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Hybrid Cars Hit More Pedestrians than Other Cars

12 November, 2009 06:44:00

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Hybrid cars are more likely to be involved in accidents with pedestrians and bicyclists than other cars, a study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) finds.

It compared the rate of accidents among hybrid cars and powered only by gas engines when it comes to pedestrians and bikes under certain scenarios.

The NHTSA looked at state-level crash files to compare crash rates on these two types of vehicles. Out of 8,387 hybrids 77 (or 0.9 percent) were involved in crashes with pedestrians. Out of 559,703 conventional vehicles studied, 3,578 (or 0.6 percent) were involved in crashes with pedestrians. Hybrids were also more likely to hit bicyclists: 0.6 percent of bicycle crashes involved a hybrid vehicle, while 0.3 percent involved a gasoline-powered car.

Photo by blarfiejandro / Flickr

The results may give added urgency to calls from some consumer advocates to require that hybrids make some noise to announce their presence.

The safety advocates in the U.S. have been talking about this issue for a while. In April, Senators Arlen Specter and John Kerry introduced a bill that will require the government to conduct a study about how to protect the blind from silent cars.

There are some weak points of the NHTSA Study.

The study uses data from only 12 states, because these are the only states which report the Vehicle Identification Number to the database, allowing identification of the make and model of car, and differentiation between hybrids and Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles.

Furthermore, only incidents involving vehicles from model year 2000 or newer were used, to ensure comparability between the construction standards. While this tends not to restrict the data set on hybrids, it does limit the data available for study.

The results are that there are only limited analyses which NHTSA claims are statistically significant.

[source: NHTSA]

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