Once considered a thing of a distant future, now more real than ever before, the electric car is a new player in town which looks like it can quickly overshadow its older, gas-based predecessor. With a great amount of press and other media coverage, cars such as those produced by Tesla Motors are becoming increasingly relevant in the car world, winning the fight over their competitors due to the lesser amount of impact they have on the environment.

A little less known, but nevertheless real fact, which is getting more and more press these days, is that those cars tend to be not only good for the preservation of our environment, but that they are very safe for driving as well.

It goes without saying that the mass adoption of the electrically powered vehicles would significantly lower carbon emission levels and help reduce the infamous greenhouse effect. Note that not using gas to power the car does not mean the carbon emissions will be zero. The electric car’s engine requires electricity of course, and this means it still needs to be charged impacting the environment in the process. According to a research conducted in the UK by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the electric cars can add around 85g/km of carbon into the atmosphere. This is not a negligible quantity; however, it is still much less than 128.3g/km which is the amount produced by an average new car in the United Kingdom.

But how many lives can they save on the road? The answer is – a lot.

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Tesla’s Model S, a new car from this company was recently lauded for scoring the best possible safety mark on the NHTSA’s (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) test. The car had an average grade of five out of five possible stars – a perfect score. Furthermore, the car surpassed even this grade in the Vehicle Safety Score (the score which can be higher than 5) and set a new VSSrecord of 5.4, which effectively made it the safest vehicle in the world. Famously, the testers did not even manage to perform one of the tests on Model S – due to the car’s specific weight distribution, the test drivers did not succeed in flipping the car over.

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Normally, as it usually goes when a new technology makes a breakthrough, there are critics which question the safety of electric cars. They tend to be especially concerned about the safety of car batteries in dangerous situations, claiming that there is a danger of the battery exploding in case of collision. However, as it is the case with the carbon emissions, even though there is definitely a certain risk involved, car batteries are still safer than gas tanks.

All things concerned, it seems that cars have a bright future ahead of them. The same cannot be stated for the gas-based motors, though. Electric vehicles are here, and they are here to stay.