this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
16 points (69.0% liked)

Electric Vehicles

3180 readers
102 users here now

A community for the sharing of links, news, and discussion related to Electric Vehicles.

Rules

  1. No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
  2. Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
  3. No self-promotion
  4. No irrelevant content. All posts must be relevant and related to plug-in electric vehicles — BEVs or PHEVs.
  5. No trolling
  6. Policy, not politics. Submissions and comments about effective policymaking are allowed and encouraged in the community, however conversations and submissions about parties, politicians, and those devolving into general tribalism will be removed.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

During 2013–2017, casualty rates per 100 million miles were 5.16 (95% CI 4.92 to 5.42) for E- HE vehicles and 2.40 (95%CI 2.38 to 2.41) for ICE vehicles, indicating that collisions were twice as likely (RR 2.15; 95% CI 2.05 to 2.26) with E-HE vehicles. Poisson regression found no evidence that E-HE vehicles were more dangerous in rural environments (RR 0.91; 95% CI 0.74 to 1.11); but strong evidence that E-HE vehicles were three times more dangerous than ICE vehicles in urban environments (RR 2.97; 95% CI 2.41 to 3.7). Sensitivity analyses of missing data support main findings.


  • "Pedestrian safety on the road to net zero: cross-sectional study of collisions with electric and hybrid-electric cars in Great Britain". Phil J Edwards, Siobhan Moore, Craig Higgins. 2024-05-21. J Epidemiol Community Health.
  • [PDF] (archive)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] khepri@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Wait, are the cars themselves are twice as likely to hit pedestrians, or are the drivers of the cars twice as likely to hit pedestrians?

[–] Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago

That's a fair question regarding clarity — the authors of the study touched on this in the "Strengths and weaknesses of the study" section:

Before we can infer that E-HE vehicles pose a greater risk to pedestrians than ICE vehicles, we must consider whether our study is free from confounding and selection bias. Confounding occurs when the exposure and outcome share a common cause. Confounders in this study would be factors that may both cause a traffic collision and also cause the exposure (use of an E-HE car). Younger, less experienced drivers (ie, ages 16–24) are more likely to be involved in a road traffic collision and are also more likely to own an electric car. Some of the observed increased risk of electric cars may therefore be due to younger drivers preferring electric cars. This would cause positive confounding, meaning that the true relative risk of electric cars is less than we have estimated in our study.

The study is technically looking at the unit of driver and vehicle, rather than only the driver or only the vehicle, so the results could potentially be different if the driver and car are viewed as a unit rather than separate.