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03.02.2024 23:47, Gennady Detinich
Statistics show that electric cars get into accidents just as often as cars with internal combustion engines. At the same time, electric vehicles are 20-50% heavier, and due to the large volume of traction batteries, their centers of gravity are greatly reduced. Thus, the road infrastructure in the form of fences and barriers was not ready to meet electric vehicles in every sense. Electric cars are effortlessly breaking through concrete and steel barriers, and that’s a problem.
Image source: ERDC
U.S. Army Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC), Midwest Highway Safety Center at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln recently spent a first-of-its-kind crash test of an electric pickup truck to understand the level of protection against intentional ramming of road infrastructure. A study has shown that barriers common on US roads are not ready to withstand electric vehicles.
It is clear that as the number of electric vehicles on the road increases, the number of accidents involving collisions with guardrails will increase. In the United States, thousands of people die every year in more than 100 thousand traffic accidents in such situations. Therefore, the issue of the reliability of fences is quite acute.
As testing has shown, the 2022 Rivian R1T electric pickup truck weighing more than 3.2 tons at a speed of 96.5 km/h overcame the barrier with almost no reduction in speed. In another test, a 2018 Tesla Model 3 sedan lifted a guardrail and drove under it, stopping behind the barrier. This has experts taking a closer look at the problem of electric vehicles being stopped by guardrails, so additional crash tests will be conducted to determine next steps given the expected changes in the US vehicle fleet.
Previous barriers were designed for light vehicles weighing up to a ton and pickups weighing up to 2.2 tons. Now it is necessary to develop new barriers taking into account the increased impact force from an electric vehicle, and then replace all barriers on roads in the United States with them.
2024-02-03 20:47:00
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