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"the two adults suffered 'non-life threatening injuries' and the two children were 'unharmed.'" Remarkable. Is there something about a Tesla that could accoun

"the two adults suffered 'non-life threatening injuries' and the two children were 'unharmed.'" Remarkable. Is there something about a Tesla that could account for this or is it just modern best practices for safety along with a non-trivial amount of good luck?

dgrin91 4y ago
A mix of modern safety, and also a major advantage of EVs in general (not just Tesla) - since there is no engine, the front of the car is basically just an empty crumble zone. That greatly increases survivability compare to traditional ICE cars in the same weight class.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  What you say makes sense, but if it is true, why aren't all cars built with the engine in the rear, then?
  - bagels 4y ago
    Fwd is cheaper and easier to provide interior and storage space.
  - stephenhuey 4y ago
    > Automakers began to abandon the rear-engined layout in the 1970s, with only a handful of cars still available in the 1980s. This was due to the fact that rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive cars were prone to oversteer, which caused vehicle instability. https://www.topspeed.com/cars/car-news/10-rear-engined-cars-that-aren-t-a-porsche-911/ https://www.topspeed.com/cars/car-news/10-rear-engined-cars-...
    - kalupa 4y ago
      not to mention how awful they are in slippery (ice/snow) conditions, which is related to exactly what you mentioned with oversteer
    - pifm_guy 4y ago
      Engines are only ~100kg usually. And a full fuel tank is also about 100kg. So the fuel tank and engine could be swapped without affecting weight distribution.
      - acchow 4y ago
        What about everything else around the engine? You wouldn’t just move the engine to the rear but keep the transmission and the alternator and etc in the front.
      - userbinator 4y ago
        Engines are only ~100kg usually 220lbs? Only the lightest ones. Let's also not forget the transmission/transaxle too. https://www.gomog.com/allmorgan/engineweights.html https://www.gomog.com/allmorgan/engineweights.html
      - BucketsMcG 4y ago
        Sorry, you're way off there. My ancient car has a gigantic 90 litre fuel tank. At 720g / litre, that's 64.8kg. And that really is a huge tank - most cars are more like 40-60 litres. The engine, meanwhile, well it depends what you count as "the engine". If we take it to mean "everything in the engine bay" - radiators, filters, pumps, etc. - you're going to be looking at several times that. Hell, even a battery is like 20kg.
      - pvaldes 4y ago
        The fuel tank is partially empty most of the time when we drive, and many drivers never refill to the top of the tank, or don't put more fuel until the tank is almost empty. Those 100Kg could be on average 30 or 40Kg.
  - mhb 4y ago
    Does it make sense? I thought there was a survival advantage to having a giant chunk of metal absorbing the impact of a head-on collision. Assuming that it is routed under you instead of into you - which it is.
    - bdamm 4y ago
      Depending on the crash, the engine being pushed under can launch the car into the air, where it is more likely to roll over. Contrast this with EVs where the battery is basically a giant puck that the occupants are sitting on top of; the deformation of the crumple zone and the low center of gravity cause the vehicle to rotate away instead of being launched.
      - mhb 4y ago
        The comparison is between identical cars except that one has an engine between you and what you're hitting and one with empty space there and the engine behind you. Also, I'm more than a little skeptical about the frequency of accidents in which a vehicle is launched into the air and rolls over due to the engine being pushed under the passengers. And even if that scenario is common, I'm skeptical that the risk of that happening offsets the benefit of having an engine between you and a colliding object.
  - BucketsMcG 4y ago
    All sorts of reasons, but it's got a lot to do with packaging and handling. Generally you want the weight distribution of the car to be 50:50 front:rear for optimal handling. A car will handle great if you can put the engine and transmission somewhere towards the middle, but obviously that isn't great news for passengers. Mid-engined cars exist, of course, but they're usually two-seater sports cars where space and comfort are lower down the list of priorities. So you're left with putting the engine somewhere towards the front, or somewhere towards the back. Some manufacturers, like BMW, achieve ideal weight distribution by mounting the engine relatively far back in the front of the car, and putting the transmission and some other heavy bits at the back. This is elegant, but too complex and expensive for your average runabout. With a front-engined car, you can safely put some of the engine forward of the front axle. Doing so means more space in the passenger cabin, but hanging the weight out front makes the car nose-heavy. In an average front-wheel-drive family car, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, and might even be desirable, as it means good traction and a tendency towards boring, predictable understeer. Sling the weight out back, like a Porsche 911, and you get the opposite problem: the car naturally tends to want to swap ends in corners. Some drivers find this fun, right up until it kills them. If a 911 is a safe car today, it's because Porsche has spent decades pigheadedly perfecting a layout everybody else abandoned long ago for its tendency to send you backwards through hedges.
    - spindle 4y ago
      I like this reply very much except that I wonder why people say that sports cars are uncomfortable. I find all the ones I've driven, including two mid-engined ones, super comfortable. Maybe it's just me. (In any case, your point that they're not space-efficient stands.)
      - sliken 4y ago
        Super comfortable mid engine ... Cayman? If you give up the rear seats it does help quite a bit, but does limit your market.
        spindle 4y ago
  - lambdasquirrel 4y ago
    It's more than just that. The skateboard design for dedicated EV platforms makes for a better-protected passenger cell. Whereas before you had to dedicate all this steel into keeping the car rigid while mounting this heavy 250kg engine all the way up front, usually in front of the wheels (and plus all the attendant powertrain stuff), now instead a lot of that steel is dedicated to maintaining the integrity of the passenger cell, concomitant to maintaining integrity of the battery skateboard. As for why few companies put the ICE engine in the back, whereas front-engine layouts tend towards understeer, rear-engine layouts tend toward oversteer, which is a safety and usability issue for the 99th percentile of drivers (and that's after you put in the engineering to make it work). Porsche spent a lot of effort making rear-engine safe. The design also results in less room for storage.
  - sliken 4y ago
    Expense. Much of engine design is getting rid of heat, which is much harder in the wind shadow of the car. It also makes it harder to have a good weight balance, and you end up adding significant engineering to keep the rear heavy car from having undesirable handling characteristics ... which is something the Porsche 911 has been battling for decades.
- blamazon 4y ago
  I did some crash testing in a previous life and it's absolutely crazy to see this play out in high speed (slow-mo) videography. The camera angle from directly below a vehicle pointed upwards in a frontal collision is biblical--RWD driveshafts turn into giant spears! Engine blocks into kinetic missiles, blazing a trail of mechanical destruction after they shear the mounts. Suspension parts zooming across the screen as springs unload their tension. Steel acting like wet cardboard. Nuts and bolts and other flotsam levitating chaotically like flocks of birds. Surreal stuff.
  - metadat 4y ago
    This sounds both terrifying and remarkable. Are there any videos you can share?
    - blamazon 4y ago
      Unfortunately not, it was long ago and the footage would not be my intellectual property anyway. I had a search on YouTube for equivalent footage and didn't see that angle represented.
  - buggy6257 4y ago
    I’d just like to say that “I did some crash testing in a previous life” makes it sound like maybe you were on the receiving end of it. :D
    - _nalply 4y ago
      And I wondered whether he had a brain dump on an external hard disk before he died.
      - blamazon 4y ago
        Sadly I have no access to such future technology. Like other posters on this board I believe I am trapped on this linear timeline.
kyleyeats 4y ago
Both kids were in car seats which held in place.
cypress66 4y ago
Teslas generally score among the safest vehicles. Lack of internal combustion engine in the front obviously helps a lot. Other than that I don't think they are doing anything completely differently than other cars. It's the small things that add up: fatter pillars, and small design choices like that overall seem to help. In the near future when they begin to use gigacastings that could theoretically further increase their safety.
- stephenhuey 4y ago
  Maybe this will help the plummeting stock to skyrocket tomorrow.
  - pifm_guy 4y ago
    The stock is still worth nearly 10x what it was in mid 2019.
    - metadat 4y ago
      Then it has a ways further still to plunge.
      - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
        I wouldn't get your hopes up.
        metadat 4y ago
        I don't have skin in the game one way or the other. Elon Musk's nature has been sufficiently exposed and reputation is already ruined. I wanted to be a fan but I can't get excited for unharnessed narcissism and power seeking. This one's crispy, Jim.
    - voisin 4y ago
      This is important context that needs to be provided more often. Lots of people talking about the “crash” when so many of the examples still are just in the range of the pre-COVID levels, which I don’t recall many people thinking was a bargain time to be buying the market!
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
[flagged]
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  FSD was not active it sounds like.
sliken 4y ago
They do seem impressively built. One broke the car crushing machine used for safety tests. Seems to be a combination of roller skate design (batteries in the floor) that helps prevent roll overs (one of the leading causes of serious injuries), being overbuilt, being a from scratch design (not a retrofit like some EVs), and generally designed well. In particular the A pillars are pretty massive. One fairly unique feature I'm aware of is the glass roof. Apparently under load the glass absorbs substantial energy before shattering, and after shattering is pretty strong and will absorb additional energy as it's deformed. This (when combined with the skateboard design) keeps cabin intrusion from side impacts exceptionally low. Another is progress for stamping 1/3rd of the car allowing a single piece of steel to replace what would normally be a dozen or more welded pieces of steel. The new model Y has a front piece, a rear piece, and the battery for the entire chassis. Seats are bolted onto the battery module and it's greatly reduced the part count, manufacturing time, alignment issues, and increased the strength/weight ratio. Check out "Munro Live" on youtube for more info.

dgrin91 4y ago

A mix of modern safety, and also a major advantage of EVs in general (not just Tesla) - since there is no engine, the front of the car is basically just an empty crumble zone. That greatly increases survivability compare to traditional ICE cars in the same weight class.

actually_a_dog 4y ago
What you say makes sense, but if it is true, why aren't all cars built with the engine in the rear, then?
- bagels 4y ago
  Fwd is cheaper and easier to provide interior and storage space.
- stephenhuey 4y ago
  > Automakers began to abandon the rear-engined layout in the 1970s, with only a handful of cars still available in the 1980s. This was due to the fact that rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive cars were prone to oversteer, which caused vehicle instability. https://www.topspeed.com/cars/car-news/10-rear-engined-cars-that-aren-t-a-porsche-911/ https://www.topspeed.com/cars/car-news/10-rear-engined-cars-...
  - kalupa 4y ago
    not to mention how awful they are in slippery (ice/snow) conditions, which is related to exactly what you mentioned with oversteer
  - pifm_guy 4y ago
    Engines are only ~100kg usually. And a full fuel tank is also about 100kg. So the fuel tank and engine could be swapped without affecting weight distribution.
    - acchow 4y ago
      What about everything else around the engine? You wouldn’t just move the engine to the rear but keep the transmission and the alternator and etc in the front.
    - userbinator 4y ago
      Engines are only ~100kg usually 220lbs? Only the lightest ones. Let's also not forget the transmission/transaxle too. https://www.gomog.com/allmorgan/engineweights.html https://www.gomog.com/allmorgan/engineweights.html
    - BucketsMcG 4y ago
      Sorry, you're way off there. My ancient car has a gigantic 90 litre fuel tank. At 720g / litre, that's 64.8kg. And that really is a huge tank - most cars are more like 40-60 litres. The engine, meanwhile, well it depends what you count as "the engine". If we take it to mean "everything in the engine bay" - radiators, filters, pumps, etc. - you're going to be looking at several times that. Hell, even a battery is like 20kg.
    - pvaldes 4y ago
      The fuel tank is partially empty most of the time when we drive, and many drivers never refill to the top of the tank, or don't put more fuel until the tank is almost empty. Those 100Kg could be on average 30 or 40Kg.
- mhb 4y ago
  Does it make sense? I thought there was a survival advantage to having a giant chunk of metal absorbing the impact of a head-on collision. Assuming that it is routed under you instead of into you - which it is.
  - bdamm 4y ago
    Depending on the crash, the engine being pushed under can launch the car into the air, where it is more likely to roll over. Contrast this with EVs where the battery is basically a giant puck that the occupants are sitting on top of; the deformation of the crumple zone and the low center of gravity cause the vehicle to rotate away instead of being launched.
    - mhb 4y ago
      The comparison is between identical cars except that one has an engine between you and what you're hitting and one with empty space there and the engine behind you. Also, I'm more than a little skeptical about the frequency of accidents in which a vehicle is launched into the air and rolls over due to the engine being pushed under the passengers. And even if that scenario is common, I'm skeptical that the risk of that happening offsets the benefit of having an engine between you and a colliding object.
- BucketsMcG 4y ago
  All sorts of reasons, but it's got a lot to do with packaging and handling. Generally you want the weight distribution of the car to be 50:50 front:rear for optimal handling. A car will handle great if you can put the engine and transmission somewhere towards the middle, but obviously that isn't great news for passengers. Mid-engined cars exist, of course, but they're usually two-seater sports cars where space and comfort are lower down the list of priorities. So you're left with putting the engine somewhere towards the front, or somewhere towards the back. Some manufacturers, like BMW, achieve ideal weight distribution by mounting the engine relatively far back in the front of the car, and putting the transmission and some other heavy bits at the back. This is elegant, but too complex and expensive for your average runabout. With a front-engined car, you can safely put some of the engine forward of the front axle. Doing so means more space in the passenger cabin, but hanging the weight out front makes the car nose-heavy. In an average front-wheel-drive family car, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, and might even be desirable, as it means good traction and a tendency towards boring, predictable understeer. Sling the weight out back, like a Porsche 911, and you get the opposite problem: the car naturally tends to want to swap ends in corners. Some drivers find this fun, right up until it kills them. If a 911 is a safe car today, it's because Porsche has spent decades pigheadedly perfecting a layout everybody else abandoned long ago for its tendency to send you backwards through hedges.
  - spindle 4y ago
    I like this reply very much except that I wonder why people say that sports cars are uncomfortable. I find all the ones I've driven, including two mid-engined ones, super comfortable. Maybe it's just me. (In any case, your point that they're not space-efficient stands.)
    - sliken 4y ago
      Super comfortable mid engine ... Cayman? If you give up the rear seats it does help quite a bit, but does limit your market.
      - spindle 4y ago
- lambdasquirrel 4y ago
  It's more than just that. The skateboard design for dedicated EV platforms makes for a better-protected passenger cell. Whereas before you had to dedicate all this steel into keeping the car rigid while mounting this heavy 250kg engine all the way up front, usually in front of the wheels (and plus all the attendant powertrain stuff), now instead a lot of that steel is dedicated to maintaining the integrity of the passenger cell, concomitant to maintaining integrity of the battery skateboard. As for why few companies put the ICE engine in the back, whereas front-engine layouts tend towards understeer, rear-engine layouts tend toward oversteer, which is a safety and usability issue for the 99th percentile of drivers (and that's after you put in the engineering to make it work). Porsche spent a lot of effort making rear-engine safe. The design also results in less room for storage.
- sliken 4y ago
  Expense. Much of engine design is getting rid of heat, which is much harder in the wind shadow of the car. It also makes it harder to have a good weight balance, and you end up adding significant engineering to keep the rear heavy car from having undesirable handling characteristics ... which is something the Porsche 911 has been battling for decades.
blamazon 4y ago
I did some crash testing in a previous life and it's absolutely crazy to see this play out in high speed (slow-mo) videography. The camera angle from directly below a vehicle pointed upwards in a frontal collision is biblical--RWD driveshafts turn into giant spears! Engine blocks into kinetic missiles, blazing a trail of mechanical destruction after they shear the mounts. Suspension parts zooming across the screen as springs unload their tension. Steel acting like wet cardboard. Nuts and bolts and other flotsam levitating chaotically like flocks of birds. Surreal stuff.
- metadat 4y ago
  This sounds both terrifying and remarkable. Are there any videos you can share?
  - blamazon 4y ago
    Unfortunately not, it was long ago and the footage would not be my intellectual property anyway. I had a search on YouTube for equivalent footage and didn't see that angle represented.
- buggy6257 4y ago
  I’d just like to say that “I did some crash testing in a previous life” makes it sound like maybe you were on the receiving end of it. :D
  - _nalply 4y ago
    And I wondered whether he had a brain dump on an external hard disk before he died.
    - blamazon 4y ago
      Sadly I have no access to such future technology. Like other posters on this board I believe I am trapped on this linear timeline.

kyleyeats 4y ago

Both kids were in car seats which held in place.

cypress66 4y ago

Teslas generally score among the safest vehicles. Lack of internal combustion engine in the front obviously helps a lot. Other than that I don't think they are doing anything completely differently than other cars. It's the small things that add up: fatter pillars, and small design choices like that overall seem to help. In the near future when they begin to use gigacastings that could theoretically further increase their safety.

stephenhuey 4y ago
Maybe this will help the plummeting stock to skyrocket tomorrow.
- pifm_guy 4y ago
  The stock is still worth nearly 10x what it was in mid 2019.
  - metadat 4y ago
    Then it has a ways further still to plunge.
    - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
      I wouldn't get your hopes up.
      - metadat 4y ago
        I don't have skin in the game one way or the other. Elon Musk's nature has been sufficiently exposed and reputation is already ruined. I wanted to be a fan but I can't get excited for unharnessed narcissism and power seeking. This one's crispy, Jim.
  - voisin 4y ago
    This is important context that needs to be provided more often. Lots of people talking about the “crash” when so many of the examples still are just in the range of the pre-COVID levels, which I don’t recall many people thinking was a bargain time to be buying the market!

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

[flagged]

colejohnson66 4y ago
FSD was not active it sounds like.

sliken 4y ago

They do seem impressively built. One broke the car crushing machine used for safety tests. Seems to be a combination of roller skate design (batteries in the floor) that helps prevent roll overs (one of the leading causes of serious injuries), being overbuilt, being a from scratch design (not a retrofit like some EVs), and generally designed well. In particular the A pillars are pretty massive. One fairly unique feature I'm aware of is the glass roof. Apparently under load the glass absorbs substantial energy before shattering, and after shattering is pretty strong and will absorb additional energy as it's deformed. This (when combined with the skateboard design) keeps cabin intrusion from side impacts exceptionally low. Another is progress for stamping 1/3rd of the car allowing a single piece of steel to replace what would normally be a dozen or more welded pieces of steel. The new model Y has a front piece, a rear piece, and the battery for the entire chassis. Seats are bolted onto the battery module and it's greatly reduced the part count, manufacturing time, alignment issues, and increased the strength/weight ratio. Check out "Munro Live" on youtube for more info.