Personal Injury Blog

Quiet Hybrid Car Engines Linked to Increase in Pedestrian Accidents

April 23rd, 2010

hybrid car engine

Having quiet hybrid car engines is not always a benefit. There is enough data to indicate that hybrid vehicles that have become so popular in recent years, might actually be linked to more pedestrian accident deaths than other automobiles.

Hybrids switch to low noise battery power while performing functions that require less power, like breaking and gliding. A pedestrian is less likely to hear hybrid car engines, like a Toyota Prius. However, when investigators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed pedestrian accidents involving hybrid vehicles with data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, they found that most these pedestrian accident deaths involving hybrid cars, occurred when the car was traveling at more than 35 mph. At those speeds, the hybrid vehicles make just as much noise as a regular automobile.

The investigators also found that the number of pedestrian accident fatalities with hybrid cars was more than twice the number of fatalities with other automobiles. Is the lack of noise the single biggest contributing factor to these fatalities, and if not, what could be causing these crashes?

According to researchers who have been looking at hybrid automobiles and pedestrian accident rates more closely, the answer could lie in the kind of population that drives these cars and the kind of locations in which these vehicles are driven. Market distribution could be a major factor in these rates, although not enough studies have been done to conclusively prove a link here. The researchers think that there is a higher risk of pedestrian accident fatalities in beach towns where there is more pedestrian traffic, and where people are more likely to drive hybrid cars. More numbers of pedestrians typically means more numbers of pedestrian accidents.

The relationship between hybrids and pedestrian accidents has been known for a while. Hybrid cars have been linked not just to fatal injuries, but also to nonfatal serious injuries in pedestrians. The” lack of noise” approach is a tempting one, but California car accident lawyers don’t believe that this only reason why there are more fatal and nonfatal injuries in pedestrian accidents involving hybrid cars.

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been too much discussion on this issue at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This month however, agency chief David Strickland said that the NHTSA would be looking closer at the need for installing sound-emitting devices on hybrid cars. One car manufacturer is actually mulling the prospect of having a device that emits a froglike sound when the engine shuts off to battery mode.

There’ll also be plenty of thought into the kind of sound that the vehicle emits when it’s on battery power. It has to be loud enough to alert pedestrians and others nearby that there is a car approaching, and must also resemble the actual whirr of an engine-driven car.

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