Pedestrians are twice as likely to be hit by an electric or hybrid car compared to one with only a combustion engine, a British study found.
TT reports that a British study has concluded that pedestrians run twice the risk of being hit and killed in accidents with an electric or hybrid car compared to a petrol or diesel car.
In urban environments, the situation is even worse: there the risk is three times as high for electrified vehicles versus cars with only a combustion engine.
The study is based on 96,000 accidents in the years 2013 to 2017 where pedestrians were injured after being hit by a car. Only two percent of the cases involved an electric or hybrid car.
But the researchers have taken into account the electric car stock and miles driven. It then emerged that the electrified cars had five deaths per 16 million miles driven, while petrol and diesel cars had 2.5 deaths.
New regulation
Precisely to attack this problem, the EU introduced a regulation in 2019 which means that all electrified vehicles must activate a warning sound for other road users up to 20 km/h. Some cars already had this voluntarily before then, but a weakness of the study is still that it covers a period before the introduction of the requirement.
The Swedish Confederation of the Visually Impaired was early on and remarked that the EU regulation was not sufficient, which we told about here. Among other things, they wanted the speed limit for the warning sound raised to 40 km/h.
