The new standards require American automakers to increase fuel economy so that, across their product lines, their passenger vehicles would average 65 miles per gallon by 2031, up from 48.7 miles today. The average mileage for light trucks, including pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, would have to reach 45 miles per gallon, up from 35.1 miles per gallon. Selling electric vehicles and hybrids would help bring up the average mileage per gallon across their product lines.
They really aren’t that much heavier. It is just one downfall that people try to play up because they want to spread anti human propaganda.
Most of the people buying giant ass vehicles don’t need them at all. If we took 90% of the trucks off the road and replaced them with electric cars the average weight would go down. So it would be good for “guardrails” if we care about them. The pedestrians wouldn’t get hit as high anymore as well making fatalities go down there as well.
Edit: quick search returned this “The study finds that a 4 inch-increase in vehicle front-end leads to a 22% increase in fatality risk for a pedestrian.”
Disclaimer: I am an EV owner.
EVs are quite a bit heavier when comparing within size class. From checking just a couple curb weights across similarly-sized vehicles, you can expect between 15% and 30% heavier.
But, to your point… if you instead compare between vehicles with a similar pricetag, EVs are about 15% lighter. When people go to budget a new vehicle, I expect many people are less willing to do the math to realize that trucks are extremely expensive to fuel and maintain, and so they’re lured in by the “utility” they provide, when in reality it’s substantially cheaper to rent one for the 10 days a year they need it.
With that said… you know what’s even better for humans than EVs? Trains. Buses. Diverse transit infrastructure!
Yup. Most of the people complaining about EV weight didn’t give a shit about ICE vehicles getting bigger and heavier for decades. They bought them by the parking lot.
I was complaining about it but I’m used to being a Cassandra now
As a pedestrian that has been hit twice, I will confirm that getting hit by a GMC Yukon was a worse experience than getting hit by a Toyota Tercel.
Yeah this is bad.
Will also share some data for folks from Ars.