[sneak]

Alternately, it’s designed in a way that almost all trucks and SUVs in the US are designed, in a way that is generally expected/preferred by customers who buy those vehicles.

I also don’t like it, but it’s not Tesla’s fault that that’s where the market is. I’ve heard from so many foolish people who don’t understand physics that they feel safer driving a big heavy vehicle and being up high.

The armor has nothing to do with the height and sight lines; it’s also not anything specific to the Cybertruck. Even midsize SUVs now are so high up and boxy that you can’t see in front of the front bumper. I was in an Escalade or Expedition or Tahoe or something the other day on the way to JFK and noticed that the center console screen has an option to view a front-bumper-cam. It’s nuts.

If this is truly a problem that needs affirmative fixing, it seems that auto industry regulation (which is already mandating cellular transceivers in vehicles, so it is definitely in scope) would be the place to address this. Expecting market participants to kneecap themselves in the face of clear market demand (especially whilst already fighting the risky and uphill battle that is EV adoption) is not fair or realistic.

IMO it could be covered in giant sharp stainless steel hedgehog spikes and be nicknamed the Childslayer and it’s probably still less dangerous to our society than something that burns petrochemicals. If you want to regulate something for safety, ban the sale of gasoline/diesel and the use of internal combustion engines.

[hennell]

There's an interesting bit in car guys vs bean counters where the author recalls the new regulations mandating a smaller average size car. US manufacturers had to make much smaller cars to lower their average. But US customers just weren't interested. They wanted big cars, not just new cars. Japanese manufacturers (who were already lower then the regulated average) stepped in and built new big cars.

Not totally similar to your point as safety regs would be more equal, but it was an interesting revelation to me (especially as here in the EU small cars are much more desirable) that really market demands are as much of a driver of these things as manufacturer production.

Regulation has to be in the right place too, ideally giving the real trade off to the consumer. (the book suggests that if America taxed fuel more like the rest of the world so you didn't have such cheap gas, car efficiency would become a much bigger selling point, leading to more demand for smaller less ridiculous cars). But I suspect that would change less the demand for low gas cars, and more the demand for low gas tax politicians.

[armada651]

It's an arms race though, most people prefer bigger cars because it makes them feel safer from all of the other big cars on the road.

Also it was actually the gas efficiency regulation that started the arms race, because big trucks were exempt from the regulations so car manufacturers started pushing more people towards buying trucks instead of sedans.

[two_handfuls]

Right. So a good step to improve safety would be to apply the same rules to trucks and cars.

[scubbo]

> I’ve heard from so many foolish people who don’t understand physics that they feel safer driving a big heavy vehicle and being up high

Can you elaborate on this a little? I only took Physics up to University level so maybe I'm missing something, but - why _wouldn't_ that make you safer in the case of a collision? My naïve assumption is that it would:

a) decrease effective force on the passengers (greater mass of car => less acceleration from a given collision force => less force transferred to passenger)

b) make the car less likely to flip (assuming that the increased mass offsets the extra instability from the height of the vehicle - which, since the chassis is likely heavier on the bottom than the large hollow areas at the top, I think is likely)

c) move the passengers (slightly, but non-negligibly) out of the direct line of impact

"Driving a big heavy vehicle and being up high" might well make you _more likely_ to have a collision, meaning that you total aggregate chance of injury goes up even as "chance of injury, given a collision" goes down - but that's more about misunderstanding statistics than physics, as well as selfishly prioritizing personal safety over societal safety.

Thank you for helping me be less foolish!

[sneak]

It doesn’t make the car less likely to flip except when the mass is extremely concentrated at the bottom (such as in a Tesla where there is a huge dense battery pack in the bottom). The COG is much higher on SUVs and trucks than it is on passenger cars. It has improved, but it is still bad.

Being out of the “line of impact” is mostly irrelevant when you are going 80mph and the vehicle hits something. That kinetic energy is going somewhere.

Large/heavy vehicles are less maneuverable and take longer to stop because of their increased kinetic energy at cruise. In collisions the massive added weight means they have much more energy that needs to go somewhere at time of impact.

The passenger safety of a car in a collision is not determined by which vehicle is still more car-shaped after the wreck, otherwise the bigger and heavier your vehicle, the better off you’d be.

Additionally, pushing around the big and heavy chassis uses way more energy unnecessarily, which is not crash safety related, but is still very unsafe due to the fact that burning petrochemicals is currently in the process of literally destroying our civilization. You might not crash, but you will burn.