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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
That’s vehicles classified as “light duty” — pickup trucks.
All other vehicle classes are down in curb weight over that same period.
Yeah, show us the average numbers for all vehicles used for private personal transport then.
square metres
US-americans will get a stroke
I guess that will lessen the number of insanely sized cars and drivers then…
I'm not sure it's reasonable to directly complain about fast 0-60 times. Slower acceleration removes options and makes merging more difficult; not all high speed roads have onramps of adequate length.
Definitely agreed on weight.
The Y scale on the third graph is a joke; that's like a 4% change over 20 years. Wheelbase is not the same as vehicle length.
I’m not sure it’s reasonable to directly complain about fast 0-60 times
It is certainly cause for concern when heavier and larger moving objects that are able to reach high speeds quicker are being controlled by increasingly more irresponsible people.
This is why there is an increase in SUVs crashing through shops when grandpa hits the wrong pedal.
Something that’s twice the weight with twice the horsepower only accelerates the same speed. Double the weight and keep the horsepower and you’ll go half as fast.
The graphs aren’t entirely 100% related to each other. The twice as fast acceleration average isn’t because of the double horsepower, that only works if the weight also isn’t doubles.
EVs have massive torque from zero speed. Horsepower is just a fake number derived from torque. A Model Y is both heavy and makes 500ftlbs torque immediately.
The acceleration of Teslas is one reason they have the highest crash rate of any brand. Fucking stupid to give the public more horsepower than a 70s formula one car.
The Y scale on the third graph is a joke; that’s like a 4% change over 20 years. Wheelbase is not the same as vehicle length.
I want to see that chart (a) starting at 0 sq. ft., and (b) going all the way back to the '50s.
12 yards long, 2 lanes wide, 65 tons of American pride!
Can you name the truck with four wheel drive?
Smells like a steak and seats thirty-five.
12 yards long, 2 lanes wide,
65 tons of American Pride!
She blinds everybody with her super high beams,
She's a squirrel crushing, deer smacking, driving machine!
Is there a metric version?
It's 'Merica, so...no
'Merica is more metric than even USians are ready to admit.
America needs to make its own KEI car standard. at least they wouldnt be as dangerous for pedestrians, or as disastrous for the environment as the fucking rolling city blocks we have now.
Especially since we're never gonna get a functional public transit system.
I'd settle for at least legalizing Kei trucks across the country
It's beyond frustrating that I can't even drive my own Kei truck on public roads where I live
legalizing Kei
No can do. That would be one letter away from legalizing DEI.
One of the sad bits of this is that the move to EVs, while a positive in many ways, also makes our cars even heavier for the battery.
There are a few different stories going on here.
One story is engineering success. The engineers squeeze out so much more performance per amount of gasoline burned, that the cost of extra weight from a fuel economy standard is significantly less than 25 or 50 years ago. If you chart the fuel efficiency over the same time period, the fleet average fuel economy went from 20 to 34 mpg, even as vehicles were getting more powerful and heavier. A 2026 Camry Hybrid has a 232 hp drivetrain (184 hp from the gasoline engine) that manages to push 3700 lbs 0-60 in 6.8 seconds. Those are sports car stats from the 80's, and yet the modern Camry manages to get 44 miles per gallon in fuel economy. Charting emissions shows an even more pronounced improvement.
Similarly, the rise of electric vehicles has increased the average vehicle weight. Batteries are heavy, and the whole chassis needs to accommodate that.
Another story is unintended consequences from dumb regulations. The fuel economy standards were updated for the 2011 model year to allow a sliding scale where vehicles with larger footprints were allowed to be less fuel efficient. Naturally, smaller vehicles were disincentivized, and compact trucks and compact cars all but disappeared. These regs need to be updated, and we'll see the return of smaller vehicles for those of us who prefer them.
And another story is shifting consumer preferences. For a whole bunch of reasons, Americans have expressed a preference for taller and taller vehicles, where crossover SUVs are much more common than the old wagons, the relative balance of sedans versus SUVs has shifted entirely in favor of SUVs.
The 5 square meters are no accurate display of the pavement covered by those cars, because they're much longer than just their wheelbase.
Just the empty cars and not with an average American inside, right?
It's an arms race. I prefer a bicycle, but am I really insane enough to ride it in between these tanks? My wife is afraid in traffic, she would never want to get a small car, just because of her safety concerns.
The only thing stopping this madness is regulations.
Citation link needed
some people must have really tiny weiners, so much over-compensation...
My wife and I purchased a new Japanese car last year. Nobody makes small cars anymore, except maybe Suzuki with the Swift? Our small cheap car is bigger than we had anticipated. Good car though.
When I get in some of the newer SUVs it feels like driving a boat.
American cars cover more pavement than they ever have
Then goes ahead and shows a change from 48.9 to 51.8
Whoever made those charts wanted to make the change look bad, no matter what.
Where is the chart of the average heavy injuries per passenger? Or the average energy efficiency of engines?
injuries per passenger
The fact that you phrased this so specifically to not mention the corresponding increased danger to other road users and pedestrians, suggests you’re a shill pushing industry talking points.
When it comes to covering pavement, it also starts at like 2008. Which is funny because I can guarantee you just from being around them that cars from the 70s were gigantic. Long hoods, big old protruding trunks.
I imagine the reason why the change is so small and why it's not quite a linear progression. There is that initial decrease again immediately post recession is just the shift in what's available for stock in the US.
The height of the SUV boom pre-recession, those cars were big. Like, we have CUVs now. Those are built on car chassis, which means they are about as long as a car is, about as wide as the car that they're based off of. For example, a Mazda CX6 is just a Mazda 6, but like, fatter. The popular SUVs of the late 2000s were like actually full-on SUVs built on heavy truck platforms. So we had things like the Hummer and of course the Escalade of the day which were gargantuan. At the same time, because those vehicles got like single digit miles per gallon, people tended to also have commuter cars, which were also a lot cheaper back then. We're talking like low 10,000s or less.
Post-recession though, like we did start seeing a lot more small cars again. For example Chevy brought in the Aveo and eventually the beat in the spark, Honda Fitts became bigger in terms of popularity, Ford brought over the Fiesta. And then gas went down again and because Americans have memories like a goldfish when it comes to gas, car sizes started growing again. When it happened again a few times during the 2010s and of course the big one during the pandemic and now cars had gotten more efficient in terms of their engine engineering and in terms of the prevalence of things like electric cars and hybrid units.
So that mid-sized CUV Is able to get better mile per gallon age or similar mile per gallon age to what someone driving around in a compact in 2007 might have gotten.
There's also a lot of unintended consequences from safety and computer designed aerodynamic models that have led to cars being shaped a very specific way with very thick A, B and C pillars which make the car door openings smaller which make the taller CUV options a little more appealing as well.
Also, just as an aside, I'm sure full-sized trucks wreck the curve because those have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it's kind of nuts how big they are and how, despite that, they're also less practical as work vehicles than ever before. Genuinely kind of stupid.
The graphs are terrible but come on, a 10% increase in weight in 10 years, doesn't sound bad to you? Especially when the base value was anything but low to begin with? And an increased space consumption of 6% is a huge additional space consumption in absolute numbers, given the huge numbers of cars.
The weight gain could theoretically be explained by the simple fact that electric vehicles are heavier than their combustion counterpart.
Though I'm well aware these are american cars so probably just means more bigger pickup trucks that will never ever be used to actually pick things up.
Hardly, the EV adoption rate in the US is pretty poor and even if we ignore that, the share of EVs among existing vehicles on the road is way to small to be the dominating factor for the increase in weight. That said, yes, EVs will lead to an increase in weight, a necessary evil. However, that can be compensated by downscaling vehicles to actual needs. People are currently buying cars far larger than what they actually need for partly irrational and partly egoistic reasons (increasing threats to life and well being towards others in the hope to slightly decrease it towards oneself).
Or plug in hybrids. Even a 20kwh battery is quite hefty.
