Fleets are going electric for reasons that have nothing to do with safety: running cost, emissions indoors, maintenance, and the fact that the trucks are simply nicer to operate. The safety consequence arrives anyway, and it arrives on the pedestrian side of the aisle rather than in the cab.
The warning system nobody installed
Walk a floor that runs combustion trucks and you will notice that people react before they look. An engine changes pitch, and a person steps aside without deciding to. That reaction is not in anyone’s safety programme, nobody trained it, and no risk assessment lists it as a control. It has been doing real work for decades regardless.
An electric truck removes it. The truck is still four to nine thousand pounds of steel travelling at walking pace or faster, but the cue that used to arrive early now arrives late, or not at all over the noise of a conveyor. Nothing about the hazard changed. What changed is the pedestrian’s warning.
Why this shows up in the injury data as struck-by
The federal severe injury dataset behind this site records 4,928 forklift-involved reports across 21 states between 2015 and 2024. Our snapshot keeps the counts, the source of injury and the narrative text; it has not been coded by mechanism, so we cannot tell you from our own data what share of those reports were struck-by. What we can say is where OSHA’s own guidance puts the emphasis. The powered industrial truck standard and the agency’s forklift eTool single out two mechanisms for pedestrians: people struck by a moving truck, and people caught between a truck and something solid. Both are proximity failures. Both depend on someone knowing a truck is there in time to move.
That is why quiet matters more than it sounds like it should. A control that degrades the pedestrian’s own detection makes the two mechanisms OSHA warns about more likely, without changing anything about how the truck is driven.
The rules do not cover it
There is no clause in the powered industrial truck standard about electric trucks being too quiet. The standard requires warning equipment appropriate to the workplace, which is the phrase doing all the work here: a horn the operator has to choose to press is not the same control as an engine noise nobody has to choose. Our plain-English guide to the rules covers what is actually mandated, and this is not on the list.
That leaves it to the site to decide, which in practice means it gets decided by whoever notices. Sites that electrify without revisiting pedestrian controls have quietly removed a layer and replaced it with nothing.
What actually replaces it
Three options, in ascending order of how much they intervene.
Projected light. A blue spot or a red side-zone throws the truck’s presence onto the floor ahead of it, which is where a pedestrian is already looking. It is the cheapest replacement for engine noise and it does not depend on anyone hearing anything. It also fails in bright ambient light, so it suits indoor aisles better than a sunny dock apron. See our blue light guide.
White noise and modulated alarms. Broadband reversing alarms are more directional than a tonal beep, so a pedestrian can tell where the sound is coming from rather than just that something is beeping somewhere. They still add noise to a floor, and the more trucks you fit, the faster people stop hearing them: the trap we covered in alarm fatigue.
Detection. A system that knows a person is there and warns both sides, or slows the truck, does not care whether anyone heard the motor. This is the layer that genuinely replaces the lost cue rather than approximating it, and the choice between tag-based and camera-based detection is covered on our systems pages.
The practical order
If you are mid-conversion, do the cheap thing first and the real thing second. Fit projected lights on the electric trucks as they arrive, because that closes the gap immediately and costs little. Then score the site properly: the Risk Scorer weights pedestrian exposure and blind intersections hardest, which is exactly the profile that determines whether lights are enough or whether you need detection.
One more thing worth doing while the fleet is in flux: ask the operators. They are the people who notice that pedestrians used to move earlier, and they usually notice it months before it shows up in a near-miss log. Treat the conversion as the trigger to re-walk the routes. A floor plan that was safe with audible trucks is not automatically safe with silent ones, and the cheapest moment to find that out is before the first near miss rather than after.
