We’re About to Find Out How Dangerous the Cybertruck Really Is
Reading Time: 6 minutesRegulators can’t do anything about it. Not yet., We’re about to find out how dangerous the Cybertruck really is.
With its sharp angles, trapezoidal body, and stainless steel (and supposedly bulletproof) exterior, Tesla’s Cybertruck looks significantly more menacing than a typical car. It was thus unsurprising that urban planning and road safety advocates reacted to the Cybertruck’s recent delivery event with dismay and anger. The Center for Auto Safety posted that it was ‘dangerous to everyone else on the road’; the urbanist outfit Streetsblog ran a story headlined ‘How to Build a Car That Kills People: Cybertruck Edition.’
I have some bad news for those apprehensive about the Cybertruck’s impact on road safety: Regardless of how dangerous the vehicle is, federal officials are powerless to prevent its sale or use on public roads. Even if the Cybertruck is as deadly as some observers predict, federal officials will have their hands tied for quite a while. Like it or not, such regulatory impotence is baked into America’s laissez-faire approach toward car safety.
At the moment little is definitively known about how dangerous the Cybertruck really is. The federal government has not shared safety ratings, nor has the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which conducts its own crash tests. Still, much of what we can ascertain from press releases, photos, and videos appears worrisome. And the most concerning Cybertruck features are not necessarily those that have attracted the most criticism.
Raul Arbelaez oversees the IIHS vehicle research center outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, where he spends his days watching what happens when cars crash into things. He told me that he has evaluated the safety of hundreds of car models, although he has not yet gotten his hands on a Cybertruck. But based on what he saw in a video of a Cybertruck hitting a wall, he brushes off the social media freakout about the Cybertruck’s alleged lack of a crumple zone (a design feature that allows a crashing vehicle to collapse like an accordion, absorbing much of its force). From Arbelaez’s perspective, nothing in that video looked out of the ordinary. ‘And even if I was observing it in person,’ he told me, ‘I’d never form a judgment without downloading records from the dummy and accessing high-precision data about how the vehicle structure intruded around the occupant.’
But other aspects of the Cybertruck’s design do raise red flags for Arbelaez. In particular, he worries about the vehicle’s many sharp edges, which seem capable of slicing a person thrust against them. ‘Any time you have a body part hitting a hard edge, that’s a stress concentration,’ he said. ‘You’re going to cause additional harm.’ He is also concerned about what the Cybertruck’s stainless steel exterior could do to a human. ‘If one of your body parts, especially the head, strikes a panel that is also bulletproof, that panel may not give very much,’ he said. ‘Would you rather fall into a concrete sidewalk or a stack of pillows?’
The Cybertruck’s uniquely boxy, elevated front end could magnify the risk in head-on collisions, especially when striking those walking, biking, or in a wheelchair. Last month IIHS released new research finding that vehicles with higher and more vertical front ends are significantly more likely to kill pedestrians.
Other aspects of the Cybertruck’s design are almost certainly dangerous, but they are not unique. At around 6,800 pounds, the Cybertruck weighs more than two Honda Accords. That’s on the upper end of car models, but some others are even heftier. (You’d need to add a third Accord to reach the weight of a Hummer EV.) All else being equal, heavier cars convey more force in a crash, and they cover more distance before coming to a halt when a driver slams on the brakes.
The Cybertruck’s superfluous power is yet another concern—and an important one. Last month Tesla claimed that the high-end ‘Cyberbeast‘ version will go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.6 seconds. Such pickup is comparable to a Formula 1 race car, and well beyond the needless acceleration already offered by competitors, like the Ford F-150 Lightning that can go from 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds. Although such power presents obvious risks to other street users who lack time to get out of the way, its practical value is dubious. ‘The Cybertruck is an over-6,000-pound piece of steel that has no business going a quarter mile in under 11 seconds,’ National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy told me. ‘Why do we need that?’
To summarize, we don’t yet know how dangerous the Cybertruck really is, but some of its design choices are disturbing, particularly when factoring in the vehicle’s massive weight and overpowered engine. Given Tesla’s myopic interest in its vehicles’ occupants (‘If you’re ever in an argument with another car, you will win,’ Musk has promised), the potential danger to other street users is real.
Now we get to the crazy part: Even if alarmed federal auto regulators wanted to pause or slow the Cybertruck’s rollout, they probably can’t. ‘I don’t know of anything that NHTSA can do within its legal framework to prevent something like the Cybertruck [launch],’ Arbelaez told me.
The reason relates to self-certification, a foundational principle of American vehicle regulations. Self-certification works pretty much as it sounds: Automakers are free to design and sell whatever they like, as long as they certify (with a label) that each car adheres to the encyclopedic Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. FMVSS sets design standards for specific elements like seat belts and steering wheels, but it contains massive omissions (i.e., nothing in it references pedestrian safety or maximum acceleration). Updating it takes years.
As long as carmakers like Tesla do not expressly violate FMVSS, they are free to use whatever designs and features they like in the United States. Although Elon Musk said on a recent podcast that the Cybertruck had ‘passed all of the regulatory tests,’ no such tests are required—or even available—from the federal government prior to the launch of a new vehicle. Tesla just needs to give itself the go-ahead.
If an FMVSS-compliant vehicle seems dangerous, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration can only intervene after launching an investigation that identifies a pattern of related incidents (often crashes). ‘NHTSA has recall authority,’ said the NTSB’s Homendy, ‘but they have to wait until something happens before they can take action.’ In the meantime, the faulty vehicles are on the road, endangering everyone.
It’s another story entirely across the Atlantic, as Musk himself seems to understand. Speaking last year in Berlin, he quipped that ‘in the U.S. things are legal by default, and in Europe they’re illegal by default.’ He’s not wrong.
In the European Union, an automaker seeking to sell a new model or feature must first obtain a governmental green light known as type approval. That process can be cumbersome, as regulatory staff conduct tests and pore over data. And the EU’s regulators have real power; they have already forced Tesla to adjust its autopilot system to provide certain safety features to all car owners, not just those who access them through gamification.
Although Tesla has promised to make the Cybertruck available to American consumers next year, the company has shared no such time frame for doing so in Europe. Given Europe’s more stringent regulatory system, that should come as no surprise. IIHS’s Arbelaez noted that the Cybertruck may be especially vulnerable in the EU because its regulations, unlike American ones, evaluate pedestrian crash impacts.
Have Europe’s auto safety regulations blocked reckless car designs and reduced crash deaths? Answering that question is challenging, since it requires disentangling the effect of car design from myriad road safety variables (speed limits, car ownership rates, and the frequency of drunk driving, to name just a few). What we do know is that Europeans are far less likely to die in crashes than Americans, whether deaths are measured per capita or per miles driven. It is hard to see how faster deployments of novel models like the Cybertruck will help the U.S. close that gap.
Predictably, carmakers hate the idea of the federal government adopting a European-style pre-approval system for cars, which would require substantial investments in time and money. But the concept has precedent. For decades, the U.S. has used a type-approval framework to oversee aviation, with the Federal Aviation Administration requiring that new airplane designs and technologies be vetted prior to deployment.
That system seems to be working quite well. Earlier this year, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg noted that American aviation is the safest in the world, with just two people dying in commercial plane crashes in the U.S. from 2010 to 2021. But the American track record on road safety is as abysmal as its aviation performance is stellar. On a per-passenger-mile basis, driving in the U.S. is over 100 times more dangerous than flying, and there is no other rich country in the world whose inhabitants are at a comparable risk of dying in a car crash. Residents of Canada, the similarly spacious and car-centric neighbor to the north, are only 40 percent as likely to be killed in a motor vehicle collision.
Even at this early stage, it’s a safe bet that Tesla’s design choices for the Cybertruck will not reduce American crash deaths, and they may increase them. And if the vehicle does prove to be as deadly as some fear, it will take time—years, likely—before federal officials can intervene to protect everyone who is not inside one.
For the sake of everyone’s safety, perhaps Musk should have to ask for permission, rather than forgiveness, before unleashing his next apocalyptic brainchild on American streets.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/cybertruck-safety-elon-musk-tesla-danger.html
Ref: slate
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