Comment by brucethemoose2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brucethemoose2 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

My beef isn't with EVs, but ballooning car mass in general.

Modern cars are just so huge, and have so much junk in them. I get a large fraction of the mass is for safety, but (for the same money) I'd much rather have a tighter, lighter, stripped down car than a clunky infotainment system, seat coolers, fragile wood trim, motorized ac vents and handles. I'll even sacrifice some sound deadening and rear AC.

And EVs, of course, just make this issue worse. Their "fuel" is such a large fraction of their mass that they more-or-less suffer from the tyranny of the rocket equation, where they need more battery to haul more stuff around, which in turn requires more battery, and now the chassis and suspension needs to be reinforced to handle the weight, and now that needs more battery and so on.

If de-contented "race edition" cars are any indication some of those extras being stripped amounts to a 100lbs at most. Only cheap way to reel in the mass while keeping the safety is to make them smaller.

Smaller, or slower. So many cars are out there running engines that are far too big, capacity that they never actually use. North American drivers seem to want cars that glide away from a stop or pass another vehicle without making a fuss, resulting in overcapacity engines. If we allow engines to actually rev to their potential, we can all do with much smaller overall designs.

I dunno. If you look at modern supercars, they are loaded with luxury stuff, and their mass is noticeably higher than supercars of old when that shouldn't be the case.

I suspect the "race edition" stripped version of many cars are still hauling around the fundamental design features they need to accommodate luxury features.

> a large fraction of the mass is for safety

To protect against other high-mass vehicles?

Kind of goes to show that the entire "I bought an SUV so that I feel safe" is a manufactured problem.

I always like to quantify things so people get real context.

https://www.admiral.com/magazine/guides/motor/electric-car-m...

> On average, an EV weighs 200-300kg more than a petrol car because of the weight of the battery and electric motors.

Edit: apparently giving factual information related to the discussion warrants downvotes in HN these days

Reply on news.ycombinator.com