If you're any kind of a car person, you owe it to yourself to check out the rest of The Autopian - it's an independent car site founded, owned, and operated by deeply weird car people, and it's absolutely amazing.
Scotty Kilmer from Houston enters the chat to talk about how new cars are plastic garbage and how their low profile tires look "cool" but are woefully fragile.
Crumple zones perform a very specific function in the sequence of airbag deployment (letting the sensors crash and bags deploy before the cabin starts decelerating). The speed window at which they will appreciably reduce the deceleration in the cabin is well below the speeds at which a seat-belted occupant of an airbag equipped vehicle has to worry about serious injury. Crumple zones are undeserving of the worship they get. If you want to worship something worship side curtain airbags. They save a lot more life and injury than crumple zones. Pre-tensioners are also another feature that I'd rather have than a crumple zone. As a general rule, features that directly keep the occupants from hitting things are far more beneficial to outcomes than stuff that acts upon the whole vehicle.
Secondly, it is perfectly possible to design cars that do not need tons of invasive repairs from minor fender benders. Revise bumper and front/rear cosmetic design to allow for effective bumpers (see also: the 1980s) and tune crumple zones to need higher forces to deform them so you don't have to potentially replace a whole car over a 10-15mph collision. The tradeoff here is that the speed range at which crumple zones do much would move up which is good for real world performance bad for scoring that perfect five stars in a low speed lab test that actually helps sell cars.
If you're going to make blanket assertions that safety tests are invalid and/or that the engineers designing cars don't know what they're doing, some references are probably called for.
> If you're going to make blanket assertions that safety tests are invalid and/or that the engineers designing cars don't know what they're doing, some references are probably called for.
Can you please cite where I stated, or hell, I'll settle for strongly implied, "the safety tests are invalid" or that "the engineers designing cars don't know what they're doing".
The person I am replying to made a trite low effort comment. I, without calling them out like they deserved, explained that the situation is more nuanced and their opinion is slightly off mark. You then replied with another trite low effort comment straw-manning me. FFS this is ridiculous.
OK, you said, "...which is good for real world performance bad for scoring that perfect five stars in a low speed lab test that actually helps sell cars." This strongly implies that you believe the lab tests are not valid for their purported purpose of making cars safe, but are rather more of a marketing gimmick.
You also said that designers should, "Revise bumper and front/rear cosmetic design to allow for effective bumpers (see also: the 1980s) and tune crumple zones to need higher forces to deform them so you don't have to potentially replace a whole car over a 10-15mph collision." This strongly implies that the bumpers as they are currently designed are crumpling needlessly at low speeds, and that they could be made to not do so, like the bumpers of the 1980s, without compromising safety, hence that the engineers designing them are not competent. Although admittedly in retrospect it could also be that the engineers are designing to the aforementioned tests. Regardless it's an extraordinary claim, requiring evidence.
Your first paragraph also makes a number of claims, many of which I'm sure are true. Certainly curtain air bags and seat belt pre-tensioners have been shown to save lives. I recall reading a study on the positive impacts of adding pre-tensioners to the back-seats of vehicles a while back. But again I don't see anything supporting the claim that crumple zones are ineffective, or specifically, that, "The speed window at which they will appreciably reduce the deceleration in the cabin is well below the speeds at which a seat-belted occupant of an airbag equipped vehicle has to worry about serious injury." That could be true, but it's not supported here.
bro but rotary engines, you need an RX7 or I hear GT3000s are fast and shit but your bank probably won't give you a loan for a used Mitsubishi. maybe your mom will let you hold on rent for a bit??
Just took a quick scan - funny, intelligent, in-depth technical content in here but very approachable. This has definitely hackernews community quality to it.
That was a great article that makes me very happy about how Ford are approaching EV utes, I've often noted the tendency to make EVs weirder than their ICE equivalents. Well done Ford.
Looking at photos of the F-150 Lightning chassis, it seems like a pickup truck's body-on-frame design has a nice unintended benefit of being easy to convert to electric. The "frame" doesn't look so different from the "skateboard" EV design that's common.
A lot of converted gas to EV cars like the Genesis Electrified GV80 rob interior space for shoehorned batteries, but the F-150 is all gains with that massive front trunk.
Here's their writeup on the electric F-150 - keep scrolling on that page, and look at the kind of depth and detail they get into: https://www.theautopian.com/the-2022-ford-lightning-is-just-...
The site is a gem.