The problem is that these are not made to crash-worthiness standards of other cars. The article hints around this when it says that in China an electric car that has top speed under 100 km/h (around 60 mph) has very little regulations attached to it.
So these are wonderful, if you do not consider that they will have to share the road with actual cars which can easily pancake them and kill the occupants.
With the advance of batteries, power electronics and electric motors, there all kinds of cool new modes of transportation coming up but they are all kind of metaphorically and sometimes physically crashing against the concept of cars and the fact that all of our streets are basically made for cars.
I think we have to start seriously rethinking cities in view of these new modes of transportation. I would suggest a city center where there are no cars and bycicles and various slow speed electric vehicles, like scooters and glorified golf carts are allowed to roam. And then you can have the suburbs where full sized cars (electric or not) can drive but will have to have full modern crash protection.
Something like this is already starting to vaguely happen in some cities in Europe. It is of course easy to do in some european cities where the streets in their centers were pre-industrial and never designed for cars to begin with. But it is something to be expanded.
And it will be very helpful if large international manufacturers created a "glorified golf cart" standard that was reasonably safe for pedestrians and bicyclists (again assuming that it does not have to share the road with cars) so that the cities around the world can start doing city planning around it.
This "$5k electric car" is a glorified golfcart pretending to be a car, which is quite dangerous, because people will treat it like a car and will all to late realize how bad it fares when it crashes with actual cars.
Is safety different from a Smart car? Some people drive velomobiles, some drive regular bikes, some drive electric scooters.
Car was always overkill and will always be unless there are two of them or there is an ability to hire bigger car conveniently. Or there are more places to park smaller car.
In Europe speed limit within towns is 50 km/h and often smaller in residential areas. That's entirely different mode of transportation from 90 km/h outside, which is yet different from autobahns.
Waymo Firefly was just a thing you've described. Time has not come yet. Until than I'd better bet on pedestrian only zones, bike lanes, low emissions zones, congestion charge, paid parking lots.
It's good for you to focus on the safety of a car's driver and passengers. Cars these days are so big for some reason, all the more reason to make them crash-worthy and safer by making them more robust by making them more weighty.
Also, the top speed of 60mph is pittiful when an SUV can go at 90 easy. I wonder why anyone would allow something so unsafe as these vehicles on the road.
Of course that 90mph top speed is essential for the quality of life of its driver - especially during the 80% of time it's stuck in traffic moving forward at 10% of that speed :)
> So these are wonderful, if you do not consider that they will have to share the road with actual cars which can easily pancake them and kill the occupants.
A much better approach to crash safety than trying to survive a crash, is to not to crash in the first place.
Companies need to make a distinction whether they want to protect the occupant from the collision beyond his control, from protecting the occupant from himself.
European accident rates started to plummet when ADASes became a thing in mass market cars.
If you can limit the maximum crash velocities to 60km/h with ADASes, then I believe car-to-car collisions can be made much, much less lethal even in such light cars.
I wonder if an acceptable level of safety could be achieved, at greater cost but without compromising weight or size, through advanced materials, active safety systems, and better driver training.
Vehicles like these would be much safer in countries with high driver training standards and a low rate of fatalities per distance driven (e.g. New Zealand[0]) as compared to e.g. Mexico[0].
So these are wonderful, if you do not consider that they will have to share the road with actual cars which can easily pancake them and kill the occupants.
With the advance of batteries, power electronics and electric motors, there all kinds of cool new modes of transportation coming up but they are all kind of metaphorically and sometimes physically crashing against the concept of cars and the fact that all of our streets are basically made for cars.
I think we have to start seriously rethinking cities in view of these new modes of transportation. I would suggest a city center where there are no cars and bycicles and various slow speed electric vehicles, like scooters and glorified golf carts are allowed to roam. And then you can have the suburbs where full sized cars (electric or not) can drive but will have to have full modern crash protection.
Something like this is already starting to vaguely happen in some cities in Europe. It is of course easy to do in some european cities where the streets in their centers were pre-industrial and never designed for cars to begin with. But it is something to be expanded.
And it will be very helpful if large international manufacturers created a "glorified golf cart" standard that was reasonably safe for pedestrians and bicyclists (again assuming that it does not have to share the road with cars) so that the cities around the world can start doing city planning around it.
This "$5k electric car" is a glorified golfcart pretending to be a car, which is quite dangerous, because people will treat it like a car and will all to late realize how bad it fares when it crashes with actual cars.