The Real Reason Guardrails Can’t Stop EVs in a Crash

You hear it all the time: the obesity epidemic isn’t limited to human beings. Cars—especially EVs—are too big and too heavy, to the point where they’re endangering our infrastructure. So when a video of a 7,173-pound Rivian R1T absolutely obliterating a highway safety barrier went viral, it was no surprise at all that the resulting commentary focused on its gargantuan weight. But is that really the whole story? Of course not. That’s the whole point of a tease, right?

The reality is, weight alone can’t explain it. Generally speaking, yes, vehicles have been getting heavier. But trucks and SUVs really aren’t that much more massive than even their decades-old equivalents, and even big EVs like the Rivian R1T, the GMC Hummer EV, and the Tesla Cybertruck aren’t that much heavier than some well-optioned heavy-duty pickups (the F-350 Platinum I drove a few months ago was probably a 7,600-pound truck, for example). So if that’s not the issue, what makes it so difficult to build a standardized guardrail?

According to the folks who do it for a living, the issue is really twofold. For starters, while passenger cars aren’t getting much heavier on spec, those driving heavier trucks are throwing off the curve, which makes it more difficult to design a single barrier with universal applicability.

According to Cody Stolle, the assistant director of the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, testing is conducted with vehicles ranging from about 2,400 pounds (subcompacts) to around 5,000 pounds (full-size pickups). Vehicles weighing 7,000 pounds or more are outliers, and as The Drive Editor-in-Chief Kyle Cheromcha points out in the video, heavy-duty pickups drivers would find themselves in a similar predicament.

The second facet of the issue compounds the first, and it’s an issue almost universally associated with EVs. Because barriers only work if they’re able to absorb the energy from an impact, they’re engineered to take those hits where most of a car’s energy is concentrated: its center of mass. Unlike gasoline cars, which have relatively tall engines under their hoods, most EVs utilize floor-mounted battery packs that lower that point considerably, as demonstrated by the test where a Tesla Model 3 almost completely undermined the main impact rail and continued on, rather than being captured by it as intended.

And keep in mind, engineers aren’t designing barriers just for the cars and trucks on sale today. America’s fleet is getting older every year, and with that greater disparity between the newest and oldest cars on the road comes new challenges for the people whose job it is to keep each of them in one piece.

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