Ultra-Heavy EVs Will Easily Demolish Nation’s Unprepared Guard Rail System

The U.S. is a global leader in traffic-related fatalities, with a thirty-percent jump in the last decade. That’s in contrast to every other developed country, which saw a decline.

So, of course, it’s a perfect time to flood American highways with a parade of extremely heavy EVs with unprecedented acceleration. Some of which are extremely pointy and feature half-cooked automation technology with a growing body count.

The dual-motor Cybertruck weighs 6603 pounds, while the three-motor Cyberbeast weighs in at 6843 pounds. The electric Ford Lightning weighs 6,500 pounds. The Hummer EV is even heavier, clocking in at 9,000 pounds, with a battery alone weighing more than a Honda Civic.

Experts have pointed out the significant safety ramifications of this transition for a while, but U.S. officials have yet to prepare the regulatory and policy landscape.

There are steps that regulators could take to get ahead of the problem and minimize fatalities, such as a scaling tax on vehicles over a certain weight. Or regulations designed to limit the ever-growing grills on giant vehicles (even big truck owners think trucks have gotten too big).

The U.S. is, of course, doing none of that. We’re also not preparing the road infrastructure — including basic things like guard rails — for our new daily driving reality.

The University of Nebraska was recently the latest to conduct a study on what ultra-heavy EVs do to our existing guard rails, which aren’t really designed to handle impacts beyond 5,000 pounds. As it turns out, when vehicles that weigh more than 7,000 pounds impact guard rails not designed for anything over 5,000 pounds, bad things happen:

“Last October, the researchers directed a passengerless 2022 Rivian R1T truck weighing around 7,000 pounds toward an MGS guardrail at 62 mph and a 25-degree angle, reflecting common highway crash conditions. The Rivian demolished the guardrail, passing through it before striking a concrete barrier that the researchers had installed as a backstop.”

The rush toward heavier EVs will result in everybody upgrading to bigger, heavier, and less efficient vehicles in an act of family and self protection. Add badly constructed and poorly regulated automation into the mix, and things get messier still.

It would cost $8 billion to upgrade the nation’s MGS guard rail system to protect public safety, so we aren’t going to do that because getting out ahead of obvious, avoidable problems isn’t really our thing. We’re going to wait until long after a parade of people die, at which point we might start thinking about implementing more meaningful physical and regulatory safeguards. Maybe.