Electric vehicles have rapidly grown in popularity over the last several years as they’ve gotten cheaper, more powerful and easier to charge. But in some cases, say traffic safety experts, they’ve also gotten more dangerous.
In particular, the proliferation of heavier electric trucks in recent years has raised concerns among safety experts who fear their increased speed and weight will lead to deadlier incidents, even as Bay Area governments work to reverse record-setting traffic fatalities and pedestrian deaths in the region. From March 2023 on, half of all new retail registered vehicles in the Bay Area are electric, according to S&P Global Mobility.
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“Electric vehicles that are coming to market are very heavy and very, very fast,” said Joseph Young, media relations director for the independent nonprofit Insurance Institute of Highway Safety.
Tesla’s Cybertruck can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 2.6 seconds; America’s most popular heavy-duty truck, the Ford F-150, takes more than double the time at 6.0 seconds.
“The reason that matters is because, in a multi-vehicle crash, physics are at play,” Young said.
Specifically, Isaac Newton’s second law of motion: mass times acceleration equals force. The heavier a vehicle is, the bigger the force upon impact in a crash.
The average EV is approximately 20-30% heavier than its gas-powered counterparts because of massive heavy metal batteries – a consistency found across makes and models – that put EVs into their own weight class. While the gas-powered Ford F-150 truck weighs around 4,500 pounds, the electric Ford-150 Lightning weighs more than 6,000 pounds.
In the Bay Area, fatalities from traffic crashes increased 48% between 2010 and 2020, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data; data on the number of fatalities which involve heavy-duty trucks is not available. Fatalities had bottomed out in 2010 with 317 total deaths, but 472 people died in the region a decade later — equal to 1.3 traffic deaths per day.
Julia Griswold, director of UC Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Center, said the main culprit of this trend is larger, heavier, and faster vehicles. And the auto industry’s own view of what defines “safety” is partially to blame, Griswold said.
“Historically, the focus has been on the occupants of the vehicle and their safety,” Griswold said. “The general understanding was that being in a bigger car would be safer in a crash.”
By viewing safety through the limited lens of a vehicle’s passengers, Griswold said the auto industry failed to consider how a larger, heavier vehicle could negatively impact the safety of pedestrians or drivers of more compact vehicles.
Griswold said this began an “arms race” among automakers. According to a 2013 UC Berkeley study titled “Pounds That Kill,” weight was found to be a critical factor in fatal auto crashes. The study found that each 1,000-pound increase in a striking vehicle’s weight increased the probability of a fatality in the struck vehicle by 47%.
Locally, a Tesla Cybertruck single-car crash in Piedmont in November 2024 resulted in the death of three teenagers and sent a fourth to the hospital after the vehicle crashed into a tree at the intersection of Hampton Road and King Avenue. Both the California Highway Patrol and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are independently reviewing the fatal incident to determine the cause of the crash. The results of the probes have not been released.
Many Bay Area cities — including Berkeley, Fremont, Menlo Park, Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose — have sought to decrease pedestrian and traffic deaths with the adoption of the Vision Zero program. The policy uses multiple infrastructure strategies from pedestrian walkways and protected bike lanes to restrictions on driving with slower speed limits and enhanced enforcement.
But policy solutions that limit larger and faster vehicles are harder to come by, Griswold said. The car-centric infrastructure across the U.S. requires many to own cars or utilize heavy-duty trucks in construction, farm work, and hauling. And downsizing comes with added safety risk as long as heavy vehicles remain on the road.
“It’s a really challenging policy issue,” Griswold said. “It would be great to see the auto industry nudged into the safety of others.”