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.
So it’s an EV Delorian.
Pretty easy to solve. Just pay those experts to stfu. Shouldn’t be a problem for musk
Who would buy this piece of crap? Like really?
Tools
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Is it because they want to use it for sth or just because it’s “cool”?
I’ll bet there are going to be some great deals for these on the used market when whatever cool factor there is collapses.
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Fellow narcissists.
Possibly unpopular opinion but I think the Cybertruck is about as dumb-looking as most any other truck on the market. 4 big doors, more cabin than bed, trucks in general are all goofy looking parking lot crawlers nowadays
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
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.
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.
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:
- big payload
- 3 pedals
- hand brake
- steering wheel
- 4x4, diff locks , transfer case
- gear lever
Nothing more is truly needed because it just adds the probability of failure.
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
“The big problem there is if they really make the skin of the vehicle very stiff by using thick stainless steel, then when people hit their heads on it, it’s going to cause more damage to them,”
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 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’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.
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.
Found Elon!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
why not both?
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.
Because cyber trucks aren’t killing people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
“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
To be fair, Tesla Autopilot probably already did that.
we’ve combined the Orphan Crushing Machine and the Torment Nexus
This sounds like something BeastChild would say in a video.
How long till these things are all sitting in random scrappers in the Mojave?
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.
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?
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.
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Grade separated bike and walk lanes.
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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.
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No right on red. This is a leading cause of pedestrian/bike impacts.
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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.
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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.
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Real pedestrian islands in wide roads that favor pedestrian crossings. They need to be deisgned for safety and be biased for pedestrians crossing.
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.
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.
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
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I agree with this, however I suppose accidents will be inevitable.
That is what you get when you slack on pedestrian safety. This a regulations problem, not a Tesla problem.
However, under the federal government’s current safety rating system, known as the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), almost every vehicle gets a four- or five-star rating. That’s because the system only takes into account the safety of those within cars, not all the people walking, pushing strollers, biking, or taking transit outside them.
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.
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
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.
could hurt pedestrians and cyclists
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.
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.
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 etcYou’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.
How many others run a social media platform catered to fashists?
They all have their own special flavors of trash.
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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.
You simply can’t stop a semi fast enough when something is doing half the speed limit
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.
That sounds like a problem with your county. If that many people are dying, wouldn’t it be worth building a separated bike path?
We have one…they don’t use it.
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.
For electric cars, those greenhouse gasses are being spewed at the power plant instead of from the car itself
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.
So my thinking is that emissions are still happening, just not necessarily where people are living and with better emissions management.
Yes, that is part of it.
Here are some other cliffnotes:
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Even when using 100% coal, you’re still producing far less CO2 than an equivalent gasoline vehicle.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
It just read their other comments and realize they’re not.
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.
