Raul Arbelaez, vice president of the Vehicle Research Center at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), explains that, with electric vehicles becoming common, battery weight is “pushing vehicle mass higher.”
The heaviest vehicle the IIHS ever tested, Arbelaez says, is a larger electric SUV, the 2019 Audi e-tron. That vehicle, as tested, was “under 6,000 pounds.” But, he says, “some of these electric vehicles that have been advertised as coming in the next few years” are significantly heavier, “one as high as 9,500 pounds.”
IIHS engineers needed to verify that their crash machine — yes, they call it a crash machine — could handle it.