The prodigious weight of electric vehicles is leading to all kinds of unexpected consequences in the automotive world. Such is the weight of big batteried EVs like the GMC Hummer EV, that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) recently revealed that it had to run specialized tests to make sure its crash testing machinery could handle them.
The team was primarily interested in finding out if the pulley system that leads vehicles down towards a crash barrier could actually pull heavy electric vehicles up to the correct speeds. They, therefore, took a couple of old junkers, loaded them up with steel plates and other heavy things, in order to get make them weigh 9,500 lbs (4,309 kg), and pulled them down the runway to their inevitable fate.
The vehicles only had to be towed up to a speed of 40 mph (64 km/h), but the 20-year-old pulley is used to pulling much lighter vehicles. It takes a lot of energy to get even a sedan up to speed and maintain it all the way to the crash barrier.
Read: Heavier EVs Mean Heavier Car Carriers, So The Trucking Industry Is Fighting For Higher Weight Limits
The IIHS knows that the machine is strong enough to pull EVs like the sub-6,000-pound (2,722 kg) Audi e-tron, because of crash testing it has already performed, but with heavier EVs on the horizon, they wanted to be sure that they would actually be able to crash vehicles like the 9,063-pound (4,111 kg) GMC Hummer EV, according to Raul Arbalaez, VP of the Vehicle Research Center for the IIHS.
“With electric vehicles coming in, and that battery weight pushing vehicle mass higher and higher, we wanted to make sure that if and when those vehicles come to market—and some of them already are—we want to be able to know that we can conduct the test here,” said Arbalaez. “And if we can’t, we need to make modifications to our crash machine.”
Fortunately for the IIHS, the test was a success and the machine was strong enough to get the heavy vehicles up to 40 mph (64 km/h) and into the crash barrier.