More pedestrians are injured in Great Britain by petrol and diesel cars than by electric cars, but compared with petrol and diesel cars, electric cars pose a greater risk to pedestrians and the risk is greater in urban environments.
I don’t understand this statement. More pedestrians are injured by gas cars but electric cars are more dangerous?
One plausible explanation for our results is that background ambient noise levels differ between urban and rural areas, causing electric vehicles to be less audible to pedestrians in urban areas. Such differences may impact on safety because pedestrians usually hear traffic approaching and take care to avoid any collision, which is more difficult if they do not hear electric vehicles.
This makes some sense. My car is just a hybrid but plenty of times I’ve had people just slowly walking in front of me in a parking lot. They can’t easily hear my car at that lower speed as far as I can tell. And full electric would be even quieter.
It’s interesting though. No easy solution is immediately coming to me, other than pedestrians getting more and more used to cars not making any sound.
Ideally we would be able to keep the benefit of quieter streets and parking lots though. Maybe there’s no getting around it