Electric Cars Twice as Lethal for Pedestrians as Petrol or Diesel

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.