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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Yes, go to…most other countries on Earth, pull someone off the street, and they’ll probably going to scoff at this uniquely American phenomenon.

I don’t live in the US, and any time I see a car that’s popular there, I’m utterly amazed.

Why can't they both be bad?

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."

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)_/¯

I don’t think that is true. It has a front crumple zone there are some photos and videos of the crash tested vehicle showing that and discussing it.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-... What do you think about this article?

Edit: heres more irt the design and safety. https://futurism.com/the-byte/experts-concerned-cybertruck-s...

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.

How many people have been killed by Teslas on full self driving versus other makes?

this is def not true

Oh? https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

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.

> 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.

https://electrek.co/2022/12/10/tesla-cybertruck-body-spotted...

What is your opinion on this article and the claims within? https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

Sedans actually kill more pedestrians than heavy vehicles overall despite there being 4 SUV/truck purchases for every 1 sedan purchased.

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...

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.

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.

In NYC I can't remember the last time I ever saw a pickup, unless it's an official city/parks maintenance vehicle or something like that.

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?

Entirely different culture than the american west and south. NYC is just about as far from the country as you can get on the north American continent.

Right but so is Toronto. Which makes me curious why pickups are a thing there -- that's the difference I'm wondering about.

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.

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.

Well yeah those models would have the most, because people buy way more of them than a Corolla or Camry.

It’s like using an overall statistic versus the per capita statistic.

https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2022-us-vehicle-sales-figures-...

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