On January 1st, there were two separate acts of terror in the United States that resulted in the deaths of at least 15 people and the injuries of dozens more. As it sits at the time of this writing, it doesn’t appear that the two events were related, but they are similar in two very distinct ways. For starters, both trucks involved in the attacks were rented from the car-sharing service Turo. The other way they were similar is they were both electric pickup trucks.
The attack in New Orleans was carried out by Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old Texas-born U.S. citizen who served in the military in Afghanistan. He drove a Ford F-150 Lightning into a crowd of people on Bourbon Street at 3:15 am on Wednesday. In addition to using the truck as a weapon, explosive devices were found in the vehicle.
The second attack on Wednesday occurred at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas involving the driver of the truck, Matthew Alan Livelsberger, a 37-year-old from Colorado and is an active duty U.S. Army Green Beret. He shot himself before detonating an explosive in the trunk of the Tesla Cybertruck that included fireworks, gas tanks, and camping fuel.
While investigations are still underway, considering both vehicles were electric and explosives were found in both cases, it does make one wonder if the end goal was to somehow detonate the vehicle’s high-voltage battery as part of the attack. Tesla CEO and future Trump Administration official Elon Musk focused on that angle with the Cybertruck, pointing out on Twitter that that truck survived the explosion reasonably well and that the aftermath is basically an advertisement FOR the Cybertruck.
As avid EV fans know, automakers spend a great deal of time and money ensuring that batteries survive extreme events, including explosions, so it’s not necessarily a surprise that the battery didn’t explode in this case. Additionally, the way these fires work, they’re difficult to put out but tend to not be as sudden as a gasoline explosion.
So maybe an EV isn’t any better for making a car bomb, but an EV is better as a terrorist tool in many cases. And that’s something that Musk, along with all of the other EV automakers, will need to come to grips with.
One of the biggest selling points for EVs — and bragged by people like Tesla owners — is how quickly the accelerate in a straight line. A Tesla Cybertruck, for example, is capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 2.6 seconds based on Tesla’s website (with rollout subtracted, which is a stupid way to calculate acceleration from zero). Tesla also quotes a weight of 6,898 pounds. That’s an incredible amount of rapidly accelerating force that could do a considerable amount of damage if that truck were pointed at a crowd of people.
You exclaim, “But what about autonomous emergency braking!?”
In several of these car-ramming attacks, you can see in footage where the attacking vehicle is stopped by AEB but then continues. These systems, while designed to prevent accidentally hitting pedestrians, won’t stop someone determined to keep driving forward and keeping their foot on the accelerator.
Additionally, these systems can sometimes be disabled by the driver beforehand and not even have to deal with the system attempting to intervene at all.
Finally, no system is perfect and some vision-only systems don’t work well at night. Ford’s system isn’t entirely based on vision, but some automakers are.
I’m not here to tell you what vehicles you should and shouldn’t buy, but an argument could be made that having a 3.5-ton vehicle be able to accelerate quicker than a Porsche 911 is a useless feature that shouldn’t be in the hands of people who don’t have advanced driver training might be a good idea.
Yes, anything can be used as a weapon if the user tries hard enough. But at no time in history has such performance become so obtainable for so many people, on top of the increased weight that comes with demands for longer range and faster charging speed.
It’s also just asking for trouble to go on social media and claim that your vehicle is essentially terrorist-proof when you have people dying in the same vehicle because the truck locked them in and they couldn’t find — or it just didn’t work — the override.
The New York Times says that vehicle ramming attacks have become common, and I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future they occur more and more with EVs — specifically pickup trucks — because of the size, weight, and performance.
