Wait, are the cars themselves are twice as likely to hit pedestrians, or are the drivers of the cars twice as likely to hit pedestrians?
this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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That's a fair question regarding clarity — the authors of the study touched on this in the "Strengths and weaknesses of the study" section:
Before we can infer that E-HE vehicles pose a greater risk to pedestrians than ICE vehicles, we must consider whether our study is free from confounding and selection bias. Confounding occurs when the exposure and outcome share a common cause. 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.
The study is technically looking at the unit of driver and vehicle, rather than only the driver or only the vehicle, so the results could potentially be different if the driver and car are viewed as a unit rather than separate.
More pedestrians are injured in Great Britain by petrol and diesel cars than by electric cars, but compared with petrol and diesel cars, electric cars pose a greater risk to pedestrians and the risk is greater in urban environments.
I don’t understand this statement. More pedestrians are injured by gas cars but electric cars are more dangerous?
One plausible explanation for our results is that background ambient noise levels differ between urban and rural areas, causing electric vehicles to be less audible to pedestrians in urban areas. Such differences may impact on safety because pedestrians usually hear traffic approaching and take care to avoid any collision, which is more difficult if they do not hear electric vehicles.
This makes some sense. My car is just a hybrid but plenty of times I’ve had people just slowly walking in front of me in a parking lot. They can’t easily hear my car at that lower speed as far as I can tell. And full electric would be even quieter.
It’s interesting though. No easy solution is immediately coming to me, other than pedestrians getting more and more used to cars not making any sound.
We have "whistlers" to supposedly give the deer/other animals warning a vehicle is approaching, maybe add a speaker system that just makes ICE sounds
Ideally we would be able to keep the benefit of quieter streets and parking lots though. Maybe there’s no getting around it
More pedestrians are injured by gas and diesel cars because most cars in the UK are gas or diesel.
The UK has less EVs, but they injure pedestrians at a higher rate than gas cars.
But can I get a licence for my pet bee? Eric the half a bee.
You can't drive half a car
Motorcycles would like a word.
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More pedestrians are injured in Great Britain by petrol and diesel cars than by electric cars, but compared with petrol and diesel cars, electric cars pose a greater risk to pedestrians and the risk is greater in urban environments.
I don’t understand this statement. More pedestrians are injured by gas cars but electric cars are more dangerous?.
If I understand it correctly, the reason is because there are more ICE cars than EVs and H-EVs. In absolute numbers, this makes it so that ICE vehicles collide with the most pedestrians, but, per vehicle, EVs and H-EVs collide with the most pedestrians.
No easy solution is immediately coming to me, other than pedestrians getting more and more used to cars not making any sound.
I've heard some newer EVs and H-EVs emit sounds (usually some sort of whirring sound) to alert pedestrians. Keep in mind that the data in this study was from 2013-2017. There have been some innovations made to mitigate this issue since then.
Not surprised they suspect it's noise related. However, I'm all for reducing noise pollution. Not for having cars overcome background noise to become noticeable.
One thing to note is that no matter how quiet the motor on a car is, the tire/road noise is still the main contributor unless you have an obnoxious exhaust system.
That is probably true most of the time but there are a few factors that come into play just for tire noise: type of tire, type of driving surface, and speed of the vehicle at least. In the city you shouldn't be going fast enough to guarantee tire noise is the biggest factor.
Though, for EVs I'm assuming that has to be true since they make practically no noise otherwise.