Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) were seen talking during the vote for House Speaker. In November of 2021, Gosar tweeted a doctored anime video that depicted himself killing both Ocasio-Cortez and President Joe Biden.

American car executives keep insisting that there is no trade-off between saving the planet and having a hell of a good time behind the wheel. “What I find particularly gratifying,” Ford’s executive chair, Bill Ford, said in April as he unveiled his company’s new electric truck, “is not only is this a green F-150, but it’s a better F-150 … You’re actually gaining things that the internal combustion engine doesn’t have.” Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, sounded equally bullish in a recent social-media post: “Once you’ve experienced an [electric vehicle] and all it has to offer—the torque, handling, performance, capability—you’re in.”

The pitch is enticing, but it raises a few questions. Is the electric F-150 Lightning “better” than the conventional F-150 if its added weight and size deepen the country’s road-safety crisis? And how, exactly, are electric-vehicle drivers going to use the extra power that companies are handing them?

[Robinson Meyer: Electric cars have hit an inflection point]

Converting the transportation system from fossil fuels to electricity is essential to addressing climate change. But automakers’ focus on large, battery-powered SUVs and trucks reinforces a destructive American desire to drive something bigger, faster, and heavier than everyone else.

In many ways, EVs reflect long-standing weaknesses in the design and regulation of American automobiles. For decades, the car industry has exploited a loophole in federal fuel-economy rules to replace sedans with more profitable SUVs and trucks, which now account for four in five new cars sold in the United States.

Meanwhile, SUVs and trucks have themselves grown more massive; their weight increased by 7 percent and 32 percent, respectively, from 1990 to 2021. The 2023 Ford F-150 with a conventional engine, for instance, is up to 7 inches taller and 800 pounds heavier than its 1991 counterpart. Each purchase of a big truck or SUV pushes other people to buy one, too, in order to avoid being at a disadvantage in a crash or when trying to see over other cars on the highway.

This shift toward ever-larger trucks and SUVs has endangered everyone not inside of one, especially those unprotected by tons of metal. A recent study linked the growing popularity of SUVs in the United States to the surging number of pedestrian deaths, which reached a 40-year high in 2021. A particular problem is that the height of these vehicles expands their blind spots. In a segment this summer, a Washington, D.C., television news channel sat nine children in a line in front of an SUV; the driver could see none of them, because nothing within 16 feet of the front of the vehicle was visible to her.

[Angie Schmitt: Big cars are killing Americans]

Few car shoppers seem to care. For decades, Americans have shown little inclination to consider how their vehicle affects the safety of pedestrians, cyclists, or other motorists. (The federal government seems similarly uninterested; the national crash-test-ratings program evaluates only the risk to a car’s occupants.)

As large as gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks are, their electrified versions are even heftier due to the addition of huge batteries. The forthcoming electric Chevrolet Silverado EV, for example, will weigh about 8,000 pounds, 3,000 more than the current gas-powered version. And there will be a lot of these behemoths: A recent study from the U.S. Department of Energy shows that carmakers are rapidly shifting their EV lineups away from sedans and toward SUVs and trucks, just as they did earlier with gas-powered cars.

The danger rises further after accounting for EVs’ unprecedented power. “This sucker is quick!” President Joe Biden exclaimed after taking a Ford F-150 Lightning for a spin last year. He was right: The truck can accelerate from zero to 60 miles an hour in under four seconds, about a second faster than an F-150 running on gasoline.

Car buyers have used zero-to-60 speeds as a proxy for performance ever since the car salesman and automotive journalist Tom McCahill began measuring them after World War II. But the metric is dangerously ill-suited for the faster propulsion of electric powertrains, which are more efficient and contain fewer components than gas engines. The Tesla Plaid Model S, for example, can reach 60 mph in 1.99 seconds, a new record for production cars and far faster than even luxury gas-powered sports cars such as the Porsche 911 (2.8 seconds).

At the risk of stating the obvious, such blistering acceleration serves no practical purpose on a public road, where it can jeopardize everyone’s safety. In Europe, an auto insurer recently linked EVs’ quick pickup speeds to an uptick in crashes. Once again, the most vulnerable street users bear particular risk: A 2018 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that hybrid vehicles, which, like EVs, can accelerate more quickly than gas-powered cars, were 10 percent more likely to injure a pedestrian than their gas-powered equivalents. Superfast acceleration also compromises the efficiency of an electric battery, reducing its range. Nevertheless, car companies are emphasizing acceleration rates in their EV-marketing pitches, such as the Chevrolet Blazer’s “Wide Open Watts Mode.”

[Read: The challenges of an electric-vehicle revolution]

As automakers design faster, bigger cars, they are squandering a chance to make EVs safer than their predecessors. Without a gasoline engine under its hood, the Ford F-150 Lightning could have been equipped with a sloping front end that would have reduced danger to others in a crash. Instead, Ford retained the high hood of its F-150, declaring the now vacant space beneath it a “frunk.” That decision was a missed opportunity for roadway safety, but it made sense when viewed through a business lens; few truck buyers are seeking a model that protects those outside their vehicle.

Indeed, carmakers are likely to claim that their EV designs and marketing pitches merely reflect the size and speed that Americans seek when considering their next vehicle. The electrification of America’s vehicle fleet will happen faster, one could argue, the more consumers view EVs as objects of desire, rather than as obligatory concessions to the greater good. But such claims treat car demand as fixed, overlooking ways in which carmakers’ multibillion-dollar advertising budgets shape consumer preferences. Anyway, why should consumer preferences trump the deadly risks posed by unnecessarily fast and heavy EVs?  

Although other road users’ safety won’t tilt many EV-purchase decisions, shoppers are more likely to care about another societal impact: climate-change mitigation. Gas-powered cars and trucks have accounted for about a fifth of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, but today’s carmakers are eager to adopt a green halo. Ford has vowed to become carbon neutral (albeit in three decades from now), while GM has made “zero emissions” a centerpiece of its corporate mission.

Because they do not produce tailpipe emissions, electric cars are less polluting than otherwise identical gas-powered models. But EVs still create emissions in other ways, notably from the electricity required to build them and charge their batteries. Such energy needs rise dramatically for the biggest cars: According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, the 9,063-pound GMC Hummer EV contributes more emissions per mile than a gas-powered Chevrolet Malibu.

Worse yet, enormous EVs are compounding the global shortage of essential battery minerals such as cobalt, lithium, and nickel. That Hummer EV’s battery weighs as much as a Honda Civic, consuming precious material that could otherwise be used to build several electric-sedan batteries—or a few hundred e-bike batteries. One recent study found that electrifying SUVs could actually increase emissions by restricting the batteries available for smaller electric cars.

That reality is inconvenient for size-obsessed automakers, as well as for certain image-oriented EV buyers, the kind The Onion skewered for believing that “driving one makes up for every bad thing you’ve ever done in your life” (including, presumably, draping your electric charging cord across the sidewalk).

Even modest-size electric cars are not a climate panacea. A 2020 study by University of Toronto scholars found that electrification of automobiles cannot prevent a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 without a concurrent shift toward cleaner travel modes such as public transportation and bicycles. Aware of that need, Norway, a global standout in electric-vehicle adoption, is replacing its EV subsidies with support for people walking and biking, while also considering a car-weight tax to nudge purchasers away from the bulkiest electric cars. A recent article in Nature endorsed such weight-based EV fees.  

The United States is not as farsighted. The Inflation Reduction Act that Biden signed in August includes a tax credit of up to $7,500 for those buying an electric car with a price tag below $55,000; in an implicit incentive to buy a larger vehicle, eligible SUVs can cost as much as $88,000 and still qualify. The new law offers nothing for buyers of e-bikes, e-cargo bikes, or electric golf carts—all of which produce a fraction of the emissions of an electric car while posing much less danger to road users. Americans require little encouragement to buy an SUV or truck; what the country needs are policies that nudge them toward vehicles that are less dangerous to the planet and to other travelers. Instead of capitalizing on electrification in that way, policy makers are further codifying the supremacy of the biggest, most dangerous automobiles.

Car executives, whose supercharged electric behemoths play to Americans’ worst instincts, are surely grateful. But the rest of us shouldn’t be.

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Over the holiday weekend, the Russians fired a wave of missiles at Ukraine—all of which Ukraine claims to have stopped in the first complete defeat of such an attack in this war. Meanwhile, a Ukrainian strike killed scores of Russians at a makeshift military headquarters. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Kevin McCarthy’s loyalty to Trump got him nothing. The Republican majority’s opening debacle You’ll miss gerontocracy when it’s gone. New Year, New Depths

The Russians, according to the Ukrainian government, fired more than 80 weapons (mostly, it seems, Iranian-made drones) at Ukraine since the start of the new year, and the Ukrainians claim they intercepted every one of them. But the attack is more evidence that Russia’s war on Ukraine is, at this point, an attempt to murder civilians and torment the survivors enough to press their government to capitulate. The Russians, of course, have misjudged their enemy: The Ukrainians have no intention of surrendering and are fighting back with great effectiveness. The Russian high command learned this yet again over the holiday weekend, when the Ukrainians scored a direct hit on a makeshift Russian barracks, killing at least 89 soldiers.

I write “at least” 89 because that is the number the Russians admit were killed, and therefore it is almost certainly a lie meant to hide larger casualties. Igor Girkin, once a separatist commander in eastern Ukraine, has become a constant critic of Vladmir Putin’s war effort; he claims that the soldiers were bunked in the same building as ammunition, and that the ensuing conflagration killed and wounded “hundreds,” which is likely closer to the truth. Dara Massicot, an analyst at the RAND corporation (and, I’m pleased to note, one of my students when I taught at the Naval War College), told me today that given the “nature of the destruction at that facility, the official Russian numbers are likely significantly undercounting casualties,” and that reports from Russian social-media channels (often more reliable than official communications) suggest that 200 to 300 men could have been lost.

The successful Ukrainian defense and the Russian losses are good news for Ukraine. Every bit of optimism, however, must be tempered by two realities. First, Ukraine remains outnumbered and potentially outgunned by a much larger Russian Federation. The Ukrainians have survived this far through a combination of excellent strategy, the resilience of its people and their leaders, an infusion of highly lethal Western weapons, the courage of the men and women on the front lines, and a mind-boggling amount of Russian incompetence and stupidity.

The second reality, however, is that the Russians don’t really care about losses. They are willing to sacrifice their own men by the truckload. We are all rightly appalled by the damage the Kremlin is willing to inflict on Ukraine and its people in its unprovoked aggression, but Putin’s cruelty extends to his fellow citizens: He is sending untrained, under-provisioned, and poorly armed men to their death literally to try to plug the holes in his lines with human meat—which is what one of their own commanders has reportedly called them. The Russian president hates Ukrainians, but he and his senior officers seem to hate their own men nearly as much.

Meanwhile, on New Year’s Eve—with so many Russian soldiers only hours from being killed in their bunks—Putin’s minions hosted a televised party that defies description. Performers put on cheesy song-and-dance numbers seemingly lifted from 1970s Soviet pop culture while Russian officers (whose gaudy dress uniforms looked like they were stolen from the palace guards of a James Bond villain) looked on with forced smiles. Parts of the telecast looked as if they had been shot elsewhere and then chroma-keyed into the production, adding a shiny gloss of unreality to the whole mess. One of the hosts, decked out in a red velvet tux, even chortled a cartoonishly evil threat into the camera: “Like it or not, Russia is enlarging!”

That’s a pretty daring claim to make while Russian forces are on the defensive and men are being buried in the rubble of their base. The whole event, like so much of what’s broadcast on Russian television now, seemed like a mash-up of a Soviet variety show, the dystopian news and TV ads from Robocop, and the galas for the rich elites from The Hunger Games, with hosts as creepy as, if less polished than, Caesar Flickerman and Effie Trinket.

This tacky, over-the-top Russian decadence is all the more striking when we think back to Putin’s ostensible reasons for launching this war. He and his lieutenants promised to save the Ukrainians from Nazis, and then from the immoral West and its rich overlords and sexual deviants. He would gather his fellow Slavs under the protective wings of the Russian eagle. Instead, Putin and his Kremlin toadies are blowing those same Slavs to pieces while they themselves swan around wearing fantastically expensive designer clothes and jewelry, dancing and laughing it up while they send Russian boys to their doom.

I still do not know how this all ends. Putin’s barbarism means that it is impossible, even once the war is over, for Russia to reenter the ranks of the civilized world. As I said recently in a discussion with Ian Bremmer and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Russia is now a nuclear-armed rogue state with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. I disagreed with President Joe Biden’s gaffe back in March about how Putin “cannot remain in power,” but I understood the frustration that led to Biden’s outburst. Even if Putin is somehow removed, however, why would anyone give a new Russian regime the benefit of the doubt, at least without war-crimes trials of the “leaders” who launched this blood-soaked misadventure?

Ukraine will survive, recover, and be rebuilt with aid from around the world. But Russia, willing to watch its own men burn in their bunkers for the sake of a dictator’s ego, will have a long way to go before it can again lay claim to being part of a community of nations.

Related:

Ukraine unplugged Sudden Russian death syndrome Today’s News Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s new minister of national security, visited a Jerusalem holy site despite condemnation from Arab leadership and threats by Hamas. The former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to charges of fraud and other crimes. Bloggers and other prominent Russian critics criticized Russia’s military operations following Ukraine’s deadly New Year’s Day strike on Russian forces. Dispatches Up For Debate: Conor Friedersdorf shares readers’ predictions for the future of artificial intelligence. Humans Being: Movies need more than reviews, argues Jordan Calhoun in the final edition of his newsletter.

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Evening Read (Gregory Halpern / Magnun)

The Quiet Profundity of Everyday Awe

By Dacher Keltner

What gives you a sense of awe? That word, awe—the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world—is often associated with the extraordinary. You might imagine standing next to a 350-foot-tall tree or on a wide-open plain with a storm approaching, or hearing an electric guitar fill the space of an arena, or holding the tiny finger of a newborn baby. Awe blows us away: It reminds us that there are forces bigger than ourselves, and it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered.

But you don’t need remarkable circumstances to encounter awe. When my colleagues and I asked research participants to track experiences of awe in a daily diary, we found, to our surprise, that people felt it a bit more than two times a week on average. And they found it in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity, a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk, a song that transported them back to a first love.

Read the full article.

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Read. How to Do Nothing, by the artist Jenny Odell—or choose another of these eight self-help books that are actually helpful.

Listen. Dive into a Broadway cast recording of Company or check out any one of the late composer Stephen Sondheim’s Gen Z–approved musicals about outsiders.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

That bizarre Russian New Year’s Eve party reminded me of the weird alternative universe created in the first Robocop movie. Released in 1987, Robocop envisioned an early 21st-century world (specifically, Detroit) overtaken by urban rot and excessive consumerism. Some of the movie’s predictions, which famously included Detroit declaring bankruptcy, seemed silly in the 1980s but turned out to be a little too on the nose: Detroit went broke in 2013. The movie also foresaw the shimmery shallowness of cable news, which was still a novelty at that time. Peter Weller was terrific in the title role (and I still say this movie should have made him first choice for the role of Batman, which went to Michael Keaton in 1989).

But the fictional ads scattered throughout the film really shine. The “Family Heart Center” invitation to come and check out the new line of artificial hearts is prescient, even if it seems less funny now that we are deluged with pharmaceutical ads (which I think should be outlawed); the ad for the new “6000 SUX” sedan was a stinging tribute to gigantic and inefficient American cars, but it seems quaint in an era when Americans have skipped right over big cars and now prize huge trucks as some sort of personal statement. I am also rather nostalgic for Nukem!, the family game of nuclear-arms racing that ends with the sore loser blowing everyone else up. Very violent, Robocop is not a movie for everyone, but if you can take the bloodshed, there’s a clever critique of late-20th-century America embedded in a darn good science-fiction romp.

— Tom

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.