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Comment by cduzz | Hacker News Reader

Colin Chapman, "guy who made lotus" had the maxim "Simplify, then add lightness" had similar guidance.

Take everything out of the race car, then if something breaks add the last thing you took out back in. I imagine he'd get frustrated at a car still running on the victory lap.... "Darn, the wheels are still on we made the wheel hubs too strong."

The problem here is safety. Making a race car that disintegrates as it crosses the finish line is best for winning a race, but probably isn't terribly robust in an accident.

I don't think Musk is trying to make "barely safe enough" cars, but he is exploring a bunch of design limits. I think the CT specifically is an engineering sample or beta program for the model 2, designed to have low uptake and validate a bunch of _really_ big changes to "normal car" architecture. When some of those gambles turn out to be bad after 2 years, they'll have to fix thousands of dud trucks not millions of model 2s.

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This seems like a misunderstanding of Chapman's quote. I don't think he implied a compromise on safety or reliability, just speed and handling.

Early race cars were not paragons of safety. I don't think I'd go so far as to say that Chapman intentionally made his cars less safe to make them faster, but I also don't know that he'd have spent any weight budget to make them safer than the regulations required.

"if it's possible to make a winning car win by having the wheels fall off of it as it crosses the finish lines" -- that's okay

"If it's possible to make a winning car win by having the wheels fall off of it as it crosses the finish line, then it bursts into flame and kills the driver" -- that's probably no okay.

But there's a lot of grey area between the two, and that's where winning teams won (and occasionally lost drivers / spectators). Old time car racing was blood sport.

https://petrolicious.com/articles/lotus-f1-cars-were-so-frag...

> Early race cars were not paragons of safety

They were death traps, racing drivers were way more cautious back in those days because any slightly severe accident was likely to result in death or severe injuries. Reliability was garbage too so basically just crossing the finish line was a great result.

I can assure you that they weren't more cautious back then, but rather they just knew the dangers and accepted them.

I think having recently been through WW2 where "reasonable things" included tasks like "hey let's disarm this unexploded bomb by chilling it in liquid oxygen." fundamentally altered people's risk calculus for a generation or two.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/08/secondworldwar...

I mainly talking about driving styles, modern F1 drivers pull all kinds of maneuvers and drive so close to the limit that would be totally suicidal back in those days (especially for overtaking, you aren't going to fight as hard when you know that any crash might result in death or severe injury)

Of course a lot of that is because of the cars. 50s to 60s cars had basically no downforce and would be undriveable on modern tracks amongst other things.

I'm certainly not implying that modern drivers are less risk-averse these days, just that the risks were massively higher and drivers generally took that into account.

Colin Champman's own words:

1. A racing car has only ONE objective: to WIN motor races. If it does not do this it is nothing but a waste of time, money, and effort.

This may sound obvious but remember it does not matter how clever it is, or how inexpensive, or how easy to maintain, or even how safe, if it does not consistantly win it is NOTHING!

2. Having established this what do we have to do to make it win:

(i) Simply stated it must firstly be capable of lapping a racing circuit quicker than any other car, with the least possible skill from the driver, and doing it long enough to finish the race.

(ii) After this, and only after this, and with absolutely no compromising of objective (2)(i) one has to consider how expensive it is, how simple, how safe, & how easy to maintain, etc. NONE of these aspects must detract one iota from (2)(i). “Good enough” is just NOT good enough to win and keep winning.[1]

[1]: https://jalopnik.com/colin-chapman-s-simple-and-chilling-def...

This is a good point because if a race car accelerates into a wall and destroys itself and kills its driver it can still win a race

Old time car races were really dangerous.

I think the worst accident was the 1955 Le Mans Accident that killed 85 spectators.[1]

It looks like the years (between 1952-1980) of 1956, 1963, 1965, 1972, 1976 and 1979 are noteworthy because those are the 6 of 28 years when a driver wasn't killed[2]...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_Le_Mans_disaster

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Formula_One_fatalities

Yep, but car racing today is orders of magnitude safer than it was decades ago, especially in F1. An insane amount of money, research and regulations has been poured into increasing safety by the FIA.

F1 tracks, cars, suits and helmets today are so safe that even on violent crashes at >45G[1] or flaming infernos[2] of gasoline and lithium, the driver can walk out of the wreck with a just a broken rib or a burned hand, whereas in the past that would have meant certain death or at least being crippled for life.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x45fLUTHCuk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ7_En2xEm4

For a professional race car, I don't think safety is an overriding concern, given its intended use case.

I think the late Robert Dewar (of AdaCore fame) made a similar comment about fighter jets: Is it really a domain for safety-critical engineering if the only thing that prevents the plane from disintegrating mid-air is a continuously running computer program?

Cars are not software, and it's ethically and morally wrong to test them in production.

Musk is playing games he doesn't understand, and wagering other people's lives to do it. He should at minimum understand that he has many, many fans who trust that he knows what he's doing, and will not expect Tesla's products to be cutting corners on safety and testing because "simpler is better" and "move fast and break things."

There are ways to find optimizations without removing a bunch of stuff and just shipping it like that to the general public: it's called engineering.

If Musk really wants to find ways to optimize the concept of a car further, he'll have to give up on point #4 and accept that it's going to take a lot of test cycles to figure out what works and what doesn't. Rushing out half-baked concepts that are likely missing key safety features because "let's see what happens" is exactly the kind of braindead approach to engineering management that is keeping me approximately 10,000 miles from anything Musk is in charge of.

#4 is the feedback loop that enables rapid improvement. Long as the experiments aren't life-threatening, are you really proposing that they only test new ideas in fake limited artificial environments, rather than in real-world environments where they can encounter the full scope of possible failure modes?

> Long as the experiments aren't life-threatening, are you really proposing that they only test new ideas in fake limited artificial environments, rather than in real-world environments where they can encounter the full scope of possible failure modes?

Are people good at reliably determining which experiments are life-threatening? Especially when those people are under pressure to move fast?

When it comes to multi-ton death machines, selling something you don't know is safe is the same thing as selling something you know isn't safe.

So why do we sell cars at all? They are the 3rd leading cause of death since before Elon Musk and yourself were born.

I don't understand the motivation behind such a question. We sell cars because the benefits to motor transportation outweigh the safety risks in aggregate. That aggregate tradeoff is nonresponsive to the singular case of YOLOing avoidable risks on a Tesla.

There's a difference between selling a multi-ton vehicle that has crumple zones and curved lines and selling a multi-ton vehicle that is designed to tenderize pedestrian rib cages. This comment also applies to today's pickups and SUVs; but while those vehicles are pretty nightmarish for the safety pedestrians and other drivers the CT is a further escalation of matters through both design and build quality.

No one knows what is safe, those that purport to know exactly what is safe are the most dangerous.

Safety is the new snakeoil. Add just a drop and a sprinkle of "think of the children" and you can sell your BS to anyone.

Yeah! How could you know anything really, you know? It's just impossible to know that you should securely affix, and test the security of, the cover of an accelerator pedal on a motor vehicle. There's no prior art to accelerator pedals and no examples of what happens when you make a bad one.

Or, you know, the other thing.

It is perfectly fine to sell a dangerous product as long as the people exposed to it have consented in an informed way.

I would hereby like to revoke consent for Tesla fans "Fully Self Driving" their deathtraps on public roads that I use.

You are probably a worse driver than Tesla FSD, I'd like to revoke consent for you to use the public road.

I took a test, which I passed, and I haven't been wirelessly updated since that test. I also haven't had a phantom braking incident yet.

Number of European countries require safety to be engineered into the product. Example, where I work, a machine in automation had a risk assessment that it produced 1600 newtons of clamping force, same biting force of an adult panda, could take off limbs. This machine could be sold in the USA and not the Europe. Re-engineered to be safe and sold in Europe, machine cannot even take off a finger.

USA is poorly regulated to keep operators safe. Designing for European mark means you can market safer than the competition in USA and sell in Europe at the same time. This also remove the need to build in safety guards or use light curtains.

Which one would you or your family members like to use day-in day-out, the 1600 newton limb remover built on USA standards or the one built around safety for Europe?

Depends, I might opt for the limb remover if it is simpler and works more reliably. Time is money and I'm confident I could use either properly so I'd likely waste more of my limited lifespan fixing the safe but more complex and more unreliable machine.

If there's no cost to the safety factor then sure, put it in. However there's almost always a cost. We all pay with a portion of our life every time we stand in an airport security line and every time we click accept to one of those EU cookie popups in a futile attempt to keep our data safe. With each click, billions of humans have a precious few moments severed from their short time on earth, moments that could be spent with loved ones.

I've been around a lot of people who say that sort of thing and it's why in my neck of the woods we note that "I never get distracted, I'm never tired, I always work perfectly" is the mantra of a woodworker who has eight fingers. (He didn't learn the first time.)

Time is money, but you can't get a finger back. And neither can your employees who work for you, who the EU regulations are, rightly, more concerned with than your bottom line.

You can get a finger back but only if your medical science is sufficiently advanced. Full fingers have been re-attachable since the 1960s, and soon we will be able to grow new fingers like a newt. The key is to continue the progress quickly rather than slow things in the name of onerous safety.

This is deeply antisocial and I hope you're not allowed near decisions that can impact other people.

I hope you don't take part in any modern medicine because almost every modern procedure was built upon a long history of extremely risky experiments that probably should have never been allowed.

Hagerty has a video on Bugatti and mentions Bugatti buying Lotus. At the time they just made the EB110 two years earlier that weighed 4,100 pounds. Talk about a difference! Colin Chapman was rolling in his grave. It's worth a watch just for the sheer bonkers life of Ettore Bugatti.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM2sUknP5Pg&t=964s

I have no intention whatsoever of spending 6 figures on a car or truck to be Musk's guinea pig and I cannot fathom who would.

I’ve never seen a car get the same amount of attention at this price point. There is certainly a slice of the population who is excited by the idea of people stopping and taking a picture of their car. The slice is not big, but it’s enough to satisfy Tesla.

I think it's more likely that it's enough to satisfy Musk. Tesla as a company is probably hurt much more by selling the Cybertruck than if they hadn't made it and had focused on a normal car.

The CT's weirdness isn't just the silly exterior. I suspect they don't want to sell a lot of them because each one they sell is a potential liability.

These new cars are 100% drive by wire; they're all in on their dry cell battery tech, it's 100% 48v for the "normal" electronics like power steering and HVAC and instrument cluster, etc.

They want to sell the CT to the weirdos who're willing to put up with whatever the heck the truck dishes out. They want paying beta testers to put miles on these things, get them more tested than they can with an internal testing program.

Only once the tech is more proven will it be "safe" to mass produce a "normal" car with all the same tech. The goal is to catch all the "nissan leaf lizard chemistry" or "bolt self immolation" bugs on the people willing to buy a CT.

clearly not, if they're shutting down production of the car and cutting 10% of staff

this is a meme car for a person that effectively doesn't exist: a survivalist tech bro.

not saying that person can't be found -somewhere-, possibly in a Neil Stephenson book, but even at the insanely inflated prices of the Cybertruck that's not enough to stake a multi-year production effort.

With FSD being tested on public roads you're his guinea pig whether you want to or not.

Was thinking the same thing, and it's one thing to be a guinea pig yourself, and another to bring these things into the road and risk everyone's lives too.

Musk also enjoyed success in spacex context, which is similar to high performance race, and not very long term uncontrolled conditions as mainstream cars.

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