Some of it has to do with CAFE standards using vehicle footprint to determine the target MPG.
gotta love when the funny regulations do the opposite of what you expect them to do.
Yeah, a lot of the regulations are written by the industries they’re supposed to regulate.
if you actually look into what the insurance industries do for crash safety testing it’s actually kind of fucked up.
Because they basically started with full frontal impacts at n speed, that was met, so a decade later they were like “half frontal impacts are a thing now” and turns out most cars performed pretty bad on that, so they fixed that, and like a decade later again, they were fine, and then they were like “oh no, now quarter impact frontal is bad now” and then that’s what they’ve recently fixed.
So most of car safety seems to be for pretty specific, though i suppose “more likely” impacts.
