Comment by lunias
5 days ago
I wish more people on the road realized the extent to which weight reduction improves all aspects of the driving experience... it really does compound unlike any other change that you can make to a vehicle. IMO heavy vehicles are a scam and the antithesis of the direction we should be moving.
I agree with you however I believe weight and safety are in a complex relationship right now, which has nothing to do with performance and handling.
Unfortunately I feel much less safe in a Fiat 500 when a significant portion of cars in the road weigh nearly 3 tonnes and perhaps can't even see me. I suspect most people are in SUVs because they're the pragmatic trade off between safety and convenience, not because they were hoping for excellent performance.
Yup, it's an arms race to see who can buy the biggest vehicle so that they can see over the second biggest vehicle and survive a collision with it.
But small cars are only unsafe because of that discrepancy between the largest and smallest cars, and it's not just weight, but height difference. It's possible to survive crashes at very extreme speeds in very light cars if they are designed to work that way (see: F1 crash g-force). Not so much if you literally get run over.
The culture needs to change. A vehicle is not a living room. The driver's seat is not a sofa. You don't need a TV in the dashboard. You don't need 8 seats when 7 of them are unoccupied 90% of the time. You don't need to go into debt to buy a land yacht.
So yeah... you're right, but it's a bummer that we've arrived at this situation.
And that’s why any vehicle over 2 tons should require a commercial driver’s license. Let plumbers and tree removal services drive them and not 19 year olds whose parents want their child to survive a fatal crash at the expense of everyone else in a twenty foot radius of the wreck.
With shortages in housing, why would culture change to support smaller cars when bigger cars are better for living out of vs living out of a small car is just the worst.
Your intuition is correct.
Americans’ Love Affair with Big Cars is Killing Them (https://www.economist.com/interactive/united-states/2024/08/...) - The Economist.
> In a crash, the fatality rate of the occupants of the heavy pickup truck is about half that of the compact car. But they are also far more dangerous to the fatality rate of people in other cars.
> The fatality rate is roughly seven times higher when colliding with a heavy pickup truck than with a compact car. As the weight of your car increases, the risk of killing others increases dramatically. For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles.
Unfortunately car safety is only evaluated in terms of safety for the occupants. Not safety of society.
Well, hood and grill shapes are mandated for pedestrian safety but everyone else is fucked.
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Classic prisoner's dilemma.
Everyone who can will naturally choose "defect" unless there's some sort of external coordination mechanism.
Not everyone, but far too many.
I wonder if larger/heavy non-commercial vehicles were taxed at a very high rate, would more people choose Fiat 500 sized cars?
In reality, any 'vehicle' which does not meet both passenger car safety and passenger car fuel economy standards [1] should only be allowed to be licensed as a "commercial" vehicle and should pay "commercial" rate (higher) taxes (and maybe even require a "commercial" stamp on one's drivers license to operate). If the states had done this when SUV's first appeared on the scene, we might not have nearly every car on the road being a hulking monster SUV today.
[1] which no SUV's nor trucks used as passenger cars, do because they are classed as 'utility vehicles' and have lower safety/fuel economy standards -- which is why the auto-makers went whole-hog on making/selling them, it got their CAFE averages down artificially.
In Japan there's a subset of cars called Kei or small cars, and they're very popular due to the lower tax, initial cost, fuel consumption and ease of parking.
In states of Australia registration is more expensive depending on the amount of doors and cylinders your car has. This doesn't seem to stop big cars being popular though, the #1 selling car in Australia is the Ford Ranger (which is BIG in Australian car standards). We're working on getting F150s sized vehicles even more heavily taxed, they aren't seeing wide adoption here and they're pretty highly criticised.
In cities like Rome you can see many small cars due to the nature of their streets and parking.
For highway driving these cars are a bit less comfortable but honestly modern Kei cars aren't even that bad. The Fiat 500 isn't a Kei sized car but it is also a very reasonable highway and city car, it can happily do both.
Maybe... I think it would definitely help. I think just driving a smaller car that puts you in control might cause a lot of people to switch. I know that when I've done the opposite; gone from a very performance oriented car to a random person's SUV, I've felt extremely unsafe comparatively in breaking, merging, changing lanes, parking, etc. etc. I think most people just have little experience to compare it to anymore.
I also think it's odd that people don't already choose other options w/o a tax in place, considering the price of a bigger vehicle is almost always just going to be higher because of materials and a bunch of other factors.
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It’s going to have to be sorted at the DMV.
You take a defensive driving course, I’ll let you drive a tank down the road. But my neighbor’s kids should not be behind the wheel of a death dealer. Those vehicles were meant for skilled laborers, not Sally who is on her phone while driving.
Tax SUVs out of existence.
A basic BMW 5 series is over 2 tonnes, with the top spec model tipping the scales at 2.5 tonnes. I mean I agree with the general sentiment but it's not just SUVs that need to go on a diet. Everything is getting heavier and heavier and heavier.
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Ironically, they've been taxed into existence.
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Weight is not the only thing that matters though. You also need to consider center of gravity and wheel base. A YJ Jeep Wrangler and a Honda Fit both weigh around 2700 lbs and they even have similar wheel bases but the driving experience between those 2 is night and day. A Honda Fit can take a turn at speed without feeling like you're going to go flying. You'll feel like you're able to flip making a turn going 20 mph in a YJ.
This is why the first performance mod that most people put on their cars is an adjustable coil over suspension. Dropping the car down by an inch or 2 changes has just as much of an impact as shedding some weight.
Ironically, most people put lift kits on Jeeps but that also usually comes with widening the wheel base and putting on larger wheels/tires.
Lifting an off road vehicle isn't ironic at all, nearly every characteristic that makes a vehicle good on road makes it bad off road and vise versa.
Increased height makes for increased ground clearance and improved break over angle. Sway bars are another suspension component that's great for reducing body roll on road at speed, but reduces articulation and ground contact off road. Differential lockers also negatively impact turning radius, and cause tire chirp, wear, and oversteer under throttle on road, while increasing traction off road.
What's silly is daily driving an off road vehicle on road, especially if you never take it off road.
You are correct, ideally you would do both. My car is lowered on coilovers, I also have front and rear sway bars, but weight reduction is so much more than just handling.
I didn't realize that Jeep was so light... pretty nice actually, but yeah, that's just an application mismatch. People buy Jeeps that will never see even a dirt road in their lives. Then they get on a dirt road once or twice and say, "Look what it can do!" Sure... a rally car would be much better. In order for the Jeep to come into its own you need to be doing something that requires ground clearance... that's basically their singular purpose: rock crawling (which almost no one does).
The Jeep YJ he is talking about is an 80s design, and some models topped 3200lb by the end of the run. So he is comparing the weight and handling of a car from the 80s to a car from the 2000s at the earliest (although the curb weight he cites means that the fit he is talking about would have to be a later model, from 2015 or later).
The modern Jeep Wrangler, and the one that would be contemporary to the Honda Fit weighs in at 4,000 lbs in the 2-door base model or significantly more depending on options.
If you compare a YJ to a Honda Civic of the same era, you see that the 1986 civic was 1800 lbs up against a 1986 YJ at 2800 lbs.
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> Ironically, most people put lift kits on Jeeps but that also usually comes with widening the wheel base and putting on larger wheels/tires.
That's not ironic. That's just caring more about the looks and you like that look. And looks > handling for that person
It's not at all about looks, it's about a different kind of handling, for off road, that's mutually exclusive with on road handling.
Yes, some people choose to emulate off road appearances, such as with fake bead locks and then only ever drive their vehicle on road. That doesn't discount the fact that there are a great many explicit choices you can make in designing and building a vehicle that sacrifice on road performance for off road performance.
Absolutely and on top of that far lower pollution from tyre and brake dust, and less damaging to the road top surface.
The weight difference would make an unmeasurable difference in those things.
The weight savings for similar power output to current PMSM motors is roughly the weight of a passenger per motor. As others have pointed out the savings become cumulative and beget more savings in other vehicle systems. So yes the difference would indeed positively affect those things.
Driving Volkswagen e-up for the first time was a very unique experience to me. My brain needed to adjust that a car can be that nimble and responsive due to its small size/weight and instant torque from the electric motor.
I went from a 2021 Opel Mokka (4.2m long, 1350kg) to a 2024 Volvo EX30 (4.2m long, 2000kg).
It was an absolute shock the first time I braked in the Volvo, not to mention trying to take a corner.
> I wish more people on the road realized the extent to which weight reduction improves all aspects of the driving experience
This is a blanket statement and completely untrue. Good driving experience is directly correlated to TRACTION, not just weight. And traction isn't just a function of weight - it also is affected by center of gravity, friction between the wheels and the road. Traction is what gives you the perception of being in control of the car.
I used to own two cars of the exact same model - one petrol and one diesel. The petrol is lighter in weight, about 100+ kgs lighter than the diesel variant. And the driving experience on that is slightly scary especially on roads with strong winds. In fact, it is so light that if you drive over tiny puddles or rumbles strips, the car will sway sideways. The diesel always feels more planted because it is front-heavy, thus adding more traction to the front wheels (both are FWDs). I always prefer the diesel for longer drives because of the heft and confidence it provides.
I get what you're saying, but tire technology has improved traction so greatly in the last decade that we can definitely take the slight loss in maximum theoretical traction for the massive benefits in other areas. There is also the question of what "maximum traction" is... what scenario are we talking about? Straight line acceleration from a dig or skidpad turning at a high speed? If we're turning at all then the momentum (which increases w/ mass) of the vehicle is what pulls it off course and causes the tires to break traction.
I also drive a FWD (a quite spicy one) and I break traction all the time, not because of weight, but because of torque. You can modulate torque, not weight. The biggest traction increases that I made on my FWD were when I put on sticky summer tires, the second was subtly changing front control arm geometry and bushings, and the third was adding stiffer engine mounts.
Agreed on getting tossed around in a light car though, not much can be done about that... other than making the roads better and lowering the center of gravity.
It's ~all battery weight, though. This doesn't really move the needle.
Curious what you mean? Surely more weight moves the weight needle?
1% or whatever just isn't a substantial savings.