9 ms·
While I appreciate the unique design of the Cybertruck, I have a huge concern with its huge size and the potential safety risks for pedestrians. The trend of i
by sushid 3y ago
While I appreciate the unique design of the Cybertruck, I have a huge concern with its huge size and the potential safety risks for pedestrians.
The trend of increasingly larger vehicles, like SUVs and trucks, has already raised issues regarding pedestrian safety. The Cybertruck, being notably larger than most contemporary cars in the same category, could exacerbate this problem, especially if it opens the door to similar designs in new market segments IMO.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoIt should be safer than a normal truck to pedestrians, since it doesn't have a broad front. With a car, the most common scenario is that car hits your legs and then you bounce on the hood. IOW, you don't get the full kinetic energy all at once. With a truck your body takes the full hit and you're more likely to fall under the tires. With a lower, sharper front, the Cybertruck should behave more like a car than a full size truck. But we really don't know yet. It's a real failure of regulators that we it's not a standard part of testing and that their aren't good standards in this area. https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-vertical-front-ends-pose-greater-risk-to-pedestrians https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-v...
- mike_d 3y agoIt is the single biggest step backwards in automotive safety in the last ten years. https://www.travelers.com/resources/auto/safe-driving/how-crumple-zones-work https://www.travelers.com/resources/auto/safe-driving/how-cr...
- slowhadoken 3y agoyeah but automotive safety has been great the last twenty years especially for children
- mike_d 3y agoIt really has, cars have gotten progressively safer every year since 1975 for everyone involved. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/children#trends https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/child...
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoAre these charts simply displaying the gradual decline in children-under-13 walking and riding bicycles?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- antasvara 3y agoThere's a line specifically for vehicle occupants.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoFair enough, but I don't think anyone doubts the increase in safety provided to vehicle occupants.
- weeblewobble 3y agoThe chart shows child pedestrian deaths went from 1632 to 144. So a tenfold decrease. No idea about the stats on child pedestrianship but I’d be surprised if it was down 10 fold.
- Turskarama 3y agoWhy would you be surprised? Even in my lifetime the number of kids you see out and about has decreased dramatically, there's both a lot less to do outside and a lot more to do inside.
- yaomtc 3y ago
- bryanlarsen 3y agohttps://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-vertical-front-ends-pose-greater-risk-to-pedestrians https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-v...
- golol 3y agoJust wait until crash test results come out before speculating wildly. Hard shells can also crumple.
- dangus 3y agoAre you claiming the Cybertruck doesn’t have a crumple zone? That doesn’t make a lot sense. The entire front hood area is hollow, there isn’t even an engine there. Just because Elon used a bunch of puffery to play up the exoskeleton doesn’t mean it acts like a boulder when it hits another vehicle. Crumple zones aren’t even relevant to pedestrian crashes.
- mike_d 3y agoThe outer skin is made of 3mm cold rolled stainless steel, likely the same 300 grade alloy that SpaceX developed. A conservative estimate for the yield strength (based on similar alloys) is 275 MPa, or roughly 1.8x the pressure required to compress a human bone (150 MPa). Normal automotive skin by comparison is made from 0.65mm steel or aluminum.
- dgfitz 3y agoYour complaint about trucks is misguided [1] and should instead lie with passenger cars until such time as passenger cars are not the leading cause of pedestrian deaths by vehicle type. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1730245/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1730245/
- amenhotep 3y agoThis says that light trucks are 1.45 times likelier to kill a person per mile driven than cars.
- ethanbond 3y agoFrom the Conclusion: > The greatest impact on overall US pedestrian mortality will result from reducing the risk from the light truck category.
- teej 3y agoThis paper is nearly 20 years old and does not reflect the state of the world today.
- Zetobal 3y agoNearly went back to the 1900s there bud.
- avidiax 3y agoThe Cybertruck is actually rather low for a truck. The edge of the hood would hit a typical person in the gut, not the neck or face as with many other trucks (especially lifted trucks). https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/model-s-vs-cybertruck-size-comparison-side-by-side-photo.8056/preview https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/model-s-v...
- camillomiller 3y agoAh well, then.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoI don't know this for sure as I've never sat in one, but from the images I've seen the visibility through the Cybertruck looks awful. That is, the slant of the windshield makes it look like the driver sits rather low, and thus would have huge blind spots in front of them. Perhaps not a huge issue at slow speeds because there is a front camera, but I hate that feeling of having poor visibility as a driver.
- xnx 3y agoI read that the height can differ 14" with the air suspension.
- kylehotchkiss 3y agoLow? I saw one in the mall last week and it’s bigger than a tundra. It also had considerable ground clearance.
- devmor 3y agoI saw one side by side with a Rivian R1T at a red light and it absolutely dwarfed the R1T. Doesn’t look low to me.
- FireBeyond 3y agoI'm 5'10. There's a lot of lifted trucks in my area. I am yet to see one where the edge of the hood would hit me in the face. Apropos of anything else, that's an actual ladder, not even a step ladder to get to things like wiper fluid, let alone engine work.
- jtriangle 3y agoMy mazda has absolutely HUGE a-pillars, which are, in my opinion, a far larger threat to pedestrians, than having a simply larger vehicle. Like you can fit a family of 4 with a stroller in mine, I find myself leaning way forward to check that blind spot every time I turn right. And even that is second fiddle to people using their phones while driving, which is an absolute plague in general, not just for pedestrian safety, but safety overall.
- albertgoeswoof 3y agoYet you still drive it
- jtriangle 3y agoWell yeah, I still owe like 15k on it...
- majewsky 3y agoI never owned a car, or a driver's license for that matter, so this is an honest question: Did you not realize this flaw during the test drive?
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoIt may not be immediately obvious on a test drive, and it's not a problem unique to the Mazda.
- addicted 3y agoThere’s a lot of evidence that larger vehicles are massive threats to pedestrians. I’m not sure what the evidence for huge A-pillars as a threat is, but if it’s worse than larger vehicles it does not in any way change the fact that larger vehicles are indeed a massive threat.
- datameta 3y ago
- MagicMoonlight 3y ago[flagged]
- yulker 3y agoLarger cars are more deadly.
- WXLCKNO 3y agoWhat a terrible take. Accidents happen. When they do, it's obviously better if people don't die.
- dgunay 3y agoI never jaywalk but I have been nearly run over several times in crosswalks. People run red lights or don't check the crosswalk during unprotected lefts or rights on red all the time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- somedudetbh 3y agoyesterday on my way to work i saw a guy in one of those huge pickup trucks cut a corner on a right turn, run over the concrete bike lane seperator, which was marked by a row of roughly three foot high reflector sticks (which he also mowed down), and then drive his right front wheels up over the curve onto the sidewalk. on a perfectly clear morning in a residential neighborhood, with curbs painted with that yellow reflective paint.
- BanazirGalbasi 3y agoCars don't always stop at marked crossings. Hell, they don't always stop at marked crossings with lights, or at school bus stops. This isn't an issue of pedestrians just randomly walking in front of cars. Drivers don't always look where they're going, and it's getting worse as people get more distracted by things like massive screens replacing physical controls on the dashboard. A decade ago, I knew a girl who got hit by a passing SUV while crossing the street to board the school bus. The bus was stopped with lights and signs out on a 2-lane road, it was impossible to miss. The SUV driver just decided not to stop and clipped her going 45 mph when legally they should have stopped. Getting hit was not her fault, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of cases were similar.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dangus 3y agoIt’s smaller than an F-150: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLvopc9oI4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLvopc9oI4A
- xnx 3y agoThere's also a danger of being able to accelerate 7,000 lbs. to 60 mph in under 3 seconds.
- harambae 3y agoPeople bring this up a lot on Hacker News, but AEB (Automated Emergency Braking) is essentially standard at this point [0] on new vehicles (technically NHTSA just makes recommendations on this right now, but as a practical matter OEM's comply because someday soon it'll be mandatory without an explicit waiver). Between the forward-facing camera (usually running some version of Mobileye EyeQ) and forward-facing radar, the odds of running over a pedestrian directly like you're thinking on a 2023+ vehicle is quite low. Even cross-traffic/bicycle/cutoff scenarios are pretty extensively covered if you read up on Mobileye's website. Personally, I'd be more concerned with older cars without AEB hitting pedestrians than the "let's make it more enjoyable when pedestrians do get hit" sentiment that seems so common in these discussions here. [0] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/automatic-emergency-braking-proposed-rule https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/automatic-emergency-bra...
- pfannkuchen 3y ago> let's make it more enjoyable when pedestrians do get hit Why can’t we have a pillowy airbag pincer on the front of cars that snatches pedestrians up and hugs them if it makes contact?
- Too 3y agoVolvo used to have exterior airbag on the V40.
- morsch 3y agoOr, you know, you could do both.
- nerdbert 3y agoI'm not sure exactly what the scope of that is, but I was hit (lightly) by a Tesla in a crosswalk earlier this year.
- benj111 3y agoAre people going to be using the front camera whilst driving and is that even a good idea?