How safe are electric cars?
True, electric cars are built differently from ICE cars due to the absence of an engine. Instead, they are powered by an electric motor and battery. Despite this, though, the way in which an electric car reacts to a collision is similar to an ICE car.
Alex Thompson, principal engineer for automotive safety at Thatcham Research, said: “We've now got a lot of experience in testing EVs compared to ICE vehicles. And we see that vehicle manufacturers have taken a great deal of care in making sure that the vehicles are designed to the same high standards as their ICE equivalents.
“In the past 25 years, crash safety for all cars has improved dramatically. And all the vehicles that are being produced now offer a very high level of safety, with EVs no exception.”
It helps that modern ICE and electric cars come kitted out with an abundance of safety technology to help decrease the likelihood of a crash, including automatic emergency braking (AEB)[1], lane-keeping assist and blind spot monitoring.
Do electric cars catch fire?
Just like petrol and diesel cars, electric cars can catch fire. Even if one cell within the battery were to ignite, this could trigger a chain reaction and cause the rest to follow.
It’s important to stress, though, that fires are very rare, because manufacturers have gone to great lengths to ensure that they don’t happen.
A Freedom of Information request submitted by Air Quality News revealed that the London Fire Brigade tackled 54 EV fires in 2019, compared with 1898 fires involving petrol or diesel cars. True, there are far more petrol and diesel cars on London roads than EVs, but this still means there were proportionally fewer electric car fires than fires involving ICE cars.