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Comment by BobaFloutist | Hacker News Reader

Just require a class A/B license to drive anything above...I don't know, 4000lbs? Exclude batteries from the weight if that becomes a problem for electric cars.

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Although I see why you'd want to exclude batteries from weight, I'm not sure it's totally justified. After all, F = MA regardless. A friend of mine was hit by an EV and suffered broken bones, despite being belted, and on the opposite side of the car that was hit. If it had been a lighter vehicle, her injuries wouldn't have been as bad.

My main thinking was there are a lot of things weight can (somewhat) be a shorthand for: Visibility past/around the car, visibility from within the car, carbon emissions, difficulty to drive, amount of space taken to park, deadliness of collision due directly to weight, impact on roads, and deadliness of collision due to form factor.

Of those, the deadliness of collision due to weight and impact on roads are the only ones that still hold up if it's an EV. I just want to avoid a situation in which someone gets a gas engine instead of an EV of the same form factor because they would need a special license to drive the EV, which just barely gets over the weight limit. But I would also be open to this law in any form.

In the F150 Lightning the batteries even on a standard range weigh as much as a Volkswagen. The standard range batteries weigh something like 1800lbs. The ER model has about 25% more battery and the Platinum weight is like 7150lbs! So maybe around 2100lbs of that is battery?

So you’re still over 5000lbs on that monster without the batteries.

I feel confident in wagering that GP didn't intend to allow driving an F150 with a regular license.

> In the F150 Lightning the batteries even on a standard range weigh as much as a Volkswagen.

Even a Smart Fortwo is minimally 1800 lbs curb weight. How old is this Volkswagen? :)

> Exclude batteries from the weight if that becomes a problem for electric cars.

Mass is mass, whether in the form of battery or frame metal.

While encouraging lighter cars would be a huge win, carving a massive exception to heavy EVs completely defeats the point.

Mass is mass, but electric cars of the same size tend to be heavier than their ICE counterparts. If the only goal is to keep cars light, then it completely defeats the point. If the goal is to keep cars smaller, and is at all informed by emissions than it makes sense to have at least part of a carve out for batteries.

Somewhat, but not completely: Visibility and center of gravity are also safety aspects, and a big battery doesn't per se make the former worse and actually (usually) makes the latter better, being mounted under the floor. So if an ICE model has one rating (or demands one kind of license), it makes some sense not to penalise an electric version but have the same limitations for that: It is worse than its fuel-driven counterpart only in the "F = ma" sense, but not otherwise. (To take a somewhat contrived example, an Audi E-Tron is probably less likely to flip over on top of a pdestrian than an A7. Or, recent talk about battery fires notwithstanding, to catch fire in doing so.)

Why exclude ecars? They are just as dangerous.

Form factor, per TFA, is a significant part of how dangerous cars are. Ecars with a smaller form factor will weigh more, and my goal would be to target form factor through weight (since it makes it harder to find loopholes), rather than actually targeting weight itself.

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