If you want to keep yourself safe and see more than an SUV driver, why not buy an Abrams?
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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Might be more achievable than you think... maybe not specifically the Abrams, but this Scorpion is available for £68,000, and you can get a Daimler Ferret for $35,000.
Then you can really fuck the cars.
Okay, fair warning to people who want to do this tanks are expensive to maintain. Not as bad as BMWs but still.
Fuck yeah, you better be ready to do your own maintenance work or you'll be paying someone else a lot. Tires for the armored cars are gonna be super expensive, and spare parts are gonna be worse if you can even find them.
Plus, you're gonna have a hard time parking anything bigger than the Ferret.
Daimler Ferret
Thank you for bringing this glorious thing to my attention!
It's interesting, isn't it? Cheaper than a new SUV, small enough to park in a one-car garage, runs on regular gasoline, relatively easy to make street-legal in most jurisdictions, and common enough that getting spare parts should at least be possible. Not a lot of passenger space, but definitely enough power to be useful as a towing vehicle if you want, and obviously fantastic off-road capability, even amphibious versions.
Of course it's like 5mpg, worse than an old steel-body coupe.
Street legal tanks? U mad
Sure I'll just go and get a 40 million dollar loan real quick and buy one
None of those are SUVs
Sorry. Pedestrian crushers.
Elsewhere earlier:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/05/monsters-of-the-road-what-should-the-uk-do-about-suvs
... occupant death rate was 6% higher in SUVs than in conventional cars, and 8% in the biggest ones.
... children are eight times more likely to die when struck by an SUV compared with an average passenger car.
... “These figures suggest that SUVs were probably killing around an extra 3,000 people in the US a year at that time – more than died at 9/11,” write Simms and Murray. Roughly a third of those died in SUV rollovers, and another third from being hit by one. The final third were being killed by respiratory problems because of the extra pollution caused by SUVs.”
The extra weight grinds the tyres:
I feel like we knew this? I remember that being the counterpoint when the first wave of offroad cars started getting popular with middle class women in particular. The dudes who preferred snappy hatchbacks and overpowered not-quite-sports sedans kept pointing this out as a way to argue for their sleeker rides. I remember that being one of the dampeners to the whole thing that seems to never have quite taken in the US.
I mean, it does stand to reason that if you just keep adding mass to the collision and all participants are equally incentivized to do so you just end up with bigger forces.
Title is incorrect.
Massive Pedestrian Crushers do keep occupants safer (literally says so in the article). MORE massive than needed starts to achieve diminishing returns as the extra weight has its own problems.
RTFA.
Trust me bro... BIG SUV, small car, it is science... physics!