Are there any vehicle regulations designed to protect pedestrians or cyclists? A quick search of "pedestrian" in the FMVSS returns nothing [1]. We can't blame automakers for marketing whatever they think will sell best that passes the regulatory bar. If new regulations would be helpful, let's make them.
What would it look like to optimize for pedestrian safety? The new USPS truck [2].
Here in Europe yes for sure. For example bull bars are forbidden and also hood ornaments that stick out like Mercedes used to have.
However I think this truck is US only for now so perhaps this is why it didn't matter there? I'm sure they would have thought of it before releasing it.
The relevant test in this report simulated a single-vehicle impact. The best insurance policy against kangaroos/deer is a modern, safe vehicle with crumple zones (and, y'know, an actual insurance policy that you'll live to collect).
A problem with hitting a deer, especially in a car, is that the bulk of body mass is sitting just above hood level and will therefore impact directly on and then through the windshield at the driver. Crumple zones won't matter.
> We can't blame automakers for marketing whatever they think will sell best that passes the regulatory bar.
Why not? This is such a cynical take, and I don't think it goes without saying that it's true. Unless you believe that organisations are organisms with an express evolutionary goal to seek profit at all cost, at least. But I think many non-profits and other companies which act in the interest of something other than profit-maximisation make it quite clear that this isn't the case.
(And, no, companies are not obligated to maximise profits. It's quite well-established that this is a myth.)
> Tesla has not said whether it will sell Cybertrucks in Europe, but its chief engineer this month told motoring publication TopGear that EU safety rules aimed at protecting pedestrians by limiting external protrusions could make it tough to sell there.
My bet is on them working their way into being put into a vehicle classification that allows them to do whatever they want.
I can see some enterprising Tesla lawyers propose that because of weight and towing power its actually a tractor if they just add some special legal connector.
Cause it’s electric they would wedge it into some newly defined class of “electric tractors.”
> I can see some enterprising Tesla lawyers propose that because of weight and towing power its actually a tractor if they just add some special legal connector.
That be great, tractors are banned to be used within cities and on highways (in many places).
> That’s no problem, city and suburbs are already full of Teslas
As I said, I'd be very happy about it being classified as a tractor because then it won't come close to any pedestrian-heavy areas like cities, which this machine seems to purposefully be as hostile to as possible.
Elon asks for an infinite torque mode and shoots a video of the cyber truck pulling a tiller followed by dual anhydrous ammonia tanks, turns to the camera and says "America Needs Farmers" to make sure the pandering is effective. Now it's definitely a tractor, no argument possible lol
Do you spend a lot of time on social media? If so then these platforms will be feeding you more of what they think you want to see, which will result in you having a faulty perception that there is some hyperfocus on the Cybertruck when it reality there isn't.
A collection of links posted to a minor website that is historically obsessed with all things Tesla is not representative or indicative of any kind of "hyperfocus" in the broader world.
I dunno. My neighbor across the street's license plate is something like "CYBRTRCK" but they're driving a Tesla. The r/san_francisco subreddit is absolutely vicious about them, too -- rampant cheering and encouraging people to tow them at any chance.
The public perception has actively discouraged me from wanting one - even though I find the design cool.
> Perhaps this hyperfocus on the Cybertruck will help jumpstart a larger shift in public opinion on general automobile-pedestrian safety?
I have bought over a dozen cars in my adulthood, and not once has the thought of pedestrian safety ever crossed my mind. Nor will it factor into my decision if I buy a dozen more. I am pretty much going to assume that no matter what vehicle I buy, if I hit a pedestrian going anything faster than a crawl, I am going to do damage to that person.
I am in a heavy moving object made of sturdy materials larger than the pedestrian. They are not going to have a good outcome.
> and not once has the thought of pedestrian safety ever crossed my mind.
Neither should it, just like you shouldn't have to worry that the car is going to catch fire because of a minor fender bender. The thing that keeps you and pedestrians safe should be a sane bunch of regulations that car manufacturers abide by to meet safety requirements.
This isn’t a thing that makes sense to regulate at an individual level, like how BP tried to pass off the fact that they are destroying the environment on regular people for not using reusable bags or whatever. Left as is car manufacturers would be happy to put up a “Pedestrian fatality footprint” for cars and it would have 0 impact on sales. If we want those changes in how society works they need to be mandated by economics or political policy. You should not be able to insure a car that poses over a certain hazard to pedestrians for road usage.
All that seems to me is some sort of pie in the sky activist notion to try and get all cars off the road. It’s not serious, reasonable, or able to be implemented.
Reducing cars in large cities would be a good idea but a more basic thing is just to enforce pedestrian safety standards on vehicles. Eg. If you hit someone with a car they need to go over the hood instead of just being smashed by the front and drivers need to have sufficient visibility of pedestrians.
I don't want to strawman, but I also can't read your position as anything other than "if the risk can't be reduced to literally 0, it's not worth trying to reduce/avoid increasing it at all".
There are obviously levels to risk. At the limit, I'm guessing you probably oppose someone attaching a running chainsaw to their front bumper.
The concern about the Cybertruck seems disproportionate to the dangers of millions of heavy, low visibility, high front-bumper vehicles on the roads right now.
The cybertruck is unique in that it does not crumple like modern cars do, due to its stainless steel construction. Making cars into tanks is actually pretty easy, and back in the 50s cars were built like that. But people in collisions often died in them because of physics. It’s like the difference between running into a wall of concrete at 30 mph vs a wall of cushion. The point shouldn’t be “preserve the car, break the human,” it should be the opposite. Elon dgaf,
this is his baby.
More like running into a wall of concrete while holding a piece of concrete in front of you vs. holding a pillow.
It reminded me of a video from China, in which a bike helmet merchant (?) proudly displays how his helmet can withstand blows from a sledgehammer, while the other helmets crumple. Like, bro, it supposed to crumple.
Helmets are absolutely not meant to crumple. It's not only blunt impact a helmet protects you from. Its also the penetration of your skull by pointy hard objects.
"Helmets are made with an inner EPS (expanded polystyrene foam) shell and an outer shell to protect the EPS. The density and the thickness of the EPS is designed to cushion or crush on impact to help prevent head injuries. Some manufacturers even offer different densities to offer better protection. The outer shell can be made of plastics or fiber materials. Some of the plastics offer very good protection from penetration as in Lexan (bullet-resistant glass) but will not crush on impact, so the outer shell will look undamaged but the inner EPS will be crushed."
Looks like a bunch of people who don’t have any information speculating about something which they have no prior experience with (new body construction style) and reporter’s reporting it as some how news worthy to get a sensational article.
Every Tesla made to date has been safer than the last and they are all rated as safer than any other car you can buy. There is no reason to believe they would abandon that world class safety goal with this product. I would be surprised if at minimum this didn’t turn out to be the highest rated vehicle in its class for safety when the official crash tests are published.
> The cybertruck is unique in that it does not crumple like modern cars do, due to its stainless steel construction.
This is simply not true, and I do not understand why people repeat it constantly.
Cybertruck has an exceptionally strong skin, but that's because unlike in other modern cars, the skin is structural. In other cars, there's a frame below and the skin is basically just there to shield things from the rain. In cybertruck, the outer shell is the main structure. In crash tests, you can see that cybertruck clearly has a crumple zone up front, and the entire structure is not stiffer than other trucks in a way that harms the passenger in a crash.
No it’s not. The Cybertruck has a structure just like every other car on the road. The skin might be adding rigidity, like other cars, and might be stressed, but the skin is not the main structure.
There are photos of the structural components all of the net.
I don't know exactly how to interpret this video, but it seems the Cybertruck decelerates the passenger over about the same time and distance as electric F150:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLKor7Aven4
Cars in the 70's and early 80's all had giant motors in them, and double barrel carbs just to have enough juice to haul all that metal. They were definitely tanks compared to pretty much any car that came thereafter.
Hrm. So if you take the Cadillac Series 70 (which would have been seen in its lifetime as a very large car; they tended to be used as head-of-state limos and that sort of thing), it was about 2 tonnes for most of its lifetime and peaked at about 2.5 tonnes. More normal full-size sedans were well under 2 tonnes. An F150 is 2.1 tonnes for the non-electric version. A cybertruck is 3 tonnes.
Cars definitely did get smaller in the 80s, but they’ve been getting bigger again for a while. 70s cars did indeed have bigger engines, but they weren’t very efficient engines.
F150, Silverado, and RAM seems to still be the worst according to that site?
Maybe it’s because pickups are driven less in cities?
I think most criticism I’ve heard about trucks are for pavement princesses, and not for folks living in rural areas actually using them for what they’re designed for.
If I plotted the number of pedestrian deaths by the kind of phones they use, we'd see that iPhones and Androids are the killers, concluding that BlackBerrys are by far the safest phone to have if you're a pedestrian and don't want to get hit by car.
If you want to see what kind of vehicle is the most dangerous to pedestrians, all of those plots should be normalized by the percentage of people who drive that sort of vehicle.
In Toronto, which is a metropolis, pickup trucks are everywhere. Is it different in other cities? Most of them get used like regular cars with nary a usage bump or scratch in the back in their lack of use, which is baffling (everyone has their theories), but they are very much not a rarity here.
NYC is a city entirely surrounded by other dense cities and fairly unique in how impractical a large vehicle would be just due to the sheer impossibility of parking it. Looking at a map, I'll bet if you drive out to, say, Monticello you'll find yourself in Truck Territory long before you get there.
It looks like my 2 year old drew it. He's been obsessed with it ever since going to see it at the local showroom and he's going to be in for a happy surprise when I take delivery of mine, whenever that is.
> "If you have an argument with another car, you will win," Musk said.
Music to my ears, given that I live in a city with a recent uptick in stolen Kias fleeing the police at high speeds.
If there was a warthog look-alike with a hard top available, I'm fairly sure it'd look and sell better than the Cybertruck. It's already similar looking to kitted-out Jeeps which people seem to love.
Bonus points if it uses a battery and generator to power electric motors, which is a pretty reliable and light maintenance setup.
Haven't seen one in person, but I know some people on the list for it. I think it looks cool in pics so far. It's kinda like a Hummer for people into AI
It's a Rorschach test. If it appears garishly stupid to you, there's a high probability that you had a pre-existing dislike for Elon Musk and that this condition has interacted with your perception of the Cybertruck.
For some reason they're called "bumpers" instead of "slicers" or "crushers" and frankly I just think that's just a failure of language not being able to keep up with the blazingly fast pace of transportation technology over the decades and decades. /s but not really
This is from Tesla, the U.S. company which has been shipping a half baked safety critical feature under the name Autopilot/Full Self Driving for years, with no government pushback.
America is basically the wild west. Whether you're a pedestrian or in another car, you're on your own.
125 people are killed every single day on the road in the US. No matter how you slice it, the US is an outlier compared to developed countries. [1]
Per capita the US sees 12.9 fatalities per 100,000, worse than Chile and Mexico. More than twice the death rate of Canada (5.8)
Per 100,000 motor vehicle per year the US sees 16.1 fatalities, comparable to Bulgaria and Lithuania, almost double the death rate of Canada (8.9)
Per 1 billion vehicle kilometres driven, it's 8.3 fatalities. That's not quite double Canada's rate of 5.1, but still much higher than other developed countries
The US is a very dangerous country in terms of vehicles compared to developed countries.
First everyone started driving SUVs and pickup trucks. Then the SUVs and trucks got bigger and heavier until they could barely fit in a parking spot or highway lane.
So obviously the next step was to make a truck out of steel with sharp edges, and have an enormously heavy battery for maximum destructive potential.
So best case both vehicles get to "share" the crumple zone of the non-Tesla, so still not as safe for either. Tesla x Tesla collisions both are fucked, and Tesla x anything else solid Tesla is fucked
I certainly don't. My Model X actually has crumple zones to absorb impact from any direction. The Cybertruck has a completely rigid frame, meaning any impact is directly transferred to the passengers. The only thing that's walking away from an accident with a Cybertruck is the Cybertruck.
> meaning any impact is directly transferred to the passengers
I'm not sure this follows. There are some clips showing impact from a front collision being transferred to the rear wheel steering axle. I want to see standardized crash tests like NHTSA and IIHS. I wouldn't be surprised if your Model X performs better, but what I would want to know is how the cybertruck compares to other trucks.
Just to add, it seems like the overwhelming concern i hear expressed is for pedestrians.
I'm also a bit concerned in general with the trend of vehicle on vehicle collisions. Cars are adding a good fraction of a ton of batteries, and that's somewhat terrifying: that a cars inertia is so much higher than it used to be. Now instead of a car with well designed crumple zones we have a car designed by some lunaric to go out and win Robot Wars, designed for Mad Max car combat?
In the US, we have trouble with bad visibility & vehicle heights that send pedestrians under. But there at least been a somewhat civil world where we don't have giant swinging blades and cleavers attached to cars. It's hard to see the cybertrucks design as anything but something out of Carmageddon, as flauting the at least semi polite society we lived & building something terrible. With the added vehicle masses at play, it feels like we could start to see some incredibly terrible vehicle on vehicle colossions too, not that we don't already have enough vehicle based horrors to haunt us.
I see a lot of complaining by armchair experts regarding the cybertruck.
I will admit that I know nothing about it but I know this isn't the first car that Tesla has built. They are a very successful company with plenty of cars on the road and they are setting quite a few of the standards that others follow. I also know that there are federal regulations that all cars must follow regarding safety.
Given all of that, is it still possible that this is a car designed by a lunatic to win the robot wars? it could well be true but you can buy it with the ease of mind that when you are stomping everyone else in these wars, you will be perfectly free from liability since its government aproved.
We had this in the 80s with tanks of cars that didn't have anything like crumble zones. The entire force was absorbed by the steel frame. A lot of people died.
Bumper height plays a far bigger role in pedestrian fatality than hardness of the vehicle shell. Cybertruck's bumper is significantly lower than pretty much every other pickup truck out there.
This is a rather one sided discussion here. Aside from the fsd hysteria, the camera set and current functionality for automatic breaking may significantly reduce front impact to pedestrians. I also feel it is disingenuous for no one to mention how dramatically lower the front “grill” is compared to other trucks and many cars. the sharp angle is a concern(see, give evidence of a balanced view). overall, the low and regularly sloped hood is probably a better situation than many here are guessing. unless your boots are stuck in the mud, people carry the majority of their weight above the bumper of the cybertruck- this really changes the dynamics, suddenly you’re sliding up a perfectly smooth slope. obviously still some questions about how the steel will respond and hardness is a concern still. but perhaps the equation changing doesn’t mean it its for the worse, many parts and pieces come together in something fairly novel here.
> "The big problem there is if they really make the skin of the vehicle very stiff by using thick stainless steel, then when people hit their heads on it, it's going to cause more damage to them," said Adrian Lund, the former president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), whose vehicle crash tests are an industry standard.
Who is hitting their head (and on what) in this sentence? Clearly there are no such thing as soft cars when it comes to human skulls?
> Who is hitting their head (and on what) in this sentence? Clearly there are no such thing as soft cars when it comes to human skulls?
Pedestrians, struck by the vehicle. A typical hard pedestrian strike hits the legs, and the person flips over and hits their head on the hood. Modern vehicles ensure there is a significant gap between the hood and the engine, so the hood has room to deform and absorb the impact.
So yes, a large piece of thin sheet metal can be a relatively soft place for a skull to land.
My friend was biking across a parking lot exit and got slammed by a car, t-boning her. She faceplanted into the hood, really really bad. A while later, she saw the same car and they had not fixed the hood, and she could see the crumple of where her face slammed into it.
Given that the metal of the hood deformed to her face, that’s a decent amount of impact energy. I would wager her outcome would’ve been even more gruesome had she carried that energy into a rigid, stainless steel hood.
Not only is there such a thing as a distinction between relatively soft and particularly dangerous parts of a car for a human skull to hit, but there have in fact been some cars made (one example is this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_C6 ) where the bonnet is rigged to explode upwards in a pedestrian collision so that it meets the impact earlier and does a better job of keeping their skull away from the engine block.
There are plenty of collisions where a car collides with something at slow speeds like in a parking lot or at an intersection. In these collisions, it’s preferable for the car to “give” a little bit and not just crush someone’s kneecaps. It makes me wonder if there’s gonna be higher insurance costs associated with a car that is more likely to have higher liability claims.
When pedestrians hit the bonnet or windscreen of a car, the impact is relatively soft.
The A-pillar or the engine (under the bonnet if there is not enough space between the two) are much more dangerous. Some cars have an active bonnet that can spring up to make room and give a softer landing.
It might not protect its occupants, if all that force gets thrown at the driver instead of the front end of the car. Crumple zones soften impacts on occupants, at the expense of destroying the car.
what… is the point of this article? some randos raised “concerns”? classic journo-trash. not a cybertruck afficionado by any means, but… come the fuck on.
> what… is the point of this article? some randos raised “concerns”? classic journo-trash. not a cybertruck afficionado by any means, but… come the fuck on.
"randos" such as the former acting head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and a George Washington University auto safety professor.
Some countries and cultures around the world have very different closely held thoughts about pedestrian safety.
as much as I personally like the thing (though its a little big in my opinion), I am in agreeance that it would not be allowed on Australian roads. Its just not safe enough by our standards.
>Samer Hamdar raised concerns about limited "crumple zones," but added that other features might make up for that.
Innovative vehicle design could challenge traditional safety paradigms like crumple zones. I guess we'll have to check the extent of the compensatory shock-absorbtion mechanisms.
Expert 2:
>"If you're in a crash with another vehicle that has a crumple zone and your car is more stiff, then their cars are going to crush and yours is resistant."
A stiffer structure could also protect the occupants better by deforming to a lesser degree? We're entering somewhat paradoxical territory with this criticism.
Expert 3:
>The heavy weight of the trucks and their high acceleration "raise red flags for non-occupants."
Heavy weight vehicles aren't a new phenomenon in the automotive industry, right? I'm uncertain about how this safety hazard is specifically unique to the Cybertruck, as opposed to many other vehicles.
Re 2: The whole point of a crumple zone is that the car crumples instead of the occupants. More specifically, you want a stiff frame around the occupants creating a safe volume of space, and anything outside that to be more malleable, so that it absorbs as much energy as possible during impact.
Re 3: heavy weight vehicles are indeed much more dangerous than lighter ones to everyone outside of them. That by itself is indeed not a new thing the Cybertruck is bringing to the table (unfortunately). But as for why heavy mass + high acceleration is a especially dangerous combination, refer to Newton's laws of motion.
What would it look like to optimize for pedestrian safety? The new USPS truck [2].
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/fmvss [2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/23/22297823/usps-postal-serv...