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this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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While 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.
Unless I'm mistaken, crumpling is meant to protect the driver and passengers. Not pedestrians, cyclists, or anyone else outside the vehicle.
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
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.
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
Crumple zones are for vehicle to vehicle impacts. They have nothing to do with pedestrian safety.
Even with the crumple, the mass of those vehicles is enormous hence the force a pedestrian or a cyclist will experience is much higher compared to a normal size passenger vehicle.