Electric Vehicles (EVs) are more likely to hit pedestrians. That’s what a new study published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health has found. But what do we know about the study? Why is this the case? Let’s take a closer look: According to The Guardian, researchers examined UK travel and road accident data from 2013 to 2017.
They examined 51 billion kilometres of travel by battery-powered cars and 4.8 trillion kilometres of petrol and diesel car trip. They found that the average annual pedestrian casualty rate per 160 million kilometres was 5.
16 for electric and hybrid cars. That number was just 2.4 for petrol and diesel cars per 160 million kilometres.
In short, electric and hybrid cars were twice as likely to hit pedestrians than their fueled counterparts. They found that of the 916,713 casualties in accidents, 120,197 were pedestrians. Over 96,000 were hit by a car or taxi.
The battery-powered cars were not more dangerous than their counterparts in rural areas. However, in cities and towns, EVs were three times more likely to hit pedestrians than petrol or diesel cars. “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,” the authors wrote as per Newsweek .
“One plausible explanation for our results is that background ambient noise levels differ between urban and rural are.