Comment by Danieru
7 years ago
Does the US not have pedestrian safety standards? An all metal front grill must be horrible on any safety tests.
I can only assume this is a joke and in a few hours Elon will do a "one more thing" before showing the real Tesla Pickup.
This take on a pickup looks like some engineer accidentally left their Halo fan-art on the shared CAD file server.
Don't be ridiculous. The US has no pedestrian safety standards whatsoever. In a sane world, the NHTSA would have outlawed bull bars and required trucks to have sideguards.
I had to look this up because i figured you must be talking out of your ass, there had to be some pedestrian safety standards.
but nope, apparently not. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/07/while-other-countries...
The US is one of the most anti-pedestrian countries I've been to. Everywhere else I've been to, drivers are supposed to watch out for pedestrians crossing the road. In the US, they've managed to make it illegal!
11 replies →
I wish we could hold these regulators personally accountable for every pedestrian death that could have been prevented by safer regulations.
3 replies →
What? I thought the pedestrian safety standard was they have right of way.
1 reply →
So, is this basically illegal in other countries? Does that mean we should expect the Cybertruck to be US-only?
That was my immediate thought. Granted, I've not watched the video as I'm at work so if it was covered then I've not seen it, but that thing looks like it has absolutely no crumple zones, and the lack of curved surfaces would cause horrific injury in a pedestrian collision.
Tesla Model S and 3 in terms of collision safety are the safest cars ever sold in America. There is a giant crumple zone where the engine would be in an ICE vehicle. The Cybertruck will be the same.
Those are not made out of this apparently super-hard steel. This thing's sales pitch sounds more like a tank than a car.
But yes, as sibling replies have pointed out, I was more aghast as the fact that the US does not give one iota of fuck about pedestrian safety, apparently. Here, you can (theoretically, granted) get fined for attaching a bullbar that compromises the pedestrian safety, for example by changing how a pedestrian bends when impacted by the front of the car and in doing so increasing the risk of spinal or other injury to the pedestrian.
My comment was largely a critique of the differing approaches to road safety.
3 replies →
No they aren’t. Model 3 doesn’t score perfect in the all the IIHS injury categories which Mercedes, Lexus, and Volvo do for the vehicle class. It got the top pick but so did 15+ other models.
Pedestrian or passenger safety ?
The model S and 3 are built almost exclusively from aluminum and aren't marketed like tanks.
2 replies →
Not meant to be mainstream. It's meant to be f'ing tough and show how much of a beast the electric vehicle can be. Really takes the air out of being 'Built Ford Tough' Likely just following the Roadster play book. Get the toughness doubters out of the way, then a more traditional truck to follow.
Does it not being mainstream even matter, though? Because at least here in AU, and I believe in the EU, to even register it as roadworthy it needs to not compromise its collision protection which includes pedestrian collisions.
I don’t think it’s for those markets, at least certainly not the EU.
3 replies →
Ever seen a train pulled by a ford? I have. Built Ford Tough is TRUE
The physics of pulling something with steel wheels on a steel track make the demo a lot less impressive than it sounds.
To illustrate, consider that the world record for a single person towing a train by a strap held by their teeth is 280 tons.
1 reply →
Humans can pull trains. There's plenty of video of that on YouTube. They're made to roll as effortlessly as possible.
Here's a bunch of HO scale (1:87) trains pulling their full sized version, too: https://twitter.com/mrtimdunn/status/1101414657418498049
You can literally push a train car on flat ground by leaning on it long enough.
Didn't Top Gear once pull a train with an MGF? I'm not sure this proves anything.
I would love to see the frowns of the EU regulators when they wake up and see this.
I guess it’s a good thing that trucks like this aren’t really a thing in the EU.
They exist, but I don’t know anyone who has ever owned or rented one. They’re hard to find, dealerships don’t tend to have them so you’d have to find a specialist importer I reckon.
Most commercial dealers will have them - the same places you'd go to buy a van (in the UK at least). I've used them for work in a couple of contexts (usually Mazda ones for whatever reason) and they've been great.
1 reply →
Never going to pass, those sharp edges and corners would give negative EuroNCAP ratings.
Doubt they're even going to try to introduce it on the EU market, there's very little demand for pickup trucks here...
In urban areas, yes. In rural areas- in Greece they're like a stereotype, farmers with pickup trucks. I know at least one person who has a pimped-up one with rollbars (bullbars?) and big lights and so on.
1 reply →
You can pre-order it in Belgium, Germany, etc. Not all countries, but a significant list.
They would promote the Semi pickup instead.
For it to be sold in Europe doesn't it also have to comply with European laws? Would Tesla create a second version of the truck for Europe?
> Would Tesla create a second version of the truck for Europe?
I don't think I've ever actually seen what Americans call a 'truck' on a street in Europe.
(Slight exaggeration, but not really.)
Some Dodge Rams and Ford pickups in Finland. They barely fit in parking lots and are ridiculously huge and polluting.
Not a whole lot but you do see them. Naturally, nobody ever uses it for working neither catched one ever hauling a payload. But they do look really great.
It's like somebody else already said, it's just too big to park. Subterranean parkings that are the norm in European cities are pretty much impossible with them.
I've seen a F150 once in my life, and that's pretty much the only pickup truck I've ever seen (Bordeaux, France).
You can see odd Toyota Hilux (I think that counts?) now and then.
2 replies →
I think you might see some in the countryside, so not exactly in the streets. But I've only seen one myself.
There's a Dodge Ram parked outside my door (Paris). It only moves on the weekend...
1 reply →
Don't Teslas have some sort of collision detection that will automatically apply brakes in case of an object in the road?
And anyway, I'm not sure why an all metal grill would be worse than the grill guard (cow catcher) already present on a lot of trucks.
Tesla pedestrian collision warning is dangerously ineffective. It passes some tests with flying colors and completely fails other pedestrian safety tests.
Plays into the inconsistent nature of autopilot.
It's not an easy feature to test. A lot of magazines have used really fake looking inflatable or cardboard people. Radar systems are going to see those really well. Machine vision solutions may correctly classify the objects as non-human. You don't want your emergency breaks to go off every time a plastic bag floats in-front of your car.
Then you have far more complex real-world situations like this one. The emergency breaking works correctly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3rmevP6XVY
I'm not sure what statistics are available for pedestrian collisions. Probably nothing short of deaths are reported reliably at the national level.
To be honest, that is also a problem with human drivers
1 reply →
As do a lot of other premium-brand cars, nothing special about it anymore.
I bought a new Subaru Forrester. Even the base model comes with cameras which do a lot of work, including automated braking
Not really. Many people in the south and more rural areas use large trucks as a daily driver. Many with custom front bumpers that are solid steel.
Sure, but a manufacturer couldn't sell a car with a solid steel bumper. In the US you have lots of freedom to modify your car after you buy it, but manufacturers have strict regulations.
Just went to Jeep’s site. Steel front and rear bumpers are a $1,395 factory option on a 2020 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon.
An interesting point: the oneupmanship game of aftermarket car customization will be the worst deficiency this thing has in terms of appealing to what I presume must be the target audience. Perhaps a radically modular interior could partially make up for the lack of exhaust systems etc to replace with custom counterparts? (the "back to the future air intakes" joke will get old very fast)
lol. hitting a pedestrian and killing them is essentially a traffic ticket in the US
>Does the US not have pedestrian safety standards?
I don't know what it is like outside of the United States but here everyone has the common sense to know "don't walk in front of moving vehicles" as you are taught as a child "look both ways before crossing" over and over and over.
You can put all of safety features you want on a vehicle, but if they hit a pedestrian there is a VERY good chance they will die. That's a lot of force and a little bit of rubber or plastic won't make a lot of difference, I say this as someone that lost a very dear friend to a hit and run as a pedestrian and lost another friend this year that was stationary on her motorcycle and someone rear-ended her and killed her (effectively) instantly.
Did both of your friends not have common sense or what? Didn't they know not to walk in front of moving vehicles? They'd be alive now if the had known that, duh.
And plus your argument falls flat if you consider that even 1% better chance of survival means a lot of lives saved. Are you saying looks outweight safety for pedestrians?
This comment crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed here. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN?
One was killed while on another vehicle... the other was killed by yet unidentified hit and run driver that was likely impaired at a speed great enough it launched her body more than ten feet into a field, to be found days after the fact and needing to be identified by dental records, almost certainly ending her life at the second of impact with the vehicle and if not she would have died from the impact with the ground.
Cars versus people not in another car, often result in death regardless of any little piece of plastic or rubber you put on a car. Plastic and rubber added makes the driver feel better, it does little to protect people.
>>Does the US not have pedestrian safety standards?
Yes we do, get out of the way.
Outside of major cities there are almost no pedestrians in the US, the only time people walk in the US is when our car/truck is broken..
and with Uber we do not even have to do that now... Technology is great :)
Turn all parking spaces into buildings and you can pretend you live in space, except without leaving Earth :).