Drivers and passengers of electric vehicles are routinely bathed in surprisingly strong electromagnetic pulses, according to the most comprehensive measurement survey ever carried out. These transients, as they are called, are fast bursts of energy which have been implicated in numerous health controversies over the last 40 years, always without resolution.
The new survey, which included close to a million individual measurements in 13 different electric and hybrid car models, showed that peak fields often exceeded the current European reference limits. In special cases, for instance when starting the engine, the fields could be far higher —up to 12 times those limits (measured in a hybrid).
Gernot Schmid, the study team leader at the Seibersdorf Labs in Austria, described the peak fields as “astonishingly high.” Manufacturers could reduce them, he said, if magnetic fields were “taken into account at an early stage of vehicle design.”
