Electric vehicles are plowing through guardrails in crash tests. Experts are studying new designs to prepare for heavier EVs and crashes on wet or dry roads.
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00:00 From mountainside race courses to distracted driving and losing control on wet and snowy highways,
00:08 guardrails have saved thousands of lives since they were invented in 1933.
00:13 The guardrail system behaves a little bit like a rubber band, capturing the vehicle by deflecting and stretching in tension
00:21 and then redirecting the vehicle and then thereafter.
00:24 As cars and trucks have grown larger in America, guardrails have gotten tougher, but new crash tests have found
00:31 many current guardrails are no match for electric trucks and cars with heavy batteries.
00:38 It revealed that our guardrail systems are not yet suitable to capture the vehicles across the weight and size spectrum
00:45 that we are encountering today.
00:47 Impacting at 60 miles an hour, this 7,000 pound electric pickup plowed right through the steel guardrail.
00:55 Cody Stolle and the team with Midwest Roadside Safety Facility at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
01:01 also put this electric sedan to the test.
01:04 It sliced right through and underneath the guardrail.
01:08 One of the nice things about EVs is that their center of gravity is much lower.
01:11 They are more stable and more resistant to tripping and rolling over,
01:15 but the CG height has a grave effect on how the vehicle interacts with the guardrail system itself.
01:21 Experts say the rate of crashes on wet, snowy, or icy roads may be doubled or tripled compared to dry conditions,
01:29 but drivers usually slow down in bad weather, so the impacts are less severe.
01:34 When we have dry or hot weather conditions, we have vehicles traveling at higher speed,
01:38 and that's when, unfortunately, the risk when a runoff road crash occurs, that's when it's at its highest.
01:45 These crash tests and computer modeling will help experts design the next generation of guardrails
01:51 to better withstand heavier vehicle impacts in any weather condition.
01:56 It's going to take time and money to fix this, and both of which are tight,
02:00 but the commitment of our state departments of transportation and the federal government,
02:04 together, we're going to be able to solve this problem.
02:07 For AccuWeather, I'm Bill Waddell.
02:12 (water sloshing)