Today’s society depends heavily on the mobility of people and goods and the need for transport is predicted to grow strongly in the coming decades. Environmental and energy concerns create a strong demand for alternative automotive technologies and in particular for electric vehicles. A serious limitation of large scale introduction of electric vehicles is the limited storage capability for electrical energy of the current generation of batteries and capacitors. Furthermore, there is a strong trend to design significantly lighter vehicles needed to consume much less energy, and to introduce new vehicle architectures due to specific demands of electric vehicles like hub motors, relatively large space needed for batteries etc.

Without new safety technologies there is a large risk that the new vehicle designs will become less safe in case of accidents. In a project recently conducted in Sweden, called SEVS (Safe Efficient Vehicle Solutions), the necessary technologies for the 2030 generation of environmentally friendly safe vehicles have been identified. The SEVS project has resulted in a number of possible societal scenarios for 2030 and a number of future vehicle architectures. Furthermore SEVS has identified the required technological breakthroughs for passenger transport as well as the transport of goods, to realize mass introduction of high efficient and safe electric vehicles on the road in 2030.

This paper will after an overview of the SEVS project focus on a number of safety related technology topics, identified in SEVS, where significant further research is needed, i.e. balance of active/passive safety, light weight design methodology, crashworthiness of future vehicles and “ information needs and availability”.

An overview of research needs for these topics will be presented.