Incidence Rates of Pedestrian and Bicyclist Crashes by Hybrid Electric Passenger Vehicles: An Update (Technical Report (2000-2008) DOT HS 811 526)

Hybrid electric (HE) passenger vehicles first became available to consumers in 2000, and their numbers as well as their proportion of the passenger vehicle fleet have risen every year since their introduction. Advocacy groups have raised pedestrian safety concerns regarding HE vehicles because a vehicle using the electric motor may be relatively quieter than a vehicle using an internal combustion engine (ICE) and may not emit the sounds that non-motorists rely on for warning as vehicles approach them. In 2009 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released the report “Incidence of Pedestrian and Bicyclist Crashes by Hybrid Electric Passenger Vehicles” with the finding that an HE vehicle was two times more likely to be involved in a pedestrian crash than an ICE vehicle in situations involving low-speed maneuvers (Hanna, 2009). This report aims to update the previous report with more data by adding additional years of State crash files as well as by increasing the number of States included in the analysis from 12 to 16.