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Comment by K0balt | Hacker News Reader

I used to wonder about the possibility of using thrusters to decelerate for impending crashes. I think for a substantial fraction of accidents that would be enough to massively reduce the risk.. but hopping over is an option I hadn’t considered practical.

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> I used to wonder about the possibility of using thrusters to decelerate for impending crashes

We could just put oversizes brakes on cars to achieve this. Have you seen the stopping distance of a Formula 1 car with its giant brakes?

Formula 1 cars also have massive amounts of heavily engineered downforce and negative camber to give them insane amounts of grip. Pretty much every street car has enough braking power to lock its brakes in almost every condition but doesn’t have nearly the grip to utilize it.

Bigger brakes != more stopping power.

Not so good on slick roads. Besides, I don’t know of any passenger car or light truck that has insufficient braking performance to the point of the tire grip not being the weak point.

Not even hopping. Just tilt/lift the car through the tight spot.

Hopping over a line of cars is only useful if you know there's nothing in front. In an accident this just means a rear end impact becomes an entirely more dangerous accident where one car is falling from the sky onto several more

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how being able to jump and hover for 2-3 seconds could be used to avoid otherwise fatal impacts, provided the software was perfect.

Given that we don't have such software, and that this currently requires trading all three seats for compressed gas storage, there are obviously some hurdles to this becoming a practical emergency feature.

All three seats??? I didn't know that

Yes, I understand 2 seats for the one with the rear thrusters while the one with all the thrusters has only a single driver's seat.

The demo car hopped over the full line of Tesla vehicles including the truck.

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