It 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.
Are 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.
The 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.
The 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.
Why 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.
Yeah but how many people never ride a bike because of this danger? Or let their kids walk anywhere near a major street? Almost everyone that I know in the US shares that fear, and they aren’t entirely wrong to feel that way (due to the current state of things).
Even when I had to take a break from running due to injury and started cycling, my doctor looked me stone cold in the eyes and asked me to please not risk my life like that.
If you think about it automotive safety is phenomenal if you decide to compare it to something else entirely. Few have the courage to say “disregard children outside of the car and think of suicide”. This is groundbreaking thinking
Gee, I wonder what has happened since, say, 2008, that has caused pedestrians to lose any trace of situational awareness and wander in front of moving cars. It's almost as if they're distracted by something that became a factor relatively recently, around the same time that drivers also became much more distracted than usual. Someone should look into that.
And imagine if only one developed country had this trend, would that be an indictment on that country?
On a more serious note though, because sarcasm is weak person's weapon, the US do have a teen formation issue imho, among them driving lessons. I think the average US citizen born post 70s lack some basis, and I'm also afraid that this seemingly lack of competency feed insecurities. And it's not anybody's fault, the country is made around driving, you can't afford to give 20 to 40 hours of driving lesson to everybody who wants to drive, because everybody _need_ to drive, and for the same reason, you cannot make the driving exam too difficult.
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-v...