I’m glad the NHTSA is going to start actually testing car safety with pedestrian dummies. That’s a start.
Smaller vehicles would see the child and stop. The cyber truck would not.. (just because other trucks and suvs are big, doesn't make the cyber truck safer)
So you don't think there should be vehicles other than "smaller ones" on the road anymore, or just no cybertrucks?
Btw I disagree, generally in a higher up vehicle you actually have a better view down, and the cybertruck is not as a high up as a truck anyway.
But it's less about overall size and it's more about window size and the front of the car. (that's why you see buses and trucks with the flat fronts)
Also you have a human and a computer looking for objects vs just a human (and there are many humans who I don't trust on the road)
Whenever someone gets killed on the road in my country, it is always someone on a moped getting run over by some truck. And I don't mean a pickup I mean one of those heavy commercial trucks.
I would rather self-driving cars not exist though. Just for the simple reason that it gives the government or corporations a plausibly deniable way to assassinate anyone at the push of a button by hacking their car. And with AI is all sorts of adversarial stuff you can do with image recognition. idk I just dont trust computers in cars
Here is my scientific data:
> Whatever their nose shape, pickups, SUVs and vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches are about 45 percent more likely to cause fatalities in pedestrian crashes than cars and other vehicles with a hood height of 30 inches or less and a sloping profile, an IIHS study of nearly 18,000 pedestrian crashes found.
- IIHS [0]
> After controlling for crash characteristics, I estimate a 10 cm increase in the vehicle’s front-end height is associated with a 22% increase in fatality risk.
- University of Hawai'i professor [1]
> [A study] found that between 2009 and 2016, pedestrian fatalities increased in nearly every circumstance examined. But among all types of vehicles, SUVs had the biggest spike in single-vehicle fatal pedestrian crashes, and crashes were increasingly likely to involve high-horsepower vehicles.
- NPR [2]
[0] - https://uhero.hawaii.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/UHEROwp2... [1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/14/611116451... [2] - https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-v...
I’m not a fan of the cyber truck, but the reviews I have seen show that vehicle is also loaded with these safety systems.
Paradoxically for a vehicle that's surely received oodles of aerodynamic attention, it at least doesn't seem like a design that might push a pedestrian to the side or lift them up onto a hood, but rather knock them forward (and then under the vehicle).
A Cybertruck crossed in front of me at a traffic light this weekend in my first Cybertruck encounter as a cyclist. I was surprised by my lizard-brain's involuntary concern as the hood's corner passed by.
Edit to add: it seems like a wide vehicle, too, which adds to the effect.
Do you think vehicle safety regulations give pedestrian safety an appropriate amount of consideration, in light of the poor forward visibility of many vehicles that are currently for sale?
Seems to me that if the bulk of the injuries encountered during a vehicle accident occur to passengers by an order of magnitude greater than pedestrians, it would make sense that design elements that protect passengers even at the expense of pedestrian safety would be a positive overall safety impact.