It’s Not Your Imagination, Your EV May Be Making You Car Sick

EVs are making some people sick, and no, I’m not talking just about Dodge fans. It seems electric cars are causing motion sickness even in folks with normally solid stomachs, and it’s not just all in their heads.

Some feel it more as a passenger, while drivers may feel nauseous using one-pedal driving with strong regenerative braking, reports ABC News. When we get into a car, we have certain expectations about how it’s going to feel as we drive it, based on the internal combustion models that have dominated the market for over 100 years. It will accelerate a certain way, stop a certain way, and sound a certain way. 

EVs turn all that on its head, according to The Guardian. The sounds and vibrations we’re used to are gone, just like the combustion engine that produces them. The sound and feeling of an engine running up through the gears, even when a CVT simulates fake gears, tells our senses what is about to happen and gives us time to prepare. Our minds may have a more difficult time reconciling the sights and sensations of movement without that additional input we’ve known all our lives, leading to confusion and motion sickness. It’s similar to folks who have never been on a boat before getting sea sick. 

Another contributing factor is the different ways EVs deliver and regenerate power compared to combustion engines. We’re accustomed to power and torque gradually building as we accelerate from a stop. It may do so quickly in something like a Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat Redeye, but it still behaves like a combustion engine. EVs can deliver maximum torque from a dead stop, which is how they can achieve crazy acceleration times like the Rimac Nevera R. It’s exhilarating, but it can also contribute to nausea, since we’re not used to this kind of acceleration.

One of the biggest culprits of causing motion sickness seems to be regenerative braking, particularly when using the one-pedal driving feature becoming common in EVs. We’re used to relatively firm jabs of the brake, not the slow, gradual deceleration that regenerative braking provides. The sounds and vibrations we’re used to from traditional engines and braking systems aren’t there, leading to a disconnect in the brain. Jerky, uneven control inputs also don’t help. This can make someone sick regardless of what’s powering the car, but it can be more difficult to drive an EV smoothly with its instant throttle responses.

One study suggests adding “auditory motion cues” to mitigate this. While we’ve argued that fake engine noises do not belong in an EV, this might be an appropriate use case for them. Just make sure we can turn them off if we don’t want them.