Electric cars more likely to hit pedestrians than petrol vehicles, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Electric cars more likely to hit pedestrians than petrol vehicles, study finds

theguardian.com

10 pointsisaacfrond22 comments

> Edwards and his colleagues studied UK travel and road accident data from 2013 to 2017. Because of an archiving problem, data from 2018 onwards is not available.

Seems like a pretty big disclaimer that all the data in this study is 7-11 years old. Both drivers and pedestrians have got a lot more used to EVs in the last decade, so I wonder how much that's changed things. And back in 2013 there were only a couple of thousand EVs on the road in the UK, which is a pretty small sample size to draw conclusions from.

> Drivers of electric cars tend to be younger and less experienced

They're quoting statistics from 2024 here (42% of 16-24 year olds own an EV), but that's a completely different time period to the study, and EVs have come down a lot in price since 2013-17 - and I find it hard to believe that 42% of 16-24 year olds own an EV when ~20% of households don't own a car at all.

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Link to the actual study: https://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2024/05/01/jech-2024-2219...

I've seen quite a few negative articles about EVs recently, which has made me wonder about the pushing of a narrative.

The fact that this article comes out in May 2024, reporting on data that is, at it's most recent, 7 years old, about a nascent technology only makes me more suspicious.

What is the value of this article to the reader? It's not, by definition, "news".

Maybe my judgement is just biased the other way.

To be fair to the Guardian, the study has only just come out, and is (apparently) using the most recent data available.

But yes, it's interesting that they're taking 7 year old data to present an anti-EV narrative without mentioning that rather important caveat.

To be fair, it is mentioned.

To be critical, it's mentioned in the 8th paragraph of a 13 paragraph article. Conversely, the very first paragraph is pure lede. The title and opening paragraph could be seen as discouraging the reading of the rest of the article. It's like the opposite of an online recipe - it's brutally efficient.

Odd for The Guardian which, as far as I understand it, is (somewhat) left leaning and I'd normally slightly correct for bias towards environmentally conscious perspectives.

I've noticed the same anti-EV bias in articles, especially from "eco-focus" news sources that publish articles that are mainly favorable to fossil fuel companies.

I believe this pushback is happening because EVs are stripping revenue from significant parts of the automotive world, primarily dealer repair shops and the fuel industry.

I can only guess why this study is being done now but the info is not new. There are reports from many decades ago about quiet trams hitting pedestrians for the same reason.

If the stats are accurate then that will be useful info.

2017 EV's didn't have the low speed pedestrian warning sound, modern EV's do. If the study didn't take that into account, it's not valid.

,,Drivers of electric cars tend to be younger and less experience''

Not adjusting for driver age after finding out as one of the main causes makes the research irrevelant.

Also the link should be to the research article itself, not a news site that doesn't link to it.

I would have liked to see the data on this.

In my experience (UK), EV drivers tend to be in their 30s and 40s because EVs are expensive. So perhaps "younger" than random drivers could be but not young and inexperienced, although there may indeed be a driver's age element in the accidents stats.

I would have liked to see the data on this

This seems to be the source:

https://www.barriersdirect.co.uk/blog-posts/182-electric-car...

Their methodology is, shall we say, open to interpretations.

Thanks!

"16 to 24 years old: 41.59% own an EV"

Hmm, that's odd. My own experience (living in a wealthy area in the South East) is that pretty much 0 young drivers own an EV: It's usually a cheap, old (petrol) banger because insurance is so expensive (and EVs are expensive, too!). Also, in the UK one can only get a full driving license (and drive on their own) at 18.

Personally, I call BS on this number.

My only possible explanation for the numbers is that a lot of people in that group defined 'owned' as "my parents own one and I sometimes get to drive it"

They're using accident data from 2013-2017, but the linked to demographic car ownership data [0] is from 2023. Even if electric car owners tend to younger in 2023 (and I'm very sceptical), that is completely irrelevant, since what we need to know is the age of electric car owners in 2013-2017.

[0] and by data I/they actually mean a survey by a market research firm.

Wonder how much of this is due to electric cars seemingly being more likely to have giant gumby touch screens and other non-traditional controls. I find cars like this almost ridiculous to drive, though I've never had one long enough to figure out if it ever gets as comfortable and automatic as a typical "old" car with more fixed, manual controls.

EVs are indeed very quiet, making them sometimes hard to detect by noise in my experience. Not even necessarily on the road: Around here hedges at the front of houses are very common. With ICEs you can usually hear that there is a car on the driveway with the engine on when you walk past so you can be careful. Now with EVs suddenly there's a car popping out of a driveway without notice.

EVs also accelerate much faster than ICEs. I often see EVs accelerating like crazy in traffic or at traffic lights and junctions.

I think there will be a period of adaptation for all road users.

Would have loved some more details.

Many petrol cars are now hybrid and are just as quiet as EVs.

Many EVs make sound when driving at slow speeds. Does that mitigate the problem? It’s actually really irresponsible that this topic isn’t brought up at all in the article. If artificial sound has a big impact we should have legislation around it ASAP, no?

Is the weight actually a big factor? There are heavy EVs and EVs that are about the same weight as their ICE counterparts. The data could give us a better conclusion on this.

We just had a report in Norway about traffic fatalities in cars.. and there’s really no significant difference between 0-4 yo cars that are now mostly EVs, and 5-9 yo cars that was mostly petrol cars. New ICE and new EVs are fairly similar.

It’s old ICE that stand out in the data: they are far more deadly to occupants in an accident. If you don’t account for that ICE looks like a massive death trap in the data. I suspect old ICE will also stand out in accidents with pedestrians: they are so extremely loud that they will skew the data heavily towards the conclusion that petrol cars are safer to pedestrians than EVs.

What can we do to improve the situation? I don’t feel like making noise is the right solution. The reduced noise of EVs and modern petrol cars is hugely valuable. Noise is negative for health. And besides, noise doesn’t help people with hearing problems or ear phones.

> Many EVs make sound when driving at slow speeds. Does that mitigate the problem? It’s actually really irresponsible that this topic isn’t brought up at all in the article.

This is brought up in the article:

> Since July 2019, all new hybrid and electric vehicles sold in Europe have been required to have an acoustic vehicle alerting system that emits sound when the car is travelling slowly, but there are hundreds of thousands of electric cars on the road without the devices. “If government made sure these systems were installed in all electric vehicles and retrofitted them to older electric cars, that would be a good start,” Edwards said, adding that the Green Cross Code also “probably needs updating”.

> If artificial sound has a big impact we should have legislation around it ASAP, no?

It's not legislation, but there are already administrative rules that govern this in the US. The NHTSA requires all new EVs and hybrids to make artificial engine noise, with specific decibel and pitch requirements, and prohibits NHTSA-regulated entities (manufacturers, repair shops, etc - but not individual vehicle owners) from facilitating the disabling of such noise.

https://www.regulations.gov/document/NHTSA-2016-0125-0001

> If artificial sound has a big impact we should have legislation around it ASAP, no?

The EU (and UK) have required this from late 2020, IIRC.

However it only applies to new cars. I don't think there's a requirement to retrofit old EVs.

I used to drive a BEV to work early mornings - 6am typically. I'd see runners with headphones/earphones who were clearly not looking when they crossed at junctions. I quickly learned to anticipate that and always prepared to stop or even came to a standstill before they saw me. It was easy and quick, especially with regenerative braking on full.

Kids were better - they could hear the low-speed whining that the car put out below 20mph.

Yes, anecdata. It would be good to know age of victim / activity / whether the vehicle had the pedestrian warning thing.

Also, many more cars now have collision detection. How does that feature or not regarding pedestrians?

the less likely to be heard argument seems strange to me as

- at least in the EU they artificially generate noises when moving at slow speeds

- non EV have also become quite silent

- the sound of the wheels on the ground and wind is still there, and in many situations especially at higher speed louder then any modern non EV motor

- at least in countries with more sane traffic laws drivers are required to look out for pedestrians and I mean they don't become invisible just because your care makes little sound, just to be clear yes that means if you hit a pedestrian even if you had precedence on e.g. a crossing you likely get a large part of the fault in the EU because you drive something which can easily kill people (any car) so you are responsible for acting with care

The data in the study is from 2013-2017 - so the requirement to make noise at low speeds hadn't come in yet (that was 2019). And ICE cars have got a lot quieter in the last decade compared to how loud they used to be.

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