New test shows disparities in Ford F-150 crash protection | Hacker News Reader

New test shows disparities in Ford F-150 crash protection

autonews.com

14 pointssixQuarks7 comments

Reminds me of the Pinto case in the 1970s. Back then, Ford saved a couple dollars on each Pinto sold by not adding some protective parts to the fuel tanks of the vehicles. In rear-end collisions, the connection from the tank to the filler neck was prone to rupture and spill fuel under the crashed vehicle, which led to some 27 deaths. Amidst a huge scaldal, the NHTSA ultimately forced Ford to recall the vehicle.

Think Ford learned it's lesson? Think again:

Today, the IIHS used to only test the safety of the best-selling version of each model. Ford, knowing this, equipped the best-selling SuperCrew variant of the F-150 with additional steel bars stopping the wheels from intruding the cabin survival space. They did not add these steel bars to the SuperCab and standard versions of the F-150.

Testing for the SuperCrew variant achieved a top safety rating. Additional testing of the SuperCab variant produced a "marginal" (i.e. 2/4) rating with components intruding 8-12 inches into the driver's survival space. Ford spokeswoman (from TFA): "All of that is to meet regulatory requirements and achieve public domain ratings."

This is sickening that someone approved this, knowing that buyers would choose the other trims based on safety ratings. In my opinion, someone should go to jail for this.

This is another reason why Tesla is so much better. They designed the car to be safe, period. They don't care to cheat on crash tests, because by designing the car to be as safe as possible, they will automatically do well in crash tests.

There's a bit of a difference here. Ford has to deal with shareholders who don't have the same mindset as say, Tesla shareholders. Have a bad quarter? The stock will get punished. Tesla stockholders (at least the ones I've talked to at the annual meeting) (leaving aside speculators and institutional investors) are in it for the long haul (myself included).

Elon knows this. Coincidentally enough, here's an email he sent out to everyone at SpaceX on the same topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3f4idq/elons_email_...

Please do not use the titles of HN submissions to editorialize.

my bad, will keep it the same in the future.

Perhaps possible for HN to parse the title/og:title meta data on a page and force that as the title of HN submissions?

The rule is to use the original title except when it's misleading or linkbait. The latter two are common, so often we don't want the original title. So not all title changes are bad, just editorializing ones (putting an interpretation or spin on the story).

Besides that, though, the data is too messy to easily be processed algorithmically. For example, it often includes the domain of the site or other branding that we don't want in HN titles.

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