I’ve heard that electric cars are making people carsick, and I’m quite sensitive to motion sickness. Will an EV make me more carsick?
This is one of those electric vehicle hearsay stories that actually turns out to be kind of true. Yes, it is more likely that you’ll feel car sick in an electric car than in a conventional car, but that doesn’t automatically mean that EVs are about to unleash a tidal wave of car sickness upon us.
According to a study by the Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard in France, it’s all down to our brains and how they work out what’s coming next. Basically, we’ve had 150 years of cars with noisy, vibrating, explosion boxes at one end, and we’ve got used to the sounds and sensations that those cars come with.
Subconsciously, then, our brains have taken in all of that information and they use it to “cue” our bodies to anticipate and expect certain movements, such as the way a car squats back as it accelerates, forwards when it brakes, or rolls when it corners.
In an electric car, those cues are different. Electric motors don’t make much noise, and so our brains aren’t able to pick up on a quickening of a car’s exhaust noise as a warning that we’re about to go faster, or a lessening of that noise as a cue that the car is slowing down. Without those familiar signals, the messages coming from our eyes, inner ear, and vestibular system can become mixed and in some people, that can trigger motion sickness.
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Basically, it’s a bit like being an astronaut. A high proportion of astronauts, in spite of their extensive training, suffer motion sickness when first exposed to zero gravity. This is because it takes time for their brains to accept the new regime of movement and physical responses.
Equally, EV braking is different – electric cars rely to a huge extent on the regenerative braking effect of their electric motors, which causes significant mechanical drag, enough to slow the car quite firmly, meaning you rely less on the mechanical brakes. It’s why many carmakers are actually starting to fit cheaper, less high-performance “drum” brakes on the rear wheels, simply because the car doesn’t need high-performance “disc” brakes any more.
However, regenerative braking has its own effect on those who suffer from car sickness. The deceleration is gentler and works at a lower frequency than the more sudden, jabbing movement of mechanical brakes, and this has been shown to trigger motion sickness all on its own.
Another study has shown that EV seats vibrate differently to those of combustion cars, because the interplay between the car’s battery, its magnetic field, and the car’s metal components. It’s been suggested that this electrodermal activity (EDA) signal can be a carsickness trigger too.
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There’s also a suggestion that EV’s lowdown torque, which can give them savage off-the-line acceleration, can also be a contributing factor.
So, how can we fight this new scourge?
Sitting up front can help, as you’re closer to the car’s centre of movement, and you can clearly see what the driver is doing, which helps clue you into what to expect next. Motion sickness medication may help too, as well as listening to something that emits sound at 100hz – this “white noise” has been shown to help in Japanese studies.
Jaguar Land Rover has also suggested in its research that new vehicle interior designs might be needed in both the electric and autonomous vehicle age (and autonomous vehicles represent a whole new level of potential for carsickness, as now you can’t even see what the driver is doing to help you) and that “features such as cooling seats, ambient lighting and multiple seat configurations are proven to significantly reduce the likelihood of motion sickness”.
Of course, there may be some people for whom travelling in an EV might be torturous, but that’s perhaps not exclusive to electric cars. I can well remember my mother and my sister refusing to travel anywhere in my grandmother’s Alfa Romeo, simply because the car’s eerie smoothness on broken west Cork roads made them dreadfully carsick. Proof, if nothing else, that there’s nothing new in the world.
