New figures show that the risk of electric cars crashing into pedestrians is three times greater than in a corresponding petrol/diesel car.
According to a new British survey, pedestrians would do well to take extra care on the roads at the moment. At least if they don't want to be run over by an electric car.
The figures are based on 32 billion short kilometers in electric cars and hybrids, while there is data from 3 trillion – i.e. 3 billion billion – short kilometers in diesel and petrol cars.
Taken together, the data show that the risk of pedestrians in the city being hit by electric cars is three times greater than corresponding diesel and petrol cars. And there are a number of explanations for this.
One of them is really obvious. Electric cars say much less than their counterparts with a combustion engine. This is explained by the author behind the study, Professor Phil Edwards, to the newspaper The Guardian .
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In fact, the professor warns against the trend, which he believes the government in England should act against. Especially if the government, as it seems now, wants to ban the sale of all new diesel and petrol cars in 2035.
– Electric cars pose a danger to pedestrians because they are much quieter than petrol or diesel cars. The government needs to ban these risks if they want to phase out the sale of petrol and diesel cars.
However, the professor also points a finger at the drivers of the electric cars in particular. They need to be extra aware of their surroundings.
– They (electric cars, ed.) are much quieter than the old-fashioned cars. And pedestrians have learned to navigate roads by listening for traffic. Drivers of these corrals must be extra careful, says Phil Edwards.
Edwards' investigation is based on figures from accidents collected between 2013 and 2017. More recent data is not available. It is all based on information on 913,713 fatal accidents. 13 percent of those accidents involved pedestrians.
And of the 13 percent, an electric car was involved in as many as 25 percent of the cases. When you take into account the number of short kilometres, which are much higher for petrol and diesel cars, it is a huge figure.
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