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Comment by Peanuts99 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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