By: Arav Anvikar.
In Connecticut, a person is allowed to drive at the age of 16, which makes kids more and more eager, as the day of their becoming seniors in high school approaches and they get closer to graduating and enjoying their freedom. Though a significant advantage of driving is that now they are allowed to operate electric vehicles or EVs. Right now, EVs are accepted as the future of the automotive industry but they aren’t very safe on the roads at the moment. The problem is that their mechanics create heavy vehicle constructions with a very powerful electric motor that allows them to increase momentum to a very high level quickly, which causes the possibility of accidents on the roads. So, while electric vehicles are beneficial in terms of reducing harmful gas emissions, they have some drawbacks due to which they can be dangerous for passengers and pedestrians alike
Larger cars may be better at absorbing and dispersing the energy created during an accident, but those cars transfer more kinetic energy on smaller cars during accidents. Electric vehicles have large battery packs in order to achieve a certain driving range. The lithium battery cells aren’t very effective so a bigger volume is needed for accommodating electric cars’ cells. The increased volume of the EVs add a corresponding physical weight to the car and consequently increases its kinetic energy. This causes a paradox because increasing the safety of the passengers of the car may cause a risk for the passengers you collided with. According to the research carried out by the researchers of the Midwest Road Safety Center of the University of Nebraska Lincoln, new electric vehicle weight should be considered while designing the highways and roads. Engineers at the university conducted a first-of-its-kind crash test. They drove a Rivian R1T weighing over 7,000 pounds into a guardrail system at 60 mph. (Nebraska Experts Weigh Highway Safety and Electric Vehicles | Nebraska Today, 2024) The EV completely destroyed through the metal guardrail with almost no deceleration. Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) conducted another study where its engineers conducted similar tests to the University of Nebraska Lincoln. In this study, they drove a Tesla Model 3 into a thrie beam guardrail at 62 mph. These rails are composed of 3 waves that give the barrier a wider surface area than normal guardrails. These guardrails are also taller and made of more rigid galvanized steel (Wenzel, 2024). The vehicle completely ignored the barrier and actually lifted the barrier and went under it, stunning the engineers. This serious failure highlights a massive infrastructure gap and by exceeding these weight limits by over a ton, modern EVs effectively render roadside barriers useless.
In addition to the infrastructure failure issues, the design of electric vehicles has created a new danger. Drivers that are used to gas powered cars are used to pressing the accelerator firmly to use time to let the car ‘rev’ up to build up speed. This doesn’t happen with an EV because of instant acceleration taking place when the vehicle is operated, which is called ‘over tapping,’ meaning that the driver unintentionally accelerates while driving towards an intersection with other vehicles without even knowing about it. Because an EV can close an intersection gap faster than a gas car, it triggers a much higher frequency of close-calls and collisions. In a study conducted in China’s signalized intersections, there was a 7.20% (or 2.4 times more likely) higher chance of collisions to happen which were not as severe, but more likely compared to traditional gas powered vehicles (Wang et al., 2025). Basically, other drivers look around to check if the intersection is all-clear, see a clear path, accelerate, and are caught off-guard by how fast the incoming EV has closed that distance. However, the dangers don’t stop there. The study also showed that an acceleration increase of 1m/s2 raised the likelihood of a collision by 37% (Wang et al., 2025). This unexpected acceleration, combined with the silence of EVs further increases the overall danger by reducing the detectability of the vehicle for pedestrians and Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs), drastically increasing their crash risk.
While electric vehicles pose huge dangers for other road users, they also create unique safety hazards for passengers in the cabin. A lot of EVs don’t have load-limiting retractors in the second row which is a car safety device inside of a seat belt spool that safely releases a little bit of seat belt slack to decrease a risk of injury to passengers. Because EVs carry much higher kinetic energy due to their weight (as discussed previously), a standard second-row seatbelt can exert highly concentrated, dangerous pressure on a passenger’s torso during an impact due to the car’s inertia. This immense force triggers a phenomenon called ‘submarining,’ which occurs when a passenger slides forward and downward beneath the seatbelt, causing severe internal organ damage mainly to the abdomen. In the Tesla Model 3, measurements taken from a dummy in the back row seats showed that it took severe damage because of high seat belt forces (IIHS unveils new ratings for seven electric vehicles, 2025). Additionally, this sudden torso restraint without controlled slack causes sudden whiplash that threatens the safety of the passengers’ head and neck, which also happened in the Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck, proving that EV weight dynamics can compromise a lot of standard interior safety features (IIHS unveils new ratings for seven electric vehicles, 2025).
However, the dangers of an EV collision can extend beyond the actual crash. To simulate how EV components behaved after a severe crash, researchers burned lithium-ion batteries. They discovered that burning the batteries produced high amounts of toxic hydrogen fluoride (HF) gas, primarily from the liquid electrolyte salt, lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF6). Specifically, HF emissions range from 20 to 200 mg/Wh of the battery’s nominal energy capacity, meaning the massive scale of an EV battery increases the chemical threat (Larsson et al., 2017). The large volume of the toxic fumes creates a dangerous atmosphere for the passengers of the vehicle and makes emergency services’ operations more difficult. Furthermore, researchers found that applying a water mist (like many firefighters use) to control the flames actually accelerates the chemical breakdown of the fluorine salts inside the battery, increasing the HF production rate by 35%. Water mist manages to cool the temperature of the battery and delays the physical fire. The water mist can actually also decrease the amount of gaseous HF in the air by collecting the airborne particles. The water binds with the tiny drops of HF in the form of the heavy acid, which is then carried away by the water flow making it slightly easier for rescuers to help injured people (Larsson et al., 2017).
The swift global movement towards electric-based transportation brings up an important conflict between the necessity of balancing environmental stability and the safety of human beings on roads. Additionally, in case of accidents, electric transportation creates risky situations like battery malfunctions, dangerous emissions, and the system of public protection and laws regarding the construction and development of roadside barriers. We must learn that this technology must move along with green energy as well as contribute to public safety on roads.
References
- IIHS unveils new ratings for seven electric vehicles. (2025). IIHS-HLDI Crash Testing and Highway Safety. https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/iihs-unveils-new-ratings-for-seven-electric-vehicles
- Larsson, Fredrik, Petra Andersson, Per Blomqvist, and Bengt-Erik Mellander. 2017. “Toxic Fluoride Gas Emissions from Lithium-Ion Battery Fires.” Scientific Reports 7 (August). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-09784-z.
- “Nebraska Experts Weigh Highway Safety and Electric Vehicles | Nebraska Today.” 2024. Unl.Edu. 2024. https://news.unl.edu/article/nebraska-experts-weigh-highway-safety-and-electric-vehicles.
- Wang, Junhua, Ailin Zheng, Jie Qing, Shuke Xie, Ting Fu, Qiangqiang Shangguan, and Lu Dai. 2025. “The Impact of Electric Vehicle’s Strong Acceleration Performance on Traffic Safety Risks at Signalized Intersections: A Case Study in China.” International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology, March. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijtst.2025.03.007.
- Wenzel, Jack. 2024. “TTI Advances Research on EV Safety and Roadway Infrastructure.” Texas A&M Transportation Institute. June 25, 2024. https://tti.tamu.edu/2024/06/tti-advances-research-on-ev-safety-and-roadway-infrastructure/.
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