> 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.
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.