Traffic safety experts and officials are raising concerns about the potential danger of having more electric vehicles on the road, as the weight of the vehicles could lead to more casualties in car crashes.
Jennifer Homendy, the National Transportation Safety Board chair, shared in an interview with CBS News that the weight of the vehicles, thanks to the size of their massive batteries, could pose a risk to the safety of other drivers on the road.
“I think it does present significant challenges for safety,” Homendy told CBS News. “If you think about an impact in a crash with a lighter vehicle with a pedestrian or a cyclist or motorcyclists, it’s going to have a much different outcome than we’ve seen in the past. Terribly tragic.”
Tests on EVs showed that they held up well in simulated crashes conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. But due to their batteries, the cars can sometimes have thousands of pounds of extra weight, causing concern for traffic safety advocates.
For example, the weight of GMC’s Hummer EV is more than 9,000 pounds, compared to its full-size pickup, which weighs more than 3,000 pounds.
The weight of the Hummer EV’s battery alone is roughly the weight of a Toyota Corolla sedan.
Now experts like Homendy say the added weight could “absolutely” lead to more deaths on the road, but there doesn’t seem to be a “focus on the safety aspect of” it.
Raul Arbelaez, the vice president of IIHS’ Vehicle Research Center in Ruckersville, Virginia, also spoke with CBS about the risk, sharing that it’s obvious.
The average weight of a vehicle on the road in mid-2023 was around 4,300 pounds, according to the Department of Transportation. Meanwhile, the weight of newer EVs was thousands of pounds more.
“It’s simple laws of physics,” Arbelaez said. “The crash for the other vehicle, when you are heavier, is going to be more severe.”
A study from 2011 looked into the risk of vehicles varying in weight during a car crash. The study was published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it found that a 1,000-pound difference resulted in a 47% higher chance that a crash would turn fatal.
What’s even scarier is that a 1,000-pound difference between an EV and a standard car isn’t close to what experts are now weighing the risk of.
“A 7,000-pound vehicle hitting a 4,000-pound SUV, the impact on that smaller vehicle is going to be quite significant,” Arbelaez said. “It is going to be a more severe crash with more intrusion and higher levels of injury.”
Arbelaez has written about the concerns he has with heavier EVs hitting the roads and the risks they bring to others around them.
“You take a very large vehicle, say a 10,000-pound vehicle, against that mid-size SUV. You have now converted that from a 40 mph crash for that smaller vehicle all the way to about a 58 mph crash,” Arbelaez wrote. “And what crash research tells us is that once you go above, say, the standard 40 mph crash severity, to 55 [mph] and higher, safety for those occupants in those vehicles goes down dramatically. The occupant compartment starts to collapse in ways that we aren’t designing for.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is monitoring the topic closely and conducting research on it to better understand the added risks of heavier vehicles on the road.
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