Since Elon Musk’s buying of Twitter, anything he does and says is now evil against mankind. And combine that with the latest fauxrage of hating on pick up trucks, you get stupid stuff like the tweet above.
Just for kicks, I wonder how a pedestrian, or an occupant of a light vehicle would fare against a very common and old vehicle like … I don’t know… oh yes! An 18-wheeler! And I say this because yesterday while stuck on traffic in Nashville, I saw the brief interaction between one of those behemoths against a (Not-So) Smart Car. It was nothing bloody or tragic, but a vehicle-to-vehicle contact and probably at low speed. Let me clarify that: It was a truck tire contact against the clow car which ended up with a circular damage on the left side of it., an almost perfect engraved circle. The cop taking the report and the trucker seemed to have a tough time holding their laughter and the owner of the Tonka wheels did not appear amused.
Given equal speeds, lots of steel will always beat less steel and lots of plastic. Some find that the hard way when requesting passage through the Pearly Gates or intubated at the local ER.
Way back in the neolithic, my motorcycle riding instructor noted it didn’t matter whether the bike or the car had right-of-way … the rider loses.
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If more people would concentrate on, you know, driving (or walking in the vicinity etc), instead of being distracted and counting on outrage armor and presumed correctness, there would be fewer accidents and injuries.
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Plus … who can hate on the ground car from Logan’s Run?
The stupid is deep… and getting deeper.
My 2015 Tundra is 5700 plus EMPTY. My 66 Mercury wagon is 4900 plus with half tank of gas .. the “news” is full of clueless morons preaching to thier blind followers.. kinetic energy eludes them.. tomorrow it will be “hybrid cars are too quiet, posing danger to pedestrians “… day after it will be “how to load your dishwasher”… gawd people are fukkin dumb..
Oh, we’ve already been through the “hybrid / electric cars are too quiet.” So now they have to have a sound track. Listen when you hear a Tesla, Leaf or some such cruises by or backs up. You’ll hear this weird humming, keening sound, as of lost souls.
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Now, if the vehicle were actually to be powered by lost souls, that would be one thing. But as it is, it’s just annoying. And kind of defeats the whole “urban peaceful and serene street scene” think we were promised.
I didn’t know Tesla had surrendered to the “artificial noise” craze. Mine (a 2013 model) certainly doesn’t do that. And yes, it’s quiet at low speeds. So is a higher end gasoline car with a good muffler.
If I were to find myself with one of those fake noise cars, I’d seek out the noisemaker and dike it out.
MSM: Squawk, Whistle, and Parrot out the worn out talking points from 30 years ago.
I drove CDL for a few years and 2 incidents come to mind. First was low speed heavy traffic. A woman in a jeep Cherokee tried to dive in front of me. The lug nuts on my driver side steer tire instantly popped her right steer tire and half way tore off her fender. She was cited failure to maintain her lane. I had paint on the crome lugs.
The second time was 4am this time of year. I was hauling 53feet of priority mail at 70mph on rte 2 in CT. A huge buck at a full gallop darted out in front of me. I had just enough time to take my foot off the accelerator. That poor deer hit the entire drive side. Bumper, steer tire, 4 drive tires, landing gear, 4 tandem tires and kissed the Mansfield bar. I pulled over and pulled the light weight aluminum bumper away from the tire and the only other issue was the entire truck smelled like the worse guy shot carcass ever.
*gut
Now, if Elon could dump all the electric junk and drop in a 350-size V8 with a 6-speed gearbox, I’d be slightly interested. Very slightly, but that’s light-years more than where I am now.
Ditch the batteries and put in a diesel driving a generator.
EV’s are, on avg. 50% heavier than a comparable ICE vehicle.
One thing EV cultists refuse to talk about is that increased wear on tires (leading to more frequent/expensive replacement) and on roads.
They can ONLY point to how low a per use charge is and have to ignore all other costs to justify them.
Apparently the eco types in Europe are aghast the massive increase in rubber dust pollution from 5500lb 750hp EVs chewing up tires.
The Hummer EV weighs 8000lbs making it the same weight class as a 1 ton pickup. Something like a Chevy Bolt or Nissan Leaf makes sense, the electric super cars are insanity.
I still say that FULL EV vehicles* will not see widespread acceptance until there is an industry standard hot-swappable battery technology implemented to alleviate ‘range anxiety’.
I’m thinking of a ‘trade-in’ system similar to those propane tank exchanges you see at many stop-n-rob convenience stores these days. The vending rack would be able to charge the exchanged batteries in situ, and vend the fully charged batteries back to another customer. The time to ‘re-fuel’ the vehicle would be comparable to a normal ICE ‘tank-up’ depending on how many cells you replace at one time (5-10 minutes for a commuter style ‘top-off/tank-up’, or 10-30min. with food/bio-break included on road trips).
You could even have split banks like some trucks have auxiliary tanks, or carry a ‘spare’ cell or two for the EV equivalent of an emergency gas can.
*not Hybrid, with on board ICE generators/drive-trains
Interestingly enough, Teslas (at leas the S) have a battery design that permits swapping, and they demonstrated a swapping station. It worked well but it didn’t get commercialized. I’m not sure why. A possible issue would be that you’d drive off with a battery of unknown ancestry and characteristics. Could that be solved? Sure, I suppose; it has been for propane tanks as you mentioned, but those are cheap.
Just remembered — isn’t NBC the outfit that rigged up a pickup truck with a stick of dynamite when they were pretending to “prove” that those cars could blow up in a collision?
Not dynamite…They used a road flare, overfilled the tank, and used an undersized filler cap to ‘aid’ in demonstrating how a saddle-tank rupture could lead to conflagration. Hopefully this indexes properly:
https://youtu.be/G0mdWLfY9B0?t=706
Where do I put a sheet of plywood and a dozen 2×4’s in this so-called “Truck”?