This helps explain why passenger and driver deaths have remained mostly stable over the past decade while pedestrian fatalities have risen by about 50 percent. From 2019 to 2020, pedestrian deaths per vehicle miles traveled increased a record 21 percent, for a total of 6,721 fatalities. This astonishing death toll has multiple causes, but the scale of the front end of many pickup trucks and SUVs is part of the problem, and that’s been obvious for quite a while.

Back in 2002, the New York Times writer Keith Bradsher noted in his book, High and Mighty, that the auto industry tapped into some “reptilian” impulses for more aggressive vehicles. A marketing savant at Chrysler in the 1990s, who helped launch the SUV trend, liked to compare the road to a “battlefield.” Bradsher quoted him as saying, “My theory is, the reptilian always wins. The reptilian says, ‘If there’s a crash, I want the other guy to die.’ Of course I can’t say that out loud.” He probably meant “the guy in the other car.” What about the guy in the street? In 2003, a study found that SUVs were three times more likely than sedans to kill pedestrians when they struck them. Leg injuries are dreadful, but “serious head and chest injuries can actually kill you,” the injury-biomechanics professor Clay Gabler told the Detroit Free Press in 2018.