Do electric cars have a higher possibility of bodywork damages?

If you drive a high-end electric car you have up to a 40% higher chance of being involved in a collision than if you drive a similar combustion vehicle. This is what was shown in the latest study by an important car insurance company. Why does this happen? It seems like the answer lies in the behavior of electric cars at the point of transferring power from the motor to the wheels. They do this at higher speed and the drivers are not used to vehicles reacting so quickly.

However, in smaller electric cars, according to this same study, fewer accidents occur. This way, when talking about the total number of vehicles and horsepower there are not significant differences in the amount of accidents.

The study has compared the accident rate of electric cars compared with those of combustion motors in case of a fleet of 1.000 vehicles. In the case of luxury electric cars and SUVs, there would be more collisions because these types of vehicles deliver almost all of their motor torque from the beginning. The vehicles not only gain speed very quickly and uniformly, but they also do it from very low revolutions. This behavior creates an “acceleration experience” very different from those that are obtained in a combustion vehicle. This makes that drivers, when accelerating, go faster than they expect.  In other words, they reach the maximum acceleration in less time than they needed when driving a gasoline or diesel vehicle.

In fact, the analysis of the accidents handled by the insurance company was completed with a survey of drivers of electric vehicles where it was confirmed that half of those drivers mentioned that they had to adjust their driving to the behavior of an electric car, both when accelerating and as well as braking.

Additional studies have revealed that the rate of collision of an electric car decreases after a period of eight months, which is the average time that takes a driver to adapt to driving this type of vehicle.

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