“Are multistorey car parks designed for heavy electric vehicles?”: Dave Bergin, via LinkedIn, asked.
This question, we suspect, has been prompted by media coverage in some circles which speculates that growing vehicle weights as we enter the EV era will cause catastrophic collapses of our existing multistorey car parks.
The fact that this story began in certain UK-based newspapers should perhaps have been a sufficient warning that it was most likely alt-conservative nonsense and merely a way to bash electric cars in a public forum. That said, there is perhaps a justifiable concern as the weight of our cars balloons – batteries being much heavier for a given energy level than liquid fuel – our car parks might start to strain under the heft.
However, we need to look seriously at the numbers before leaping to any panicked conclusions. Let’s take the best-selling EV model in the world right now, the Tesla Model Y. The two-motor, long-range version of the Model Y weighs, at the kerb, 1,930kg, which is certainly not light, but it’s equally not all that heavy in modern terms. The Toyota RAV4 Hybrid reached a similar kerb weight when it was first launched back in 2016, for example, and no one started worrying about buckling car parks at that point.
Ireland’s best-selling electric car, the Volkswagen ID.4, weighs about the same as the Model Y if you look at the basic, small-battery version, and stretches to 2,256kg if you consider the two-motor, four-wheel drive GTX model. Again, that’s not a light car by anyone’s standards, but given the general growth in combustion-engined car weights in the past decade, propelled by our collective rush to buy SUVs, it’s equally not a vast increase compared with more conventional models.
It’s more outlying models – such as the US-only Hummer EV, which weighs a frankly stupid 4.5-tonnes, 1.5-tonnes of which is the battery – which create a narrative that all electric cars are giants. Yes, the Hummer is pointlessly big and heavy, but it’s also massively expensive and will only sell in relatively small numbers. Even heavy EV SUVs that we can buy in Ireland – such as the Mercedes-Benz EQS SUV – have 2.5-2.7-tonne kerb weights that are easily matched by equivalent internal combustion models.
Equally, we need to consider that it will be another few years yet before EVs make up the majority of new cars sold, and longer still – by far – before they account for the majority of cars on the road. Car parks can relax for the moment, in other words. There is also a trend that electric cars tend to be physically larger than current combustion-engined designs, and that will cause car park design to evolve, with larger spaces and fewer cars inside, which will likely ameliorate any potential for a structural overload.
According to the experts from Link Engineering, a firm of engineers and architects: “Even though the largest modern EVs are much heavier than cars produced when multistorey car parks were first built, a car park full of laden EVs (of about 3.5 tonnes each) will not exceed the design load commonly used for most car parks, although there will be an associated reduction of design safety factors.”
That “reduction of safety factors” is the only kicker in all of this. Although it’s incredibly unlikely that a troop of hefty EVs all parking up at once will trigger a catastrophic car park collapse, it is likely that a constant in-and-out flow of such vehicles (and equally hefty diesel and petrol models – weight gain is not exclusive to EVs) might make for faster wear-and-tear on car park surfaces and structures, requiring owners and operators to pay more attention to maintenance and repair.
However, the short answer is: yes, multistorey car parks are easily able to cope with EVs, at least in the medium term.
