None of these monster trucks are going to crumple from a fleshy pedestrian. Crumple zones are for when you hit another vehicle or tree or something
Comment on Tesla Cybertruck's stiff structure, sharp design raise safety concerns - experts
the_q@lemmy.world 6 months agoWhile Chevy and Ford have giant trucks too, they also crumple where the stainless steel Tesla doesn’t. Crumpling makes the vehicle dissipate the force of a crash in case you weren’t aware.
Regardless, no one needs this Tesla monstrosity just like no one needs the giant vehicles Americans seem to be obsessed with.
hardcoreufo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
filister@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Even with the crumple, the mass of those vehicles is enormous hence the force a pedestrian or a cyclist will experience.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Crumple zones are for vehicle to vehicle impacts. They have nothing to do with pedestrian safety.
Gigan@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Unless I’m mistaken, crumpling is meant to protect the driver and passengers. Not pedestrians, cyclists, or anyone else outside the vehicle.
yamsham@lemm.ee 6 months ago
To an extent it’s both. I mean intent-wise it’s all about the occupants of the car, but as a side effect it also slightly reduces the impact on the pedestrian. The way I would think about it is that crumple zones on their own aren’t nearly enough to protect pedestrians, but removing them would be going completely in the wrong direction
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Crumple zones don’t crumple when hitting anything as soft as a person. I had a car run into me while stopped. They were doing about 45, it was the worst-case impact, driver corner to driver corner. My airbags didn’t go off. I lost the left front fender and headlight. No crumple zone changes (that’s part of the unit body, when it gets bent, it often totals the vehicle). A pedestrian would’ve bounced off that car with broken bones and a concussion, minimum.
They’re for occupants.
Plastic bumpers are the only thing that compresses easily enough to not injure a pedestrian. And even those are pointless, at a speed where a pedestrian impact would compress a bumper, is fast enough to transfer a lot of momentum into a human body, and compress the bumper into the harder parts of the car.
chitak166@lemmy.world 6 months ago
No, not to an extent.
Crumpling does nothing for a person getting hit by a car. Please stop spreading bullshit.
yamsham@lemm.ee 6 months ago
From a physics perspective, yes it does. Not much, but yes it does do something.
In order for a crumple zone to work, the material must be at least slightly softer than the rest of the structure. When you have a collision, both the strong structure and the relatively weak crumple zones will flex, but the crumple zones will flex more. In a big collision, like with another car, they might flex so much they have permanent damage (the crumple), but even with a pedestrian they will flex a little. The more they flex, the more it cushions the impact for both the pedestrian and the occupants of the car.
As I said, the amount of cushion for the two parties is massively skewed in favor of the car, and crumple zones alone are not anywhere near enough to make cars safe for pedestrians. But objectively, yes they do slightly cushion the impact for a pedestrian, and in the perfect edge case collision it might mean the difference between life and death.