We recently received a great update on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration EV testing and safety standards…
The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards are in the Code of Federal Regulations. Go to http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/cfr-table-search.html
Scroll down to title 49, Transportation and select the Oct 2008 volume.
Then select the 500 – 599 subpart, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and then select part 571.
FMVSS 305 is the standard specific to shock prevention, battery retention and electrolyte spillage. It references some of the other standards as well.
NHTSA was petitioned by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers to amend this standard to accommodate fuel cell vehicles, and you can read about that in the docket. Some of these changes would also effect battery EV’s. Go to www.regulations.gov and in the box, “Enter a Key word or ID”, type in NHTSA-2007-28517. Then click on “open docket folder”. The notice of proposed rulemaking is on page 3. Go to this docket to see the progress of this rulemaking action.
The EMS division worked several years ago on some first responder training with DOE, but if so the materials would be very old. We generally just ask the manufacturers for their guides. They are available at http://www.extrication.com/ERG.htm.
NHTSA crash tests online at http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/portal/site/nhtsa/menuitem.8027fe7cfb6e727568d07a30343c44cc/.
If for any reason you want to look up crash test results/video/reports on any hybrids you can find them there. We have some very old reports on EV’s, for example, the EV1 is test 2898. The easiest way to query the database is “Query by vehicle parameters such as make, model, and year.”
Also, we received this additional safety information from NREL…
Seems like the details of safety would have to be addressed by the OEMs – for example, Prius has emergency response guidelines: https://techinfo.toyota.com/techInfoPortal/staticcontent/en/techinfo/html/prelogin/docs/2ndprius.pdf
Emergency Response Guides for Hybrid Vehicles: http://www.ct.gov/cfpc/cwp/view.asp?Q=445610&A=832&cfpcPNavCtr=|30654|
GM Emergency Responder Hybrid Resources: http://www.extrication.com/ERG.htm#GM_Emergency_Responder_Hybrid_Resources
GM probably doesn’t have any EV emergency response manuals out yet but there are things like this: http://gm-volt.com/2009/08/25/chevy-volt-underwater-testing/
