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Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

It is the single biggest step backwards in automotive safety in the last ten years.

https://www.travelers.com/resources/auto/safe-driving/how-cr...

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-v...

Are you claiming the Cybertruck doesn’t have a crumple zone? That doesn’t make a lot sense. The entire front hood area is hollow, there isn’t even an engine there.

Just because Elon used a bunch of puffery to play up the exoskeleton doesn’t mean it acts like a boulder when it hits another vehicle.

Crumple zones aren’t even relevant to pedestrian crashes.

The outer skin is made of 3mm cold rolled stainless steel, likely the same 300 grade alloy that SpaceX developed. A conservative estimate for the yield strength (based on similar alloys) is 275 MPa, or roughly 1.8x the pressure required to compress a human bone (150 MPa).

Normal automotive skin by comparison is made from 0.65mm steel or aluminum.

yeah but automotive safety has been great the last twenty years especially for children

It really has, cars have gotten progressively safer every year since 1975 for everyone involved. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/child...

Are these charts simply displaying the gradual decline in children-under-13 walking and riding bicycles?

There's a line specifically for vehicle occupants.

Fair enough, but I don't think anyone doubts the increase in safety provided to vehicle occupants.

The chart shows child pedestrian deaths went from 1632 to 144. So a tenfold decrease. No idea about the stats on child pedestrianship but I’d be surprised if it was down 10 fold.

Why would you be surprised? Even in my lifetime the number of kids you see out and about has decreased dramatically, there's both a lot less to do outside and a lot more to do inside.

Not everyone involved. Not for people outside the car. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat...

you're more likely to die from falling than a pedestrian incident. Even more people commit suicide. Wow this is a dark subject.

Yeah but how many people never ride a bike because of this danger? Or let their kids walk anywhere near a major street? Almost everyone that I know in the US shares that fear, and they aren’t entirely wrong to feel that way (due to the current state of things).

Even when I had to take a break from running due to injury and started cycling, my doctor looked me stone cold in the eyes and asked me to please not risk my life like that.

Like, what the hell

If you think about it automotive safety is phenomenal if you decide to compare it to something else entirely. Few have the courage to say “disregard children outside of the car and think of suicide”. This is groundbreaking thinking

Gee, I wonder what has happened since, say, 2008, that has caused pedestrians to lose any trace of situational awareness and wander in front of moving cars. It's almost as if they're distracted by something that became a factor relatively recently, around the same time that drivers also became much more distracted than usual. Someone should look into that.

Nice

And imagine if only one developed country had this trend, would that be an indictment on that country?

On a more serious note though, because sarcasm is weak person's weapon, the US do have a teen formation issue imho, among them driving lessons. I think the average US citizen born post 70s lack some basis, and I'm also afraid that this seemingly lack of competency feed insecurities. And it's not anybody's fault, the country is made around driving, you can't afford to give 20 to 40 hours of driving lesson to everybody who wants to drive, because everybody _need_ to drive, and for the same reason, you cannot make the driving exam too difficult.

"because sarcasm is weak person's weapon"

I don't like you.

Only for the children in the car. It's gotten dramatically worse for the 99.9999999% of children who are outside the car.

Just wait until crash test results come out before speculating wildly. Hard shells can also crumple.

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