Tesla Cybertruck's stiff structure, sharp design raise safety concerns - experts

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.

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.

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.

That's... computer generated. BeamNG maybe?

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

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Wow looks unsafe as fuck!!

Holy shit you were the driver?

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.

Yeah, this cybertruck would fit right into the game.

Hmm, that is a game I haven't played in two decades.

Don't they have to safety test these things before they sell them?

The solution is to only sell them in the USA which has no pedestrian safety standards

Yup, that’s vehicles for ya

And get the judge to make them pay damages in the form of pallets of Robitussin!

He’s going the distance

Cake or Death?

“Let them fly private.”

He ate it all

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 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.

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?

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'm pretty sure Tesla is devoid of any technology that detects pedestrians.

Detecting that collision is on the same order of difficulty as self-driving cars.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, I don't think even a cybertruck can stand up against a fully-loaded semi.

Bro I'm the cyclist in this thought experiment

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?

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

Sidewalks that are contiguous, i.e dont dip down to the level of the street.

How do you accommodate for people in wheelchairs? That's why they dip in the U.S.

Unless I'm mistaken, crumpling is meant to protect the driver and passengers. Not pedestrians, cyclists, or anyone else outside the 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.