Research and analysis

The safety risk of electric and hybrid vehicles to visually impaired pedestrians

Report by Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) into the risks of quiet electric and hybrid vehicles to visually impaired pedestrians.

Documents

Assessing the perceived safety risk from quiet electric and hybrid vehicles to vision-impaired pedestrians

Request an accessible format.
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need a version of this document in a more accessible format, please email webmasterdft@dft.gov.uk. Please tell us what format you need. It will help us if you say what assistive technology you use.

Details

The Department for Transport commissioned TRL to investigate the accident risk posed by E/HE vehicles and compare it with that for equivalent vehicles with traditional internal combustion engines (ICEs), to determine whether E/HE vehicles are audibly more difficult to detect.

This report presents the findings from the study, based upon

  • a review of vehicle accident statistics
  • a programme of practical measurements to compare the noise of E/HE and ICE vehicles
  • a small-scale subjective assessment of the noise from these vehicles involving vision-impaired participants

Updates to this page

Published 25 July 2011

Sign up for emails or print this page