Hacker News Reader

Comment by bb123 | Hacker News Reader

Electric vehicles often have much better safety credentials than their ICE powered counterparts for a few reasons:

* All of the weight is in the bottom of the vehicle, giving a lower centre of gravity. I'd bet this will kill the old F150 in a moose (or child!) test.

* The lack of engine means the entire front part of the car is a huge crumple zone. This gives designers more wriggle room for pedestrian protection too. This is an increasingly important requirement in road safety standards.

* The electric motors are able to respond with torque far faster (in ms) than an ICE engine, so traction and stability control are more effective. Again good for things like the moose test.

* Switching our road transport to electric will probably save more children, and the adults they will become, from a lifetime of lung problems and premature death from pollution than better pedestrian safety features ever will.

View on HN

> The lack of engine means the entire front part of the car is a huge crumple zone.

Crumple zones don't help pedestrians.

The new F-150 will be bigger and heavier than the absurdly huge early-00s Hummers. The hood is so tall and long that they're talking about putting forward-facing cameras inside the cab because you can't see anything in front of you shorter than 6" tall out the windshield.

If Ford was interested in safety, they would reduce the outrageous length and height of the front end which is now no longer even pretending to be necessary housing for an engine. Vehicles made to work prioritize visibility, Ford trucks are made to intimidate and kill.

That’s completely untrue - The design of crumple and impact zones like the hood, bumpers and headlights absolutely do help pedestrians. There is a suite of Road safety tests designed to specifically evaluate exactly that: https://www.euroncap.com/en/vehicle-safety/the-ratings-expla...

Not in the US.

See https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/04/28/vehicle-safety-standa...

Nobody is designing market specific hoods and radiator core supports. Maybe a little of the front body plastic but nothing substantial/structural.

The F150 is only really sold in the US/Canada market, at least as a passenger car. You might be able to import one as a commercial vehicle in Europe but I've certainly never seen one.

The only time I've seen an F-150 was near a US military base in Germany.

F-150 isn't sold in the european market, and neither are any other American flat-top high front trucks precisely because they are too deadly to pedestrians.

> The new F-150 will be bigger and heavier than the absurdly huge early-00s Hummers.

And a Tesla Model 3 long range is heavier than a 2020 F-150.

>Crumple zones don't help pedestrians.

Not the kind you're thinking of.

But the top half of the bulbous front end that basically every modern car has is mostly empty space and flimsy plastic to create what's basically a crumple zone for pedestrians.

> The new F-150 will be bigger and heavier than the absurdly huge early-00s Hummers.

Citation needed

Since I'm getting downvoted I figured I'd post the numbers.

New F-150 Lightning curb weight estimate is 6500 lbs.

H1 is 7200-7500 lbs.

H2 is 6400-6600 lbs.

The F-150 is a couple feet longer but both the H1 and H2 are wider and taller.

Use those numbers to make your own determination. F-150 specs are from here: https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America...

> The lack of engine means ... This gives designers more wriggle room for pedestrian protection too.

this is important. It is an option they DID IGNORE! for marketing.

The thing that kills pedestrians (both physically and preventing vision) is the high trunk. They could have lowered it since there is no 9L engine or whatever inside. But they decided to keep it for "frunk" marketing.

> Switching our road transport to electric will probably save more children, and the adults they will become, from a lifetime of lung problems and premature death from pollution

The sizable majority of modern car pollution comes from particulates that come off asphalt, not emissions from engines. It's still important to go EV to reduce carbon, but that doesn't improve local air quality. Modern internal combustion engines have pretty minimal pollutants in their emissions.

Getting older cars off the road is the major way to improve emission pollutants. Beyond that, improving air quality to any significant degree requires either fewer cars on the road, or less heavy cars on the road. Asphalt particulates scales quadratically with the weight of the car.

I'd like to see some actual data rather than some handy-wavy bullet points speculating on what maybe could be the case.

I agree with the rest, but I'm pretty skeptical of this claim:

> Switching our road transport to electric will probably save more children, and the adults they will become, from a lifetime of lung problems and premature death from pollution than better pedestrian safety features ever will.

Do you (or anyone) have order-of-magnitude estimates for either/both of these figures? I mean, electrification in general is great, but the F150 cannot take credit for all of it. I am interested in reduced pollution deaths/QALYs that can be attributed to F150 electrification specifically -- that's the topic of this article and thread.

Here are some stats on fossil fuel deaths in general

https://youtu.be/Jzfpyo-q-RM?t=355

On average in the US, the CO2 output required to power an electric vehicle is 1/3 of an ICE vehicle. So theoretically this would translate to less deaths as bb123 suggests, but hard to compare to direct pedestrian deaths. (Yes there are some logical gaps as ICE C02 output is a very low percentage of total fossil fuel output).

Remember the emissions to manufacture the vehicle... they're higher for EVs. Lifecycle emissions for EVs therefore aren't much lower than ICE.

The lifetime emissions for EVs are massively lower than ICE's, unless the EV gets totalled in its first year of operation.

They are maybe 40-50% lower. Does this move the needle for climate change? No. And it’s not just lifetime car emissions. It’s the car dependent life that cars require

Source: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129478_lifetime-carbon...

It's only 50% lower because most electricity grids emit a lot of carbon. Once the grid switches to 100% carbon-free, the number becomes a lot lower. And most of the embodied carbon in the car comes from industrial electricity or transport, so as the grid & transport goes green the embodied carbon goes down, eventually to zero.

Electricity only accounts for about 25% of greenhouse gas emissions, but it also enables industry (20%) and transportation (15%) to decarbonize too, by allowing them to replace their fuel with electricity.

A 50% reduction is already massive, but electrification of both vehicles and the industrial processes creating the vehicle will eventually let that number go to zero which should be our goal.

if you're adding those, you need to add the emissions when actually processing crude oil into gasoline.

Hang out at a bus station or a school during kid pickup time, you'll feel like you're in a coal refinery. I can't imagine that's good for your lungs.

Here's half of the equation: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl... https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/child...

Edit: Here's relevant data to the other side: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/10/vehicle-... https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/asthma_stats/asthma_underlying_de...

> * All of the weight is in the bottom of the vehicle, giving a lower centre of gravity. I'd bet this will kill the old F150 in a moose (or child!) test.

The important thing to note about the moose test is that it doesn't specify that the moose has to survive. It's simply a test of whether the occupants will survive hitting a moose. I would wager anything that is designed to pass the moose test will kill anything that it hits that is below the moose's center of gravity. So actually the vehicle is way less safe for pedestrians than a vehicle that would fail the moose test.

But if all that matters is the safety of the occupant I guess this is okay.

> * The lack of engine means the entire front part of the car is a huge crumple zone. This gives designers more wriggle room for pedestrian protection too. This is an increasingly important requirement in road safety standards.

The kind of "crumple zone" that enhances pedestrian and cyclist safety is more like a beer can. Again, the crumple zones in this vehicle are designed to keep the occupants safe but not designed to keep any other road user safe.

> The important thing to note about the moose test is that it doesn't specify that the moose has to survive.

The moose test is about safely dodging around a moose that wanders out onto the road without wrecking the vehicle.

Why did you write this long comment as if you were an expert on the moose test if you don't even know what the moose test is? That's an incredibly disingenuous thing to do.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv9Oo5TMiWw

I assume because they want to see less vehicle traffic on the road. Arguments along these lines are thrown out by people that hate cars on the road to help change the argument from facts to 'what about the children'.

Your second point is also untrue. The shape and structure of traditional car crumple zones and impact areas like the hood and headlights have a significant impact on pedestrian survivability: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257775117_Crumple_z...

These zones are explicitly designed with pedestrian safety in mind, as it is a specific area of testing for roadworthiness certifications: https://www.euroncap.com/en/vehicle-safety/the-ratings-expla...

> The important thing to note about the moose test is that it doesn't specify that the moose has to survive. It's simply a test of whether the occupants will survive hitting a moose.

Completely wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_test

The car fails the test (at that speed) if the "moose" is hit at all (or it skids, turns or tips over).

Ideally in the moose test the moose and car never make contact. It is a test of the car's ability to safely support extreme evasive manoeuvres, rather than its crash survivability.

Tall SUVs typically fare worse at this because of their higher centre of gravity causing instability:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_test

Reply on news.ycombinator.com