The first thing that crosses your mind when driving an electric vehicle - if you have the mind of a teenager like us - is to creep up behind an unaware pedestrian and wait to see him or her freak out when they turn around and see a huge Lexus RX or a Tesla Model X.
All jokes aside, pedestrians have gotten used to relying on their sense of hearing when crossing a road, and sometimes do so without bothering to check whether a car is coming or not. Bicycle riders have been facing this problem for years, but in recent times, EV and hybrid car drivers are starting to feel the burden as well.
It’s easy to put the blame on pedestrians and start programs to educate them (“Hello. This is the 21st Century and we now have electric cars. How about you start using your eyes before crossing the road? Thank you. Goodbye”), but there are other aspects that need to be taken into consideration. Things like sight-impaired people, for example.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows a worrying statistic, even though it’s only an estimate: according to this organization, an electric car or a hybrid car driving at lower speed has a 19 percent higher chance of being involved in a pedestrian accident than a conventionally powered vehicle.
The NHTSA says that, if its proposals were implemented, the number of annual pedestrian and bicyclist injuries in the US would drop by about 2,800 from its current total of 125,000. These proposals force automakers to equip their cars with automatic audio alerts that deploy when the vehicle drops below a certain speed. The threshold set by NHTSA is 18 mph (30 km/h).
A government plan regarding this issue has been in work since 2013, but it kept getting delayed until in July this year the NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind said a November deadline was agreed upon. With November all but over, the agency said it failed to meet the schedule and asked for another extension until March 2016.
It is said that implementation of this new set of rules will cost the automakers a total of $23 million as registered cars will have to be recalled and have a waterproof speaker retrofitted.
The fact that electric cars are almost completely silent is a wonderful thing, and it would be a shame to change that, but since it’s all in the name of safety, a concession has to be made. Besides, this opens up a lot of new possibilities for the automakers. Like the one in this clip below, for example:
"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie) Full profile
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