Re:Tesla Cybertruck may be unsafe for other road users: Aust...
by kube-system on Saturday November 30, 2019 @01:54AM
(#21668921)
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.
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.