It's not your imagination: Cars have gotten taller over the past few decades. Safety regulations influence automotive designs in ways that laypeople may not realize. In particular, hoods have gotten higher; manufacturers are required to raise them above the engine block, leaving a gap, so that if the car strikes a pedestrian and their head strikes the hood, the hood has room to deform and thus cushion the blow.

Perhaps forthcoming regulations will alter automotive design parameters further. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) recently noticed a spike in pedestrian and bicycle fatalities, prompting a study. What they found is that "The forward blind zones of six top-selling passenger vehicles grew substantially over the past 25 years." Taller hoods, thicker A-pillars and larger sideview mirrors are shrinking our forward field of view.

By placing camera rigs in a variety of car models, then running the visuals through computational sotware, the study created 360-degree blind zone maps. In the animation below, the blue area—which is disturbingly large, as the red pedestrian is about to learn—indicates the blind spots of a sample vehicle:

The study found an across-the-board increase in forward blind spots over a 25-year period of vehicle design with, unsurprisingly, SUVs doing the worst.

"Goal: Researchers measured the blind zones of six top-selling light-duty vehicle models (one pickup truck, three SUVs, and two passenger cars) across multiple redesign cycles (1997-2023) to determine whether the blind zones were getting larger.

"Results: In the 10-m forward radius nearest the vehicle, outward visibility declined in all six vehicle models measured across time. The SUV models showed up to a 58% reduction in visibility within a 10-m radius. Other vehicles exhibited smaller (7%-19%) reductions."

The news isn't all bad—though the results are still mixed: "At longer distances (10 m to 20 m), vehicles demonstrated both increases and decreases in visibility."

Auto designers don't need to crumple up all of their new sketches just yet; the IIHS says further study is required.