Electric cars kill pedestrians at double the rate of petrol or diesel vehicles, a study in a BMJ journal has found. The Telegraph has more.
Experts said that electric or hybrid cars were twice as likely to be involved in a road accident with a bystander than a petrol or diesel car over the same distance.
The researchers suggested the vehicles’ quieter engines were a significant factor in higher fatality rates and called on the Government to mitigate the risks as it phases out petrol and diesel cars in pursuit of Net Zero.
The study looked at the number of casualties from road collisions in Britain between 2013 and 2017 using Road Safety Data and calculated the number of pedestrians that had been hit by different types of cars.
Over the period, 96,285 pedestrians were hit by a car or taxi. While three-quarters of these people had been hit by a car with a combustion engine, this was because they covered significantly more miles.
To overcome this, the researchers calculated the rate of casualties per 100 million miles covered by electric and hybrid cars compared with petrol and diesel cars.
They found that 5.16 people on average were hit by an electric or hybrid car for every 100 million miles that type of vehicle had driven, compared with 2.4 people for petrol and diesel cars.
The road accident data were cross-referenced with annual mileage figures from the National Travel Survey, with 32 billion miles of electric and hybrid vehicle travel and three trillion miles of petrol and diesel vehicle travel included in the analysis.
Two per cent of the pedestrian casualties were caused by an electric vehicle, while 24% of the accidents did not have a record of the engine type.
The researchers said that even in an “extreme case” scenario where all of these were accidents involving traditional combustion engine cars, the casualty rate would have been 3.16 per 100 million miles, still 63% lower than seen with electric cars.
Worth reading in full.
One potential confounder is that electric cars are more likely to be used on shorter hops in urban areas (due to range constraints) while petrol cars are more likely to be used for long journeys where miles can be racked up with no pedestrians around. It’s not clear how well this issue has been dealt with by the researchers. But still, it makes sense that quieter vehicles will be involved in more incidents with pedestrians – and that heavier vehicles will cause more harm.
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Regarding the last paragraph and long journeys. There aren’t many pedestrians on the motorways! Is there no beginning to the superiority of EVs and Hybrids over ICE vehicles?
Clearly not it would seem.
Beginning of the end, maybe?
For those that can remember that far back, It was a parody of the the insult made by Clive Anderson interviewing Jeffrey Archer on tv many moons ago, circa 1990. “There’s no beginning to your talents.”
The Government Should Do Something (TGSDS)!
Let’s ban something! I know, let’s ban pedestrians wearing headphones – for their own good, or crossing roads except at lights crossings (jaywalking laws). While we’re at it we could ban all vehicles from city/town/village centres and/or reduce the speed limit to 10mph.
Various governments have done far too much – they should butt out of our lives.
How about we ban walking along the road staring at a phone and attempting to text? ——-What do all these people do that is so important on phones that it cannot wait till they arrive at where they are going? ——-The answer is NOTHING. They think they are using technology but in reality the technology is using them.
If it is free, you are the product!
Another potential confounder could be that newer cars come with touch screens that are more distracting for the driver as their eyes are off the road longer
Will’s off on his anti electric car hobby horse again. I notice that he didn’t feature the widely reported petrol car fire but always jumps at the chance to publicise rare electric car fires. Will disparages ‘experts’ when they are pro Net Zero or not lockdown sceptics, but is happy to become credulous when they are anti electric cars.
Why does the study rely on statistics from 2013 to 2017,the infancy of electric vehicles?
I suspect that the statistics you are relying upon are for all types of vehicle fires, and does not refer to spontaneous combustion, which is the main concern when it comes to evs.
PS I didn’t spot him disparaging any experts or “experts” in the atricle.
A car having a prang and then bursting into flames as a result is not so terribly unusual – though all forms of crash safety have improved over time. However, suddenly bursting into flames a few weeks or months after a crash is pretty much an EV thing.
Or bursting into flames without any crash!
Fair point. Could it be that accident statistics for later than 2017 had not been compiled/released at the time of the report? I have not looked. Another question which is suggested above by TheGreenAcres would be ‘are newer vehicles generally involved in more pedestrian accidents per distance travelled than older cars’?
One other idea that occurs to me is that EVs may be driven by richer people who may be more careless of their fellow men? The only supporting evidence is that new EVs are more expensive than ICE cars. I don’t know of any evidence about the attitudes of richer drivers.
Someone has noted a slightly surprising statistic and offered two possible explanations (the quietness of EVs and a suggestion that they may be more urban). The quietness issue is easily fixed by fitting noise makers. Alternative explanations should be suggested and tested against the available facts.
My neighbour has an EV. It makes an awful lot of noise when he reverses out onto the road.
Surely the onus for safe driving must be on the driver. Could it be that EV drivers are more keen in spotting admiring glances than keeping an eye out for pedestrians.
When I was growing up and aspiring to learn to drive my parents moved us to a house on a fairly busy town road. We always reversed into the driveway and drove out forwards as reversing out would have been far more dangerous.
Sounds like my place, that is exactly what I do. Have not reversed out for the four years that I have been at the property. It had Iron gates when I bought the place, so they were taken down the moment I moved there and given to a Sheep farmer mate who used then for hurdles.
Everyone has known petrol has been inflammable since err… the invention of petrol. If you see or smell petrol where it shouldn’t be, then there’s an indication something is wrong. If there is a fire then they are fairly easily dealt with.
However, batteries aren’t meant to suddenly self combust, but they do. There have been a number of car transporter ships sunk because when this happens the fires are much hotter and near impossible to put out. Also EVs still have appalling range especially in winter, electricity prices have shot down any economic reason to buy, and they are far MORE harmful to the environment than a conventional ICE (mining for limited supplies of rare earth metals). Finally a 5 year £20k+ battery is almost worthless. Whose going to buy these cars?
But do carry on and virtue signal if you want. The UK public are literally not buying into this bs.
The problem with BEV car fires is that they are much more intense. It doesn’t really matter which car goes on fire first (BEVs apparently less likely) it’s when the fire spreads to a BEV that you get real problems to the extent that Alder Hey Hospital has banned them until it gets its sprinklers upgraded.
I wonder what happens to an FCEV when its hydrogen tank bursts. Will the pressurised gas mix with the atmosphere resulting in an explosion or will it just burn like the Hindenburg?
Concerning Hydrogen fires: https://hydrogen.wsu.edu/2017/03/17/so-just-how-dangerous-is-hydrogen-fuel/
Petrol car fires can be extinguished by normal fire-fighting techniques and small amounts of water.
BEVs are UXBs (Unexploded Bombs – if you don’t understand the reference.) Their battery fires are thermal runaway fires, explosive, giving off copious toxic gases, impossible to extinguish,
That’s the difference.
Infancy of electric cars? That was London 1884, and they havd had nearly 150 years to catch on – I wonder why they didn’t?
Surely even climate activists must know and realise that a silent EV will be more dangerous to pedestrians than a noisy petrol one. We don’t need any type of study to confirm common sense. It is the case that we mostly use sight to look out for traffic, but sound is also a factor.
It’s not clear when the data was collected, but a few years ago it became a requirement for electric vehicles – either hybrid or battery only – had to have an artificial noise generator up to 30 km/h speed. My older one made in 2017 was virtually silent at low speeds, but my current one complies with the newer standard. There is one along the road from me, which has a similar set up, and I can detect it up to about 100m away in reasonably quiet conditions.
They can be more audible than some modern petrol engined cars, in which the engine is quite low noise, especially at low speed. The only situation that may be relevant is that electric traction ones do start silently from rest in car parks; the absence of an engine does not mean it will not move, so it pays to be wary of those who might not see you – occasionally it’s wise to use the horn to warn them (which is what it’s there for).
The other matter with BEVs is, of course, the overall mass. They are heavy machines, thus can cause more damage than older ones.
It shoudn’t be beyond the manufacturers to have a noise generator so you can choose what kind of vehicle you sound like. I wonder how many would end up on ‘V8 with supercharger’..?
Judging by the number of ICE cars which have been modified to ‘pop’ on deceleration (an understatement, if ever I heard one) I think ‘Merlin’ would probably be favourite.
Is the noise generation thing optional or something? I know I’m a bit deaf but I can barely hear them, which in my rural, narrow road, no-pavement area is a distinct problem. Coming downhill they are virtually silent. I nearly got mown down by one yesterday which didn’t even bother to honk its horn to announce its presence – just sailed past as I pulled myself out of the hedge.
They are automatic, but only work at speeds less than 30 km/h (19 mph), then they assume that there is enough tyre noise. The other issue is that many cars are a fair bit wider than they used to be.
The study is here. I never read summaries of studies in newspapers
https://jech.bmj.com/content/jech/early/2024/05/01/jech-2024-221902.full.pdf
In relation to the confounder of urban vs non-urban miles they say in the results when they tried to adjust for this
but strong evidence that E-HE vehicles were three times more dangerous than ICE vehicles in urban environments (RR 2.97; 95% CI 2.41 to 3.7).
But they also say age may be an additional confounder which they haven’t adjusted for.
Confounders in this study would be factors that may both cause a traffic collision and also cause the exposure (use of an E-HE car). Younger, less experienced drivers (ie, ages 16–24) are more likely to be involved in a road traffic collision and are also more likely to own an electric car. Some of the observed increased risk of electric cars may therefore be due to younger drivers preferring electric cars. This would cause positive confounding, meaning that the true relative risk of electric cars is less than we have estimated in our study.
Much as I hate electric cars i would be very vary of drawing any conclusions at all from this study.
This sort of observational study is generally junk unless the associations are enormous.
As well as the near impossibility of adjusting for confounders, there are the complex interactions between confounders, mediators and colliders which create a complex adaptive system with multiple feedback loops that can’t be unravelled.
I’m surprised that younger drivers are more likely to own (or at least be driving, I guess) a BEV, and would like to see the stats. I’ll check the study to see if there’s a reference.
Dammit. The link didn’t work for me.
Sorry. Try this one
https://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2024/05/01/jech-2024-221902
Ta muchly. That worked.
Man walking in front with red flag; 12pm speed limit for UXBs.
“…called on the Government to mitigate the risks as it phases out petrol and diesel cars in pursuit of Net Zero.”
No problem. There won’t be any cars at all.
I wonder if all the electronic displays distracting drivers, anxiously monitoring the charge left, might be a factor?
I’ve not read this study, but if the summary above accurate describes the study, I’m surprised two other factors are not mentioned:
I saw lots of them in America in the DC area. I see hardly any in England. You can lament British sardonic jadedness but it has its saving graces. It is hard to imagine a television evangelist extracting money from the poor in this country the same way as in America. Just like the Brits are a bit iffy about the climate agenda. Orwell said in the 1940s that German style fascism would never take hold here because people would just laugh at the absurdity of it all. I think on some level it still holds true. The anti-iintellectual bent of the British might be their salvation. The fine old English art of taking the piss.
Ok so that’s it then we should ban all cars and get bicycles. There is only one problem with that though. The leftists that would like to depopulate the globe will have even more people than ever if they are not being mowed down by private vehicles……..Oh dear what a dilemma.
Have you heard and major figure, or anyone, in say the last twenty years say something positive about Britain that is sincere and true. We are in the retreat and hibernation phase. We get buggered and beaten senseless with no way to respond. The opportunity presents itself. Either you keep getting treated like a doormat or maybe all the pummellings have built into you a nascent and smouldering desire for renewal and with the understanding the energy to bring it about. You will know which path you are on.
Pretty obvious innit? ——Just like every other bit of the absurdity that is NET ZERO
We have no control over energy supplies in the sense that if they wanted to restrict or cut off our energy then who would we be dealing with? And with world events as they are we are becoming more and more disconnected from the things that keep us alive. It might not look that way but just look at how people spoke a few decades ago. They were very much more in control of their own world. We have had this centralized nastiness gradually imposed on us like a fat lady lowering her ass onto a chair. Do you accept being smothered by her?
We should be happy things could’ve easily gone the other way. People might’ve embraced electric cars and the rest of it. Of course many did but the encouraging lesson from this battle is just how weak the enemy is in terms of offering a viable future. And the events of the last five years have woken many from their slumbers. For all of the nastiness of the world I think that we can still discern the operation of benificent forces.
I wonder what we will go back to when it all collapses. Will it be the horse and cart? I can live with that. Of course they enviage a drastically shrunken population. That’s a bit more difficult. Asimov wrote a story about precisely this subject called Triage. I don’t generally look to scientific minds but Asimov is worth considering as a visionary. Many arch atheists like Susan Blakemore are starting to embrace pan-psychism – the idea that the universe is pervaded by mind, a halfway house to spitituality. So much has changed in this regard in terms of how human beings feel. I think it is a wonderful thing that despite all the horror there is still a deeper sense of a mission in progress in terms of the connection of humanity.