Crash tests show nation's guardrail system can't handle heavy electric vehicles

EVs account for 1% of vehicles, and only 7.6% of new cars. If trucks haven’t been a major issue at 20% of the vehicle population, making a big deal out of EVs seems a bit overblown.

https://www.edmunds.com/electric-car/articles/percentage-of-...

Does this also mean they don’t care about semi trucks going through guardrails? Semi trucks account for 10% of highway miles traveled, which is also more than EVs.

https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/freight_analysis/nat_freigh...

That's a bit disingenuous when SUVs are another 40% of the market, making ~60% of vehicles sold still the size and weight of trucks, with or without beds.

It is still a lot

> Who funded the University of Nebraska to specifically test EVs in an improbable perpendicular collision with a guardrail?

The US Army - who use the same barriers at road blocks. It looks like the research was really about heavier vehicles. The focus on EVs does ignore the general trend to larger vehicles as you say.

https://engineering.unl.edu/news/240131/mwrsf_evs_safety/

Guardrails are typically installed such that a head on is almost impossible - they are designed for more of a glancing blow that redirects you back to the road. In that application I've seen them keep a fully loaded semi from crossing a medium into oncoming traffic.

To get a head on at speed you would need to going across the road - maybe in the desert it is flat enough to get your car up to speed when going perpendicular to the road, but I'm not sure why you would try that.

The other option is hit the start of the guard rail - while this can happen, the start of guardrails are generally angled so this is still a redirecting blow not head on. Where they cannot be the start is covered by rubber dumpers to slow you down before you hit it.

Is it a head on collision? The first angle in the video makes it look like it is, but the second angle makes it clearer that its actually hitting from an angle. It seems to be close to a 45 degree angle, which is slightly closer to a real world scenario.

Electric cars tend to be much heavier than ICEs. While your model 3 is lighter than the limit it is a small car that is just barely under the limit. While much larger F150 starts out at only slightly heavier.

Cause.. Big Oil FUD

Weight of the car is not as big of a factor as people think. Per the IIHS, the size of crumple zones actually may have more impact than the weight: https://www.iihs.org/topics/vehicle-size-and-weight

That might suggest that a car like a Tesla which is very heavy but can't crush very much thanks to the battery has an unclear safety benefit, but a truck does.

Realistically, practically nobody is going to get into a fatal crash anyway, though, so if you honestly attempt to price the difference in safety, you may come out to a few dollars. Certainly not enough to justify buying an SUV over a civic.

A Honda Civic is 2900-3100 lbs. A Honda CR-V is 3500-3600 lbs. That weight difference will not make much difference in a collision with a cyclist or pedestrian.

Even if they went with something heavier like a Tesla Model 3 (3900-4000 lbs) or a Tesla Model Y (4200-4400 lbs) or a Ford F-150 (4700 lbs) it would still not make much difference.

Yes, at a given speed a heavier vehicle will have more momentum and more kinetic energy than a lighter vehicle of the same shape, but momentum and kinetic energy aren't as directly correlated with how much a collision hurts a pedestrian as many here seem to think they are.

Once the vehicle is sufficiently more massive than the pedestrian that the collision causes very little change in the vehicle velocity a heavier vehicle at the same velocity is not really going to hurt the pedestrian more in the collision itself.

E.g., a large freight train hitting you at a slow walking pace is not going to be worse than a small car hitting you at the same speed, even though the train has way more momentum and kinetic energy. Speed that car up to highway speed and then it will greatly injure you even though it still will have much less momentum and kinetic energy than the slow train.

Much more important is the shape of the vehicle. Besides affecting what injuries are incurred from the collision itself it can affect what happens after. A shape that knocks the pedestrian away is probably safer than one that tends to draw the pedestrian to under the car where they get run over.

$5000 is a long trip to Europe and/or one to Central America (adjust to taste).

Or, not needing a weekend job while studying.

Haha, my mom got me a 1983 Cadillac brougham for my first car. The land yacht did 0-60 in TWELVE SECONDS. Obv I never tried passing.

for main roads. However for back roads and residential streets the road is designed assuming only a few semis per year (mostly moving trucks which are already lighter than average) and so the heavy car every day is a much larger share of the wear.

Road tax is paid into the general funds, same as any other taxation, and stopped being related to the maintenance of roads several generations ago.

EV drivers do pay less tax in general (including significant amounts of fuel duty not needing to be paid) but then they do far less harm to the people and environment around them too.

Sounds like my example scenario would not work for you. That being said, renting may not be necessary, since many people already own gas powered cars, and most electric vehicle owners already have another car. Since you already have a gas-powered car that can do the trip, it might make sense for your first electric car to have short range, and you just use the gas-powered car for the long trips. Not trying to move the goal posts, just remembering a more realistic alternative to renting as I sip my first cup of coffee.

> When I own it I don't worry about what my kids are doing to the car - as anyone with kids knows they will do something.

I hope your kids are of the young variety lol

Your prices are all off by a factor of 3-4 or more. Most Americans would be fine with a sub-$30k EV for daily life and an occasional rental the handful of times they need to pick up large cargo or travel hundreds of miles in a single day with only brief stops.

Among other things, that would mean you don’t have to pay more for every other trip you make carrying extra weight for features that you don’t need most of the time. People buy SUVs thinking they’ll go skiing twice a year but they’re paying 2-3 times as much for almost all of their mileage which doesn’t need that ground clearance or 4WD in addition to the 30-50% higher sticker price.

Batteries are a major part of the cost of an electric car. If you spent $100k on an electric car that had a 100 mile range, it must be a Maybach.

It would be much more realistic in this scenario for the electric car to be $30k, in which case you can earn interest on the $20k not spent, and have plenty of money to rent a car when you need it.

Maybe I’m seeing things with more nuance, but to me what I’m reading in many of these articles is that EV’s are still new, and there are challenges to solve, which is true.

The weight of the average vehicle is increasing because of Trucks, SUVs and EVs. EVs are the new thing though.

That's not new at all because EVs won't reach 100% of personal vehicles for many decades.

>biofuels

Absolutely not. The land use impacts are enormous.

Trains are fine but cannot replace cars.

There are systems being developed where the discharged electrolyte is pumped out of a vehicle and replaced with charged electrolyte.