Oisín Coghlan

speaker

187 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 31 Aug

Oisín Coghlan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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The Claire Byrne Show · Are cars simply just too big these days? · 7 Aug 2026 podcast

And basically on average, car European cars have been getting 1.2 centimeters longer every year, half a centimeter higher, and half a centimeter wider.

And the most important thing for safety, the bonnet has been getting half a centimeter higher every year since 2010.

But that means like that like that they're 30 centimeters wider than they were at the start of the century.

So that's a foot wider in old money.

They're half a foot uh

Taller and they're about three inches or seven centimeters a higher bonnet.

And that's what really makes the difference.

The report calls it car spreading, which kind of chimes with that issue of car spaces.

But the real issue is safety, because when you're hit by a car with a low bonnet, a normal old-fashioned bonnet, you tend to roll over onto the bonnet and that absorbs some of the energy, and then you fall onto the ground.

Whereas with that

Higher uh bonnets, it hits you in the in the hips or the stomach, it knocks you down, and often you get run over.

And the st the statistics on terms of safety are really startling.

If you're there's a huge study done in the US, and if you're hit by a car that is like over a meter high in terms of the bonnet, you are 45% more likely to be killed.

They've that's what they looked at, 18,000 accidents, and that was the that was the finding.

And even if it's uh

medium car like maybe seventy centimetres, you're still twenty five percent more likely to be killed.

And we're now looking at cars that are that are at seventy to eighty centimeters in height in Ireland, and every ten centimeters makes a real difference.

So it's safety before you get to pollution and car space, which are also really important, it's safety particularly for children, uh, that that's the most important issue here.

I guess it's consumer preferences and ways that that car firms think they can make more money out of us uh basically by get by by giving us this the sensation of greater space.

There's a bit of sort of mutually assured destruction here.

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