Jonathan Gitlin
If you’re worried about on-road vehicles getting too big and heavy, especially as we transition to electric vehicles, you’re not alone. On Wednesday, National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy sounded the alarm during her keynote address at this year’s Transportation Research Board annual meeting in Washington, DC.
“I am concerned about the increased risk of serious injury and death to all road users due to heavier curb weights and [the] increasing the size, power and performance of vehicles on our roads, including electric vehicles,” she told attendees.
The poster child for excessive electric vehicles is the electric GMC Hummer, a monster truck with a monstrous curb weight of 9,063 lb (4,110 kg). The vehicle is still powerful enough to rush to 60 mph in three seconds. Appropriately, this feature is called “WTF mode”. Indeed, Homendy drew attention to the gigantic Hummer in his speech.
Its gross weight rating is 10,550 lbs. The battery alone weighs over 2,900 lbs, which is about the weight of a Honda Civic. The Ford F-150 Lightning weighs between 2,000 and 3,000 lbs more than the non-electric version. has a significant impact on the safety of all road users,” Homendy continued.
The problem is a simple physical one: all other things being equal, a heavier vehicle transmits more energy during an accident than a lighter vehicle. Speed matters too, of course—small increases increase large increases in kinetic energy when crashing. But while municipalities and states set speed limits, there is no similar restriction on the curb weight of passenger vehicles.
An F-150, a 3 series and a mini drive in a bar
To help visualize the problem, it helps to look at some examples of our vehicles gaining mass over time. Take, for example, the American bestseller, the Ford F-150 pickup truck. There are myriad powertrain, cabin and powertrain combinations, but let’s look at some examples that come closest to today’s. Ford’s excellent F-150 Lightning electric pickup. When a breakdown of curb weights was given, I erred on the side of caution and chose the heaviest.
Eric Bangman
As you can see, in 1993 an extended-cab F-150 weighed just under 2 metric tons, at 4,218 pounds (1,913 kg). A decade later, and now with a slightly larger Supercrew configuration, that number had increased by 18%, and by 2013 a similar truck was 35% heavier than two decades ago.
In fact, Ford has put the truck on a diet for the current generation; a gas-powered 2023 F-150 Supercrew weighs 4,948 lb (2,244 kg). But the pounds pile up if you want an F-150 hybrid or the all-electric version.
Eric Bangman
This problem is not limited to pickup trucks. We can see the same trend with BMW’s 3 Series, which grew slightly between 1993 and 2003 and then quite significantly in 2013. Some of that mass had been lost for 2023, at least until you were upgrading to a plug-in hybrid or a hybrid. EV battery powertrain.
Eric Bangman
And the same goes for the smaller cars on our roads, like the Mini. To the untrained eye, a 1993 example looks pretty much like one of the 1961 originals, and its 1,400 lb (635 kg) curb weight now seems inconceivable. The Mini is reborn in the 21st century, but in 2003 it still weighed just 2,513 pounds (1,140 kg). This increased a bit over the next 10 years, then a slight diet followed by 2023. But the electric versionat 3,144 pounds (1,426), gets pretty maxi for a mini.
0 Comments