UK study finds EVs aren’t a greater threat to pedestrians, hybrids have higher casualty rate

A United Kingdom-based study from the University of Leeds has found that electric vehicles aren’t more of a risk to pedestrians than gas-powered vehicles; however, hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) have a higher pedestrian casualty rate. 

The study, published in Nature Communications, notes that while EVs are accepted as an option to reduce carbon emissions, the broader sustainability impacts are still not well understood. 

“The goals of sustainable mobility include reducing crashes, injuries, and fatalities within the transport system, reducing greenhouse gases to mitigate climate change, reducing criteria air pollutants and improving public health, reducing noise pollution and improving affordability and equity of access,” the study says. “Among these, improving road safety by reducing crashes, injuries, and fatalities is a critical goal, since globally around 1.19 million people are killed and 30–50 million severely injured every year from road crashes.” 

According to the study, the road safety implications of EVs have received little attention from the academic community. It adds that other studies often focus on HEVs and EVs together. 

In theory, EV collisions with pedestrians could be higher because they produce very little noise and are heavier than traditional internal combustion vehicles, it says. Yet, EVs have an advantage of being a younger fleet, with likely more advanced safety features like collision-avoidance systems, the release says. 

The study utilized data from Great Britain’s STATS19 road safety database from 2014 to 2023 to understand the pedestrian safety implications of EVs, focusing on answering whether a pedestrian’s risk of collision with an EV is larger than that with an ICE vehicle. And in a collision, whether pedestrians are likely to be more severely injured if the hitting vehicle is an EV instead of an ICE vehicle.

The data showed there were 210,360 pedestrian casualties during that timeframe. Of these, HEVs were responsible for 7,946 casualties (4.7%) and EVs for 1,150 (0.69%). 

Researchers then compared the data to the number of gas, electric, and hybrid vehicles on the roadways and miles driven for each year. The report notes that overall pedestrian casualties have been decreasing annually in Great Britain due to improvements in pedestrian safety, but increasing for EV and HEV fleets as their traffic volume has started to grow. 

Over time, the EV casualty rate appears to be decreasing and has seemingly stabilized at nearly the same rate as ICE vehicles, the report says. It also found that once a collision occurs, the severity of injuries to pedestrians is not different for an EV compared to an ICE vehicle. 

“As such, the current pattern of adoption and use of EVs do not adversely affect the achievement of the important transport sustainability goal of reduced road crashes, injuries, and fatalities,” the report says. 

HEVs, however, showed a larger casualty rate compared to ICE and electric vehicles, the study says. It notes that a substantial share of HEVs on the road were manufactured before the addition of acoustics for the purpose of alerting pedestrians. 

The vehicles are also very popular in UK taxi and private-hire vehicle fleets due to low running costs compared to gas vehicles and better emission performances, according to the report.

“These HEVs are driven on an average of three to four times as much as a typical private car, meaning our exposure vehicle miles for HEVs may have been underestimated, so casualty rates were likely overestimated,” the study states. 

It adds that taxis and private-hire vehicles are often driven in urban areas where they are exposed to a higher number of pedestrians. 

“As such, the issue may be less a result of whether the vehicles are HEV or ICEV, rather than where and how the vehicles are driven,” the study says. “Investigating such potential confounding factors (e.g., driver age or pedestrian density of areas where the vehicles are driven) is an important avenue for future research — both for HEVs and EVs.”

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