Hacker News Reader

Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

I'm somewhere in the middle, young enough that almost everything I've seen new is disposable crap (including the tools), old enough that I have had an interest in things from before and noticed that they really were built much better, or at least heavier, back then.

I've made the comment on here before that I believe it's short term energy optimisation, in that it used to be seen as reasonable to much heavier objects around. We've made everything so light we've lost the infrastructure for moving heavy stuff around when we might need to.

Kids today have no concept of how heavy workstations, TVs or monitors used to be, and they think it's exaggeration. Let alone tools, cars, appliances etc.

View on HN

Yes.. try moving that 36 inch Sony Trinitron from the car inside the house.. weighs 200 pounds+ IIRC....you need at least 2 strong people

I remember the Sun monitors (21" I think) were about 80 lbs. I've read that part of that was a metal frame to hold all of the wires in front of the screen.

They were fun monitors - we had a lab full of them, they would degauss on startup, and the degausser would induct into the monitor next to it (and a little bit into the monitor after that).

Right. Bought two out of a University lab and lived in an apartment six stories high with only stairs. Moved out those monitors even and they were more difficult to get down than the couch...

Don't let me get started about fixed frequency, X11 modeline guessing (wrong of course) and needing a second monitor to even get back to the original config.

The weight from a CRT is mostly about the amount of glass required to keep the atmosphere out, as it's essentially a vacuum bottle with better marketing. On that 21" display, you've got about 6000 pounds of force trying to push the face inward, not to mention the sides, neck, etc.

Yeah, these monitors were a bit heavier than most consumer 21" monitors at the time. We also got Viewsonic monitors for PCs, which were lighter. At the time, I had assumed the additional weight was from extra shielding, but I later read that some of the weight difference was a metal frame holding the wires. The trinitron had a bunch of vertical wires instead of a grid of holes on the front - If I remember right, they'd shimmer a little if you smacked the side of the monitor with your hand.

It's possible they also had more glass than typical for a 21" monitor, I don't recall if they were any flatter than the Viewsonics or not.

BWAAAA

I wish I still had one around, just to degauss it occasionally.

Cars haven't gotten any lighter. Rather the reverse. Battery packs are quite heavy.

Even non-EVs have gotten quite a bit heavier due to the inclusion of more structural safety features and creature comforts.

arguably the biggest driver is simply the cost of oil. crumple zones made of styrofoam and plastic bumpers arn't making things heavy.

e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2019/01/03/new-ve...

That article is being disingenuous and wrong. It's comparing the lightest possible Civic configuration with the heaviest possible Accord of a different body type.

The 2000 Accord sedan is 2,712lbs, not 2,987lbs (which would be the wagon).

The 2019 Civic sedan is 2,743–2,923lbs depending on equipment/trim.

So yes, the Civic compared to an older car of similar size did get heavier.

The Miata proves that cars don't have to be heavier, but the Miata also took advantage of much more aluminum compared to the older models. Maybe mainstream cars should also switch to use more aluminum to keep weight down, and you're right that the reason they don't is because oil is cheap enough where weight isn't a priority enough to use more expensive aluminum instead of steel.

> That article is being disingenuous and wrong. It's comparing the lightest possible Civic configuration with the heaviest possible Accord of a different body type.

Good to know.

> So yes, the Civic compared to an older car of similar size did get heavier.

If the minimum is 1% heavier and the maximum is 2% lighter then I would not say "did get heavier".

You can only make the argument that the Civic is "2% lighter" when it is being compared to a wagon; apples to oranges comparison that invalidates the whole comparison.

They picked that specific year Accord because it's the same size as a sedan as that specific year Civic sedan, so it makes no sense to then compare the weight to the much larger Accord wagon variant. You might as well compare the sedan to a crossover to argue that the sedan didn't get heavier.

The range is 1% heavier to 7% heavier comparing the sedan to the sedan. Both ends of the range are heavier, so "did get heavier" is an accurate statement.

Okay I misread you then, but you're saying the 2000 Accord sedan only has one weight, while the Civic has a several percent range? If that's right then do we know which Civic trim is equivalent to the Accord?

If we know that trim is worth at least 6%, and we don't know how to align the cars, then the confidence interval around "1% to 7%" extends far enough to overlap some negative percents.

A 2000 Honda Accord and a 2019 Honda Civic have nearly identical dimensions. Car models generally get bigger with each generation over time.

Another thing not mentioned by this poor article (everything forbes does these days is hot garbage), is that vehicles which are heavier do damage quartically proportional to their weight - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

So the ever increasing weight of cars, trucks, SUVs, and especially semi-trucks is also responsible for our roads being shit, full of potholes, and expensive to fix.

Surely they do damage proportional to the fourth power of the contact pressure on the tire contact patch, not the fourth power of the overall vehicle weight, right? So adding axles or wider tires etc mitigates this.

Exactly because of the fourth power low, almost all of the road damage comes from the heaviest vehicles: class 7 and 8 trucks as well as buses etc. Even the heaviest passenger vehicles are negligible by comparison. And the weight of semi-trucks hasn't been "ever increasing": normal maximum weight has been fixed at 80,000 pounds for decades.

In some areas the roads are shit due to weather conditions, mainly frost heaves. This has little to do with vehicle damage.

It's also due to the size of the vehicles that are popular today. SUVs and pickup trucks(used as family vehicles).

However the increase has also been offset with weight savings in other places.

- The use of aluminum in suspension components and body panels

- Long ago the move to unibody over body on frame for small cars

- smaller engines, V8s weigh more than an inline 4 cylinder and require heavier suspension components.

For example a 1989 Lamborghini Countach 25th weighs around 3200lbs which is slightly heavier than a 2022 VW Golf GTI (3150~)

I see comments that blame safety technology (electronic components) for increasing the weight of a car but a blind spot monitoring system probably weighs less than 5lbs. A rear camera is also around that.

Structural safety and airbags do add to a cars weight but these changes have made cars extremely safe.

Almost like changing the energy source causes a step change in energy optimization priorities . . .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com