Hybrid vehicles’ silence seen as posing peril

As the car crept up to them, the students didn’t react. It wasn’t until it was about to run them over that they even knew it was there. And that was only because it hit their white canes.

The hybrid car’s electric motor had kicked in. And the students, all of whom are blind, couldn’t hear it.

“It came up, and it was right there. We had no idea it was even coming,” said Chad Wilburn, one of students, who took part in a demonstration of the new hazard posed by the quiet hybrid vehicles earlier this year in Salt Lake City by the Utah Center for the Blind.

Advocates for the sight-impaired say the vroom of a conventional engine is the only sure way a blind pedestrian can know that he or she may be walking into the path of an approaching car. They have been pushing for safety measures for several years, and Congress is considering a bill that would order the Transportation Department to make sure hybrids and the coming generation of all-electric vehicles make enough noise to be heard.

But they’re not the only ones worried about the silence. Emergency workers are raising the alarm, too, saying it can be hard to tell whether a hybrid’s engine is still running at the scene of an accident.

“If it’s in gear, it can lurch forward and injure someone,” said James Surrell, a physician at Marquette General Hospital in Michigan, who teaches hybrid safety classes for rescue workers and emergency medical technicians.

Hybrids’ electronic motors offer several other challenges for emergency workers at the scene of an accident. The biggest is that they are electronic motors.

How quiet is a hybrid? Researchers at the University of California-Riverside found last year that the margin of safety for blind pedestrians was 74 percent less when a hybrid was approaching silently, compared to a vehicle with a conventional engine. Subjects could correctly judge the approach of a conventional car when it was about 28 feet away, but they couldn’t detect a hybrid until it was 7 feet away — or about one second from running them over.

In addition to a standard 12-volt battery under the hood, a typical hybrid engine uses another battery under the back seat that packs as many as 600 volts — more than enough to cause instantaneous death.

There have been no documented reports of any emergency worker’s having been electrocuted by a hybrid battery in the United States. But in literature they publish for emergency responders, nearly all manufacturers include vivid warnings like this one in the first-response manual for the Nissan Altima Hybrid: “Failure to disable the high voltage electrical system before emergency response procedures are performed may result in serious injury or death from electrical shock.”

First puzzle: Is it a hybrid?
On the road, government safety tests indicate that hybrid vehicles are just as safe as their gas-powered counterparts. Any concerns come from what to do once one of them has been in an accident.

The high-voltage batteries are thoroughly sealed in protective metal, and there is little chance that they could leak or explode. In fact, hybrid engines are packed with automatic sensors designed to stop the flow of electricity on impact or whenever the side-impact air bags deploy.

But that assumes the sensors themselves haven’t been damaged.

In its guide for emergency responders, Toyota, whose Prius popularized hybrids in the United States, warns crews to “never assume the Prius is shut off simply because it is silent.”

Emergency agencies across the nation have added specialized training for workers responding to accident scenes involving hybrids, like a hybrid safety seminar last month at the Lamar Institute of Technology in Beaumont, Texas. That’s because “we’re worried about forced entry into a hybrid and using the jaws of life,” said Brad Pennison, a captain with the Beaumont Fire Department.

At these seminars, crews learn that the first difficulty is recognizing that a vehicle is, in fact, a hybrid, which calls for different procedures.

An msnbc.com-NBC News special report Alex Johnson is a reporter for msnbc.com. The following NBC stations contributed to this report: KBMT of Beaumont, Texas; KSL of Salt Lake City, Utah; and WLUC of Marquette, Mich.

Most contemporary hybrids are built to resemble their conventional counterparts — a design philosophy the industry calls “mainstreaming.” Many can be identified only by a badge or a small logo; if that’s damaged or hidden by debris or another vehicle, rescue crews may have no obvious clue that there’s a high-voltage battery lurking in the wreckage.

If the “hybrid” badge is missing from the door of its Silverado and Sierra trucks, Chevrolet details a four-step inspection process that crews should follow to determine whether they’re dealing with a hybrid or a conventional engine. Steps 3 and 4 require opening the hood, assuming the emergency workers can get to it.

Saturn, meanwhile, suggests finding the vehicle identification number on its Vue sport utility. “If the eighth digit is a five (5), this signifies the vehicle is a Hybrid,” its responder guide says.

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