Cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20086798

During 2013–2017, casualty rates per 100 million miles were 5.16 (95% CI 4.92 to 5.42) for E- HE vehicles and 2.40 (95%CI 2.38 to 2.41) for ICE vehicles, indicating that collisions were twice as likely (RR 2.15; 95% CI 2.05 to 2.26) with E-HE vehicles. Poisson regression found no evidence that E-HE vehicles were more dangerous in rural environments (RR 0.91; 95% CI 0.74 to 1.11); but strong evidence that E-HE vehicles were three times more dangerous than ICE vehicles in urban environments (RR 2.97; 95% CI 2.41 to 3.7). Sensitivity analyses of missing data support main findings.

  • “Pedestrian safety on the road to net zero: cross-sectional study of collisions with electric and hybrid-electric cars in Great Britain”. Phil J Edwards, Siobhan Moore, Craig Higgins. 2024-05-21. J Epidemiol Community Health.
  • [PDF] (archive)
  • KalciferOPEnglish
    4•1 month ago

    That doesn’t make much sense. ICE vehicles have got so quiet, especially at low speeds, that most of the noise is tyre noise.

    What doesn’t make sense? The point that you just stated was precisely the motivation for the study — there was a concern that EVs and H-EVs are too quiet to be safely perceived by pedestrians.

    There were far fewer models of electric and and h-ev cars being available during the time of they’ve taken their data from (7 to 11 years ago now) than ICE and even compared to how many there are now. Therefore it’s entirely possible that an issue with a particular model (for example visibility issues caused by a pillar blindspots) could skew the results.

    In the “Strengths and weaknesses of the study” section of the paper, they touched on the age of the data being a weakness. In addition to the concern that you pointed out, there are also new regulations that have been put in place to mitigate these issues — e.g. the NHTSA mandates that cars have a minimum amount of sound that they must emit [source].

    It would be interesting to see if they can get the same results with 2019-2024 data.

    Agreed.