Context
A new analysis by independent automotive blog FuelArc suggests that fire fatalities are 17 times more likely in a Cybertruck than in the infamous Ford Pinto — the posterchild of deadly cars if ever there was one.
It’s specifically 17x more fire fatalities per car on the road - 5/35000 for the cyberturd, something like 30/3000000 for the pinto.
Notably the Pinto’s design was placing the gas tank behind the rear bumper, so getting rear-ended badly enough could cause a fireball. The big scandal was that Ford did the math on the cost of settlements vs recalls and found settlements would be cheaper, so they didn’t fix the issue.
Cyberturd on the other hand has big lithium batteries strapped to the bottom, notably locks occupants in the vehicle in the event of power failure (e.g. bad crash or battery failure, explosive or otherwise) AND its “apocalypse proof” design means it takes first responders a long time to smash through the windows to rescue you before you’re barbecued.
The big scandal was that Ford did the math on the cost of settlements vs recalls and found settlements would be cheaper, so they didn’t fix the issue.
I support having the death penalty but only for use against people with power that do shit like this.
China stays winning on this sort of thing fr
gas tank behind the rear bumper, so getting rear-ended badly enough could cause a fireball
The 1993-2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee had the same issue, with higher fatality rate per fire crash
On October 2, 2009, the Center for Auto Safety filed a safety defect petition for the recall of all 1993–04 Jeep Grand Cherokees with the fuel tank located behind the rear axle. At the time of the petition, CAS had identified 172 fatal fire crashes with 254 fatalities in the FARS file from calendar year 1992 through 2008. CAS identified 44 fire crashes with 64 deaths where fire was the most harmful event. In comparison, NHTSA reported a total of 38 fire crashes with 26 fatalities when it recalled the Ford Pinto.
I believe the recall fix was to install a trailer hitch that would deform the tank in such a way that it was less likely to cause a fire.
this used to be a country about engineering catastrophe on purpose to save a buck
the result of this is that now this is a country that engineers catastrophes out of complete and utter incompetence.
Oh yeah, the whole cybertruck is an engineering disaster I really want to hear a good deep dive on. There are so many systemic issues with its production, and it really is the exact shit you’d end up with by running a car manufacturer like a software company.
It genuinely suffers from trying to reinvent the wheel for like literally every part of the car - most automakers purchase parts from specialized manufacturers that serve a bunch of different automakers, Tesla builds nearly everything in-house and as a result suffers from issues that every other manufacturer solved many decades ago (like auto glass that doesn’t spontaneously shatter, functional windshield wipers, wheels that don’t rip off at the lug nuts, basic waterproofing, etc)
IIRC, there were a couple additional issues with the Pinto. There was a problem with the filler tube that connected to the fuel tank (I think it was welded to the body or something), and this could cause a rupture and subsequent conflagration. The fuel tank was much too close to the bumper, and there wasn’t enough of a buffer zone around it; there were lots of structural items nearby that could cause punctures. Ford actually had the option to license a self-sealing “fuel bladder”, a design that came from the aviation industry, but the bean counters nixed that. The doors tended to bind and jam in a collision, trapping occupants in a burning vehicle. And finally, '70s-era Ford was really making some lousy cars, especially small ones. The Pinto is yet another case of “the hard way is the easiest to learn”. (I think there was an episode of Engineering Disasters that covered the Pinto fiasco in great detail).
The diagram you posted below shows what a defective design it really was. It’s almost as if they shoehorned in the fuel tank wherever they could, like it was an afterthought.
it takes first responders a long time to smash through the windows to rescue you before you’re barbecued.
Panicked tweet: “Help us, Daddy Elon! We’re stuck in our Cybertruck and there’s a fire! Something’s burning and it smells like bacon. W” and it ends there.
funny(?) morbid anecdote
Bacon smell is real lol. When I was a kid, my dad and I were stopped at an intersection on our way to get lunch. We started talking about how good the nearby barbecue smelled, until he realized there wasn’t any barbecue place nearby… then I noticed smoke coming out of the chimney at the funeral home across the way — they were doing a cremation
CW: cannibalism
The macabre term long pig for ‘human flesh used as food’ dates from the mid-nineteenth century. It is supposedly a translation of an expression used in the language of a cannibal people of the southwestern Pacific rim.
I wonder if there have been any at least fairly notable death metal bands with that name. A band that did one EP and existed in Liverpool for 8 months in 1983 doesn’t really count to me.
Measuring the data in this way actually skews it in favor of the cybertruck, because the ford Pintos have each had a lot more road-time and thus more fire likelihood. So likely more than 17x worse
I think you meant the gas tank was behind the rear axle, it was definitely ahead of the bumper. Subsequent studies had shown that the pinto wasn’t uniquely unsafe compared to other subcompacts from the era.
yeah, between the rear axel and the bumper. “just behind” the bumper if you’re coming from the back of the car, e.g., rear-ending it
edit: diagram to clarify:
Currently engulfed in flames, love the truck, tho
What even is the point of the cybertruck? Is it just an ‘own the libs’ mobile?
You buy one to prove a point to your ex wife
Or you buy one to initiate a divorce without having to do the work of filing for it
Surely Tesla has not released their independent crash testing data on the Cybertruck because it makes them look really good.
Self
to the worst people imaginable lmaoMy mom had a powder blue pinto. It was the first and last “off the lot brand new car” she ever bought.
…
I mean, she didn’t burn to death in it or anything, she just never trusted a brand new car pretty much for the rest of her life. Always bought used.
I did some googling and the wagon looks pretty cool - https://hexbear.net/post/4453426
Whenever I think about 70s cars I always think back to the popular myth that the chevy Nova performed poorly on the mexican market because if you separate the syllables it says “no go” but Nova literally just means new in spanish it was just a shitty car.
Nuevo is new, “No va” means “it doesn’t go”
For the record, nova doesn’t mean new in Spanish. Maybe Italian or Portuguese
It does mean the same thing as the English word nova though:
Catalan
It means new in latin, not in Italian. Not sure about Portuguese.
Worth noting, the Nova actually outperformed sales targets in Mexico for so long that they ended up building a factory in Mexico City just to make them. They switched production over to the Citation when GM sized down its lineup, and it was so beloved as a car that in 1985 GM replaced the Citation II with new Novas based on the AE82 Corolla platform, built at the NUMMI joint factory in Fremont, CA. These new Novas proved similarly so popular that GM started just straight up importing and rebadging Toyota Sprinters as the Geo Prizm.
Another fun fact: the name association most people in Mexico would’ve had at the time would have been to PEMEX gasoline which was also often branded as “NOVA” gas.
Rant
I googled for an interesting or funny article on the issue but google sent me to three crappy articles and I gave up.
Yeah its a pre-internet myth I doubt there is much about it easily findable.
It’s funny to see an article describe it as a copy-and-paste urban myth when the article itself is probably accurate but still no thought and no effort copy-and-paste garbage. Even NPR let me down. I know there must be something good (a blog post?) but I don’t feel like fighting with google for dozens and dozens of minutes to maybe find it. Or not.
snopes article from 1999 is p good
(Found from a citation in the section about the myth on the Chevy Nova Wikipedia article)
Thanks. I started to instinctively ignore Snopes but that can be very dumb of me. Even if so many recent articles are garbage - the site is very old and it used to be good.
Lol yeah I wasn’t sure about either it until I saw the publish date, that’s why I specified the year. Not sure when it got bad but anything like pre-2010 seems likely aligned with their original purpose of debunking urban legends, and the older the better
That seems about right. It was bad in the years just before Trump 1.0. I remember trying to use it for r/PoliticalHumor. I wanted a simple quote that said in effect “No - the Nazi party wasn’t socialist. And here’s why…” The Snopes article was ridiculously large. Don’t remember how long it was. ~2,000+ words? I kept scrolling down and down and down. Finally the very last two paragraphs were pretty good so I shared them. Snopes did that for any simple situation. You’d have to scroll and scroll to maybe find anything good.
Then it started to turn to shit pretty quickly after Trump 1.0 started. Fact checking™ became a liberal thought terminating cliché and Snopes had a lot of competition for ad revenue from WaPo, Politifact, etc.
Ford Pinto
Mad scientist: At last, I have invented a bad bean!
