![]() All of a sudden that 20 mph crash where the other car was safe isn’t safe anymore. You’ll have more people who are vulnerable. ![]() ![]() That makes it more dangerous for every other smaller vehicle. The other option is to increase the stiffness of the front-end. There is a little flexibility there, but there are limits. The first choice is to make the front-end much longer. Stiffer too? What does that mean in a crash?Ī designer of a heavier vehicle has two choices for managing the extra energy of a crash. But it certainly seems like instead the momentum is in favor of heavier and stiffer cars. And can we put in a battery that’s half the mass and save some of those resources and maybe make the vehicle more nimble. Maybe instead let's focus on infrastructure improvements that make it easier for people to charge more often and get rid of this range anxiety. We can shave a few thousand pounds off and not get 1,000 horsepower and 300 to 400 miles range and that’s fine. I hope we can say, you know what, we're not going to make this thing 9,500 pounds. With electrification, I hope we can change course. They went into making more powerful, higher-torque engines that are great for marketing but maybe aren’t the safest thing for people. What happened over many years with improvements in powertrain technology is they didn't always go toward making more efficient engines. And at some point, whether it’s the Hummer or some other EV truck, you’re going to be testing vehicles this heavy. It typically takes up to four minutes to charge and store that energy. Our system has a series of 16 cylinders that have nitrogen in them, which is compressed to store energy. My biggest concern was that we wouldn't have enough energy to pull the system. All I needed to do was hook it up to our propulsion system and figure out if it can get up to our highest crash speed, 40 mph for our frontal crash. They said, “Hey, I’d fix them up.” But we got them for close to nothing from the junkyard. Some of the Youtube commenters weren’t too happy that I was calling them junkers. So I said, “Can you get me an old junker?” Some older model pickup. ![]() Raul Arbelaez: We’ve been conducting tests on electric vehicles for several years now, but I wanted to be sure that we’re prepared to test something this heavy. They often combine the beefy dimensions of supersize SUVs with a battery that itself weighs as much as a small sedan. Now EVs are tipping the scales even further. And despite improvements in safety technology and car design, heavier vehicles have contributed to increasing road deaths in recent years, according to data from the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-particularly among pedestrians, cyclists, and people driving smaller vehicles. Vehicle safety standards mostly reflect the safety of people inside a vehicle, not those outside. But many of the same qualities that help a vehicle’s safety rating-including increased frame stiffness, size, and weight-also make them more of a menace to everyone else. The trucks and SUVs that have taken over US roads in the past two decades protect their own passengers exceptionally well. To prepare for heavy EVs like the electric Hummer, IIHS crash tested pickup trucks loaded with concrete.īut Arbelaez is still worried. The pickup went boom and a video of the test had a viral moment. Despite the extra strain on the cables, the system held. So Arbelaez bought a few cheap, old pickup trucks and began loading them up with concrete to match the Hummer’s weight. That reason was the Hummer EV.Īt more than 9,000 pounds (4,000 kilograms), the electric SUV is about a third heavier than the weightiest vehicle IIHS has ever tested-which happens to be another EV, the Rivian R1T-and more than twice as heavy as the average American car, which weighs about 4,000 pounds. But until recently, he didn’t have a reason to question whether the IIHS equipment would be up to the task of crashing heavier vehicles. The nonprofit lab tests most of the popular cars on the market and its safety endorsements are coveted by automakers. Raul Arbelaez, who oversees crash tests at the IIHS, has watched that transformation occur over his two-decade career, seeing sedans morph into “crossovers” and minivans become SUVs. But perhaps the biggest difference is that cars were a lot less heavy-about a quarter lighter than the average vehicle today. Backup cameras didn’t exist, airbags weren't mandatory, and safety rules had not yet killed the pop-up headlight. American roads looked different when the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety built its car-smashing crash test system in the early 1990s.
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