There was a Cybertruck at the Paris Games Week (there was a Tesla corner in the con for some reason). That was my first time seeing one in person.
The most striking thing was how tall it was. Half the kids attending the PGW were smaller than its front bumper. I hope these things never, ever get allowed in France.
Not just Merica. People prioritize flashing their status via a large, expensive impractical cars than the greater good everywhere. Large American SUVs are flying off the shelves in Europe.
> Large American SUVs are flying off the shelves in Europe.
Not in the part of Europe I'm in. I can't recall the last time I've seen an American car here in the streets of Vienna. Also: Don't large American SUVs consume a lot of petrol? Considering the gas prices I'd assume not many people can/want to afford them.
Don't change the meaning please. Obvious not teeming like in the US but the traditional European family station wagon is being replaced by large SUVs everywhere in Europe.
> Large American SUVs are flying off the shelves in Europe.
If they were truly “flying off the shelves,” I’d expect the frequency to be so obvious that it would be unmistakable. So I’m asking you to support your claim with data or at least more detailed anecdotes. Which city? Which models?
The market share for American car brands remains relatively low, typically below 5% in Europe. Notable American manufacturers like Ford and Tesla have struggled to capture a substantial portion of the European market compared to their Asian and European counterparts
Ford has gone pretty much entirely native in Europe. though. Their line up for decades has been pretty indistinguishable from German or French carmakers.
Their European division was a bit similar to what GM/Opel had going.
That’s strange since the Cybertruck doesn’t meet European regulations (at the very least UN-R26) due to pedestrian safety. Not sure if there is a workaround if someone imports it as their personal vehicle though.
Obviously it's legal to own and display road-illegal vehicles. Just think about open-wheel racing, including go-karts. Just can't drive them on the road. The truck will have been transported inside a bigger truck or on top of a car transporter.
Perhaps there's some sort of exception if it's just for exhibition? If there wasn't, I suppose it would be difficult to have things like museums, auto shows, etc
There is an exemption for formal road legality for vehicle development and sales in all countries I've been working in with vehicle development and testing.
It’s not strictly about height, that is only one of the factors. Modern cars usually have pedestrian safety systems that the cybertruck does not have by design.
What are these? Have you seen a hummer or a ford F2 or f350? What about a Lexus LS or GX? Cadillac Escalade or Lincoln Navigator?
What about a Camry other than its size specifically is for pedestrians when hit?
Then we have the smart car. A small bubble designed to not crush. Fairly sure if that thing hits somebody they are not going to be “gee I am glad that the car makers made this car so safe for me being hit by it”
I can think very hard what a car would look like that would be pedestrian safe, and what features it would have. And none of any cars today look like they would be safe.
As for features for safety only one comes in mind, automatic breaking for pedestrians.
As for the cyber truck. The bend up front looks a lot more safe than most of the other pointy cars.
A hood low enough to throw the pedestrian over the car. Enough space under the hood to allow enough deformation to prevent serious head injury (main reason the pedestrian is killed as I remember). Hood "airbags" that lift the hood up, adding even more space to decelerate the pedestrian (as I remember, this was optional but available to car manufacturers).
Normally new cars should come with emergency braking. As I remember, emergency braking is the only new technology to challenge the seat belt in efficiency. All the other safety features are almost marginal on how effective they are.
I don't know if the cybertruck has it, but I think the EU regulations might be a little behind the times, not yet recognizing the efficiency of emergency braking.
> EU regulations might be a little behind the times, not yet recognizing the efficiency of emergency braking
Emergency breaking system have been a mandatory assistance system for a while now (afaik it was introduced mid 2022). Admittedly, I don’t know how efficient they actually are in preventing injuries from pedestrians.
I just know that from my experience driving with these systems, they occasionally do seem not quite there. I’ve had my car warn me from hitting a guy that was happily walking on the sidewalk but completely ignore people taking a pedestrian crossing (maybe because I was already breaking myself).
So yeah, tech is great and all. But having design considerations as a completely passive system like your front bumper breaking off on colission still seems essential
TL;DR it’s about being low enough to not smack people of different heights in the head and cause massive acceleration of their brains against their skulls. Same with internal organs, and for legs it’s more about having some of that energy transferred into rotational energy, then having a soft-enough bumper and hood to again minimize acceleration forces and energy transfer.
There are also airbag-based solutions where it either inflates under the hood to give some cushion for the hit person to decelerate more gradually before stopping against something less forgiving, or kinda like a giant couch / Wacky Races cartoon catcher’s mitt inflating on the hood and front of the vehicle before they’re actually hit.
I just wish that the US would stop allowing people to build and operate killdozer pickups with bumpers well above where other vehicle bumpers are. When those crash into other vehicles, the other vehicle ends up with a differential, tires, and probably skid plates smacking into their vehicle, which it’s not designed to handle. Combined with how larger tires require more braking power to slow at the same rate, plus modified suspension geometry, higher CG, increased weight, and decreased driver intelligence, it makes for a much more dangerous vehicle for others to be around. Why do we continue to allow this, just like all the obnoxious modified exhausts and ECU tunes that massively increase the pollution being put out by one vehicle so they can feed their egos and intimidate other road users?
Stuff like this has no legitimate purpose off-road and no business being operated on public highways: https://www.tiktok.com/@leanqueen6.7 but it’s become some idiotic macho culture thing.
Interesting about height and fatality risk: (from the article)
> a 10cm increase in the front-end height of a vehicle led to a 22% increase in pedestrian fatality risk, most strongly affecting the survival chances of women, children, and older people.
Even if it were allowed on the roads of France, with its 4 tons, you would have to pass the specific driver license C1 [1], because over the 3.5 tons limit of a classical driver license B. More than that, the C1 must be renewed every 5 years at least.
It's basically the same size as an F-150. It has a crumple zone although it probabl only activates for hard car collisions. I've seen no evidence that it is significantly worse for pedestrian safety than an F-150. Which is not good at all, but it is still a bit pretentious to paint it as a horribly dangerous car when there is no evidence that it is worse than one of the most common cars in the US.
> I've seen no evidence that it is significantly worse for pedestrian safety than an F-150
Serious question: have you looked? Or is there any special reason you imagine that if such evidence existed, you would have seen it?
I say this because I spent 10-15 minutes looking for information and gave up because I’m not sure of any tests which I could use to compare the two, or any testing bodies that focus on pedestrian safety. If that information exists, I’d be interested to see a side by side comparison.
I originally thought that the nhtsa would perform some tests of this kind but I was disappointed to find out that this doesn't seem to be the case. Most focus on pedestrian safety seems to be on automatic emergency braking and other ADAS systems. In this regard I claim that by default one should expect the Cybertruck to be at least decent. Not the best but surely not terrible.
While the shape of the hood and the visibility obviously matter of course it seems to be the case that such evaluations are basically done by eyeballing it. Pedestrian dummy crash tests with collection of force data etc. seem to not at all be standard. Which sucks, but it again shows that the Cybertruck is not an outlier on some well-established metric.
I predict if after some years a statistical analysis is done on pedestrian crashes by car model the Cybertruck will just be some kind of average. It has decent AEB and it is a new car driven by young people. Would other cars have caused less injury in the crashes that do occur? Probably. To a degree that it justifies calling it a pedestrian killer? I doubt it.
See, my concern here is that I feel very skeptical about my instincts on this. I suspect both cars are bad, but if the Cybertruck is (for example) twice as bad as a the F-150, would I know what that would look like? I doubt it.
Up until you’re sticking Mad Max type spikes on the front, I am not sure that I’d be able to say with confidence anything other than “I think probably trucks with high bonnets are worse for pedestrians than sedans with low bonnets”.
But as you say, there’s also a bunch of interesting side concerns: what if the vehicle itself twice as bad (i.e. causes twice as many deaths at the same speed in collisions with pedestrians), but where other vehicles are getting into one collision with a pedestrian every 100 000 miles or whatever, Cybertrucks only get into collisions every 200 000 miles due to advanced AEB (or use of self-driving, etc.)? Are they even?
I dunno. Just an interesting thought to chew over.
I like the idea that it is “pretentious” to predict — without evidence as you’ve pointed out — that getting hit by a 6,600+lb vehicle is bad but it is not pretentious to confidently predict without evidence that getting hit by a 6,600+lb car is the same as getting hit by a different vehicle that is one to two thousand pounds lighter.
So not most European cities? Unless you only count villages and old towns of larger cities.
Europeans have been building and designing towns around cars almost since after the end of WW2. They just used a somewhat different approach (since European cars were tiny compared to NA ones in the 50s and 60s). There has also been a reversal with more focus on pedestrians and public transport over the last 20-30 years.
Yes I don't think it should be allowed in Europe, yet the outrage I see, also from, Americans, as if this is some new never seen before level of danger on the road is unreasonable.
Easy to say but does that really represent the statistical reality? Does higher acceleration cause more accidents? Sports cars have more accidents. Sports cars that are driven by young people that want to show off. Cars with a high top speed. But do you think people will try to corner with the Cybertruck like they're racing? Yes they will spend a few seconds after each stop sign at hogher speed than if they weren't driving a Cybertruck but then they're just coasting down the suburbs with 30mph or whatever. But it is not obvious to me at all that Cybertruck driving should occur significantly often in dangerous fashion just because you can get to your cruising speed and overtake a bit quicker. You need statistics to back up these claims and these don't exist yet.
Even so there is research on how car design impact road safety, and if there’s a sliver of doubt that that’s sufficient to justify banning the Cybertruck from public roads the tests to prove its safety should be done in a way where gathering statistics doesn’t mean killing people.
>tests to prove its safety should be done in a way where gathering statistics doesn’t mean killing people.
Honestly, I believe that in the noisy world this is exactly how you do things. You try it out. We've done it for hundreds of years. If you have good reason to expect drastically effects you are careful of course. I don't think there is a good reason to expect drastic effects from the Cybertruck. If you were wrong you will quickly see problems arise and can cancel your trial. If nothing bad happens, seems alright. This is basically how we've dealt with the safety aspect of engineering and medicine since forever. You can never perfectly predict what's gonna happen.
That thing is all steel and sharp corners. Not at all the same as a delivery truck, adhering to basic pedestrian safety standards and also driven mostly by workers with special driving licenses. Also they are way slower than these steel battering rams.
The most striking thing was how tall it was. Half the kids attending the PGW were smaller than its front bumper. I hope these things never, ever get allowed in France.