Tesla Cybertruck's stiff structure, sharp design raise safety concerns
reuters.com
reuters.com
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...
> 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.
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.
"Light Vehicles Safety Built in Not Bolted On" - https://autoexpert.com.au/s/Light-Vehicles-safety-built-in-n...
And the bull bar will actually decrease the damage on your vehicle when hitting a deer.
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.)
Perhaps this hyperfocus on the Cybertruck will help jumpstart a larger shift in public opinion on general automobile-pedestrian safety?
What hyperfocus?
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&query=cybertruck...
There's a lot of Cybertruck news on the HN front page in the past month. Which is what I meant by "hyperfocus".
OpenAPI having 1122 results in the last month seems like a lot.
The public perception has actively discouraged me from wanting one - even though I find the design cool.
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’ve seen crazier
That be great, tractors are banned to be used within cities and on highways (in many places).
The idea is to go after the f150/raptor/ram market and that’s mostly exurb and suburb
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.
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.
All cars pose a fatality hazard to a pedestrian.
There are obviously levels to risk. At the limit, I'm guessing you probably oppose someone attaching a running chainsaw to their front bumper.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_helmet
But I'm not gonna stop you from wearing a Stahlhelm for riding. Whatever floats your boat mate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: heres more irt the design and safety. https://futurism.com/the-byte/experts-concerned-cybertruck-s...
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.
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.
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.
There are photos of the structural components all of the net.
https://electrek.co/2022/12/10/tesla-cybertruck-body-spotted...
I don’t live in the US, and any time I see a car that’s popular there, I’m utterly amazed.
Deaths by SUV seems to be on the rise though.
Here’s data from a bike site.
https://data.bikeleague.org/new-nhtsa-data-vehicle-data-show...
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.
People simply don't drive them here, at least not in Manhattan or the parts of Brooklyn I know. Contractors seem to all use vans.
(Obviously there must be some, but truly it would be incredibly rare to see.)
I wonder what explains the difference?
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.
It’s like using an overall statistic versus the per capita statistic.
https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2022-us-vehicle-sales-figures-...
edit: have come to the point now with vehicles where it's nice to have one that doesn't stand out too much
Bonus points if it uses a battery and generator to power electric motors, which is a pretty reliable and light maintenance setup.
> "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.
More accurately, given the lack of crumple zones, your truck will win at your expense.
Source?
America is basically the wild west. Whether you're a pedestrian or in another car, you're on your own.
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.
America needs the CyberSUV.
Indeed.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
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.
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 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.
AEB is a system, not just on Teslas, that will stomp on the brakes if the vehicle is about to plow into a person. The Cybertruck has this. It helps.
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.
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?
There are degrees of hardness for sure, if I had to chose what I would be hit with I wouldn't go for a cyber truck
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Expert 1:
>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 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.