I missed this last month but was happy to hear it discussed today on the radio. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is considering requiring new vehicles to pass pedestrian safety thresholds in the same way that it currently requires them to pass driver and passenger safety thresholds. In short, vehicles that posed increased threat to pedestrians (especially threat of head injury) would be less likely to receive approval. This would mostly impact large SUVs and trucks where the front grill of the vehicle is more likely to strike the head of a pedestrian directly. It's still unclear to me if they would take sight lines into account but tall front grills also produce front blind spots that are much larger and tend to be particularly unsafe for children or short adults who may be passing in front of one of these vehicles in a cross walk or parking lot without the driver knowing.
https://apnews.com/article/us-pedestrian-safety-rule-suvs-pickup-trucks-8ab66c3416dcb91484ec502d6e114ad1
As the article mentions, the industry would prefer to avoid these sorts of standards (which may limit their ability to produce these very tall vehicles for which there is a certain amount of consumer demand as this design tends to make drivers feel safer by placing them above other traffic). They would like instead to focus on technology like auto-braking for detected pedestrians.
I agree the technological advancements are really important for pedestrian safety (I recently purchased a Subaru that has much more extensive safety features than any previous car I've owned, including auto-braking, and I really like the additional security this offers me) but my feeling is "why not both?" Also I'd like to see the technology move in a direction of addressing the problem of people looking at their phones while driving. One reason I support these new rules is that so many drivers are inattentive and looking at their phones and if people are going to be doing that then yes I'd like to remove the option for them to drive these huge, tall vehicles that are particularly dangerous to pedestrians.