Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares said in a recent interview that electric vehicles being capable of blistering acceleration is actually a safety feature.
Top Gear reports Tavares made the comments to journalists at the reveal of Stellantis’s new electric vehicle platform, which will allegedly be able to hit 62 mph in two seconds flat. Does the evidence actually show that lower driver speeds are actually safer? Of course. Just don’t tell Tavares.
The Rivian R1T offering 800 hp and 3.0-second zero-to-60 time? For safety. The Hyundai Ioniq N offering 641 hp and a zero-to-60 time of 3.25 seconds? Also a safety thing. The GMC Hummer EV? Definitely designed with safety in mind. Although, if you look a little more closely, it’s clear that Tavares is talking about a very specific kind of safety while trying to convince journalists that a new EV platform that should be able to hit 60 mph in 2.0 seconds isn’t dangerous.
I am living on a farm in the deep countryside of Portugal, and I often drive on the small roads around here. The acceleration power is first a matter of safety. It is first a matter of overtaking in safe conditions, making sure that you can change lanes, you can overtake a truck on a two-lane road. So, it is not necessarily about speed. It’s about acceleration power to overtake in safe conditions, and we are very happy that the electric vehicles carry that kind of capability.
In that exact situation, he’s not entirely wrong. If you disagree, try passing a chicken truck in the North Georgia mountains behind the wheel of a 1995 Mazda Protege. It helps to have more power in situations like that. Although, we’re usually talking about the difference in 100 hp and 250 hp, not 100 hp and 1,200. And from the sound of it, Tavares is really passionate about being able to safely pass slow-moving vehicles:
[T]here is nothing more difficult than starting to overtake a truck and then having to jump on the brakes because you just discovered that the acceleration of the car you’re driving is not good enough to overtake in safe conditions. So, you jump back on the brakes, and you go back behind the truck. The acceleration capability for us is first a safety measure. The more acceleration you have, the safer the conditions under which you overtake can be, and from that perspective, the BEV technology is great as we all know.
If you live in a rural area, it’s understandable that your idea of vehicle safety would include concerns about passing slow-moving trucks. The thing is, though, in the U.S., only like 15 percent of people live in rural areas, and vehicle safety is about a lot more than just passing trucks safely. If the driver of a Hummer EV hits your car, that 9,000 pounds is going to really hurt. Of course, it needed to be that heavy because it needed a massive battery to give it a decently usable range.
And that’s not even getting into all the issues you run into once you add pedestrians and cyclists into the mix. When the roads are full of EVs that have a ton of mass and are capable of incredible acceleration, you’re just asking for a bad time if you let people drive those vehicles around other people. Ultimately, it’s still got to be worth all the road deaths if a millionaire gets to enjoy zipping around rural Portugal, right?