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Comment by theultdev | Hacker News Reader

I think if your child/stroller gets hit with any car it's going to be a problem

The height of the vehicle makes it really difficult for the driver to see obstructions.

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)

Got it, "smaller vehicles" would stop and the cybertruck would not, scientific test concluded.

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)

As someone who has gotten hit by a small car before, I would probably be toast if it was a truck. It just hit me in the legs.

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

The driver's literally can't see front of the vehicle. 2 weeks ago I was at a mall in Orlando and saw two separate SUV drivers fail to see the 4ft metal traffic pole in the parking lot and just plowed right over it, damaging their vehicle.

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...

The amount of active safety sensors and monitors on newer/modern vehicles tend to make up for all that. My SUV is so loaded with cameras, sensors, and automated braking systems that it is significantly safer for anything that might be within the classic “blind spots” of larger vehicles than the smaller cars I have driven. My vehicle barks at me and will auto brake if I am anywhere near anything that I might hit. I’d venture to say that I would have to try and intentionally hit something to override the safety features it has.

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.

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