The original was about cars, not pickups. For pickups the standard was magazines started pulling the max weight trailers up pikes peak (a long steep grade) on a hot day with the AC on (I was going to write at the speed limit, but I suspect they are going faster than legal speed just like everyone else). Without those large grills there isn't enough cooling and the engine will overheat forcing you to slow down. Older trucks could handle this grade and drivers just slowed down a bit - which is the safer thing to do anyway. (either that or you should have a semi-truck - including the additional training required to drive one)
Which is what's caused a size-war with cars. Your own safety by being the bigger car comes at a detriment to someone else's safety, and as cars, especially trucks, have gone off the deep end in this regard they've become downright negligent.
I say this as a benefactor of the bigger-car-wins situation, as my father is still with me by virtue of being in the bigger car recently. It's selfish but it's also sensible if everyone else is going to be in a bigger car, and so I think it's something that could only be curtailed by regulation.
If you're comparing a new Camry to a 1970s Cadillac, sure. Sizes have increased within each product line (see original mini -> modern mini, porsches) and the types of vehicles available in each niche have also grown larger (Scion xB -> kia soul, Toyota pickups -> f150s). The overall trend has been for increasing sizes.
I feel safety standards should not only take into account the damage done to occupants of the vehicle in case of accident, but also the damage done to occupants of the other vehicle (and pedestrians, cyclists, ... ). To a certain extent this is probably already the case, but I think it should be much more important.
My buddy bought a Miata some years back with an "active bonnet" specifically designed to react to hitting a pedestrian. I believe it was only installed on the American version because it's an EU requirement.
It is already the case but it's a process full of massive compromises. There's not much you can do to stop an F150 from annihilating anything it hits.
I think the best defense for pedestrians, cyclists and even other cars is the design of our roads. Stroads are a great example of the worst possible outcome: deadly, fatal speeds, poor separation of different traffic flows and zero defense for pedestrians. Where there's conflicts of interests between cars and other users of the space we should be deferring to those other users, not letting cars fly through city streets at 30mph with naught but a bump of concrete protecting everyone else.
There are 4 sections in the EuroNCAP tests (European safety standards). One of them is about damage done to pedestrians and cyclists. The others are: adult occupant, child occupant, and safety assist features.
The latter includes the annoying seatbelt warning, that's why most (all?) cars sold in Europe have it.
The standards only take into account collisions with cars in the same size class. That's why tiny cars can still have perfect crash test ratings but be absolutely destroyed in a collision with anything significantly larger. You can look at driver fatality statistics for various makes and models and the numbers for smaller cars are like 10-50x higher than larger ones.
