is a clear respect for the fact you're in a 4,000 lbs vehicle Completely unrelated, but it's interesting to me how deeply the "4000lb. vehicle" meme seems to h

is a clear respect for the fact you're in a 4,000 lbs vehicle Completely unrelated, but it's interesting to me how deeply the "4000lb. vehicle" meme seems to have embedded itself. I can find plenty of articles backing it up and talking about how cars are so much heavier now, cars are getting heavier, etc. But I notice a problem: they include SUVs, trucks and "luxury" land-yacht vehicles in that classification as representative of the "average car". Cars intended for broad segments of the market are usually much lighter than this. A Toyota Corolla, for example, weighs 2800lb., the (popular) Ford Fiesta is 2500lb., the Nissan Versa is 2300lb., and even hybrids like the Prius (2500lb.) come in way under the "4000lb." meme. These are still much heavier than bicycles, of course, but it fascinates me how much people have decided that SUVs, trucks and gigantic luxury cars are "average" and built their memes of car weight around that.