Real-time crash identification using connected electric vehicle operation data

•An accurate vehicle crash identification algorithm is developed based on machine learning techniques using electric vehicles’ operation data.•Data before and after the battery disconnection is retrieved for feature extraction.•The AdaBoost algorithm is used to classify whether a potential crash event is a real crash using the constructed features.•The model has an F1 score of 0.98 on testing data for crash classification, and the identified crash times are all within 10 s around the true crash times.