The most striking thing was how tall it was. Half the kids attending the PGW were smaller than its front bumper. I hope these things never, ever get allowed in France.
I'd appreciate EU citizens writing to their MEPs about this.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/08/tesla-cyb...
What are these? Have you seen a hummer or a ford F2 or f350? What about a Lexus LS or GX? Cadillac Escalade or Lincoln Navigator?
What about a Camry other than its size specifically is for pedestrians when hit?
Then we have the smart car. A small bubble designed to not crush. Fairly sure if that thing hits somebody they are not going to be “gee I am glad that the car makers made this car so safe for me being hit by it”
I can think very hard what a car would look like that would be pedestrian safe, and what features it would have. And none of any cars today look like they would be safe.
As for features for safety only one comes in mind, automatic breaking for pedestrians.
As for the cyber truck. The bend up front looks a lot more safe than most of the other pointy cars.
Normally new cars should come with emergency braking. As I remember, emergency braking is the only new technology to challenge the seat belt in efficiency. All the other safety features are almost marginal on how effective they are.
I don't know if the cybertruck has it, but I think the EU regulations might be a little behind the times, not yet recognizing the efficiency of emergency braking.
Emergency breaking system have been a mandatory assistance system for a while now (afaik it was introduced mid 2022). Admittedly, I don’t know how efficient they actually are in preventing injuries from pedestrians.
I just know that from my experience driving with these systems, they occasionally do seem not quite there. I’ve had my car warn me from hitting a guy that was happily walking on the sidewalk but completely ignore people taking a pedestrian crossing (maybe because I was already breaking myself).
So yeah, tech is great and all. But having design considerations as a completely passive system like your front bumper breaking off on colission still seems essential
TL;DR it’s about being low enough to not smack people of different heights in the head and cause massive acceleration of their brains against their skulls. Same with internal organs, and for legs it’s more about having some of that energy transferred into rotational energy, then having a soft-enough bumper and hood to again minimize acceleration forces and energy transfer.
There are also airbag-based solutions where it either inflates under the hood to give some cushion for the hit person to decelerate more gradually before stopping against something less forgiving, or kinda like a giant couch / Wacky Races cartoon catcher’s mitt inflating on the hood and front of the vehicle before they’re actually hit.
The pushback is, of course, mostly cost-based.
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2007/12/the-truth-about-eu...
https://americawalks.org/vehicle-safety-for-pedestrians/
I just wish that the US would stop allowing people to build and operate killdozer pickups with bumpers well above where other vehicle bumpers are. When those crash into other vehicles, the other vehicle ends up with a differential, tires, and probably skid plates smacking into their vehicle, which it’s not designed to handle. Combined with how larger tires require more braking power to slow at the same rate, plus modified suspension geometry, higher CG, increased weight, and decreased driver intelligence, it makes for a much more dangerous vehicle for others to be around. Why do we continue to allow this, just like all the obnoxious modified exhausts and ECU tunes that massively increase the pollution being put out by one vehicle so they can feed their egos and intimidate other road users?
Higher bumpers are also a lot less safe for pedestrians, obviously: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15949454/
Stuff like this has no legitimate purpose off-road and no business being operated on public highways: https://www.tiktok.com/@leanqueen6.7 but it’s become some idiotic macho culture thing.
> a 10cm increase in the front-end height of a vehicle led to a 22% increase in pedestrian fatality risk, most strongly affecting the survival chances of women, children, and older people.
Kid killer cars
[1] : https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F31121
That said do you see those in Boston or NYC a lot?
So not most European cities? Unless you only count villages and old towns of larger cities.
Europeans have been building and designing towns around cars almost since after the end of WW2. They just used a somewhat different approach (since European cars were tiny compared to NA ones in the 50s and 60s). There has also been a reversal with more focus on pedestrians and public transport over the last 20-30 years.
Serious question: have you looked? Or is there any special reason you imagine that if such evidence existed, you would have seen it?
I say this because I spent 10-15 minutes looking for information and gave up because I’m not sure of any tests which I could use to compare the two, or any testing bodies that focus on pedestrian safety. If that information exists, I’d be interested to see a side by side comparison.
I predict if after some years a statistical analysis is done on pedestrian crashes by car model the Cybertruck will just be some kind of average. It has decent AEB and it is a new car driven by young people. Would other cars have caused less injury in the crashes that do occur? Probably. To a degree that it justifies calling it a pedestrian killer? I doubt it.
Up until you’re sticking Mad Max type spikes on the front, I am not sure that I’d be able to say with confidence anything other than “I think probably trucks with high bonnets are worse for pedestrians than sedans with low bonnets”.
But as you say, there’s also a bunch of interesting side concerns: what if the vehicle itself twice as bad (i.e. causes twice as many deaths at the same speed in collisions with pedestrians), but where other vehicles are getting into one collision with a pedestrian every 100 000 miles or whatever, Cybertrucks only get into collisions every 200 000 miles due to advanced AEB (or use of self-driving, etc.)? Are they even?
I dunno. Just an interesting thought to chew over.
Even so there is research on how car design impact road safety, and if there’s a sliver of doubt that that’s sufficient to justify banning the Cybertruck from public roads the tests to prove its safety should be done in a way where gathering statistics doesn’t mean killing people.
Honestly, I believe that in the noisy world this is exactly how you do things. You try it out. We've done it for hundreds of years. If you have good reason to expect drastically effects you are careful of course. I don't think there is a good reason to expect drastic effects from the Cybertruck. If you were wrong you will quickly see problems arise and can cancel your trial. If nothing bad happens, seems alright. This is basically how we've dealt with the safety aspect of engineering and medicine since forever. You can never perfectly predict what's gonna happen.
There are also far fewer of them per capita than passenger vehicles.
At the end of the day they're a necessary evil while the ever growing number of vanity pavement princess pickup trucks are not.