At the current rate of horrible fiery deaths, FuelArc projects the Cybertruck will have 14.52 fatalities per 100,000 units — far eclipsing the Pinto’s 0.85. (In absolute terms, FuelArc found, 27 Pinto drivers died in fires, while five Cybertruck drivers have suffered the same fate, at least so far.)
But it is so financially efficient! It isn’t wasting money on safety.
Reads like clickbait. There’s 34K Cybetrucks, so the actual number of fire fatalities is rounded to 5, one of which is the trumptower guy (so 20% is already intentional). Not that these are encouraging numbers, but you can’t draw conclusions from an N of 4.
You can draw conclusions because there’s only 35,000 on the road. That is a terrible rate.
What a dumpster fire that truck is.
And some people wonder why the cybertruck is barely sold outside the US.
Everything I hear about this thing is bad.
It’s barely sold in the US as well.
Might have something to do with it looking fucking stupid.
I have no problem with something looking stupid. The problem for me is not just that it looks stupid, but that it is stupid. It’s a stupid thing that shouldn’t exist.
It’s barely sold outside the US because other places (like the EU) also care about the safety of people outside the vehicle. That’s why European and Asian cars (except the models explicitly for the US market like the Tacoma) are designed for pedestrians to be deflected, while US cars are a moving brick wall which will squish them like a bug.
Also, I suspect you’d need commercial plates and a special license to drive it most other places, due to the weight.
Do you have a reasonable alternative solution to teach pedestrians lessons?
Edit: (/s)
Pedestrians would probably learn more from the experience if they don’t die.
(sorry dropped /s)
deleted by creator
Cybertruck will have 14.52 fatalities per 100,000 units — far eclipsing the Pinto’s 0.85.
Holy shit, that means the Cybertruck fatality rate is around 17 times higher than the Pinto’s!
If you read the article is was specifically died by fire. Not any other cause of death.
Right but the specific issue with the Pinto was that it would explode into flames on a rear impact, so this is the appropriate metric.
Like deaths from other accidents would skew the numbers anyway because 70s cars were death traps compared to today, but even in that context, the Pinto’s explosions were alarming.
Beating it on that isolated metric is a very special kind of achievement.
Top of the line in utility sports.
Unexplained fires are a matter for the courts.
Do you realize how fucking insane that is? From 1921 to 1951 the rate of auto deaths dropped by around 50%, and from 1921 to 2011 the rate dropped by 90%. This is not just due to regulations on cars and pedestrian travel, but also in very large part due to crash safety in cars that steadily improved. With crash safety becoming a science, and crash test dummies being invented, and crumple zones, and air bags and seatbelts and the laws thereof.
Musk, asshole motherfucker that he is, is trying to destroy all of that.
Absolutely! What’s weird is that Teslas have been top-rated for crash-worthiness in the past, so there are a few possibilities I can think of:
- They need to be top crash-worthy, because of the stupid autopilot trying its best to kill the occupants
- They need to be top crash-worthy, because otherwise any crash at all would result in a fiery death
- The Cybertruck is an outlier and is not as crash-worthy as the previous Teslas
- All of the above
What was that rule of thumb for taking multiple choice tests? If you don’t know the answer, always select “all of the above”?
Is it me or are there guts in this picture?
The driver was inside the vehicle at the time, so I’m sure some of that is his remains. But a lot is probably burned seat material and such. It’s hard to say for sure.
Hard to tell. The picture was widely used in the media, and they’re usually quite careful about that kind of thing. There’s something reddish in it, but it could be material from the truck or its contents. One of the photos the police released of his guns had some red foamy material in it, another photo had some stringy red material (plastic?) lying in the road, and there were various red items in the bed too. I’ll mark it NSFW just in case.
Really took the wind out of my satirical comment that Musk wanted to bring back the Pinto.
I would trust a Smart Fortwo more than the POS Cybertruck.
I’m guessing that some people at the National Transportation Safety Board are about to get fired by Elon Musk.
Safety belts are a waste of precious money!
…and unlike the Pinto, because we are so deep into fucked-reality-ville, it won’t get recalled.
Ford’s reasoning was that it was cheaper to pay out for the injuries and deaths than to change the car. Cybertruck has a much better plot armor, a fanbase that refuses to believe it’s crap.
The very real origin of the Fight Club joke about not doing a recall
“joke”
I think that fanbase is staying to wane. But who knows, maybe the gas loving Maga rednecks will start buying…who am I kidding, most of them can’t afford the ridiculous price tag.
deleted by creator
Not only that, it’s not even a proper truck. They could have come up with a standard truck design and used tech and EV to create a new niche that was usable. But no one can tell Elon no, so his 5-year-old self’s vision had to be made because it’s different. Sometimes different doesn’t mean better.
They can just buy a used one since the value of these fucking hunks of junk drops dramatically once its driven at all.
I read a reddit post recently by a guy who had bought one for $135K after shelling out $50K to a broker to find him one. He was wanting to sell but couldn’t get more than $70K for it lol.
Nah. The Ford Pinto laid the groundwork for the NHTSA’s regulatory control of forced recalls. The only way this thing doesn’t get recalled for being dangerous is if Musk’s D. o. g. e manages to undercut or defund the NHTSA.
Additionally, other countries with better regulatory bodies won’t even allow it to be sold or will require mandatory recall of these vehicles which means the end of the cyber truck. They can’t even sell them because people don’t want them.
The other thing is that insurance companies can absolutely refuse to insure them and if I’m honest, they may be the main reason that the NHTSA doesn’t back down from regulating them (insurance companies are a powerful lobby, and they absolutely can countermand the automotive lobby in some cases).
My point is, it’s more complicated than just “Musk is a government official now, and historically dangerous cars weren’t recalled”.
NHTSA
Project 2025 has explicit targets for reforming NHTSA. It is unambiguously in their sights, just lower on the priority list.
Agreed. And that’s where consumer choice comes in. People don’t want them. Tesla is having to rework their entire plant to use the assembly lines that produce cybertrucks because they can’t sell the ones they’ve already made. They projected and prepared to manufacturer and sell 500,000 and they’ve sold something like 40,000 and the rest are just sitting in retail lots or holding lots collecting dust. The best estimate seems to be that they might be able to sell another 30,000 in 2025. But with tax credits for EV’s going away and other regulations going into effect world wide, that is probably a pipe dream.
On a scale from 0 to 3 (out of 10), how surprised would you be to read that the DHS decided to purchase 250.000 cybertrucks, because they are bulletproof? Before you go to Google it - I made it up, but there is a 50% chance of it coming in the next weeks.
I would be surprised for a lot of reasons. The main one being, they’d have to be dirt cheap and have an exceptional warranty agreement attached in order to compete with other automakers who make bulletproof vehicles. And, further there’s too many other problems with the amount of information they collect that the DHS would not have full and direct control over. Tesla’s are well known for recording anything and everything. We learned when they blew one up outside that Trump Hotel that they can be remotely locked by Tesla the company. A private company should not have that kind of direct access to government vehicles of any kind.
You mean that dog killer lady and Nazi weirdo care about competition and data security?
They aren’t the only people who have a say in what happens. It’s funny to me that y’all clearly don’t know how the government works or how much red tape there is. Tesla is an overvalued and under performing company that barely deserves to be called an automotive manufacturer.
The government has already signed contracts with other car manufacturers for the purposes of armored vehicles. Those manufacturers will absolutely sue for breach of contract in the event that the government doesn’t pay them and utilize their vehicles. Further, there are still regulations and specifications that are required to be met. They can’t fire everyone no matter how much they think they can. And Congress will not jeopardize their cash cows.
It’s a lot of different echelons of the government that this type of thing has to go through and it’s definitely not going to happen overnight. I’m not saying it can’t happen. I’m saying that it’ll take time and the other automotive companies will fight back against anything they see as a conflict of interest.
I can understand that people think things look bleak. But like half of what’s going on right now is scare tactics to make the general populace capitulate without a fight. The people who know how things work are very rarely ever at the top of anything. The people who get shit done are rarely at the top.
The budget is already signed sealed and delivered. Where’s DHS gonna get this money? Because I would bet other car manufacturers have already bid for the contract for new vehicles. So unless you’ve got something that says Tesla won the bid, quit playing with me.
Look, all I’m asking is that Tesla investors lose all their goddamn money.
I’d like to thank you for this measured take in response to my unbridled cynicism.
To be fair, you made a good point. In the article it states pretty definitively that the NHTSA hasn’t been allowed to have the Cybertruck independently crash tested which is bogus as hell.
The fact that it can’t force that from any car manufacturer doesn’t really make sense. They haven’t even received relevant data related to Tesla’s in house crash testing and I can’t even begin to understand how that’s legal.
They will be neutered even further soon, they’re on the project 2025 list.
I believe they’re absolutely not street legal in the UK, nor in the EU. Those were never “ridiculous sized trucks” Walhalla to begin with (although I see more Rams than I care to, these days), so there’s roughly zero chance those things will become mainstream here.
Heck, we have rain here, that’s enough of a wankpanzer repellant.
They haven’t been banned from sale in the UK or EU so far as I can tell, according to the article.
But the relevant safety organizations and municipalities have been impounding them when they show up, so that’s something.
They don’t have to explicitly ban the Cybertruck if it doesn’t pass the existing regulations. It’s not legal to drive in UK/EU. You could buy one for display-only or something I’m sure.
I love Elon Bad posts, but I think it’s worthwhile to examine why Elon bad in this case.
Like many reactionaries, Elon’s business philosophy is pure tech-bro-libertarianism. And like all libertarians, he’s stuck in the neoliberal mindset of less regulation (don’t scrutinize) and more efficiency (let me be cheap), in order to create the safe space that industrialists need to
extract, er create.He’s literally said things like (paraphrasing)
When I see a specification for three bolts I ask: why can’t we do it with two?
His transparent reasoning is that if he’s allowed to cut corners, he’ll save money today and consequences can be dealt with when they arise.
He’s following the software model of release a minimally viable product and patch it later. Only instead of user frustration at being beta testers, you fucking die maybe.
You can’t use “literally” and “paraphrasing” like that.
You can’t use “literally” and
… be over 14
That’s literally not true.
He is like a child who is still rebelling against his parents who made him go to bed early too many times.
Also, normally the cost savings should go to the client, not into some billionaires bank account.
Him and his libertarian friends fuck up left and right. Crashing startups and just getting more money for another. Constant recalls. Blowing up rockets until it works.
Yet they hold the government to a standard of being perfect and high performing with no room for failure. NASA can’t be blowing up rockets. As soon as they do the world comes down on them.
And Trump is the biggest fuckup of all these guys.
deleted by creator
Blowing up rockets until it works is a far better approach than trying to get everything to work on the first try and ending up with a hugely overpriced white elephant.
Sure, if it was cheaper than just doing it correctly the first time which it’s not
How do you do something “correctly” when nobody knows what that is? If your main priority is to do it “correctly” you will never develop anything fundamentally new.
A rocket is not fundamentally new and hasn’t been for almost 100 years.
Rockets perform correctly when they deliver their payload to the correct orbit.
You can calculate the energy density of fuels, the efficiency of your engines at various atmospheric pressures, and determine the payload size you can deliver with your engines and fuel. Blowing up rockets for “tests” is so 1950s. We have whole college programs on rocket design. We have desktop computers more powerful than anything available in the 1960s, and NASA managed to design the Saturn V, a rocket of similar size to starship, with the computers of the time and fucking slide rules. The Saturn V had its problem, but each rocket managed to deliver its payload and perform its part of the mission without blowing up.
Your comment is classic tech bro. No understanding of real engineering principles and only a desire to shove some shit out of the door as fast as possible.
