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Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

Good. The Bolt is a great form factor. We need to stop this never-ending race to get the biggest and heaviest cars for no reason in the US. We already have people driving trucks around lifted beyond belief with beds that never get used. The excess weight and size not only makes them harder to control but also much more dangerous when they collide with people or other cars and more damaging to our roads leading to more need for constant construction and bad effects on our climate due to the pollution created to maintain roads.

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>Good. The Bolt is a great form factor. We need to stop this never-ending race to get the biggest and heaviest cars for no reason in the US.

This is basically a fringe position. According to wikipedia the Bolt is classed as a "subcompact" car. In the late 2010s basically every car manufacturer exited out of the subcompact segment[1] because of lackluster sales. At least in North America, almost nobody wants subcompact cars.

>We already have people driving trucks around lifted beyond belief with beds that never get used.

Every time this sort of conversation comes up, pickup trucks are always brought up as the problem. Yet, if you look at sales data[2], their market share only rose modestly. Arguably they're just returning to historical trends after fuel prices came back down in the late 2010s. The fastest growing segment is actually crossovers. They come with much of the same concerns you raised about pickup trucks, but I suppose they're way harder to demonize so nobody really talks about them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcompact_car#2000s_to_presen...

[2] https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/research/the-rise-of-th...

People try to sell this as a manufacturer decision, but they were really brought kicking and screaming into the current market. They all dumped huge amounts of money into developing updated small car platforms in the mid-2000s only to have them all wither on the vine. And companies that didn't offer SUVs or crossovers in their lineup got hammered.

> pickup trucks are always brought up as the problem

Don't you know the outgroup is bad and the cause of our problems? /s

And they wonder why people in flyover states dislike them.

> They come with much of the same concerns you raised about pickup trucks

I disagree strongly with that. these are very different vehicles.

Crossovers are regulated like cars, built like cars, and anre often are roughly the same size as equivalent cars. They’re just lifted slightly off the ground (in some cases barely) and given a hatchback.

As an example, compare dimensions of a Toyota Camry to a Toyota RAV4. Most of the exterior dimensions are almost identical. The RAV4 is notably a little bit longer outside of the wheelbase and only about 200 pounds heavier.

I think the distinction people are grasping at here are monocoque constructed vehicles (the vast majority of cars/crossovers/SUVs on sale today) and ladder-frame/body on frame construction - most trucks and some really big SUVs/offroaders.

It's the body on frame vehicles that end up being heavy and compromised much of the time - its a way of manufacturing a vehicle that stretches back practically to the stone age. I also agree crossovers do not deserve to be compared to body-on-frame construction.

In interests of not upsetting anyone - I also agree there are some limited usecases body on frame is better! But for most private passenger transport, a monocoque construction will have advantages - size, weight, fuel economy (function of weight reduction), driving dynamics, pedestrian safety etc. Body on frame can also make it easier for a commercial vehicle to offer bed customization options, given the car structurally is just a pair of rails on wheels that can be extended or shortened as application demands. A monocoque generally can't change its length as easily.

There are new pickups flirting with monocoque construction - the Honda Ridgeline, Ford Maverick, Hyundai Santa Cruz, famously the Tesla Cybertruck...

Trucks need to haul and tow. You need a real steel frame to do that.

The cybertruck will manage 14,000lbs on a monocoque. Just because traditionally this hasn't been the case doesn't mean you can't make a monocoque that can tow. The truck industry has had little incentive to innovate here until very recently as for 40 years vintage body-on-frame architectures have sold and sold. As I said - I'm not disagreeing that body on frame does have some legitimate use cases today - it's just that with modern construction techniques it's much more rarely going to be private transport.

I think if someone tries to tow 14k lbs with a cybertruck, it's going to be ripped in half.

It's literally rated for 14,000 lbs, so no, it won't.

Rated by who? Because I don't believe Tesla's claim because it seems absolutely outlandish. They would have been building F150's like this decades ago if it were true.

Has a car manufacturer ever lied about rated tow weights in recent memory? I genuinely don't see the incentive - it would just lead to crashes, warranty claims and eventually a class action lawsuit, or worse if deaths resulted. People rely on these numbers to drive safely.

14,000 lbs is absolutely within realms of normal/possible for a nearly 20 foot long 6000lb truck - its more or less exactly the same as high-spec Ford trucks.

It's almost a given one of the first things youtube is going do with a production Cybertruck is find something that weighs almost exactly 14000 lbs and try to tow it up and down the steepest inclines they can find.

Has Tesla ever promised something and not delivered, I think that's the real question. Another question is, how often are Teslas totaled for what would be a minor accident in another vehicle?

All that twisting and bending force being applied to a unibody, I can't see it ending well.

Tesla's Model X (depending on options) has a towing capacity of 5k lbs [1]. As far as I can tell, nobody is claiming that this is false and there's a few anecdotes of people with 5k campers they tow.

So, afaik, historical claims by Tesla on towing capacity are true so there seems to be more reason to believe a future towing claim is accurate based on previous towing claims than believe it's false because previous non-towing claims have been false.

[1]: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-7A684E2...

5k on a unibody is standard. I'm just talking about feature claims in general.

I think we're going to see Cybertrucks with totally trashed frames if they try to go live with 14k loads.

It's standard in the sense that the vast majority of unibody vehicles produced today have a 5k towing limit.

It’s not even available for sale.

I ran into one problem with monocoque/unibody construction. I ran my wife's Honda Pilot into another vehicle on icy roads. Around 5 mpg, direct T-Bone. We drove home about 75 miles just fine. No leaking fluids. About 35,000 miles total on the car. Just smashed in the front right a little. Insurance totaled it and gave me $18,500. Body shop told me monocoque/unibody construction is very difficult and expensive to repair. Evidently, for anything more than plastic fender-benders, they're very frequently "totaled" instead of repaired.

I think this is a very minor downside of this style of construction.

Another aspect is that repairability of the frame isn’t as important as preventing injury to the occupants.

You know what’s more expensive than a totaled $18,500 vehicle? Hospital bills.

I am not convinced in that circumstance I would have been worse off in an F-150 or any other modern body on frame construction.

What about the bolt EUV? It’s not a large car by any means but it is the size of a very small SUV meaning it is just on the edge of the smallest car a US consumer will willingly buy.

Whereas Ford replaced the much-loved, and best-selling Fiesta with their fugly SUV Puma.

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