One of the first things that hits you about the EV experience is its relative smoothness, compared to internal-combustion cars, with their vibrations and noise. You might assume that these attributes would make EVs more comfortable for those who tend to get carsick, but research has found that the opposite is in fact true. Electric vehicles can exacerbate sensations of motion sickness in passengers, and science tells us why.
It’s more or less the same reason why you never hear about drivers getting carsick. If you’re driving a car, you know how the vehicle is about to react as you manipulate the gas, brakes, and steering. Your passengers don’t, though—they can only guess. And that mismatch in expectation versus physical reality gets to the root of what causes motion sickness.
Now consider an electric vehicle. All of those audio and kinetic cues that have defined cars for more than a century are now gone. There’s no rumbling engine to signal movement, and, in most models, the driver doesn’t even need to press the brake pedal to quickly slow down; the car does it automatically and steadily off acceleration. Passengers have even fewer signs to instinctively pick up on, and this can lead to problems, as William Emond, a PhD student at France’s Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard, told The Guardian.
“If we are accustomed to traveling in non-EVs, we are used to understanding the car’s motion based on signals such as engine revs, engine vibrations, torque, etc. Yet, traveling in an EV for the first time is a new motion environment for the brain, which needs adaptation,” Emond explains.
Emond sums it up as the brain lacking “accuracy in estimating the motion forces” of EVs, compared to our ability to estimate how gas cars behave. Two studies cited by The Guardian back this up: One from 2020 linked the silence of EVs to increased carsickness, while another from 2024 related seat vibrations to the phenomenon.
Regenerative braking is part of the problem, too, as “low-frequency deceleration,” rather than quick stabs of the brake pedal, has also been correlated with increased motion sickness. This one is admittedly a little surprising because you’d assume a slower, more gradual movement would result in less fatigue for passengers. I’m no expert, but if I had to guess, the progression from sharp acceleration to relatively sharp deceleration without a coasting phase—as most EVs default to one-pedal driving—plays a part. That sequence goes against what we’ve all been primed to expect, riding in gas cars all our lives.
As EVs grow within the market, it will be interesting to explore whether motion sickness will become less common, because we’ll all have built more experience with them. Consider young kids in the coming decades, who might have limited or no experience with combustion-powered cars; maybe they’ll fare better than us today. Even so, perhaps a larger subset of people in the future will still be prone to carsickness in an all-EV world, compared to the all-ICE one we grew up in. So many questions, and the only thing that will answer them is time.
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