A Tesla Cybertruck driver was killed in what appears to be the first reported fatal crash involving the electric pickup truck, which has yet to undergo third-party crash testing.
How do you even get a vehicle past safety regulations and up for sale without third party crash testing?
Deregulation.
There’s miles of safety regulations for cars in the US,
Yes, you can really tell that when you compare cars for EU markets to those for USA.
Didn’t Murika only legalise adaptive headlight a few years ago?
I found this article informative.
In order to sell a new vehicle in the U.S., manufacturers must provide information from their own company crash tests to NHTSA to ensure compliance with federal standards.
Yup, regulatory capture at work. You see this a lot in EPA and OSHA as well - “we’ll take your word for it until serious shit starts happening a lot.”
They all do spot checks.
It would cost a shitload of money if they had to clear every single model, or product or service.
So either everything gets more expensive (people complain), or we increase taxes further (people complain)
You’re getting downvoted but people REALLY don’t understand the field of regulation. How many regulators do people think exist? Compare that with the number of engineers and technicians designing building and testing cars at the OEMs? Do you think these people can get 100% validation? Do you think there is budget or appetite to achieve this level of regulation?
It’s not even a desirable goal. Do you think every batch of food and agricultural goods that is manufactured or imported is 100% inspected? How feasible do you think that is?
The point is regulators are generally able to use sound statistical methods to obtain excellent levels of public safety with TINY budgets. Sure, more would be better, but it will never be necessary to get close 100% coverage simply because most humans WANT to make a quality product and most manufacturers… at least have a brand to protect in terms of not killing anyone.
Nobody is asking for 100% coverage, that’s a strawperson argument. We just want someone in the process to have two things 1) the public interest 2) authority to do something.
Engineers and technicians are servants. Capitalists are in charge and they’d poor mercury down and infant’s throat for a dollar. This idea that we should rely on good actors in the system is just another version of “trust us bro”.
I get your sentiment, certainly. When regulations work well they protect engineers and technicians from the pressure to cut corners to save money. That’s hard work that can only be done by well funded and fully empowered regulatory bodies something that’s unfortunately become a political issue and is being actively undermined.
That being said I’ve been on both sides of the engineer-regulator relationship and I’ve rarely been in a “trust us bro” situation. Both sides want a safe, high quality product. When regulators work well, they can definitely protect engineers from capitalist pressure. Being able to say “sorry, I know it’s expensive, but we have to do it or we won’t get certified” is worth its weight in gold when you’re trying to design a good, safe product!
So we do what conservatives keep telling us works for everything, privatize it.
Regulations should be made to require all models be tested by a 3rd party that is not a government agency or government funded. If some schmuck wants to sell something potentially dangerous, it’s on them to foot the bill proving it’s not dangerous. They stand to benefit from the sales, it shouldn’t be on the public anyway to be paying for that.
Public safety should be managed by public entities, not private. That’s a blatant conflict of interest and I’m not a fan whatsoever.
Some things can sometimes work well, like when the regulation is publicly managed but privately tested using straightforward methods. UL does decent work here, but the profit incentive on both sides creates a nasty conflict of interest and puts pressure on engineers and technicians that compromises their work and integrity.
There is nothing fundamentally broken about our regulatory system except politics. If the funding stops getting cut and politicians stop gutting regulatory bodies’ ability to interpret and enforce regulations there won’t be a problem.
Regulators in general care about their work, care about public safety, and use sound statistical approaches to getting the best bang for the taxpayer and corporate dollar. Keeping private profit out of the equation means costs are low and companies aren’t at a competitive disadvantage internationally.
Instead we race to the bottom (people die)
Money
Boeing did it.
I don’t know about Cybertruck but other Teslas rank high up in the safest cars ever tested. Would be surprising if this wouldn’t apply to cybertruck too though who knows.
Edit: also, 15 to 20k units sold and this is the first fatal crash involving one
other Teslas rank high up in the safest cars ever tested.
I’ve heard that, but now I kinda think they probably just made those up.
Well, the euro NCAP tests give them some of the highest scores as well, so I do trust that (not including cybertruck).
Watch that crash test video and tell me that’s safe…it crashes like a 72 Impala.
Numbers skewed by time spent out of service waiting for something.
I suspect nhtsa is facing pressure to push through EVs as part of the larger effort to promote move to carbon emissions reduction.
What an incredibly bold claim with zero evidence to back it up.
I sleep well knowing this thing will never be street legal in the EU.
Cybertruck, built Fraud tough
DPS confirmed the driver was fatally injured at the scene, but his identity remains unknown due to severe burns. The intense fire also prevented authorities from identifying the vehicle’s license plate or VIN.
Holy shit, it straight up cremated him in a lithium fire. Teslas are a fucking abomination.
There is a video of the cybertruck crash test and the thing is very stiff with very little no crumple zone - so most of the energy of the impact goes directly to the driver and passengers.
And the edges are sharp like a knife in a crash. Incredibly dangerous.
It’s almost like you should follow the lessons of the past and… Who am I kidding, muskrat is a billionaire therefore he’s a super genius who knows better than the decades of research into collisions…
I mean it was a cool idea on first glance because it does things differently. But then a sane person would think about it for a while and listen to the engineers why there is a reason cars don’t look like that.
Tesla Cybertruck Cuisinart Edition.
emergency rooms going to have a name for crispy filleted cybertruck crash victims.
I hope it will be called “an Elon special.” His name should always be associated with it
The driver was too high-poly to survive the collision.
Wait, first?
That was the first crash?Huh. I thought for sure people who buy those crash on the way home from the dealership. Of in their garage if “car” is delivered.
From the article:
appears to be the first reported fatal crash
(emphasis mine)
And they say people can’t read anymore. It’s hidden there in the very first sentence of the article. Who would think to look there?
First of all, I’m illiterate.
Second of all, yes, I am surprised by that. Bump one pedestrian and it’s a fatal accident.
To be fair, that’s not what the headline says
deleted by creator
The crazy part about all that steel and those difficult to break windows means its going to be a hard vehicle to escape in a fire or underwater. He may have bought a tesla but nobody deserves to die for that decision.
If you choose a car with an unproven safety record, you accept the high likelihood you will die in the event of a crash.
Only 19999 more.
A few years ago the fightfighters in my town had to undergo new training because there was a tesla car fire at an accident scene that they had a very hard time putting out. Shit just wouldn’t stop burning.
Lithium fires need to be doused in salt to put out. Or, technically you can put out a metal fire with gasoline.
You go from a class D fire to a class B fire, and then you can put that out as normal. But yeah, salt is better.
Water is the last thing you want to use on class D fires, followed by CO2. Both have the oxygen ripped off by the burning metal, making the fire burn hotter.
A dump truck of sand also does the trick…but it better be very dry sand
It does. New tech has new problems, but nothing we can’t work with
Hopefully a more responsible company can figure out how to make those batteries safer since I’m not counting on tesla to do it.
And it’s not because I think their r&d teams are bad. It’s more like their narcissistic CEO will probably fire anyone who points out any problems or he’ll just straight up ignore them and keep selling his mobile single use crematoriums.
A first step would be for Tesla to make it easy to escape the car in case a fire breaks out and power is cut. You know, as other manufacturers do already.
Fair enough. Tesla as a company gets worse and worse the more I learn about them.
I just realized that this is my first time seeing “First fatal crash” reported for a car model (I don’t pay much attention to cars)
I realize that with the number of car accidents that happen daily, every model is bound to have a fatal one eventually, but huh… witnessing “the first one” feels weird. Morbid.I was about to call bullshit but it appears I missremembered Angela Chao had a Model X
