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Comment by californical | Hacker News Reader

What, that the EU cares about the effects of products on people other than the purchaser?

That things which are good for an individual but bad for everyone else deserve scrutiny?

Calling a cybertruck too dangerous shows a quite high degree of regulatory conservatism. That could be good from some perspectives, but in the long-term it will leave the EU increasingly irrelevant as things develop, because new things always come with risks. But if your standard of unacceptable danger is 'hardened electric truck' then you'll be increasingly far behind on the curve of adoption, to say nothing of creation, of new tech because they'll all certainly go well beyond that.

Go back to times past and think about electricity for instance. Can you even imagine? 'Yeah we'd uh like to set up these poles all around the countryside and string some wires between them. And yeah if anybody touches those wire, they die and all the electricity gets screwed up. If lightning strikes them or a tree falls on them, yeah they're gonna fall and start fires. And there will be live wires - and uh yeah again, touch 'em and you die. Anyhow, we good to go? In exchange for this totally-safe-tech we'll be able to have electric lights! I mean how cool is that? Err and in full disclosure about those lights, uh don't touch the sockets or well.. you know, yeah - you die. Okay, so we good to go?'

Ironically it's the US that's a lot more regulatorily conservative when it comes to automobiles than the EU, if you look at things like matrix headlamps, replacing the wing mirrors with cameras, flashing brake lights, etc.

"A car with sharp metal edges that slices up pedestrians" is not a technical development.

Don't be daft, I don't think Europe's at risk of becoming irrelevant because they put a greater emphasis on pedestrian safety than the US.

Perhaps just look at a few ancient European towns with cobbled streets with no pavements, no wider than 2.5M and hairpin turns at many junctions. Perhaps it's just a product that doesn't suit the market.

Can you argue, in good faith, that you think Europe, in its current state of regulatory bureaucracy, would have greenlit the deployment of electricity? How about of cars in general? And for electricity - mind you all that risk I mentioned was genuinely at first solely and exclusively for electric lighting. Obviously all the things that build on top of electricity rather required electricity infrastructure to exist first!

> Can you argue, in good faith, that you think Europe, in its current state of regulatory bureaucracy, would have greenlit the deployment of electricity?

I can and so can anyone else, but what fantasy scenario is this? Which specific rules of this "regulatory bureaucracy" would stop it?

The reason the cybertruck is banned is because, in part at least, it has square edges instead of round. So somebody might get hurt! Seriously, the law is UN-R ECE R26. Here [1] is the rather incomprehensible text of the law. By contrast with electricity you're putting up stuff all around the country knowing that it will catch fire, it will kill people, and then trying to run it into people's homes where it again will kill people, and more - for more convenient lighting. To this very day, after more than a century of safety improvements, tens of thousands of people die per year from electrocution, to say nothing of electrical fires. This is so many orders of magnitude beyond 'square edges' that I don't think anybody can argue, in good faith, that the EU would approve electricity.

Similarly for cars themselves. You're speaking of machines which operate on the basis of hundreds of small explosions per second hopefully contained within a metal chassis under a hood to let a person drive tons of metal around which can trivially be weaponized to cause mass deaths, as has already happened multiple times in Europe. Even when not behaving maliciously, the number of deaths caused by crashes is in the millions per year. And again that's also after a century of safety improvements.

[1] - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2010/26(2)/oj/eng

> after more than a century of safety improvements, tens of thousands of people die per year from electrocution, to say nothing of electrical fires

What was the lethality of gas lighting in terms of intoxication or fires? How many people died per year per household served?

If gasoline cars were invented today, they would be immediately banned because gas is a deadly poison and fire hazard. It would be considered crazy to allow just anyone to pump gas into their car.

Can someone comment on why this disagree with this?

I find that in online discussions people become much more downvote/hostile oriented when they know they're wrong, but can't really argue against it, rather than when people disagree and genuinely think they're right - which tends to lead to nice debate.

People, in the short term, don't like the cognitive dissonance being rattled, but I think in the longrun that's what has the biggest impact on our ideological direction shifting.

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