EV heavyweights put other road users at risk

Automakers are trying to appeal to Americans who love large vehicles as they launch their electric lineups. But boosting the number of heavyweights on the road will put others at risk, experts say.

With EVs significantly outweighing gasoline cars, inevitable crashes threaten more severe injuries and fatalities for other road users.

"From a physics perspective, we think it's an unavoidable problem when you're adding that much weight to vehicles without dramatically changing their designs," said Michael Brooks, executive director at the Center for Auto Safety.

Speed, driving under the influence of alcohol and failure to buckle seat belts are the primary causes of traffic fatalities, according to NHTSA, but safety groups say heavier vehicles make crashes more severe.

Crash data for electric pickups and SUVs is limited so far. The only available pickups — the Rivian R1T, the GMC Hummer EV and the Ford F-150 Lightning — began deliveries to customers less than two years ago. Rivian, GMC and Ford sold fewer than 20,000 of them collectively in the first half of the year, according to the Automotive News Research & Data Center.

But there's plenty of information on commercial vehicles, and the larger EVs are approaching that weight class.

More than 4,000 occupants of other vehicles were killed in crashes with large trucks of 10,000 pounds or more in 2021, up 19 percent from 2020, according to a NHTSA report. Injuries increased 13 percent to nearly 110,000.

The one-sided statistics show how those in smaller vehicles are generally the losers in these collisions. Fewer than 500 occupants of the large trucks were killed in multivehicle crashes in 2021. Fewer than 29,000 were injured, according to NHTSA. That indicates that the occupants of large EVs are generally more protected than occupants of smaller vehicles.

A GMC Hummer pickup weighs 9,046 pounds— the equivalent of three Chevrolet Malibu sedans. The battery makes up nearly a third of the Hummer's weight. Its size provides the truck an EPA-estimated range of 329 miles.

Depending on the configuration, the Ford F-150 Lightning weighs about 2,000 pounds more than its gasoline-powered counterpart.

It's not just the batteries adding to the weight of large electric pickups and SUVs. The big batteries launch an engineering cycle that requires heavier brakes and other components. The Hummer, for example, is equipped with an upsized braking system, which allows the heavy pickup to stop safely, General Motors said in a statement to Automotive News.

Discrepancies in vehicle weight have long been a safety issue, especially as most consumers choose pickups and SUVs over sedans.

"Nobody has ever wanted to talk about how much more you're putting at risk the other person when you drive around a bigger, heavier vehicle. Otherwise, we wouldn't have such high volume of these very large SUVs," said Raul Arbelaez, vice president for the vehicle research center at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. "We really need to keep doing work to protect those vulnerable road users."

In the first half of this year, pickups and SUVs made up 79 percent of light-vehicle sales in the U.S., according to the Automotive News Research & Data Center. The weight differences will be exacerbated with the rise of large EVs that match the mass of many commercial vehicles, Arbelaez said.

"We're now potentially going to have a lot of passenger cars that are up in that range at the same time that we still have some of these older, lighter vehicles around," he said.

EV crash testing, like combustion engine vehicle collision impact measurements, examines occupant protection, looking at whether areas of the cabin collapse or allow an intrusion causing injury, Arbelaez said.

Automakers follow NHTSA's New Car Assessment Program, which includes 5-Star Safety Ratings on the crash protection and rollover safety of new vehicles. The ratings measure safety for crashes into barriers and with vehicles of a similar weight. They do not measure the crash protection of two vehicles of drastically different weights, so the ratings don't look at what happens when an electric pickup collides with a compact sedan.

More than 40,000 people die on U.S. roads each year, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. A holistic approach that incorporates technology, policy, vehicle design and other factors is critical to reducing fatalities, said Kris Poland, deputy director of the NTSB.

GM points to the safety features in the Hummer as factors that mitigate its weight.

The Hummer has a full suite of advanced driver-assistance system features, and torque vectoring modulates power from front to rear and left to right to better control acceleration and coasting, spokesperson Mikhael Farah said.

The low, centered location of the battery also makes the pickup more stable and enables better protection in a rollover, "as it lowers the vehicle's center of gravity significantly," he said.

But safety officials are concerned about heavy EVs' damage to other vehicles and road users.

"We don't want to just have the protection for the people inside the vehicle," Poland said. "With some of these larger vehicles, they are protecting people inside the vehicle, but it's causing more harm outside of that."

Automakers are slotting battery packs weighing thousands of pounds into EVs to extend driving range and give consumers more confidence to reach their destination. Until battery technology advancements enable lighter batteries to provide a longer driving range, automakers are unlikely to cut down on battery weight, experts say.

Other design and technology features can enhance safety and improve crash compatibility without slashing battery volume. Long front ends, for example, absorb more energy in crashes before vehicle occupants are impacted and help mitigate the effect of the extra weight in a crash with a lighter vehicle, Arbelaez said.

Still, automakers would have to drastically change EV designs to reduce the crash power to the level of a small sedan — so much that the EV wouldn't be a viable vehicle, he said.

"The front end of the EV would have to get ridiculously long," he said.

The NTSB recommends intelligent speed-assist technology — mandated on new vehicles in the European Union — to ensure safe driving speeds. That would reduce the impact of crashes.

The technology would include speed warnings and interventions, Poland said. It would determine the speed limit in effect by comparing a vehicle's location to a database of posted speed limits and/or using onboard cameras to recognize speed limit signs.

Many automakers in the U.S. offer the technology but market it only toward teen drivers and their parents, according to an NTSB report.

Automakers should also prioritize crash avoidance systems, such as automatic emergency braking, and headlights that allow drivers to react quickly at night, Arbelaez said.

"Vehicles on the road continue to get even more safe as automakers across the board test, develop and integrate breakthrough safety technologies, such as automatic emergency braking, that help save lives and prevent injuries," the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents major automakers, said in a statement.

But technology is only one piece of the solution, Arbelaez said.

"It can't prevent all types of crashes. Everyone is going to have to do their part: drivers, auto manufacturers designing vehicles, policymakers," he said.

Poland is optimistic that automakers will take the crash risk of heavy EVs seriously. The NTSB issued recommendations to U.S. automakers to create emergency response guides for extinguishing EV fires. Each automaker has begun or completed the recommendation, she said.

"Based on that experience," Poland said, "there's a high level of interest in ensuring that the vehicles are safe."