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Comment by golol | Hacker News Reader

It's basically the same size as an F-150. It has a crumple zone although it probabl only activates for hard car collisions. I've seen no evidence that it is significantly worse for pedestrian safety than an F-150. Which is not good at all, but it is still a bit pretentious to paint it as a horribly dangerous car when there is no evidence that it is worse than one of the most common cars in the US.

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> I've seen no evidence that it is significantly worse for pedestrian safety than an F-150

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 originally thought that the nhtsa would perform some tests of this kind but I was disappointed to find out that this doesn't seem to be the case. Most focus on pedestrian safety seems to be on automatic emergency braking and other ADAS systems. In this regard I claim that by default one should expect the Cybertruck to be at least decent. Not the best but surely not terrible. While the shape of the hood and the visibility obviously matter of course it seems to be the case that such evaluations are basically done by eyeballing it. Pedestrian dummy crash tests with collection of force data etc. seem to not at all be standard. Which sucks, but it again shows that the Cybertruck is not an outlier on some well-established metric.

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.

See, my concern here is that I feel very skeptical about my instincts on this. I suspect both cars are bad, but if the Cybertruck is (for example) twice as bad as a the F-150, would I know what that would look like? 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.

yea I prett much agree

I like the idea that it is “pretentious” to predict — without evidence as you’ve pointed out — that getting hit by a 6,600+lb vehicle is bad but it is not pretentious to confidently predict without evidence that getting hit by a 6,600+lb car is the same as getting hit by a different vehicle that is one to two thousand pounds lighter.

I assume they don’t have a lot of F-150s in Paris, either.

Any city built and or designed before cars is a nightmare for giant American pickups.

That said do you see those in Boston or NYC a lot?

> Any city built and or designed before

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.

Yes I don't think it should be allowed in Europe, yet the outrage I see, also from, Americans, as if this is some new never seen before level of danger on the road is unreasonable.

I don't know, the average driver handling a 6600 lbs chunk of sharp aluminum capable of going 0-60 in 4 seconds terrifies me.

Easy to say but does that really represent the statistical reality? Does higher acceleration cause more accidents? Sports cars have more accidents. Sports cars that are driven by young people that want to show off. Cars with a high top speed. But do you think people will try to corner with the Cybertruck like they're racing? Yes they will spend a few seconds after each stop sign at hogher speed than if they weren't driving a Cybertruck but then they're just coasting down the suburbs with 30mph or whatever. But it is not obvious to me at all that Cybertruck driving should occur significantly often in dangerous fashion just because you can get to your cruising speed and overtake a bit quicker. You need statistics to back up these claims and these don't exist yet.

You don’t need data to be terrified of something.

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.

>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.

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