I’ve recently written rather extensively about pedestrian safety, and naturally, the growing size and weight of our vehicles has been a recurring theme.
Following those articles, I often have the privilege of getting a feel for public opinion and the questions still hanging in people’s minds. This is usually through emails I receive directly as well as comments under social media posts featuring our research.
One recurring theme has been some variation of: ‘Why don’t you look into these silent EVs?’ or ‘What about EVs and their heavy batteries? Why aren’t you highlighting them as a risk?’
So I thought, fair enough. What about them? Let’s look into it.
I completely understand the rationale behind these questions. Sound is an important warning cue for pedestrians. Without it, there is an obvious concern that pedestrians, particularly distracted ones, may not notice a vehicle approaching.
And yes, weight is weight, whether it’s spread across a bigger car or concentrated in a heavy battery. Or is it?
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Does that theoretical assumption show up in the empirical data too?
I wish I had the local Australian analysis ready to offer. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, but hopefully we’ll make that happen too, perhaps in a year or so.
Fortunately though, in the meantime, some very useful evidence has emerged recently from the UK, published in Nature Communications, a very prestigious academic journal.
EV uptake is further ahead in the UK than in Australia, which naturally makes it a better playground for answering this particular question.
So here’s how this question has been studied in the UK context.
The study used Britain’s official police crash database, looking at pedestrians hit by cars, taxis, and private-hire vehicles between 2014 and 2023. The vehicles were grouped into electric, hybrid, and conventional petrol or diesel vehicles.
But simply counting crashes wouldn’t be fair. There are still far more petrol and diesel cars on the road than EVs.
So the researcher estimated how many miles each group travelled and calculated the number of pedestrian casualties per billion miles driven.
The main comparison was limited to 2019–2022, when there were enough EVs on the road.
The central question of the analysis is: when a pedestrian is hit, does the type of vehicle affect how badly they are injured?
For this, the researcher used individual crash records and accounted in their statistical modelling for things such as speed limit, vehicle type, pedestrian and driver characteristics, weather and other crash conditions – basically, the usual details recorded in crash databases.
Here’s what the modelling results showed.
First, being hit by an electric vehicle did not make a pedestrian more likely to be seriously injured or killed than being hit by a conventional petrol or diesel car. Once the other factors were accounted for, there was no statistically significant difference.
So, at least in this dataset, the extra weight of an EV battery did not translate into more severe pedestrian injuries.
One may ask: how can extra weight matter for a large SUV or ute, as our own studies have found, but apparently not for an EV? Well, weight is only part of the story.
Our research, as well as that of others, shows that it also matters how big and tall the vehicle’s front is, what its front looks like, where it strikes the pedestrian and where the pedestrian ends up afterwards (on the bonnet, on the ground, or underneath the vehicle). In fact, our findings suggest the severity outcome of the crash is more sensitive to vehicle height and frontal structure than to weight per se.
So that may well explain why the extra weight of a battery does not show up in the same way.
The researcher also looked at the other side of the question: are EVs more likely to hit pedestrians in the first place due to their alleged ‘sneakiness’? Again, the answer was negative.
Fully electric vehicles were involved in 57.8 pedestrian casualties for every billion miles travelled. For petrol and diesel cars, the figure was 58.9. In other words, basically identical.
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Hybrids, however, produced the real surprise. Their rate was about 120 pedestrian casualties per billion miles; more than twice that of both EVs and conventional cars.
And spoiler: there are some possible explanations offered for this unexpected result, but nothing solid enough that I feel comfortable offering you as the explanation. So, I’ll leave this one as a peculiarity. We simply don’t know with any certainty why that’s the case.
I won’t deny that EVs are sneakier than non-EVs. I’ve been around them and, yes, you often can’t hear them coming. But as far as the data tells us, this hasn’t translated into a meaningfully higher risk of hitting pedestrians. And when they do hit someone, the extra weight of the battery hasn’t translated into meaningfully worse outcomes either.
And if the evidence had shown a different effect in either of those areas, I wouldn’t have hesitated to share it with you. I’m in no marriage with any mode or type of transport, green or otherwise, when it comes to safety.
In the meantime, let’s still be careful not to get hit by those sneaky EVs. There are a lot more of them around today than there were just a few months ago.
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