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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

It's a brutally agressive looking machine - I assume intentionally so. That flat front pretty much guarantees padestrian/cyclist/motorcyclist fatailities in a collision. And over on Ars Technica they say "Musk implied that in a crash with another vehicle, the Cybertruck [...] will destroy the other vehicle." [1] - and presumably therefore kills its occupants too.

Opinion: this is the purest physical realisation of the Musk/Tesla world-view. A kind of Conway's law for cars. Deeply depressing, and the tech merely distracts from this a little. Why do we need this thing, again?

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/11/the-tesla-cybertruck-fi...

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We also need more legislation holding automakers and drivers liable for the impact of their designs on other road users. I'm not up to speed on product liability, but this type of statement from Musk seems likely to invite lawsuits from anyone injured by a Cybertruck.

Hopefully the car has a good pedestrian avoidance system. Otherwise, it seems to have a large blind spot for the driver. The nearly flat front also looks dangerous as well.

Lets remember that most sedan [and smaller] cars do not fair well in collisions with pick-up trucks like the Ford F250... and neither do pedestrians and cyclists. Then consider all of the even larger, heavily industrial vehicles on the road...

Does look like the cybertruck might be even burlier than a F250... but the point is, we already share the road with "mini-tanks" [that are intrinsically more dangerous to other vehicles in collisions]. Adding one more niche model is not a significant risk increase.

And the manufacturers of all of these vehicles should be partially liable for damage caused.

Don't forget that aggression and belligerence in vehicle design is a selling point to certain segments of truck buyers. It's not enough that the vehicle will protect its occupants in a crash. Its ability to destroy the thing it crashes into is a selling point to some people. I have more than once heard people boasting about how much their truck would damage a [slur] little Prius (or whatever) if they ran into one.

what I don't get is why the effect of a crash on other isn't taken into account in the evaluation of car safety

It is. One of the key differences between the EU and US regulations is (was?) that there is a greater evaluation of what happens to a pedestrian when hit by the car being tested.

I hope this car never makes it into Europe in current form.

Tesla have made statements saying that it won't. As a layman, I don't think the flat front is possible.

Sharp edges are also not allowed in most European countries.

The impact to pedestrians is taken into account. The impact on other cars isn't, because I don't see how you'd do that objectively - do you just crash it against an identical model? A selection of several other cars from different categories/brands? How would you determine those? Do you just test head-on collisions, or the whole gauntlet of impacts? Wouldn't that make any test require dozens and dozens of vehicles, and ultimately tell you very little because the variety of vehicles on road is so huge that your crash results against a Honda Jazz might mean nothing in a crash against a Civic or anything else.

Well I think one can start with a bit of an average car. I mean humans vary a lot too. Both in size and resilience. If there’d be some wireframe made that can represent a bit of the car rigidity of an average 2008 car for example we can definitely see how this monolith would vaporize any car, versus the Jazz that’d mostly dent itself in a crash. And include that in the rating as well. Current SUV trends are abysmal for others with their 800bhp and near 3000kg kerb weight. It’s I think a solid way to stop this race to the bottom.

it would be possible to test the effect of the car on a (or several) standardized objects, and compare the car resistance to these standardized objects

The issue with that is that manufacturers would obviously work to make sure their cars score super well against those specific objects. Would you be able to make sure it translates well to collisions against real life cars in real life situations? I'm not sure - usually when you start judging manufacturers on a certain metric they make sure to do well on that one metric at the cost of everything else.

Avoiding Goodhart's law is a general problem, and in this case it's the regulator's problem.

No crash test is perfect, but some are useful. Cars don't change that much from year to year and manufacturers tend to copy each other quite a bit. Developing a suite of tests against a selection of typical vehicles seems very doable.

Existing crash tests don't perfectly cover every scenario, and people quibble about the details, but the tests still provide useful information.

This is just an initial response, so probably flawed, but I'd suggest testing against a vehicle which only exists to represent the lowest safety rating (for occupants) that is allowed on the roads of whichever jurisdiction this is.

If the new design results in harm to the passengers, it's unsafe for existing legal road users.

well a strong enough crash will always result in harm to either or both sides. One still has to define the type of crash etc.

I hate these minitanks but I acknowledge it's not simple to test like this.

Make heavier car forbidden on some roads or make them pay proportionally to a ratio of their empty weight vs. weight fully loaded would seem fair. This way trucks are not impacted, but stupidly heavy SUVs are. And apply a factor for EV, due to battery.

> well a strong enough crash will always result in harm to either or both sides. One still has to define the type of crash etc.

Sure, but that's way beyond the scope of a comment on a web forum to enumerate let alone describe in detail. Whatever the current survivability standards are, they'll say speeds and directions etc., so reuse those but with the new car as the other object in the collision.

It can apparently also withstand a baseball thrown at the window at speed manageable by an unathletic 8 year old. Impressive. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-67586213

I really hope it won't pass EU legislation. It's like an APC.

During the initial cybertruck announcement, Musk said this is their first vehicle they were designing to only be exclusively sold in the U.S., specifically because they could create a crazier design by only having to conform to one set of regulatory constraints.

Are flat fronts and apparent indifference to truck-pedestrian interactions specific to the cybertruck, or did Tesla just miss an opportunity to improve the status quo in this regard? I am trying to calibrate my Musk skepticism.

How are the crumple zones on the Cybertruck for protecting the occupants inside the Cybertruck itself?

Not great - https://youtu.be/wqcu0j3Wsys?t=815

It actually did great. The occupant area was minimally damaged - the front end absorbed the collision as it was designed to do. The driver would have walked away from this collision.

Tesla makes some of the safest vehicles on the road from a driver/occupant perspective, but lately HN loves to hate on Tesla.

Well, not really - not much crumple zone in the front and the way the sides haven't crumpled at all means all of that force went into the occupant area.

Tesla does make some of the safest vehicles, I agree, but probably not the Cybertruck. Let's wait and see the crash test results before speculating, either of us could be wrong.

HN is awfully leftist, and Musk doesn’t enjoy the greatest admiration among those people.

He shouldn’t appeal to most anyone regardless of party affiliation, but he supports the “my freedom of speech” people by allowing and unbanning some of the worst of Twitter, so he has a particular audience he’s attached himself to. Mind you, he was left until they started paying attention to who he was and once that happened, he found it easier to oppose the more right-leaning folks. Musk will pander to whichever crowd is easiest to appeal to

Actually extremely good

https://youtu.be/L6WDq0V5oBg?si=X0Lo5iOfzxAYl11D&t=1125

Given that Tesla have repeatedly designed the safest cars on the road, I'm very interested to see what Cybertruck's official crash test scores are.

Depressing yes, but not because of Musk/Tesla. We'd be surrounded by SUVs, trucks, carjackings, and deer regardless. Unfortunately the best I can do is get the biggest steel cage possible and look out for #1.

His statement is clearly hyperbole, if anything it shows that he gave up on protecting pedestrians long ago when it became clear most vehicle buyers and the regulatory bodies don't care.

A big part of protecting pedestrians is visibility and automatic braking. I know Cybertruck has a bumper-height forward-facing camera, and I would expect the Tesla software to be very good.

As for direct visibility, while I'm sure it's worse in a Cybertruck than with a small car, I'm interested to know how it compares to other trucks. With a shorter front (in both height and depth) you would think it would be better, and I'm guessing it probably is.

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