Are electric cars safe in accidents?

This post , part of a serial publication we ’re run all aboutelectric cars , was written by Christopher Lampton from HowStuffWorks.com .

Cars are serious machines . They down more than 30,000 masses per year in the United States alone . What progress to them life-threatening is their size , their weight , their speed , their impulse and – perhaps most scarily – they have a armoured combat vehicle full of gasoline , a gist that can potentially get fire and explode .

This is one way in which strictly electric cars are distinctly safer than cars with inner combustion engines : They do n’t carry any gasoline . But they tote up an solely raw cistron to the safety equality . Almost all galvanic car currently on their fashion to the marketplace use large arrays of atomic number 3 - ion ( Li - ion ) battery . And – cease me if this sounds familiar –Li - ion batteries have a tendency to take in fire and occasionally explode .

We ’ve learned to live with the danger of cars with internal burning engine . Automakers have put considerable effort into developing systems that reduce the red of lifetime – seatbelt and airbags are prime example – and beyond that we simply admit that a certain passing of lifespan due to accidents is the inevitable price we pay off for all the benefits that automobiles supply us . In some cases , that includes keep open lives . Just think of all the lives that would be lost if ambulance powered by internal burning engines were n’t useable . perchance , in the end , more lives are saved by cars than are terminate .

But as we slowly make the conversion from gas - driven machine to electric machine , are we moving to something that ’s even less safe than what we have now ? Just how safe are Li - ion battery , anyway ? After all , there have been a number of documented cases of the Li - ion batteries in laptop calculator and cell phone catch ardor . The trouble relate to the high free energy denseness of the batteries . The amount of energy packed into each battery is quite prominent relative to its size . That ’s why Li - ion batteries have become the electric battery of selection for electrical cars , but it also gives them some of the characteristics of an explosive . And if the small Li - ion batteries in cell phones are a peril , conceive of how much more dangerous the huge battery raiment in a car can be . The battery pack in a Tesla Roadster , for instance , consists of 7,000 battery under the hood of a single car .

To combat the possibility of these battery go nuclear , Tesla and other electric gondola makers are installing a bevy of precautionary machine – for instance , fuses and circuit breakers that unplug the batteries when the hit detectors become mindful that the battery pack is about to sustain damage . go along the battery cool is also essential ; the live the batteries , the more probable they are to blow up . Tesla as well as Ford ( in its new Focus Electric model ) circulate radiator - chill coolant throughout the battery plurality to keep the temperature as low as possible while the railroad car is escape . Nissan , in its all - electric LEAF model , is using an breeze - cool system . The division of the barrage fire into an array ( as opposed to one prominent bombardment ) is also partially a safety choice : The batteries are separate from one another by steel case to prevent flack from spreading through the entire large number .

Not amazingly , one of the current loss leader in inventing ways to make electric car battery good is Volvo , a company that has always consider in advance safety system to be their major marketing percentage point . Their raw C30 DRIVe Electric locates the battery pack as far as possible from the car’scrumple zonesto keep it good in a collision . According to Volvo safety expert Thomas Broberg , " We may well see further down the line that cars powered only by electrical energy can be made even safer than car with combustion engines . "

We can only go for that he ’s right .