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johnea

This whole news wave seems like propoganda to me.

This is all about the weight of the vehicle, it has nothing to do with the fuel.

This will be the same for a premium escalade:

Premium Luxury 4x4 2022 Cadillac Escalade Gross weight, 7,600 lbs

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It does seem a bit propaganda but I think it highlights a larger issue and doesn’t go far enough! So many cars are so much bigger now. The entire guard rail system probably needs to be reexamined in the face of new vehicle sizes.

Alternatively we could fix the massive regulatory issues that lead to this.

1. Smaller vehicles have tighter emissions requirements and those requirements increase every year. So manufacturers of ICE vehicles have tended towards larger and larger vehicles year after year.

2. In the wake of Japanese auto manufacturers eating US manufacturer's lunch in the US we banned entire swaths of vehicles (minitrucks, microvans, kei cars). Because of this, in practice vehicles below a certain size that are produced by some of our main non-domestic (and maybe also domestic but I'm not sure) auto manufacturers (toyota, honda, mazda, nissan, subaru, etc) are illegal in the US unless they are a model that is 25 years old.

So we've made it impractical or even in some cases impossible to even build, sell, and market smaller but just as practical vehicles. If we fix that issue first, I imagine the market will eventually trend back towards smaller, cheaper, practical, and more efficient vehicles.

I suspect there's going to be a lot of cultural resistance to any attempt to introduce smaller vehicles to US marker right now. Starting from inclusivity arguments centered around smaller cars not being able to fit "people of all sizes" and ending with safety concerns where key cars would just feel unsafe on any kind of american highway sitting in a 6000+lbs lifted F-250's blindspot.

I think this ship has sailed and there's no coming down in vehicle sizes in US any time soon.

I think there's an argument to be made that large vehicles should face tolls when entering the city. Small vehicles as well but not nearly as substantial. I think some cities already do this to be fair. It's a good way to incentivise that local traffic be kept in as small vehicles as is practical.

> Starting from inclusivity arguments centered around smaller cars not being able to fit "people of all sizes"

Idk. I don't think there's substantially different cabin sizes past a certain point. The space any given seat has in an escalade or F-150 really isn't that different to the space a significantly smaller RAV4 has. And even between say a RAV4 and a camry the amount of space isn't massively different (however the rav does have more space).

This isn't to say that you should be banning normal sized vehicles but there really should be some type of disincentive for 4000+ lb vehicles and maybe an incentive for ultralight vehicles as well.

"In the wake of Japanese auto manufacturers eating US manufacturer's lunch in the US we banned entire swaths of vehicles"

Those are safety requirement issues. That's why classics get an exemption. You can't domestically manufacturer simular vehicles because they wouldn't meet the standards either.

But that's the issue. Those cars are legal in basically every jurisdiction except the US (they have equivalent classes in the EU as well).

We basically set the laws such that their niche wasn't viable despite being perfectly safe.

"despite being perfectly safe"

I think there's some background missing here on a definition and the restrictions of those classes.

Or maybe cars for commuting shouldn't be 7,500 lb?

In Europe car over 3500kg requires another driver's license class. It is not a car, it is a lorry!

3500kg translates to ~7716lbs, so their comment (and the Rivian covered by this topic) still applies within your confines.

It's 3500kg including payload, so the car in question would be essentially unusable under the rule.

Or more simply just taxed like commercial vehicles. Make the tabs cost $1000 per year for anything with weight or height exceeding some limit.

Yeah, this is what I meant.

Slap taxes above a certain weight, and you will see manufacturers drop the weight to right below the threshold faster than you can blink.

Most states do their for pickup trucks regarding registration fees. It's about double the registration cost, but doesn't really factor in to most people's decision.

That's funny because when car manufacturers decided to do universal cars (versus the old California-edition/49-state cars), the whole country went up in arms about how CARB was costing them so much and how "Commiefornia" was dictating their lives. Despite the additional cost being 300-600usd (depending on the vehicle) or so.

Most of the car people were concerned about quality and not cost. Same reason people still opt for the non-CA brake cleaner and other solvents.

When quality comes at the expense of pollutants, people measure their own priorities.

The point is, you're welcome to shop for non-CA items, if they're legal in your region.

It's worth noting that EVs aren't the only vehicles that crest the 5,000-pound mark. Any full-sized, heavy-duty pickup on the market will easily surpass 6,000 pounds, with some like the Ford F-350 and Silverado HD 2500 even exceeding 7,000 pounds. Even the Chevy Suburban, a fairly common vehicle for families, can tip the scales at over 6,000 pounds depending on its powertrain. But EVs are universally heavier than gas cars of equal dimensions thanks to their batteries, and many of them are already beyond the limit.

> But EVs are universally heavier than gas cars of equal dimensions thanks to their batteries, and many of them are already beyond the limit.

And this definitely matters. The energy required to stop a vehicle is a linear correlation to the mass, and our ability to stop vehicles quickly still relies on creating heat using friction; it has not progressed nearly as quickly as our ability to accelerate vehicles.

"and our ability to stop vehicles quickly still relies on creating heat using friction; it has not progressed nearly as quickly as our ability to accelerate vehicles."

We've had a lot of innovation in braking - including better tire compounds, disc brakes, anti lock, better brake compounds and design, etc. Most people just don't talk about them or compare braking stats.

There have been some advances (fewer in recent years, most of the technologies you've listed are decades old), but braking distances for consumer vehicles is still in the 130' range at 60 mph. This is better than the 200' from a decade ago, but still significant.

Consumer vehicles now able to accelerate to 60 mph in 2 seconds, but it can still take them up to 3 seconds to get back to 0.

Note: These are based on a safety article from Edmonds, 'Keep your Distance', who uses a distance of 132' with a braking time of 3.1 seconds. They appear to be measuring a car at the lighter end of the spectrum, as other articles I found still refer to 200'+ at the heavy end of the spectrum.

Many of the technologies I've listed are continually improved. They're not just a once and done, especially for things like compounds.

Average braking distances for any passenger vehicle class isn't even close to 200 feet, not even for pickup trucks.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-safety/best-and-wor...

Many of the fastest cars also have the best brakes. There are a number of them that can even get under 100'.

https://www.motortrend.com/features/20-best-60-to-0-distance...

If we want to talk trends in poor braking, we can look at Tesla and EVs in general. In many cases EVs select low rolling resistance tires with poor performance. The top quality low rolling resistance tires can be good, but many EVs have tight margins and lower end tires with less grip. It's not just weight. You can compare similar weight vehicles like a Tesla and a Silverado, and the conventional vehicle generally brakes better.

Even a junker can lock its wheels under hard braking, right?

AFAIK the limiting factors are tire grip, ABS control and of course mass.

I wouldn't assume that. I've definitely been in a few junkers that couldn't do it on warm, clean, and dry pavement. Although you've already got pretty good braking performance in those conditions anyways.

Even then though, the travel of the brake pedal may be such that the time to full braking power is significant. Fortunately brakes are fairly straightforward and getting them back to good performance usually isn't a complex or expensive process.

That's not true, even in hard braking a large fraction of the kinetic energy is converted back via regen braking.

Hybrids and EVs can also stop (to some extent) with regenerative braking.

"This is all about the weight of the vehicle, it has nothing to do with the fuel."

It's not all weight, but also energy and density. It's slightly related to fuel, at least until batteries get significantly lighter.

Gross weights are misleading in this conversation because most passenger vehicles are not driving nor tested at their gross, but only slightly above curb weight.

The Rivian's _curb_ weight is 7k. Not that the Escalade is light, but in its diesel, long wheel-base version it's 6.2k.

> This is all about the weight of the vehicle, it has nothing to do with the fuel.

It does in the sense that an EV weighs 50% more than its ICE comparable. (For example, the Volvo XC40 ICE is 1,690 p̶o̶u̶n̶d̶s̶ kg, while the XC40 Recharge is 2,520 kb with battery modules.)

You should double check those numbers. The XC40 combustion car is 3800-3950 lbs. The EV version is 4600-4800 lbs. 20% more, which is certainly something but not nearly 50%.

Comparable cars in the sedan category are only typically 10-20% more than their combustion counterparts, unless they’re just designed poorly.

Thanks, I corrected the units in the post above. Source: https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-/media/applications/pdps..., page 12.

Page 12 says 2170kg for the EV version. Not 25xx.

I added the weight of the battery modules (listed on the same line) because https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/models/xc40-rec... lists Total Weight as 2480 kg (so within 40 kg).

That total weight is the GVWR number, which is intended to be the maximum design weight, beyond which the manufacturer will tell you you’ve overloaded the vehicle. It’s not the actual weight of the car.

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