Electric vehicles have earned strong crash-test scores, and their occupants tend to walk away from collisions in good shape. The people in the other car are a different story.

The reason is mass. Battery packs are heavy, and the weight gap between EVs and the cars they share the road with is growing.

When the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crash-tested its first EV, a 2011 Nissan Leaf, it weighed 3,339 pounds. In a March 2023 report, IIHS noted that many current EVs top 6,000 pounds. The GMC Hummer EV comes in at about 9,500 pounds, and the Rivian R1T pickup at about 7,000. A typical gas car or SUV weighs 3,000 to 4,000 pounds.

National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy raised the same concern in a January 2023 speech to the Transportation Research Board. She pointed out that the Hummer EV’s battery alone weighs roughly 2,900 pounds, about as much as a compact sedan, and that the Ford F-150 Lightning runs 2,000 to 3,000 pounds heavier than its gas counterpart.

A 2026 Tinbergen Institute discussion paper by economists Junjie Lin, Cheng Keat Tang and Jos van Ommeren looked at more than 300,000 two-vehicle collisions in California. The authors found that EVs are typically about 20% heavier than comparable gas vehicles. Driving an EV cut the driver’s risk of serious injury or death by 18%. For occupants of the other vehicle, the risk rose by 13%, an effect the authors attribute almost entirely to weight.

Physics explains it.

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