The point of the comment you're replying to is that the Cyber Truck doesn't crumple... By design.

>Cyber Truck doesn't crumple

The point of the comment you are replying to is that it would be rather unreasonable to assume that.

No, it is quite reasonable to assume the car is designed not to crumple (or to resist crumpling) based on Elon sayng that it was designed not to be dented.

Dents are just a minor form of crumpling.

GM had an entire brand of vehicles designed not to be dented for about a decade during the 90s: Saturn. All of those vehicles performed normally in crash tests.

Exterior bodywork work is irrelevant to occupant crash safety performance on unibodies (or space frames, like the Saturn S series), because they’re non structural elements. They’re decorative. Soft metal is chosen because it’s cheap to produce, not because it’s a crumple zone.

Crumple zones on unibody cars today are made of much stronger steel than the body is, and the channels are in the unibody frame which are slightly inboard from the sides of the car.

If you hit the crumple zones of a regular car on the road today with a sledgehammer, they wouldn’t dent. You’d need to hit them with something imparting many thousands of times as much force, like a car.

The only safety benefit to soft body panels is pedestrian safety.

I was under the impression that dents affect bodywork, and crumpling affects (/is provided by) the vehicles internal structure. I would think that makes them distinct concepts in this context.

Depends on the design of the vehicle. It would be silly to assume Tesla, which has historically created some of the safest cars it their class, would completely ignore driver safety.

Yeah, emphasis on "minor". Try hitting a lamp.