A white Ford F-150 Lightning allegedly drove into a crowd of New Year's revelers in New Orleans, sparking concerns about the safety of heavy, quick-accelerating electric vehicles. The incident echoes previous attacks where terrorists used vehicles to inflict harm, but this marks the first time an electric vehicle was involved in such a major attack.
Police surrounded a white Ford F-150 Lightning that crashed into a work lift after allegedly driving into a crowd of New Year’s revelers in New Orleans ’ French Quarter Wednesday. The incident mirrors a familiar pattern: a terrorist rents a large vehicle and drives it through a crowd. In the 2016 attack in Nice, the rented vehicle was a midsize truck. In a 2017 attack on the Hudson River Greenway, in New York, it was a pickup truck from Home Depot.
Later that year on Las Ramblas, in Barcelona, a The twist in the New Year’s Day attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans: for the first time in a major vehicle attack, the car was electric. It’s a grim, perhaps inevitable marker in the rise of the American EV. But it also poses questions about how heavy, quick-accelerating electric vehicles might challenge our infrastructure, from the anti-terror design that now rings so many public buildings and popular gathering spots to the simple bollards that stop customers from backing through the window of the liquor store. We don’t yet know why Shamsud-Din Jabbar chose to rent an F-150 Lightning before he began his murderous rampage last week, but he could hardly have picked a more deadly passenger vehicle. With its high bumper, quick acceleration, and 6,000-pound curb weight, the F-150 Lightning is one of a new class of everyday megacars that has alarmed pedestrian safety advocates—and will prompt changes to the way we design our roads and our cities. As Andrew Mosemanlast week, “It’s easy to wonder whether this was a deliberate choice—if the perpetrators of what might turn out to be acts of terrorism chose EVs on purpose to cause maximum damage.” (The Las Vegas attacker also rented an electric vehicle.) That’s not to say that the attack was deadly because the vehicle was electric; anti-ramming infrastructure is usually built to withstand vehicles of 15,000 pounds in order to stop trucks, explained Michael Dalzell, of the Vancouver-based bollard shop Reliance Foundr
ELECTRIC VEHICLES SAFETY TERRORISM NEW ORLEANS VEHICLE ATTACKS
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