Raul Arbelaez, vice president of the IIHS Center for Vehicle Research, wrote the following about vehicle protection and weight.
What do electric vehicles look like? It’s a question that comes up again and again in other tactics in my role as administrator of our vehicle crash resistance assessments.
When we tested electric cars in 2011, the query was about the threat of fire. When damaged, lithium-ion batteries can ignite, and fires can be incredibly difficult to extinguish. Therefore, we have special procedures for EV testing, adding battery voltage tracking. and temperature and have our local firefighters on site.
After fifty-five EV crash tests and no fires afterward, I’m still worried about those batteries, but I need a more mundane explanation as to why than their chance of catching fire. My biggest fear is their weight and what all that extra weight from cars means. for the protection of other people on the road, especially occupants of lighter vehicles, as well as pedestrians and cyclists.
While electric cars are poised to take off and soon eclipse traditional vehicle sales, we plan to launch many more in the coming years. Many of those electric cars, SUVs, and trucks will compete for our TOP SAFETY PICK and TOP SAFETY PICK. Awards. As we do with the vast majority of cars in the U. S. market, we’ll put them in the Array
There’s a big difference between the first all-electric vehicle we tested (a 3,339-pound 2011 Nissan Leaf) and the current generation of EVs, many of which exceed 6,000 pounds. These are SUVs and giant pickup trucks with a power that demands a battery.
To put that extra weight in context, when I first heard about the 9,500-pound GMC Hummer EV, I had a practical concern. Could our crash check device in the HRV take care of that?Could we drag a vehicle like this up to our 40 mph check speed without breaking our device?
To locate it, we retrieved old debris, loaded it with metal plates and a concrete block to bring the weight to about 9,500 pounds, and then sent it to the tracks. Everything worked; All we needed was a little more loading time for the hydraulics and a little more clamping force on our tow line to hold the vehicle in place.
The challenge with this extra weight is less easily solved when one of those incredibly heavy EVs crashes into another non-electric car or SUV that weighs between 3000 and 4000 pounds. (A non-electric pickup truck, which weighs about 5,000 pounds, might fare a little better. )
When two vehicles collide, the heavier vehicle pushes the lighter vehicle backwards, generating superior forces on the others on the lighter vehicle and lesser forces on the others on the heavier vehicle. That’s why we stipulate that our frontal crash tests, which are conducted as opposed to a constant barrier and simulate a collision with a vehicle of the same size, can only be in comparison between weight cars.
Over the years, we’ve done several crash demonstrations combining giant cars with smaller cars to show the effect of length and weight on crashes. In two tests conducted in 2018, one with a mid-length SUV and a small car and one with a giant car. and a minicar, whether it’s smaller cars that performed poorly in our tests.
Assuming the new generation of heavy-duty electric vehicles are designed to perform well in our crash tests, there’s no explanation as to why they can’t offer smart coverage to their occupants. In fact, their additional weight will give them greater coverage in the event of a multi-vehicle collision. Unfortunately, given the existing design of those cars, this increased coverage comes at the expense of the other people in the other cars.
The extra weight can also pose a risk to pedestrians and bicyclists, even if the danger to them is not so simple. The difference in weight between a user and any type of passenger vehicle is already so huge that the extra weight coming from an EV battery wouldn’t make much difference in most cases. (Large cars pose a greater risk to pedestrians and bicyclists, however, this is basically due to their height and shape, which influence visibility and whether the user is thrown to the ground when hit. )It’s not clear that all EVs have braking functionality that’s good enough for their extra mass. If the extra weight leads to longer prevention distances, it will most likely lead to an increase in pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities, which have already accumulated in recent years.
And while there are doubts about the performance of the brakes, we already know that those cars don’t have any problems when it comes to accelerating. Today’s large electric cars are a double whammy in terms of weight and power. Even though there were a lot of heavy cars on our roads before electric cars, a delivery truck designed to go from 0 to 60 in about 3 seconds like the Hummer discussed above or the 7,000-pound Rivian R1T pickup truck. Even the more modest Kia EV6, a small SUV that weighs around 4,500 pounds, enjoys the same quick acceleration. .
If the current trend towards increasingly heavier and stronger electric cars continues, the number of ultra-heavy, high-acceleration cars will increase all around us, adding to residential areas. This will make it much more likely that a collision involving a huge weight disparity will occur.
We do not want to slow down electrification (there are smart reasons for this) and we are not doomed to undo all the protection gains of the last few decades. But this breakthrough will require a new way of thinking about the types of cars we want. on our roads.
On the one hand, as a society, we deserve to think about how many other people deserve to be circulating massively in their day-to-day lives and in the city. There are electric cars with more moderate weights. (Remember that Leaf?) The heaviest of the new electric vehicles are heavier because they are bigger, but also because larger batteries give them greater diversity and greater power.
The ability to travel 400 miles on a fare is convenient but unnecessary for maximum trips. As charging speeds and infrastructure improve, this will undoubtedly become less vital for car travel as well. Force-wise, does it do the kind of quick acceleration that the new models offer?Does bragging really matter or is it even a smart idea? Vehicles with excessive degrees of force simply inspire you to accelerate, leading to more fatal accidents.
If especially reducing the weight of electric cars isn’t an option, automakers deserve to make other design tweaks to improve crash compatibility. Heavier cars can also be built with an extra weight area at the front to help offset the effect of their extra weight in the event of a collision with some other vehicle. While we sometimes think of passageways as vital to protecting a vehicle’s own occupants, an additional area would also protect other people in other, lighter cars. Since no engine takes up space at the front of the vehicle, there would likely also be more flexibility to design headlamps that are less likely to injure pedestrians and bicyclists.
In addition, I hope that the expected innovations in battery generation will help by allowing smaller batteries to store more energy and that a developing network of public fast chargers will meet the need for longer range.
In the meantime, we want to redouble our efforts on existing solutions. Manufacturers deserve to equip all new cars with high-performance collision avoidance systems that recognize and brake pedestrians and cyclists, as well as other cars, as well as smart headlights that allow drivers to temporarily react at night. State and local governments deserve to lower speed limits, considering the increased danger of weight disparities, and support them with increased law enforcement.
Electric cars are here to stay, but we know what that means in terms of safety.
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