>The curb weight of the most popular vehicle in the USA, the Ford F-150
It's worth noting that even though the "most popular vehicle" is a pickup truck, pickup trucks aren't the most popular type of car on the road, making up for less than 20% of vehicles.
EVs account for 1% of vehicles, and only 7.6% of new cars. If trucks haven’t been a major issue at 20% of the vehicle population, making a big deal out of EVs seems a bit overblown.
Does this also mean they don’t care about semi trucks going through guardrails? Semi trucks account for 10% of highway miles traveled, which is also more than EVs.
That's a bit disingenuous when SUVs are another 40% of the market, making ~60% of vehicles sold still the size and weight of trucks, with or without beds.
"SUVs" include crossovers, and they're by far more popular than truck based SUVs. The best selling SUVs (and crossovers) is the Toyota RAV4, Honda CR-V, and Nissan Rogue, all of which top out at around 3500 lb.
> Who funded the University of Nebraska to specifically test EVs in an improbable perpendicular collision with a guardrail?
The US Army - who use the same barriers at road blocks. It looks like the research was really about heavier vehicles. The focus on EVs does ignore the general trend to larger vehicles as you say.
Guardrails are typically installed such that a head on is almost impossible - they are designed for more of a glancing blow that redirects you back to the road. In that application I've seen them keep a fully loaded semi from crossing a medium into oncoming traffic.
To get a head on at speed you would need to going across the road - maybe in the desert it is flat enough to get your car up to speed when going perpendicular to the road, but I'm not sure why you would try that.
The other option is hit the start of the guard rail - while this can happen, the start of guardrails are generally angled so this is still a redirecting blow not head on. Where they cannot be the start is covered by rubber dumpers to slow you down before you hit it.
This is true, but they are also designed with a maximum deflection for a worst case head-on crash.
Typical one-rail guard rails should not deflect more than 2-4ft, while the cable style you see in interstate medians are designed for something like 5-12 ft.
For those comparing this (EVs) to trucks, the difference is center of gravity. Even if a rail is only designed for a given weight, much effort went into containing trucks and other high center of gravity vehicles. The rail catches the vehicle and holds it down, redirecting excess energy into the ground. (Its why cable-styled rails have a gap below the top cable. Others have similar features.)
But what they are not designed for is excess weight with a low center of gravity, where the excess energy just blows through the rail and can't easily be redirected in a more safe direction.
Is it a head on collision? The first angle in the video makes it look like it is, but the second angle makes it clearer that its actually hitting from an angle. It seems to be close to a 45 degree angle, which is slightly closer to a real world scenario.
Electric cars tend to be much heavier than ICEs. While your model 3 is lighter than the limit it is a small car that is just barely under the limit. While much larger F150 starts out at only slightly heavier.
EVs are heavier but by far the heaviest vehicles sold by volume are ICE SUVs and trucks. This should be a neutral measure based on the risky attribute since heavier vehicles are more dangerous to everyone regardless of the power source.
There are already a few EV trucks and SUVs - and they are significantly heavier in general. Maybe a diesel truck (which mostly doesn't even have a EV option yet) would be as heavy - I can't find any specs to compare but maybe your google-fu is better. A Tesla model3 is not much lighter than a F150 (lowest weight of the F150), but is clearly much smaller.
Yes, nobody’s arguing that EVs are light. My point was simply that because EVs are still a small percentage of the market there are more heavy ICE vehicles on the road because we’re three decades into consumers moving away from small cars. That Tesla 3 buyer was more likely to have also been considering an Escalade than a Honda Civic.
There's someone I follow on YouTube[0] who criticizes the install quality of roadside barriers, with some positive results[1], after his daughter died in a collision with an incorrectly installed guardrail.
We are shopping for a car my daughter will eventually go to college with.
My first instinct was to get a Honda Civic which was nicely in our budget and I loved driving when I was in college
But then I realized how much heavier cars have gotten, and how much of a disadvantage they are in a collision so we will be getting a heavier car. Probably a CRV though maybe we can try and make electric car work in our budget but we will see. The irony is that we would have gotten a more efficient car, except for the weight disadvantage and safety concerns because we are now pitted against electric cars that weigh so much.
As a Western European, it's crazy to me that the public transportation and road systems are so fucked up in the US that
1) Kids need a car to go college
2) When buying a car, an important criteria is how heavy it is so that if it's in crash, hopefully the other person dies and not you. Of course, no matter what will happen to cyclists or pedestrian when hit by your fuck ton killing machine
That might suggest that a car like a Tesla which is very heavy but can't crush very much thanks to the battery has an unclear safety benefit, but a truck does.
Realistically, practically nobody is going to get into a fatal crash anyway, though, so if you honestly attempt to price the difference in safety, you may come out to a few dollars. Certainly not enough to justify buying an SUV over a civic.
Literally the first line: A bigger, heavier vehicle provides better crash protection than a smaller, lighter one, assuming no other differences between them
Sure we want a car with crumble zones and airbags, but physics really comes into play: when a car weighs 3x as much as yours, in a collision you will be suddenly accelerating backwards. Brain injury at the very least is highly possible.
A Tesla X weighs as much as a Chevy Tahoe - and while large SUVs are fairly common they usually smaller like highlanders and the like.
It’s fine to price the probability low, but when you are dealing with extremely high consequences to your children, it’s hard to have a dispassionate view of the probabilities.
A Honda Civic is 2900-3100 lbs. A Honda CR-V is 3500-3600 lbs. That weight difference will not make much difference in a collision with a cyclist or pedestrian.
Even if they went with something heavier like a Tesla Model 3 (3900-4000 lbs) or a Tesla Model Y (4200-4400 lbs) or a Ford F-150 (4700 lbs) it would still not make much difference.
Yes, at a given speed a heavier vehicle will have more momentum and more kinetic energy than a lighter vehicle of the same shape, but momentum and kinetic energy aren't as directly correlated with how much a collision hurts a pedestrian as many here seem to think they are.
Once the vehicle is sufficiently more massive than the pedestrian that the collision causes very little change in the vehicle velocity a heavier vehicle at the same velocity is not really going to hurt the pedestrian more in the collision itself.
E.g., a large freight train hitting you at a slow walking pace is not going to be worse than a small car hitting you at the same speed, even though the train has way more momentum and kinetic energy. Speed that car up to highway speed and then it will greatly injure you even though it still will have much less momentum and kinetic energy than the slow train.
Much more important is the shape of the vehicle. Besides affecting what injuries are incurred from the collision itself it can affect what happens after. A shape that knocks the pedestrian away is probably safer than one that tends to draw the pedestrian to under the car where they get run over.
What does your daughter think? She's the one whos going to need to gas up and park the thing. What about the extra 5-7k the CRV would cost? Do you think she'd prefer to spend that cash another way?
> My first instinct was to get a Honda Civic which was nicely in our budget and I loved driving when I was in college...But then I realized how much heavier cars have gotten,
I can't judge. It's mostly on me that my son's first car was a 1989 Cadillac Brougham. His daily driver now is a 1963 Dart but he's looking for another Brougham.
You’ve been competing with “light” trucks on the roads for a couple decades that weigh the same or more than your average Tesla. Factor in that they have worse driver visibility, higher bumper height, and make up about 20% of the vehicles on the road and you have a much more concerning threat.
Have you seen the spiked lug nuts truckers are using on their wheels now?
I love that Americans are going full
Mad Max on their vehicles choices and it won't be long until we all have these projecting spikes, front end people crushers and heavy as possible vehicles. This winter I started driving around with a 1/4 ton of gravel in the back of my F150 just to help counter other larger trucks. Reduces handling a little but if I do get in a crash the other f150 or smaller vehicle will be toast :)
I keep seeing YouTube shorts of guys going up to highway guardrails, checking them out and discovering that they were improperly installed like no nuts or that the bolts aren’t torqued down enough. No idea why this showed up in my feed or if it’s just some weird funnel for someone’s side hustle or what.
This added weight is related to the tire eating article from a few days ago…? Also, added weight times millions of vehicles wears down roads and infrastructure more quickly, increases damage costs in simple fender benders… how much is this actually costing us?
It's barely a blip on the radar compared to the large trucking industry, whose tractor-trailers cause about 2500 times the wear and tear on road compared to a car[1].
for main roads. However for back roads and residential streets the road is designed assuming only a few semis per year (mostly moving trucks which are already lighter than average) and so the heavy car every day is a much larger share of the wear.
Road tax is paid into the general funds, same as any other taxation, and stopped being related to the maintenance of roads several generations ago.
EV drivers do pay less tax in general (including significant amounts of fuel duty not needing to be paid) but then they do far less harm to the people and environment around them too.
> Guardrails are intended to keep cars from careening off the road at critical areas, such as over bridges and waterways, near the edges of cliffs and ravines and over rocky terrain, where injury and death in an off-the-road crash are much more likely. ... “Guardrails are kind of a safety feature of last resort,” Brooks said.
From what I've observed this is wrong. Guardrails seem to be used semi haphazardly along roads in places where it wouldn't be the end of the world to go into the ditch. On a bridge, or a median, or elsewhere where going outside the road boundary could be particularly dangerous, they use much better reinforced walls.
I'm certainly adverse to the high volume of visibility killing, oversized vehicles - but the video card shows a truck smashing thru a jersey wall.
I used to open closed roads by pushing jersey wall sections with my 1969 Delta 98. JWs already seemed persuadable when confronted with a weighty personal vehicle (granted, those JWs weren't joined).
I'd like to know the failure rate of super-weight vehicles against corrugated rail or cable+post guardrail system.
Have you ever tried to rent a car for long trips? To rent a minivan is $100/day and my vacation is going to cover several days. My mom lives 300 miles away - close enough to make this trip over a weekend every month. The savings in rental costs more than half the payment on a new minivan, and with your plan I'd still need to pay for the EV I use most days.
Rental cars also have damage clauses. When I own it I don't worry about what my kids are doing to the car - as anyone with kids knows they will do something.
Sounds like my example scenario would not work for you. That being said, renting may not be necessary, since many people already own gas powered cars, and most electric vehicle owners already have another car. Since you already have a gas-powered car that can do the trip, it might make sense for your first electric car to have short range, and you just use the gas-powered car for the long trips. Not trying to move the goal posts, just remembering a more realistic alternative to renting as I sip my first cup of coffee.
> When I own it I don't worry about what my kids are doing to the car - as anyone with kids knows they will do something.
My minivan is 12 years and 220k miles old. Sure it works, but it is showing age and I'm expecting to replace it in a few years. I'm looking at options for an EV, and if can't do long trips it is hard to justify.
Not sure where you live, but at least 50% of the time I am driving my car I am probably putting over 100 miles on it per trip. My weekly trip for groceries might be the only one where I am driving a shorter range.
Tell me you live in a city without telling me you live in a city...?
The nearest city is a 25-mile drive for me (one way). I have to drive that at least once a month, sometimes several times a week.
I have to fairly regularly take 100-mile drives (again, one way) to see a veterinary specialist for some of my pets' health problems.
Most years, I take a 67-mile (one way) trip to the local Renaissance Festival—sometimes I go 2-3 times in a year.
Even if I wanted to rent, the nearest rental place (that's not just U-Haul or similar) is....in the city! And for a long drive, it's even more important to know the ins and outs of the car, know that you'll have enough space, be comfortable, etc.
If I lived in a city, and only had to drive a maximum of 25 miles to get to 99% of what I wanted all the time, I would seriously consider something much smaller with less range. As it stands...well, actually, I drive a Subaru Outback, but that's mainly because the comfort and space of the available (non-luxury-priced) electric cars couldn't match it, but I 100% support and understand people buying EVs with as much range as they can find.
Your prices are all off by a factor of 3-4 or more. Most Americans would be fine with a sub-$30k EV for daily life and an occasional rental the handful of times they need to pick up large cargo or travel hundreds of miles in a single day with only brief stops.
Among other things, that would mean you don’t have to pay more for every other trip you make carrying extra weight for features that you don’t need most of the time. People buy SUVs thinking they’ll go skiing twice a year but they’re paying 2-3 times as much for almost all of their mileage which doesn’t need that ground clearance or 4WD in addition to the 30-50% higher sticker price.
Batteries are a major part of the cost of an electric car. If you spent $100k on an electric car that had a 100 mile range, it must be a Maybach.
It would be much more realistic in this scenario for the electric car to be $30k, in which case you can earn interest on the $20k not spent, and have plenty of money to rent a car when you need it.
What's new is that there seems to be a really strong force trying to tell us that "EV are bad" from many different actors when in fact it's "our transportation models are bad".
When Tesla seemed to be the only serious brand about EV, the panic was low in the ICE world but now that many brand have real EV and that many countries are setting up bans on ICE sales, they start to panic.
Every business (fuel transport, around the corner mechanic, schools, parts shop and I guess a lot more others) in the industry have to shift and some want the propaganda to help them stay alive during the shift.
If you're a teen wondering about his career, would you start a multi years studies about ICE now?
Maybe I’m seeing things with more nuance, but to me what I’m reading in many of these articles is that EV’s are still new, and there are challenges to solve, which is true.
The weight of the average vehicle is increasing because of Trucks, SUVs and EVs. EVs are the new thing though.
I hope society ends up settling on some fluid based sustainable fuel in the end. Maybe it's fuel cells, flow batteries, or even a combustible. The advantages of weight and refueling speed are hard to beat.
For 30% of the population they could completely replace cars. For another 50% they could let you go from being a 2-3 car family to a 1 car family (more likely a truck - either to haul tools, or to tow the boat)
Of course to replace cars much a comprehensive network that would be expensive to build in the short run. (in the long run cheaper than the road network which would need many less lanes)
It does seem far from where we are now. However, if someone wants to build trains (without me paying for it in taxes), I will happily buy a ticket if it is convenient and cost effective for me to use.
The curb weight of the most popular vehicle in the USA, the Ford F-150, is 4,200 to 5,700lbs. How's it working now?