TELO Trucks introduces Madan Gopal, a vehicle safety engineer with over 35 years of experience, the last 15 of which were at Tesla working on programs including the Model S, Model 3, Cybertruck, Semi, and robo-taxi. He retired in 2024 and joined TELO as a consultant in September 2025.
His core argument for small EVs is structural. A traditional ICE vehicle has a 300 to 400 kilogram engine block sitting up front on two rails, so energy in a crash has to travel through those rails and not much else. TELO's design uses a dual load path, routing crash energy through both the lower structure and a mid-belt line that connects to the A-pillar, distributing the forces more efficiently in a smaller footprint. Electric motors, by contrast, are roughly the size of a watermelon and weigh around 40 to 50 kilograms, which gives engineers far more flexibility.
Gopal also clarifies a widely misunderstood aspect of crash testing. Official tests from NHTSA and IIHS are run at 35 to 40 mph not because cars only crash at those speeds, but because that range covers roughly 99% of the cumulative crash frequency distribution. Designing for 70 mph would require making vehicles so stiff that they become dangerous to smaller cars, cyclists, and pedestrians in lower-speed collisions, where most crashes actually happen. Kinetic energy scales with velocity squared, so going from 40 to 50 mph adds 25 to 30 percent more energy, not just 10 mph worth.
On aftermarket modifications: adding a heavy steel bumper changes the vehicle's crash structure in ways its airbag calibration was never designed for. The airbags may not deploy when needed, or may deploy in a parking lot fender-bender where deployment at over 100 mph is not something you want. Similarly, custom seat covers can block side airbags embedded in the seat that deploy in under 25 milliseconds, roughly a tenth of the time it takes to blink.