Tesla Cybertruck's stiff structure, sharp design raise safety concerns - experts
(www.reuters.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 08 Dec 2023 16:00
https://lemmy.world/post/9308646
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 08 Dec 2023 16:00
https://lemmy.world/post/9308646
Tesla Cybertruck’s stiff structure, sharp design raise safety concerns - experts::The angular design of Tesla’s Cybertruck has safety experts concerned that the electric pickup truck’s stiff stainless-steel exoskeleton could hurt pedestrians and cyclists.
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Why are they hitting their heads on it? Is that really the worst possible outcome, multiple people intentionally bonking their heads on it and getting more hurt?
I don’t buy this story. I think it’s a plant.
Edit: lots of stupid replies to this comment, holy shit. At least try to understand the point I spelled out in plain English.
I’m guessing they are talking about accidentally hitting someone with the car. At lower speeds, collisions shouldn’t be lethal at least with a regular car (there are a lot of other factors too, but anyway). I can imagine that if you hit a thick steel panel it’s going to cause you more damage than the regular aluminum car.
It genuinely scares me that they are so confident in them being right that they didn’t stop for one second to try and understand what the sentence actually means.
This will happen with any car. Mass x velocity wins every time. A car would need a giant balloon around it to transfer energy into the pedestrian slowly enough to not injure them significantly.
And what “regular aluminum car”? Cars aren’t, by and large, aluminum. They’re still mostly steel. Not that it matters, aluminum body panels are less flexible than equivalent steel panels. The places where aluminum is heavily used are things like engines, suspension components, substructures, etc. There are very few cars using aluminum extensively in the body. Ford pickups use it in the bed, Jeeps use it for the engine hood. There are others, but making aluminum body parts is more complex than steel that’s easily stamped, and assembly is different.
You’re probably right, I’m no car connoisseur.
Still, reading the article it seems like the cybertruck is using thicker panels for it’s body.
And yes, I very much agree that mass x velocity always wins, but in urban areas where there are accidental hits in crossroads at very low speeds that are, normally, not lethal, a harder material can cause worse injuries. And I think those are the situations that the article was referring to.
Found Elon!
This is a lesson that we already learned a while back.
We used to make cars that were tough, but then we noticed that people were dying way too easily when they hit a tree or a wall.
In an indestructible car, all of the forces of a crash are directly applied to the people inside of a car. You might as well have have been riding a motorcyle when you crashed. They would need some advanced harness system that gives a little on impact without letting you hit the steering wheel or center console… there’s not a whole lot of space for that.
In the cars of today, the car is meant to crumple in a way that absorbs as much of an impact as possible while trying to keep the occupants alive.
If the cybertruck is too stiff, even a collision at a slow speed will kill or severely injure the occupants.
Late reply but to specify, the crumple zones dissipating energy to protect the occupants, but in part the situation you’re describing airbags do a great job at preventing people from hitting the steering wheel / walls.
A very very advanced harness system might compensate a little for a lack of crumple zones during a very rapid deceleration collision. The issue isn’t so much as stopping someone from but being thrown around in the car, seat belts do that, but nothing can stop one’s internal organs from doing the same thing inside their body. So when a body stops during a rapid deceleration, internal organs still try to move. This movement tears everything, most notably one’s aorta and a torn aorta means death with no possible chance of survival.
A small tear in one’s aorta and one may survive long enough for emergency services to show up, a bad one and they will have bleed out before a 911 call taker has time to answer a call for help.
The thing that can stop that is being immersed in liquid.
I’m guessing you’ve never seen a person hit by a car before. They don’t deflect away like video game characters. A person hit roughly in the middle of their body will be “folded” over the car, smashing their head into the body of it. Then they’re either flung away, roll over the top, or get pulled under, depends on what the driver does, how hard the hit was, and how big the vehicle is.
In a car with a molded plastic body, the head bounces back off and the plastic is dented. With a plate of solid steel, the person’s head is splattered like a melon all of the “bulletproof” windows. Then the sharp edge slices them in half. Sounds very metal until it starts happening to children several times a week.
Want to make a wager about how long it is before someone is sliced in half by a cyber truck?
I’d put money on it doesn’t happen in the next ten years.
I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure they were being facetious.
When you hit a pedestrian, their body doesn’t stay straight. The force causes their torso to fold downward, and their head will likely impact the panel above where you struck them.
I dare you to convince me that anyone still buying Tesla would not see that as a benefit. That’s going to be the number one selling point of this thing after articles like this make their rounds.
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Why the fuck do people hate on the one class of people using the most efficient form of transportation that also provides exercise in a world that can’t stop spewing greenhouse gasses (For electric cars, those greenhouse gasses are being spewed at the power plant instead of from the car itself) and people don’t get enough exercise?
Fucking. Madness. Cyclists should be applauded and not targeted.
I’ll give you an honest answer. I live in a rualish area. There’s a 2 lane highway that’s roughly 50 miles from my city to another one. 55 and a lot of blind curves. Farmers in semi trucks use that road all the time for hauling stuff.
Every summer there’s a pack of cyclists that try that route. They barely do 25. Every summer one of them does on one of the corners. You simply can’t stop a semi fast enough when something is doing half the speed limit, especially on a sharp corner.
They’re a fucking menace. There literally hundreds of miles of trails to ride in my area, but they have to be on that one particular road. They’re simply the most self centered assholes in the universe IMO.
Yeah,itd be one thing if they were using it for transport and actually not blocking traffic and being safe about it, but none of that is true. They all think they’re Lance Armstrong or something, and its the tour de france. People have places to be!
That’s the crux of it. They could ride on the sidewalk and slow down…or they could simply move over and let traffic pass. But they don’t. It’s some holy war to piss off as many people as possible while wearing spandex.
All the hardcore cyclists I’ve known are miserable insufferable people so it makes sense. Middle managers on their second or third marriages that hate their lives. There’s plenty of sport out there that offers superior fitness and doesn’t do damage to your prostate…but, whatevs.
That sounds like a problem with your county. If that many people are dying, wouldn’t it be worth building a separated bike path?
I don’t know his county specifically, but often times the roads are designed to fit in an area, with a set number of lanes, and built to that width. You cant add bike paths with out redesigning, buying more land, and building miles amd miles of path. And for what? Five bozos to ride through in fair weather?
Not enough benefits to justify the costs. Plenty better things to spend money on.
We have one…they don’t use it.
How does that make absolutely any sense?
“I couldn’t stop fast enough because they were going too slow!”
More like you’re following far too closely.
What part of 55 and blind curve do you not understand?
You realize 55 is the maximum speed, right? It doesn’t mean you have to continue driving 55MPH over corpses.
You might want to look up the stopping distance of a semi at 55.
Most efficient?
Human bodies are god awful at converting fuel to useful mechanical energy.
I’m pretty sure they meant most efficient in terms of emissions, not energy conversion. Even if you count farting as emissions, bikes put out basically no emissions. You’d have to get 100% of your electricity from renewables to match them in an electric car.
That’s not because they’re efficient, it’s because they use almost no energy in the first place.
Poor energy conversion means more emissions. 🤦♂️
Are you honestly going to tell me that you think a person riding a bicycle produces more emissions than a person driving a car?
I’m sure that would be relevant if my body was attempting to push an entire car to work every day. When I cycle to work, I’m carrying at most 15 kilos of bike and belongings with me. With the efficiency multiplier of gears and wheels, I believe my 8 kilometer trip burns about 200 kilocalories. I don’t think that much energy will move an entire 2000 kilo car very far at all, whether it’s powered with electricity or petrol.
And how much food does that require you to ingest? What did it take to produce that food, deliver it to you, and take it away when you shat it out?
So easy to ignore all the inbound energy that was utilized for your body to produce 2kc.
200 kcals is like 1/10 of the average person’s daily intake, so maybe 1/3 of an average meal? Not much at all, comparatively. If you’re still concerned about efficiency, slap a small electric motor on the bike, but even a fully human-powered bike is more energy efficient than driving an entire car.
I don’t know about other cities, but locally we have a very nice and well paved city-spanning network of bicycle paths that are parallel to, but separate from, the city streets. And we have a group of guys on their $10k bikes who ignore these paths to ride three across in a lane during rush hour on roads that will beat their wheels square, ignoring all red lights and stop signs. They make it hard for me to ride, because I get associated with these people by virtue of riding a bike.
People don’t hate cyclists. They hate those cyclists.
This is of course excluding those who hate everything which isn’t horrible for the planet. They hate bikes, electric cars, smaller cars that don’t burn much gas, vegetables, and any woman with a spine.
I agree with you about cyclists but this is conservative misinformation that’s been debunked in a thousand different ways so I’d appreciate if you’d stop spreading it.
I’d like to see the information debunking this. In my area, 89% of power is from fossil fuels. My naive understanding of this is that this will still generate emissions, although I would expect the capabilities of reducing harmful emissions to be much better at a power plant instead of having to build it into every vehicle. So my thinking is that emissions are still happening, just not necessarily where people are living and with better emissions management.
Damn, the parent comment to mine got deleted, so nobody will see this anyway.
You don’t really need sources for this, just apply some basic sense.
Yes, that is part of it.
Here are some other cliffnotes:
Even when using 100% coal, you’re still producing far less CO2 than an equivalent gasoline vehicle.
Gasoline only comes from one place: Extracted and refined dinosaur carcasses. Electricity can come from wind, solar, nuclear, etc. Personally mine is 100% wind energy.
Gasoline is transported by gasoline-burning vehicles. Electricity is transported over wires, further reducing CO2 emitted from transportation.
I mean we can go down a big rabbit hole about the environmental costs but the EV always wins out, if not instantly.
Bikes and ebikes (or even just walking) are obviously going to produce a crapton less CO2 than either.
You have serious issues and world view problems to even begin to think things like that about people.
I mean yeah that could be it. Or more likely; they are joking.
Why do you believe they are joking? What indicates that especially with this behavior being common?
Oh fuck off, this behavior is not “common” more often than not people say shit like this to get a raise out of someone, or as a joke in the “image people actually behaving like this” way.
I’m sorry but that’s not right at all, and people do actually think like this in the US and it is common.
It just read their other comments and realize they’re not.
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<img alt="" src="https://i.ibb.co/q1rdHcW/edgy-boy.jpg">
I am a Tesla owner and a cyclist. It’s not a benefit.
Did you buy your Tesla since Elmo when full fash, and would you buy one now if you didn’t have one already?
No and yes. Find me an automotive CEO that’s not a giant POS and we’ll talk. It’s a great car, overall.
There’s giant POS and the there’s Elon Musk
Not convinced cows look a whole lot like maps tho they have too many legs etc
You have to be a special kind of stupid to think Musk is unique among billionaires.
His only ‘uniqueness’ is the brand that’s attached to his name. If you notice, he behaves exactly like all other celebrity billionaires, such as Trump and Kanye.
Every controversy is just free advertising for their brands.
You’ll notice OP wasn’t comparing billionaires, they were comparing automotive CEOs. So that’s a scarecrow argument. All of the other automotive CEOs have an order of magnitude less wealth than Musk.
He has the wealth of a nation state and owns one of the world’s largest social media sites, a rocket company, a car company, and actively promotes far-right hate speech and meddles in international politics.
At least he isn’t giving out copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The automotive CEO most similar to Musk is probably Henry Ford, and I’m honestly not sure which one is worse.
Well, one is dead… So not much you can do about him now
Considering his feelings about Jews, it’s only a matter of time.
Trump, Kanye, musk etc are the weird ones. Very wealthy people are actually likely to hide from the public and only seek the attention of their ridiculously wealthy peers or whomever they want to
buyinfluence, not from the entire world population with every brainfart they produce. It’s just the very top few has a hard time avoiding it because they’re on top of the lists and stand out. Kanye or trump are still * far* away from that wealthiest top. Look at the list of 1bn-80bn worth person: many you’ll barely have heard of before, if at all. It gets even more so if you ditch the Anglo-Saxon centered view on the list and look at the most wealthy people in China, Middle East etcHow many others run a social media platform catered to fashists?
They all have their own special flavors of trash.
Gonna be real fun to see the crash test rating.
Without crumple zones, all of the kinetic energy goes into the occupants.
OTOH it weighs almost 7000lbs (~3100kg) so it’s going to plow through most of everything with its sheer mass.
You’d be surprised how much a concrete pillar holding up an overpass can actually take. They don’t break like in the movies, they are specifically designed to take big truck impacts and not fail. Anybody crashing a Cybertruck at highway speeds into one of those is instantly turned into red colored mashed potatoes.
case in point
We have barriers good enough to stop a fully-loaded semi in effectively zero distance.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
case in point
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Why does that sound delicious 😭
It is! In a pressure cooker, you can cook beets in a basket over a layer of potatoes and garlic cloves. The beet drippings turn the potatoes pinkish-red. Super fun for kids.
But has the pressure cooker been crash tested
Or you can just hang out under a highway overpass with a scoop and a cooler
Free range. Sustainable harvest. Recycling. Sounds good!
Eat the rich?
Go hit a 10"+ tree in a pickup and see how fast you stop. You can wander over and pick the engine up when it flies out the hood. The tree will loose some bark.
Been there, done that. 0/10. Do not recommend.
Same, hit a small (maybe 5") tree going about 60mph. Came to a complete stop immediately and put my head through the windshield. We went and peeled the license plate off the tree the next day.
I guess it put a little mark on the tree but it was basically fine, completely destroyed the car though.
For me it was a rather large tree that I hit at about 100km/h (+60mph). Tree was fine. Car, not so much. The ambulance ride was nice though, and the first responders thought we were extremely lucky to be alive.
Wear your seat belts kids.
…kera.org/…/be102f-20170208-spinal-tap.jpg
I know it’s fun to bash Tesla every now and then for their ridiculous things.
But do you really think, after making 4 vehicles with top of the line safety, that they will just say ‘eh, fuck it’ with the cybertruck?
It’s an aluminum casting base construction, just like the Model Y, so why would there be no crumble zones?
Because they wanted it to be bullet proof.
The safety standards are a regulatory requirement. They have to pass the same tests as any other vehicle.
Not in the US. We don’t have many safety regulations on vehicles and crash tests are not mandatory.
Correct. Especially large trucks are further exempted.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Federal_Motor_Vehicle_Safety_S…
How many more should we have?
How does getting rid of crumple zones facilitate that?
It doesn’t, not directly, however, the materials used in the exterior paneling contributes to the lack of safety in the vehicle and in crash tests, not only because of the materials, but also because of the shape of the panels and how they are joined.
There are crumple zones, they’re just not as big as those in competing trucks. But yeah, the safety comparison is probably negligible, what really makes me think it’s a bad truck is the design of the bed. It’s got slanted walls. That really limits what you can haul and how you can get it into the bed.
Let’s be real. No one is hauling anything in this truck. In my experience the more expensive truckk the less its actually used for anything.
The entire cybertruck fleet hauling completed by 2030 is probably the equivalent to one year of 01 Nissan Frontiers…
Yeah the practicality of the cybertruck is definitely questionable!
That actually would be on brand for Musk.
Were talking about Elon here. Yes, I do think so. In addition, don’t give too much credit, the other vehicles would always be inherently safer because they’re electric.
Ah yes, inherent safety can naturally be disregarded in such considerations.
Here you go:
youtu.be/SQjoDV6vDaI
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/SQjoDV6vDaI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Thanks for sharing! How do I know if this is good or bad haha
Couldn’t trust the truck enough to put a dummy in the seat.
Considering it’s rendered, they might as well just toss a human in.
That’s… computer generated. BeamNG maybe?
I’m pretty sure that’s BeamNG, yeah. That sand looks like a texture from Johnson valley, I’m pretty sure the wall they’re hitting is either a gas station or a garage model that was placed on a road, and the skid marks from the tires look the same as they do in BeamNG. You can see body panels and doors clipping through the body of the truck on several occasions, too.
Wow looks unsafe as fuck!!
Looked convincing at first, but it felt too clean- Then at 7 seconds in, you can watch a white panel clip straight through the door and windshield lol
Yeah, without a disclaimer and evidence it’s modeled correctly it’s just straight misinformation at this point.
Second crash, the body part above the front wheel goes straight through it.
Look at the name of the channel too.
What makes you think it doesn’t have crumple zones?
Because unless they have been outright lying in all of their specs, the entire body is made up of the same thick stainless steel that they have shown to be literally bulletproof.
It’s 4x as thick as current sheet metal used in other vehicles, and twice as thick as the steel bumpers used in old cars that didn’t have crumple zones.
That combined with the fact that they have stated that all of the strength and rigidity for the truck comes from the exoskeleton, that would preclude being able to crumple.
They have not made safety a priority in anything on this monstrosity. The windows are are all laminated and shatterproof, meaning you can’t break them to escape if there’s a fire or you end up underwater and the body is bulletproof meaning that it can’t be torn open with the jaws of life if you need to be extracted.
It’s a giant metal coffin.
Bulletproof steel can still crumple. And it does. It’s not made of adamantium. It’s a completely different type of force. The vehicle was crash-tested a long time ago. Just look at the photos.
E: wow, this guy is sharing straight up disinformation he pulled from his ass and I’m the one being downvoted…
What photos?
I’m not sure you should be talking about others sharing disinformation when the crash tests were only released 8 days ago.
roadandtrack.com/…/tesla-cybertruck-crash-test/
I’m not sure you should be talking at all considering you don’t seem to realize you can actually store footage from events that took place at an earlier date 🙄
So when you said:
You meant “just look at the video that was released a little over a week ago?” Because it sure didn’t look like that’s what you meant.
No, I meant exactly what I said. I’m not sure what part of that is confusing you.
Okay, let’s see these photos then.
These videos/photos were leaked over a year ago, along with many others
Here are some more recent ones clearly demonstrating the crumple zones
The first link is from September and the second from November. So I don’t know where you’re getting a year ago from.
These videos/photos were leaked over a year ago, along with many others
Here are some more recent ones clearly demonstrating the crumple zones
Windows will shatter just like any other car window, and a jaws of life would pull apart that tin can no problem.
The side windows are laminated like a windshield. They are explicitly designed not to shatter.
They are just regular tempered glass. That might have been the BS they claimed at the original announcement, but that did not make it to the production version.
Ah, so it’s all from your incorrect assumptions about how materials work.
I don’t know what the hell you’ve been reading, but they’ve never claimed the entire truck is solid stainless steel. Just the exterior panels.
they claimed that the exterior panels would be able to add to the rigidity and strength of the truck. Not that it was 100% rigid or that the exterior made up 100% of the structural strength.
The interior is still basically just a regular aluminum body like all their other cars.
I thought a car had to have that before it went on sale?
Believe it or not in the USA it’s actually based off of self compliance in the USA. There is no specific government body that has a standardized test that they have to pass to be made legal. The manufacture gets to make that decision themselves, then if there is an issue that the government finds later they can be pulled from the road.
I hope they get pulled from the road. Problem is, he’ll just bribe some government officials
:O
We all saw how well self-compliance worked for the 737 Max…
Oh I believe it.
Yeah have you seen the footage it’s as stiff as the rod up musks butt hole
If anyone actually cared about this they’d be going after Ford and Chevy, not a vehicle that isn’t even available to the public yet.
why not both?
Although being fair, the other day just out of curiosity I was taking a look at electric cars in my country and almost every single one of them was a needlessly huge SUV.
There were a few exceptions, but I was not expecting that maybe 25 out of 30 cars were in the bigger size.
Because cyber trucks aren’t killing people. Trucks made by Ford and Chevy are. Why put effort into solving a problem that doesn’t exist yet when there is a real problem right now, and if you solve that one it will also solve the cyber-truck problem.
You’re able to do both, you have a massive country with a massive government with a lot of funding.
99% of the time it’s not one or the other, and your argument literally works the same if they handle the dystopian car first.
They haven’t even been on sale for two weeks and those sales have been limited. Maybe give it the well over a century that Ford and Chevy have had before making that claim.
Bigger size = bigger profit margin. We’d be a lot further towards carbon neutral if cars hadn’t grown to ridiculous average sizes while engine efficiency improved a lot.
A bit of a straw man argument, but also based. They should go after all production vehicles and require that they meet pedestrian safety standards or that ownership requires additional licensing/training.
In the EU they do, and the Cybertruck has already failed the pedestrian safety requirements there.
The NHTSA is just now starting to talk about “rating” vehicles for pedestrian safety in the US, but to my knowledge there is no actual rule or mandate yet. We just inherit whatever is designed into vehicles that are also sold in the EU, if those vehicles happen to be sold here.
While Chevy and Ford have giant trucks too, they also crumple where the stainless steel Tesla doesn’t. Crumpling makes the vehicle dissipate the force of a crash in case you weren’t aware.
Regardless, no one needs this Tesla monstrosity just like no one needs the giant vehicles Americans seem to be obsessed with.
Unless I’m mistaken, crumpling is meant to protect the driver and passengers. Not pedestrians, cyclists, or anyone else outside the vehicle.
To an extent it’s both. I mean intent-wise it’s all about the occupants of the car, but as a side effect it also slightly reduces the impact on the pedestrian. The way I would think about it is that crumple zones on their own aren’t nearly enough to protect pedestrians, but removing them would be going completely in the wrong direction
Crumple zones don’t crumple when hitting anything as soft as a person. I had a car run into me while stopped. They were doing about 45, it was the worst-case impact, driver corner to driver corner. My airbags didn’t go off. I lost the left front fender and headlight. No crumple zone changes (that’s part of the unit body, when it gets bent, it often totals the vehicle). A pedestrian would’ve bounced off that car with broken bones and a concussion, minimum.
They’re for occupants.
Plastic bumpers are the only thing that compresses easily enough to not injure a pedestrian. And even those are pointless, at a speed where a pedestrian impact would compress a bumper, is fast enough to transfer a lot of momentum into a human body, and compress the bumper into the harder parts of the car.
No, not to an extent.
Crumpling does nothing for a person getting hit by a car. Please stop spreading bullshit.
From a physics perspective, yes it does. Not much, but yes it does do something.
In order for a crumple zone to work, the material must be at least slightly softer than the rest of the structure. When you have a collision, both the strong structure and the relatively weak crumple zones will flex, but the crumple zones will flex more. In a big collision, like with another car, they might flex so much they have permanent damage (the crumple), but even with a pedestrian they will flex a little. The more they flex, the more it cushions the impact for both the pedestrian and the occupants of the car.
As I said, the amount of cushion for the two parties is massively skewed in favor of the car, and crumple zones alone are not anywhere near enough to make cars safe for pedestrians. But objectively, yes they do slightly cushion the impact for a pedestrian, and in the perfect edge case collision it might mean the difference between life and death.
From a physics perspective, people don’t exist.
We’re talking about the human outcomes of being hit by a car with a crumple zone. Zero benefit.
Even with the crumple, the mass of those vehicles is enormous hence the force a pedestrian or a cyclist will experience is much higher compared to a normal size passenger vehicle.
None of these monster trucks are going to crumple from a fleshy pedestrian. Crumple zones are for when you hit another vehicle or tree or something
Crumple zones are for vehicle to vehicle impacts. They have nothing to do with pedestrian safety.
Rasied this being an issue on the Marces Brown video, the finishing on those panels is pretty backyard with exposed edges of pretty sharp steel. I also think the steel is going to look like shit after a couple of years when the coatings fade off. Also bulletproof panels don’t necessarily lead to safe crumple zones which doesn’t bode well for them in Europe at least. A lot of design choices for people who are scared of driving, which usually makes them really bad for use in a public space.
Marques Brownlee
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This thing is huge, it does 0-60 in under 3 seconds, has sharp angles, and its styling does not seem to target the sensible end of the market… It’s like an industrial strength pedestrian destroyer.
It’s actually a pussy-magnet.
Even the pasty-facediest of incels will have no problems getting laid showing up in one of these bad boys.
It’s just how the world works 🤷
Help, I bought a Cybertruck and now every cat in town is chasing me!
I hear it has preprogrammed wait times for replying to text messages from females based on the redpill algorithm.
I would like to hear from the women of Lemmy- how many of you would have sex with a man just because they drove a Cybertruck?
Have you actually had any form of friendship or relationship with a women in the past couple of years?
Comon… sarcasm is not always obvious… but his comment was sarcasm. It has to be. I choose to believe it is.
And as a bonus it actually looks like something out of Carmageddon.
I shudder to think what one of those cybertrucks would do if it tried to plow through a crowd of protesters.
Probably 0-60 in 4 seconds
Probably about the same thing as any other vehicle.
Jesus are we really gonna pretend this is the first vehicle that would obliterate a pedestrian in a collision?
People are going to be pissed when they find out cyclists lose in collisions against any vehicle, not just prototype electric trucks.
Good argument for separate infrastructure.
And using it.
There are certain streets in my city that are multi-lane, paired one-ways, they’re major routes with a LOT of traffic.
There are parallel streets that make the same connections, that only see local traffic, people who live on those blocks.
Where do the cyclists like to ride, with the cars doing 25 at most, or with the cars on the 45 mph street where people speed up to 60 at times?
Cyclists (as a group) love to shout about the rules of the road saying they can be there, but so many disregard those same rules when it’s convenient.
Running red lights/stop signs (because it takes effort to start again! Wait, I thought one of the arguments was it’s good exercise?), riding against traffic, (bad in the city, but I think is the better approach for rural areas), etc.
You (the royal “you”) wanna ride a bike? Good for you. I’ll do my best to make the road safe for you, but it’s a two-way street. Work with me, not against me.
And I’ve been a motorcyclist for 30+ years now, dealing with some similar issues (especially that we’re not visible to drivers). People in cars will make mistakes, it’s up to me to ensure they see me, that they know what my intentions are. Most drivers really have no idea what to expect out of a two-wheeler, with or without an engine. That needs to be acknowledged and considered with every interaction.
Edit: aww I offended a bunch of cyclists who do these things, but don’t have the balls to comment because they know this is all true.
That doesn’t mean some vehicles aren’t much worse than others.
Yeah, I don’t think even a cybertruck can stand up against a fully-loaded semi.
It actually does. Cyclists are generally fucked, as in fully fucked, when colliding with any vehicle. I don’t see any reason to separate the categories here.
Hell, motorcyclists lose, even with 1000lbs of bike.
Something called physics can’t be bypassed. Worrying about making cars less dangerous for pedestrians is a foolish endeavor at this point. I really don’t see it making that much difference when you look at the mass differential.
Deforming plastic bumpers aren’t going to make much difference when they just compress with so little pressure that hard parts of the car are still impacting human bodies.
This is a uniquely American problem, and therefore something we’re doing is wrong. Why just accept that our streets are so dangerous? Don’t you want safer streets?
You’re going to be pissed when the first loan payment comes due and you still feel empty
Bro I’m the cyclist in this thought experiment
Raises concerns just now? There’s a reason why civilian cars don’t look like military atvs - because they are not military atvs
Aren’t military ATVs road legal though?
I hope this monstrosity will never be approved in Europe. Imagine the impact passengers of a Twingo or any other small city cat will experience in the unfortunate case of a head collision
Seriously, having been hit by a fairly rounded Impreza at low speed that still did significant damage, I’m shivering at the thought of what these edges would do to soft tissue and bone in the same conditions. The pressure at the contact points would be dramatically higher.
Sorry about that.
Holy shit you were the driver?
Well, I drive an Impreza and I did hit a pedestrian at low speed several years ago, so probably.
It’s a small lemmy.world.
Yeah cars should definitely not be colliding with people. The results are horrible. Welcome to civilization with cars, where our overall strategy for minimizing the death cars to do pedestrians is based on collision avoidance rather than making car-pedestrian collisions safe.
Making car-pedestrian collisions safe is a ridiculous idea failed to doom from the start. Cars are big and hard, people are small and squishy.
I think the key is to prevent cars and people from coexisting as much as possible.
My quite large awd minivan that can tow 3500 lbs and fit a massive amount in the back has a hood that slopes down quickly to about a waist height. God forbid if I hit someone, they would clearly be scooped up onto the hood, which might sound bad but literally every single new pickup (with basically the same specs as my minivan on paper except with less capable AWD because of no weight in the back and a bed that doesn’t come with a cover like mine did) is basically designed to try to hit a pedestrian in the shoulders and head and smash them down under the vehicle. This isn’t a hypothetical safety thing, pedestrian fatalities are raising at an alarming rate because it has become cool for insecure men to drive around pickups that are optimized to kill a pedestrian in an accidental crash. Also, the rear cab seats of these pickups are extremely dangerous in a crash (there isnt any space to cushion collision) which is dark given that I always see losers driving around their whole family in these monstrosities treating it like a family vehicle.
I agree though that kicking cars out of places that pedestrians are in and valuing pedestrian use of public ways over car use especially in urban areas is ultimately the best solution.
If you ever felt like your truck didn’t look and drive enough like a prep counter, Elon Musk has got your back.
But, like a prep counter, the blood washes off easily
Cars made of metal do more damage when running down pedestrians than cars made of nerf do. Is the solution to make all cars out of nerf, or to stop running down pedestrians?
I agree with this, however I suppose accidents will be inevitable.
The correct answer is to copy the netherlands in every possible way. You add physical impediments to your transit corridor to make it safer for people and cars to coexist.
Grade separated bike and walk lanes.
Sidewalks that are contiguous, i.e dont dip down to the level of the street. If the sidewalk stays level, pedestrians and bikes cross faster while the sidewalk serves as an inante speed bump where pedestrian traffic crosses roads.
No right on red. This is a leading cause of pedestrian/bike impacts.
Traffic lights not across the road, but next to the road. This keeps driver vision focused in front of their car where pedestrian cross, not looking far off.
Narrow driving lanes. These force cars to slow down, lowering pedestrian impact speeds which drastically reduce mortality. This goes hand in hand with seperated bike/walk lanes.
Real pedestrian islands in wide roads that favor pedestrian crossings. They need to be deisgned for safety and be biased for pedestrians crossing.
Almost like putting the pedestrian first. Unfortunately that is the opposite of America. In good ol USA the car has right of way. That’s why you have jaywalking as a crime. In other parts of the world the pedestrian has right of way and so car has to stop for them.
Would need to upend the whole American system
How do you accommodate for people in wheelchairs? That’s why they dip in the U.S.
They go straight across the road in the Netherlands for streets that cross sidewalks. They dont dip down, so all wheelchair users can just continue on the sidewalk as is.
The sidewalk that intersects the road is a smooth curve. To enter the sidewalk in a wheelchair, you just roll up the smooth curve like a car would. The bump is aggressive ebough to slow down a car, but not so aggressive a person in a wheelchair would have any issues with it.
Heres a great link about how they work. One of the best urban design youtubers as well, by the by.
That front trunk just looks like a guillotine
.
He ate it all
“Let them fly private.”
Cake or Death?
I’ll have the chicken then.
He’s going the distance
and he’s going for speed
No shizsle. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand the inherent problem of this flaw in the car design.
Don’t have to pay pain and suffering to the dead
Pretty easy to solve. Just pay those experts to stfu. Shouldn’t be a problem for musk
I don’t like Teslas, Musk or the cyber truck but it can’t be any more dangerous than the 4 ft wall of radiator traditional pickups have now. Not saying this isn’t a concern but I am way more concerned about the millions of pedestrian crushing rolling walls already on the road.
Tesla seem confident it’ll be safer in part because of that.
I’m wondering if they’ve done some something that can lower the front further if an imminent crash is about to happen with a pedestrian to lower the nose even more. Maybe it won’t work if you’re already at lowest setting, but if you’re raised at all maybe.
You think they’d have advertised a feature like that though by now, so maybe not, but I bet they could.
Would be a good feature for any vehicle with air suspension that can detect an imminent crash with a pedestrian
Detecting that collision is on the same order of difficulty as self-driving cars.
This is not true.
Anti collision systems of various sorts have been around for over a decade. The problem space is minuscule compared to self driving, and almost all car manufacturers offer both forward and reverse collision detection at this point.
In fact I think EU is making it a requirement soon.
Any car with AEB has this capability which is a lot of cars ya.
I don’t know how fast they can lower the vehicle though? There isn’t a lot of time between when AEB kicks off to slow you down and the accident.
Detecting a pedestrian where you would want to lower the front vs say a deer or moose (or other vehicle for that matter) where you don’t want to lower it is more complicated.
Better to just not build the vehicle out of sharp polygons like it needs to be rendered on a Super Nintendo with FX chip.
You could only enable the lowering in pedestrian heavy areas (city) assuming they legit can’t tell a moose apart.
You aren’t going to find many moose in downtown NYC ;)
Again, nothing to do with shape, this would be a good feature for any air suspension vehicle that can detect a pedestrian.
Edit: And I’m not sure we need to worry as much about city deer, they are small enough.
Edit: Also if they CAN detect a moose, they should do the opposite and raise the front.
I’m pretty sure Tesla is devoid of any technology that detects pedestrians.
It definitely detects pedestrians: the live on-screen image shows them when they are nearby. They also claim to have automatic emergency braking when it detects pedestrians being in danger. I haven’t seen this in action, but then again, I don’t drive where pedestrians walk, so… But I can tell that my Tesla does weird short brakings on a motorway when nobody is close. Detects my future ghost, probably.
Their own claim is that their cars are quite a lot safer than USA average: www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport – but I have heard it being rumoured that sometimes companies lie.
I hope you never drive where there are patches of ice on the road.
I do, weekly. These don’t happen incredibly often, and they happen only when the cruise control is switched on. Not once have they caused a dangerous situation.
Your wording makes it sound like the existence of even more dangerous trucks somehow excuses this dangerous truck. Both the 4 ft wall and the sharp metal blade edges are dangerous and irresponsible designs.
I’m not excusing it at all, I think it’s one of the worst vehicles ever made, too big, heavy and fast. People are for sure gonna crash these beasts.
What I meant was I’d like to see traditional truck designs that have millions of vehicles on the road be scrutinized before the 10 cyber trucks. You’re way more likely to be hit by a regular truck which has a deadly design than a cyber truck just because of how many more are on the road.
“I don’t like x but it can’t be worse than y” is a construction which serves to minimize how bad something is. Instead, let’s scrutinize both: “This cyber truck is ridiculously dangerous. While we’re at it, let’s also regulate the 4 feet tall wall of grill on other trucks.”
is a construction that leads to nothing getting done as a result of failing to acknowledge there are limited resources.
The concept of “first” is absolutely key to accomplishing anything.
… Doesn’t “limited resources” basically just mean here ones ability to consider more than one thought at a time? Surely a species capable of collaborative efforts like space travel can handle the complexity of generalizing to say “no, sorry, none of the human-bulldozer designs are okay actually”?
Criticism is not a scarce quantity to be preserved. It spreads, like a fire. Take literally any social movement, like #metoo or BLM. People don’t suppress smaller stories to “save” criticism for bigger stories. The small stories add up. Right now, the F150 is one of the best selling cars in the US. The average American is no where close to criticizing it. But everyone already makes fun of the cyber truck. We can use that.
“Let’s not criticize this dangerous truck design because we should save our criticism!” is the worst way to get people to criticize dangerous truck design.
I’m pretty sure it actually is significantly more dangerous. The front end of traditional pickups will still crumple and absorb a great deal of force. If the cybertruck is more rigid and the sharp edges have a potential to gash pedestrians on impact, that’s two factors that don’t apply to current pickups.
So are we really contemplating pickup trucks as more safe in a pedestrian collision because they have crumple zones?
When a truck hits a pedestrian and the front of the truck crumples, is that pedestrian okay?
There’s a difference between a shattered pelvis and being impaled because someone thought sharp corners are cool and safety standards are oppression.
No one is getting impaled on a forty degree corner lol
I don’t actually know the ride height but it looks like the cyber truck has a much lower nose when driving on normal roads compared to a lot of trucks, so while it may be very stiff, maybe it’ll just launch you over the hood.
The shorter and lower nose should improve visibility too. Regular pickups have a blind spot as large as an entire daycare center.
And those are largely banned from the EU as well. The issue is the lack of regulation in the US, it’s killing pedestrians daily.
“Raises”?
That was a concern the day it was unveiled years ago
Yeah but actual production models only became available Dec 1st, and production is still low until sometime next year without any additional delays.
Don’t they have to safety test these things before they sell them?
They do… But just for the passengers inside.
Although it’s not rocket science to predict the obvious design issue here.
Well, we allow anyone with the cash to drive giant ass trucks that have bumpers at sedan head height… So it’s not like this is terribly surprising
That seems like an odd reply to my comment about how the safety and other concerns are as much a concern now as they were when the cybertruck was announced.
I guess to answer your question, USA vehicles go through nhtsa.gov certification process that requires a bare minimum safety features and then assesses a star rating for safety, both of which are specific to the class of vehicle in question. However, Early and Late release models do not appear to require NCAP ratings and sometimes trigger recalls such as the 2016 TESLA MODEL X P100D SUV AWD Later Release.
It did make the news when Cybertruck Crash Testing videos were made public 5 days ago, but no rating has been made available online yet.
I updated my reply, sorry for seeming standoffish.
Didn’t expect them to act this stupid. They have no damn solution for this mammoth of a tin box, exerting pressures way above what is needed to obliterate any living thing at speed.
Yup, that’s vehicles for ya
The solution is to only sell them in the USA which has no pedestrian safety standards
Again, this whole thing smacks of some entitled person (hmmm, who though?) who knows nothing, making design decisions that are stupid and self indulgent.
I call it “The Homer”, just like the episode where Homer designed a car. You know the result…
No I don’t
Homer designed his own car, ignoring any advice from the designers and engineers who worked at the company, and ends up bankrupting said company cause no one likes the car.
I call it, the “HomerTruck!”
who the fuck cares
Safety experts as well as pedestrians and cyclists. It’s right there in black and white.
i already hate cars, and especially unnecessary civilian trucks. i do not fucking care about elon musk drama. it’s so fucking boring. i don’t need to laugh at the cyber truck again. it’s destroyed this website.
this article doesn’t belong in a fucking technology sub.
Safety concerns…who would have thought? This cannot be an actual recent concern. Everybody could see the safety issues from the day it was unveiled…
Good thing safety regulation is the reason why we hopefully will not see this monstrosity on EU roads.
I’m just so amused by your inclusion of ‘hopefully’ in that sentence… hard to know what to expect when the whole world is a bit
It’s not a recent concern, it’s been talked about since the initial reveal
That is what you get when you slack on pedestrian safety. This a regulations problem, not a Tesla problem.
usa.streetsblog.org/…/while-other-countries-manda…
nacto.org/…/why-the-u-s-gives-monster-suvs-five-s…
Brings back some “carmageddon” nostalgia though.
Yeah, this cybertruck would fit right into the game.
They even got that low-polygon aesthetic.
Hmm, that is a game I haven’t played in two decades.
“Hey, I know you’re disappointed by the lack of Autopilot™, but look on the bright side, every Cybertruck comes standard with our patented Child Buster™ technology to cast those little shits into the depths hell where they belong!”
And perfect for running over protesters. And with the weight of this thing, there’s little likelihood of those pansies surviving. They don’t deserve life if they’re going to use it making your drive last 5 minutes longer.
/s
This sounds like something BeastChild would say in a video.
we’ve combined the Orphan Crushing Machine and the Torment Nexus
To be fair, Tesla Autopilot probably already did that.
Who would buy this piece of crap? Like really?
Tools
I think the main market was supposed to be like a utility vehicle. It’s got some nice specs for actual work purposes for an electric vehicle, while saving money by not making a pretty body.
I don’t know why some people like the look and want it for recreational use.
It was supposed to be a utility vehicle but it genuinely failed. If I wanted a utility vehicle, I would get Toyota Land cruiser 79. For a utility vehicle, you need something reliable, something which does not have 246 useless electronic features and something you can drive while wearing gloves (you cannot so this with tesla considering every setup is made via the display).
Tbh, to me is seems like a car which is made purely for city and for the ones who just want to show off. It definitely is not a proper workhorse.
If I wanted a utility vehicle (which would be abused), I would look for:
Nothing more is truly needed because it just adds the probability of failure.
Shit on me if you must but I actually like the look and features of the car. However I likely wouldn’t buy a Tesla in general
You’d like the “features” of any car, it’s why they’re features. It’s the tradeoffs that actually matter.
And yeah, it looked cool at first, but that’s really just because of its uniqueness. From an actual design perspective, it just looks…stupid.
It could be a good vehicle, if it was built by someone else.
The past few years have revealed that while Tesla have the tech, they lack the basic precision manufacturing that other automakers mastered decades ago.
I agree, features are nice and I also would enjoy trying to drive one. But in a for a long term usage, I bet the reliability will be an issue and also some Tesla shenanigans such as 20k for the battery.
Thing is: I personally don’t give a shit about features. I like simple and basic vehicles that last for many years.
A lot of people. Bunch of my coworkers were hyped about the release.
I’ll bet there are going to be some great deals for these on the used market when whatever cool factor there is collapses.
Good deals on used cars is a thing of the past I’m afraid
Is it because they want to use it for sth or just because it’s “cool”?
Fellow narcissists.
.
It looks exactly like a ‘rad car’ that I doodled in my social studies notebook after slamming two bottles of Robitussin.
You should take Tesla to court for stealing your idea
And get the judge to make them pay damages in the form of pallets of Robitussin!
maybe that would be the outcome in a fever dream episode of Judge Judy.
How long till these things are all sitting in random scrappers in the Mojave?
Meme car is real.
Here we go again, trying to shame a narcissist out of doing the thing he was doing to get you to react by shaming him.
This is never going to be available in Europe. Sad because I like it. Can’t afford it in 100yrs but would like to see others drive it.
I don’t jump the hype and hate it just because “Elon made that”. It is a cool shape, different than other cars. Doug DeMuro would have his hands full with all the quircks&features.
So it’s an EV Delorian.