most major cities. Are people who move their families from suburban areas to urban areas “manslaughterers” because by doing so they have increased the probability of their children being victimized by violent crime? Of course not. The question is self-evidently absurd.

So, consumers of America, buy any kind of car or truck you like if you want one and can afford it. No matter what type of vehicle you have, always be careful and pay attention to the road when you drive. Nothing more need be said, because this isn’t rightfully a political issue. But if the Left wants to make it one, conservatives should have no problem being on the side of normal people who don’t hyperventilate over their fellow citizens’ car purchases.