The other week, I left an event with a bag that was too stiff and too large to be carried by a bike, so I treated myself to a taxi home. It should have been a luxury, but when I got back 45 minutes later I collapsed on my bed. My legs were shaking and my nerves – from the tips of my toes to the top of my head – were alight with nausea. I had spent the entire journey focusing solely on not letting the motion sickness, which had seized me within minutes of getting in the car, win. It took an hour to begin to pass.
I've never been able to read or look at my phone in vehicles, but otherwise car sickness never bothered me before. However, in the last few years I've started to experience it much more – I often now become unbearably nauseous even when I obey all the rules. There didn't seem to be a pattern to when it would happen. But, in the back of that taxi, with my knuckles taut and white, I realized it could be because I was in an electric car.
A cursory search online confirmed that I was not alone. Friends tell me they have never had car sickness until the last few months or years; they've had to get drivers to stop so they can pull over on the side of the road; they pre-emptively stick their heads out the window like a puppy. Reels of glamorous women concentrating intently on not getting sick in the back of Teslas go viral.
But it's not just anecdotal. Academics have been delving into this phenomenon and making a case that electric vehicles (EVs) may be causing and exacerbating car sickness.
William Emond has just completed his PhD researching car sickness at the Université de technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard in France. He explains that specialists and researchers have long predicted that the switch to autonomous and electric vehicles would “increase the occurrence and severity of car sickness”.
A Chinese study submitted in June this year found that while fuel vehicles were associated with a higher frequency of motion sickness, the motion sickness in EVs was far more severe. Emond adds that car manufacturers are very aware of this and are working to mitigate it – his own PhD researching solutions was connected to a German car manufacturer.
To understand the connection requires understanding how motion sickness works. It's triggered by “a mismatch of information coming into our bodies”, says Michael Wareing, a consultant ENT surgeon at The Royal London Hospital.
“Our balance is made up of our ears, our eyes and all the joints in our body sending information to our brain, telling us where we are in space.” He gives the example of being under the deck on a boat. “Your stimulus system, your ear balance system and your proprioception (sense of position) is telling you that you are moving while your eyes are telling you that you aren't. When you get this mismatch of information you can feel nauseated.” The same logic applies to all kinds of motion and, incidentally, is why motion sickness is primarily a passenger phenomenon (and why it's worst in the back seat, when you can't see the road clearly in front). All drivers are explicitly in the know of how the vehicle will move.
EVs can exacerbate that mismatch in different ways.
One is the fact that they can accelerate much faster than we're used to. “EVs rely on electric motors, which have much greater torque from a standstill,” says Mika Takahashi, senior technology analyst at IDTechEx, an independent research agency on emerging technologies. “A consequence of this is the acceleration felt by passengers can be much greater than in an ICE [internal combustion engine] car, which can be a significant factor in motion sickness.”
Similarly, EVs increasingly use regenerative braking, explains Richard Lane, car journalist at Autocar. “When you lift off the accelerator, the car will begin to slow even before you put your foot on the brakes. That's simply because the electric motor, rather than powering the wheels to drive the car forward, begins to harvest energy and provide resistance to the wheels.” While efficient, the resulting deceleration can be very jerky and sudden.
“It's exactly such movements that contribute to car sickness, according to researchers,” Emond says.
The more responsive acceleration and deceleration is made worse by the fact that EVs have silent motors and very little vibration, meaning passengers lack contextual clues about motion. Even the addition of tinted windows, Wareing says, can add to this.
As Lane puts it, in EVs “there's no context to road speed – you are in a sensory vacuum”.
Studies have found that adding the context back in, for example with vibrations in your seat, can potentially mitigate carsickness.
Not everyone feels sick in electric cars, of course. Emond explains that there is no definitive answer to why some people are susceptible in this environment, but there are theories.
“There are some studies that show that gender has an influence for example, maybe because of the hormone cycle,” he says, which could explain why everyone who contacted me with a story was a woman. Age also appears to be a factor – both when you're younger and your inner ear is developing, and during a teen's hormonal developments, but also as you age when your inner ear and vision degrades.
“Some studies anecdotally identified that Asian people are the most sensitive population to motion sickness,” he says. “It's also why it's an issue the automotive industry is focusing on, because the industry is focusing on selling a lot of cars in China, for example.”
Then there is the question of when, where and why people are passengers in EVs. Many of us are most likely to ride in one when using a ride sharing app such as Uber (the company's goal is for 100 percent of rides in London to have zero emissions by the end of 2025).
Given that people will often use a taxi after nights out, it's worth considering that alcohol can worsen the experience, as can smoking and coffee. Car sickness also tends to be worse in cities, where traffic can be stop-and-start at the best of times, or when running late stress and anxiety can also exacerbate severity.
“Some studies found that, for example on planes, some people who are not necessarily motion sick but are very stressed and anxious before traveling will get motion sick even if they're not normally susceptible,” Emond says. “Whereas people who are very sensitive to motion sickness but are not stressed do not get air sick.”
The position of your body can even have an influence. One study found that symptoms escalate when passengers adopt a head-down posture, which connects to another exacerbating factor – looking at your phone.
“I did a bit of research and I saw the TikTok generation are saying electric cars are making them dizzy,” Wareing says. “But that's probably because people are sitting there on their phones. If you're looking at this static device in the back of a moving car, that doesn't quite make sense and might make you feel dizzy or nauseated.”
Experts say the best solutions to managing car sickness are to remain focused on the road ahead, sitting in the front if you can. If you can reduce postural sway, that can sometimes help too. And where possible, avoid anything that makes nausea worse – including looking at your phone.
Plus, this is not a forever problem. Emond describes the current period we're in as a “transition phase” where we introduce the new technology and iron out the kinks.
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“Almost all manufacturers are interested in this topic, and if motion sickness is not tackled right now, that's a problem for car manufacturers because it will lead to an acceptance problem.”
Then, there's the quality of the driving. I've had terrible rides in EVs, and I've had good ones.
“In my experience, you do need to be a little smoother in electric cars than you do in traditional combustion engines, mainly to do with the response of the motor,” Lane says. “If the driver is not someone who's smooth on the controls, like the pedals or the steering, you can actually have quite a jerky experience, especially as a passenger.” Hopefully as more people drive EVs the driving quality will get better, and much less nauseating.
