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Americans’ love affair with big cars is killing them

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Witnesses said the driver showed no signs of slowing down. On June 3rd Nicole Louthain and her six-year-old daughter were stopped at a red light in Grand Forks, North Dakota when they were struck from behind by Travis Bell. Such crashes are not uncommon—around 10,000 rear-end collisions occur in America every day. What made this one noteworthy was that the vehicles involved were so unevenly matched. Ms Louthain was driving a Ford Focus, a compact car weighing around 3,000lb (1,360kg), whereas Mr Bell was in a 7,000lb Ram 3500 “heavy duty” pickup. Alas, the disparity proved deadly. Although Mr Bell was not harmed, Ms Louthain suffered serious injuries. (Court documents later showed that Mr Bell had been drinking.) Her daughter Katarina was air-lifted to a nearby hospital where she died two days later.

The crash in Grand Forks helps to illustrate a sad truth about America’s roads. For all the safety features available in cars today to help them avoid crashes, when they happen they are still often determined by the laws of physics. When two vehicles collide, it is usually the heavier one that prevails. This advantage has changed little over time. Thirty years ago when a passenger car crashed with a pickup truck or sport-utility vehicle (SUV), the driver of the car was roughly four times as likely to die; today this driver dies around three times as often. Critics say this is too high a price to pay for roomier interiors and more powerful engines. Carmakers insist they are giving consumers what they want. An analysis by The Economist shows that weight remains a critical factor in car crashes in America. Reining in the heaviest vehicles would save lives.

Chevrolet Silverado 5,774lb

Chevrolet Silverado 5,774lb

Chevrolet Silverado 5,774lb

Mismatches between big and small cars on America’s roads are not new. In the 1960s the 1,400lb Mini Cooper shared the road with the 5,000lb Cadillac Fleetwood and the 5,500lb Lincoln Continental. But whereas today heavier vehicles attract the bulk of the criticism, back then it was lighter ones that drew scrutiny. Indeed many cars of the time were woefully unsafe. In 1969 America’s National Highway Safety Bureau conducted crash tests on a Subaru 360 and a King Midget, two sub-1,000lb “mini-cars”. When pitted against vehicles twice their size, the tiny cars crumpled like soda cans.

Over the years policymakers struggled to solve this mismatch, or “incompatibility”, problem. Often, they made things worse. When Congress set fuel-efficiency standards in the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s, cars were swiftly downsized. Within ten years cars shed 1,000lb; trucks dropped 500lb. Although these changes saved motorists money at the pump, they also led to more traffic fatalities. A paper published in 1989 by researchers at the Brookings Institution and the Harvard School of Public Health estimated that the shift towards smaller, lighter cars in the 70s and 80s boosted fatalities by 14-27%. A report released in 2002 by America’s National Research Council concluded that the downsizing of America’s fleet led to thousands of unnecessary deaths.

As cars got bigger, regulators shifted their focus from the lightest vehicles to the heaviest ones. The impetus for this was the rise of SUVs. Between 1990 and 2005 the market share of such vehicles in America grew from 6% to 26% pushing up the weight of an average new car from 3,400lb to nearly 4,100lb. As suburban soccer moms traded in their station wagons for Ford Expeditions, many felt safer. And they were right. “One of the reasons the roads are much safer is because vehicles… [are] bigger and they’re heavier than they were,” Adrian Lund of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), an industry research organisation, told conference-goers in 2011. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, even advocated for supersizing America’s fleet to improve safety, writing in the Wall Street Journal that large vehicles are “the solution, not the problem”.

But researchers quickly learned that the extra protection provided by heavier vehicles comes at the expense of others on the road. In a paper published in 2004 Michelle White of the University of California, San Diego estimated that for every deadly crash avoided by an SUV or pickup truck, there are an additional 4.3 among other drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. Another paper in 2012 by Shanjun Li of Resources for the Future, a think-tank, estimated that when a car crashes with an SUV or pickup, rather than another car, the fatality rate of the driver increases by 31%. In 2014 Michael Anderson and Maximilian Auffhammer of the University of California, Berkeley estimated that when two cars crash, a 1,000lb increase in the weight of one vehicle raises the fatality rate in the other by 47%.

Researchers also found that the safety benefits of vehicle weight suffer from diminishing returns. This means that, once vehicles reach a certain weight, packing on more pounds provides little additional safety, while inflicting more harm on others. “At some point heavy vehicles cost more lives…than they save,” wrote Brian O’Neill and Sergey Kyrychenko of the IIHS in 2004. This makes intuitive sense, says Mr Anderson of Berkeley. “Once you outweigh the other guy by a factor of two times, is adding 200 pounds more really going to make a difference for you? Probably not. But it’ll make sure that he gets completely destroyed.”

So how big is too big? At what point do the costs of the heaviest vehicles—measured in lives lost—vastly exceed their benefits? To answer this question, The Economist compiled ten years’ worth of crash data from more than a dozen states. Like the data compiled by Mssrs Anderson and Auffhammer, our figures come from reports filed by police officers, who are tasked with recording information about car crashes when called to the scene. Although all states collect such data, we focus on those that collect the most detailed figures and share them with researchers. The resulting dataset, which covers more than a third of America’s population, provides us with a sample that is both big and representative.

In total, our dataset includes millions of crashes across 14 states occurring between 2013 and 2023. Although accident reports vary from state to state, most of the crashes in our database include information about the geographic location of the crash, the number of cars involved, each passenger’s age and gender, whether they were wearing seatbelts and the types of injuries that they suffered. To obtain the curb weight of each vehicle, we collected the vehicle identification numbers (VINs) included in each crash report, and then matched them to vehicle specs data from VinAudit, an auto-data provider. Combining these data yielded roughly 10m crashes. After dropping observations with missing data, we were left with around 7.5m two-vehicle crashes involving more than 15m cars.

What do these data tell us about the relationship between vehicle weight and road safety?

The heaviest 1% of vehicles in our dataset—those weighing around 6,800lb—suffer 4.1 “own-car deaths” per 10,000 crashes, on average, compared with around 6.6 for cars in the middle of our sample weighing 3,500lb, and 15.8 for the lightest 1% of vehicles weighing just 2,300lb. But heavy cars are also far more dangerous to other drivers. The heaviest vehicles in our data were responsible for 37 “partner-car deaths” per 10,000 crashes, on average, compared with 5.7 for median-weight cars and 2.6 for the lightest cars.

To estimate this relationship more precisely, and control for potential sources of bias, we conducted a regression analysis of our sample of 7.5m two-vehicle crashes. We found that getting into a crash with a vehicle that is 1,000lb heavier is associated with a 0.06 percentage-point increase in the probability of suffering a fatality, even after controlling for the curb weight of one’s own car, the age and gender of the driver, the population density of the crash location and whether the passengers were wearing seatbelts. Given that the probability of suffering a fatality in a two-vehicle crash is 0.09%, on average, this suggests that getting hit by an additional 1,000lbs of steel and aluminium—roughly the difference between a Toyota Camry and a Ford Explorer—boosts the likelihood of a fatality by 66%.

As for the weight at which the social costs of driving a heavier vehicle exceed the benefits, the evidence is clear. Vehicles in the top 10% of our sample—those weighing at least 5,000lb—experience roughly 26 deaths per 10,000 crashes, on average, including 5.9 in their own car and 20.2 in partner vehicles. For vehicles in the next-heaviest 10% of our sample—those weighing between 4,500lb and 5,000lb—the equivalent figures are 5.4 and 10.3 deaths per 10,000 crashes. A back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that if the heaviest tenth of vehicles in America’s fleet were downsized to this lighter weight class, road fatalities in multi-car crashes—which totaled 19,081 in 2023—could be reduced by 12%, or 2,300, without sacrificing the safety of any cars involved.

Given these figures, one might expect carmakers to be slamming the brakes on production of their heaviest SUVs and pickups. In fact, they are pressing on the accelerator. Official figures from the Environmental Protection Agency show that the average new car in America weighs more than 4,400lb (compared with 3,300lb in the European Union and 2,600lb in Japan). In 2023 vehicles weighing more than 5,000lb accounted for a whopping 31% of new cars, up from 22% five years earlier.

United States, new vehicle production

Source: Environmental Protection Agency

United States, new vehicle production

Source: Environmental Protection Agency

United States, new vehicle production

Source: Environmental Protection Agency

It would be easy to blame car buyers for this trend but Mr Anderson says that Americans looking for a new car face a Cold War-style “arms race”. “As you see the vehicle fleet around you getting heavier, then you want to protect yourself rationally by buying a bigger and heavier car.” Such rational individual decisions have led to a suboptimal outcome for society as a whole.

When asked to comment on The Economist’s findings, representatives from the big three car manufacturers pointed to safety features that help drivers avoid crashes, rather than those that make them less deadly. “Vehicle weight doesn’t solely determine crash performance,” Mike Levine, a Ford spokesman, wrote in an email, highlighting crash-avoidance technologies such as automatic emergency braking and front and rear “brake assist”. General Motors pointed out that carmakers have improved the compatibility of their vehicles over the years, citing a voluntary deal struck by manufacturers in 2003, more than twenty years ago. Stellantis (whose biggest shareholder part-owns The Economist’s parent company) declined to comment except to say that the company’s vehicles “meet or exceed all applicable federal safety standards”.

Regulators are ill-equipped to fix the problem. America’s tax system subsidises heavier vehicles by setting more lenient fuel-efficiency standards for light trucks, and allowing bosses who purchase heavy-duty vehicles for business purposes to deduct part of the cost from their taxable income. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), America’s top auto-safety agency, uses a five-star rating system to score crash performance, but only takes account of the safety of the occupants of the vehicle in question, not that of other drivers. “Our rating system reflects a bias towards the occupant,” explains Laura Sandt of the Highway Safety Research Centre at the University of North Carolina, “it is not designed to rate the car in terms of its holistic safety effects.” The NHTSA declined to comment on The Economist’s findings.

There are signs that Americans may be wising up. A survey conducted last year by YouGov, a pollster, found that 41% of Americans think that SUVs and pickup trucks have become too big; 49% said such vehicles are more dangerous for other cars and 50% said they endanger cyclists and pedestrians. Researchers are raising the alarm. Since 1989 the IIHS has regularly published the driver fatality rates of popular car models. In 2023, for the first time, the group also estimated the rate at which cars kill drivers in other vehicles. Policymakers are starting to take notice too. “I’m concerned about the increased risk of severe injury and death for all road users from heavier curb weights,” Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in a speech last year.

But the odds that carmakers curb their heaviest, most dangerous vehicles are slim. American car buyers value safety, but mainly for themselves, not society as a whole. And although regulators are tasked with protecting consumers, they rarely do so at the expense of choice, no matter how deadly the consequences. “There may be a certain point where you say, ‘you know what, passenger vehicles shouldn’t be weighing this much,’” says Raul Arbelaez of the IIHS’s Vehicle Research Centre. “But it would, politically, be really hard to gain any momentum on that.” Finally the shift towards electric power is likely to increase their weight further, as battery-powered vehicles tend to be heavier than their internal-combustion equivalents.

“Manufacturers are playing by the book,” says Mark Chung of the National Safety Council, a non-profit. “They’re making a business decision, and it’s a rational decision. Unless they’re forced to think differently, they’re not going to. So I think this is where our federal partners really need to step up.”

Sources: State governments; VinAudit; The Economist

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Checks and Balance newsletter: The Democrats’ future is up for grabs

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Checks and Balance newsletter: The Democrats’ future is up for grabs

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Economics

Trump’s approval rating on economy at lowest of presidential career

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President Donald Trump is registering the worst economic approval numbers of his presidential career amid broad discontent over his handling of tariffs, inflation and government spending, according to the latest CNBC All-America Economic Survey.

The survey found that the boost in economic optimism that accompanied Trump’s reelection has disappeared, with more Americans now believing the economy will get worse than at any time since 2023 and with a sharp turn toward pessimism about the stock market.

The survey of 1,000 Americans across the country showed 44% approving of Trump’s handling of the presidency and 51% disapproving, slightly better than CNBC’s final reading when the president left office in 2020. On the economy, however, the survey showed Trump with 43% approval and 55% disapproval, the first time in any CNBC poll that he has been net negative on the economy while president.

Trump’s Republican base remains solidly behind him, but Democrats, at -90 net economic approval, are 30 points more negative than their average during his first term, and independents are 23 points more negative. Blue collar workers, who were key to the president’s election victory, remain positive on the Trump’s handling of the economy, but their disapproval numbers have shot up by 14 points compared to their average for his first term.

“Donald Trump was reelected specifically to improve the economy, and so far, people are not liking what they’re seeing,” said Jay Campbell, partner with Hart Associates, the Democratic pollster on the survey.

The poll was conducted April 9 through 13th and has a margin of error of +/-3.1%.

The results show that Trump has so far been able to convince only his base that his economic policies will be good for the country over time: 49% of the public believe the economy will get worse over the next year, the most pessimistic overall result since 2023. That figure includes 76% of Republicans who see the economy improving. But 83% of Democrats and 54% of independents see the economy getting worse. Among those believing the president’s policies will have a positive impact, 27% say it will take a year or longer. However, 40% of those who are negative about the president’s policies say they are hurting the economy now.

“We’re in a turbulent, kind of maelstrom of change when it comes to how people feel about what’s going to happen next,” said Micah Roberts, managing partner with Public Opinion Strategies, the Republican pollsters for the survey. “The data… suggests more than ever that it’s the negative partisan reaction that’s driving and sustaining discontent and trepidation about what comes next.”

While partisanship is the most significant part of the president’s negative showing, he loses some support among Republicans in key areas like tariffs and inflation, and has seen a notable deterioration among independents.

Tariffs look to be a substantial part of the overall public’s discontent. Americans disapprove of across-the-board tariffs by a 49 to 35 margin, and majorities believe they are bad for American workers, inflation and the overall economy. Democrats give tariffs a thumbs down by an 83-point margin and independents by 26 points. Republicans approve of the tariffs by a 59-point spread — 20 points below their 79% net approval of the president.

Large majorities of Americans see Canada, Mexico, the EU and Japan as more of an economic opportunity for the United States rather than an economic threat. In fact, all are viewed more favorably than when CNBC asked the question during Trump’s first term. The data suggest the public, including majorities of Republicans, do not embrace the antipathy the president has expressed towards those trading partners. On China, however, the public sees it as a threat by a 44% to 35% margin, substantially worse than when CNBC last asked the question in 2019.

The president’s worst numbers come on his handling of inflation, which the public disapproves of by a 37 to 60% margin, including strong net negatives from Democrats and independents. But at 58%, it’s the lowest net positive approval from Republicans for any of the issues asked about the president. 57% of the public believe we will soon be, or are currently in, a recession, up from just 40% in March 2024. The figure includes 12% who think the recession has already begun.

The public also disapproves of the president’s handling of federal government spending by a 45% to 51% and foreign policy by a 42% to 53% margin.

Trump’s best numbers come on immigration, where his handling of the Southern border is approved by a 53% to 41% margin, and deportation of illegal immigrants is approved 52% to 45%. The president achieved a slight majority of support from independents on deportations and 22% support from Democrats on the Southern border. While still modest, it’s the best-performing issue for Trump among Democrats.

Meanwhile, Americans have turned more negative on the stock market than they’ve been in two years. Some 53% say it’s a bad time to invest, with just 38% saying it’s a good time. The numbers represent a sharp turnaround from the stock market optimism that greeted the president’s election. In fact, the December survey represented the sharpest swing toward market optimism in the survey’s 17-year history and the April survey is the sharpest turn towards pessimism.

The president’s troubles with his approval rating do not appear to be translating for now into significant potential gains for Democrats. Asked about congressional preference, 48% of the public support Democratic control and 46% support Republican control, barely changed from CNBC’s March 2022 survey.

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‘He should bring them down’

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U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Win McNamee | Annabelle Gordon | Reuters

President Donald Trump on Friday lobbed his latest criticism at Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, as the White House’s discontent for the economic policy leader hits a fever pitch.

During a Friday afternoon question-and-answer session with reporters, Trump pointed to examples of prices going down.

“If we had a Fed Chairman that understood what he was doing, interest rates would be coming down, too,” Trump said. “He should bring them down.”

Trump has long argued that the Fed, which sets monetary policy in the U.S., should cut down interest rates. His latest comments come as the White House has ratcheted up its attacks on Powell in recent days.

White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Friday that Trump and his team are assessing whether they can remove the Fed chair. Powell has said previously that he cannot be fired under law and intends to serve through the end of his term as chair in May 2026.

“The president and his team will continue to study that matter,” Hassett said at the White House after a reporter questioned if firing Powell “is an option in a way that it wasn’t before,” according to Reuters.

Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough.” His post included the nickname of “Too Late” for Powell, a continuation of Trump’s habit of giving satirical titles to political rivals.

His use of the word “termination” raised questions around if Trump was referring to Powell’s potential removal from his post ahead of schedule. Hassett said on Friday the administration will look at if there’s “new legal analysis” that would allow for Powell’s firing.

Powell appeared to irk Trump after saying Wednesday that the president’s contentious tariff plan could drive up inflation in the near-term and create challenges for the central bank in managing goals of high employment rates and price stability. Powell said Trump’s levies — many of which are currently on pause — are “likely to move us further away from our goals.”

“We may find ourselves in the challenging scenario in which our dual-mandate goals are in tension,” Powell said in prepared remarks before the Economic Club of Chicago. “If that were to occur, we would consider how far the economy is from each goal, and the potentially different time horizons over which those respective gaps would be anticipated to close.”

Powell also said that the Fed was “well positioned to wait for greater clarity before considering any adjustments to our policy stance.”

The Federal Open Market Committee has its borrowing rate currently targeted in a range between 4.25% and 4.5%, where it has sat since December. Fed funds futures are pricing in a more than 90% likelihood that the central bank holds rates steady again at its policy meeting next month, according to CME’s FedWatch tool.

As Trump’s team has scaled up criticisms, some Democrats have gone on defense. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., warned on Thursday that a president firing the Fed chief would be dire for U.S. financial markets.

“Understand this: If Chairman Powell can be fired by the president of the United States, it will crash markets in the United States,” Warren said on CNBC.

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