Electric cars are no more of a danger to pedestrians than conventional vehicles, according to new research.
A study of UK data published in Nature this week found there was a fall in casualty rates for both electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles in 2019 following the introduction of the Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System (AVAS), an audio alert designed to warn other road users during low-speed driving.
However, more data is needed to find out more about this association, the researchers from the University of Leeds said.
An earlier study from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found that pedestrians are twice as likely to be injured by an electric or hybrid (E-HE) car than by one with an internal combustion engine. The paper published last year said this is "consistent with the theory that E-HE vehicles are less audible to pedestrians in urban areas where background ambient noise levels are higher."
Concerns – justified or otherwise – were that the quieter operation and heavier weight of electric vehicles, compared to their combustion engine counterparts, could potentially stall the mission to replace carbon fuels with alternatives that are less likely to increase global temperatures.
Leeds University's Zia Wadud, Professor of Mobility and Energy Futures, and colleagues analyzed British government road safety data from 2014 to 2023. Their conclusion was that the pedestrian casualty rates for collisions with electric vehicles were statistically similar to those for conventional vehicles from 2019 to 2023 when electric vehicle ownership began to accelerate.
Wadud said: "There were two worries about EVs and road safety. First, whether EVs would increase the number of collisions with pedestrians because they were quieter than traditional vehicles. Second, where there is a collision, whether the injuries to the pedestrians would be more severe when involving an EV because the vehicles are heavier. Our results show that this is not the case."
One explanation is that although they are heavier owing to large battery packs, electric vehicles are also more likely to have better safety technologies than most internal combustion engine vehicles on the road today, which help them to evade crashes or limit impact, the authors argue.
The researchers also recommended further research to determine whether electric and hybrid vehicles remain as safe as conventionally powered cars when accounting for the number of safety features employed by each group. ®
Source: The register