I have said it many times before: today’s left are pro-choice on exactly one thing, prenatal infanticide. In everything else, they want the government to take control of your lives. William Teach noted that the Biden Administration are trying to shut down existing coal-fired electricity generation plants through emissions regulations which would force them out of business. The Democrats tried to force every American to take an experimental and long-term untested ‘vaccine’ against COVID-19, punishing those who refused with loss of their jobs. They have put in regulations designed to ban the sales of new gasoline-or-diesel-powered trucks and automobiles by 2035, even as the Administration threaten to shut down the coal-fired generation plants, even though 16.2% of our electricity is produced from burning coal. I’m not quite sure how the math works out in trying to push plug-in electric vehicles and concomitantly reducing our electric generating capacity.

Not only do they want to force people into plug-in electric vehicles, the government also wants to regulate the choices we have in those vehicles:

As cars and trucks get bigger and taller, lawmakers look to protect pedestrians

by Joel Rose | Friday, August 23, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

RUCKERSVILLE, Va. — In a cavernous white room full of bright lights, video cameras and microphones, a driverless cart hurtles at 37 miles per hour into the side of a large SUV.

Researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have crash-tested thousands of cars and trucks like this one over the past three decades at their facility in central Virginia.

But a few years ago, they noticed that those vehicles were getting bigger and heavier. So they decided to make the cart that crashes into them larger, too.

“It was meant to represent a small pickup or a midsize SUV, and those vehicles have gotten heavier and heavier over time,” says Becky Mueller, a senior research engineer at IIHS. “So it’s 500 kilograms more weight because that’s what the vehicle fleet now reflects.”

Americans’ cars and trucks are getting bigger and taller, while roadway fatalities have also climbed sharply over the past decade.

Why have cars and trucks gotten bigger and taller? Because those are the vehicles that the car-buying public have chosen to buy. American automobile manufacturers have moved to produce the vehicles that their customers want to buy. Article continues below the fold, because it contains an embedded video.

Now lawmakers in Congress are expected to introduce a bill on Friday that would require federal standards for hood height and visibility to protect pedestrians and other vulnerable road users.

“We’ve seen these standards over time improve vehicle safety with a focus on the people in the vehicle,” said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.), a co-sponsor of the Pedestrian Protection Act, in an interview with NPR. “But this would sort of expand that to pedestrians, bicyclists and people outside the vehicle.”

How do they want to do that?

Scanlon’s bill would require regulators to set standards for hood height, and to make the driver’s visibility part of the agency’s safety assessment for new cars.

It was Dodge which began the big front-end trend in trucks, something which gave them a sales boost, and which General Motors and Ford quickly copied.^[1]Remember: General Motors and Dodge make pickups, but Ford builds trucks! My 2010 Ford F-150 (196,000+ miles) is visibly larger than my previous 2000 Ford F-150, including the front end. I would have been perfectly happy with the same size truck as my 2000, but at the time I was living in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and I needed the four-wheel drive for the areas winters.

Now we have legions of naysayers, people who don’t like seeing bigger trucks and SUVs on the road, but think about what has happened: the very predominance of larger vehicles on the road indicates that the majority of car and truck buyers have chosen larger cars and trucks, meaning that the naysayers are in the minority.

My 5’0″ tall wife bought a 2021 Toyota Camry a couple of years ago, and it’s a decent car. More, it fits her. But, when it comes to visibility for the driver, it really doesn’t fit her 6’2″ husband. The post between the windshield and driver’s door, as well as the rear-view mirror and low-to-me ceiling create serious blind spots when I’m driving the infernal thing, while my visibility in my F-150 is clear and wide. What the good Congresswoman wants is something which would put people like me at more risk of causing an accident due to reduced visibility.

It seems that, at every turn, the American left want to restrict our freedoms and our choices, all for our own good, don’t you know.