5 ms·
yes and no. Older cars were far heavier and far less safe. They could make incremental safety design improvements that allow to reduce weight incrementally with
by sgc 6y ago
yes and no. Older cars were far heavier and far less safe. They could make incremental safety design improvements that allow to reduce weight incrementally without compromise.
- elihu 6y agoI think cars of all eras have had a mix of heavy and light designs. With modern materials, it's possible to make safer, lighter cars but modern cars are also required to have more safety features. A Model S is about 4500 to 5000 pounds. I used to drive around in a 1981 Mazda GLC, which is about 1800 pounds. The White Zombie, a famous electric conversion with a 0-60 time of about 1.8 seconds is based on a 70's Datsun which I believe was about 1700 pounds (after adding a couple series-wound DC motors and a trunk full of batteries it's around 2000 pounds). If you asked some engineers to make a car under 200 pounds, they'd construct the thing using similar materials and techniques as a modern bicycle, and it might even be fast and safe at highway speeds, as long as it didn't collide with a modern car that weighs as much as five or six large pianos. So, in a sense modern cars are on average very heavy because they have to share the road with other cars that are very heavy.
- allendoerfer 6y agoNext to roads are often things like bridge pillars and those things are also very heavy and not very soft.
- elihu 6y agoThat is true, but designing a car to be survivable on impact with a strong, immovable object is a different kind of problem than designing it to be survivable in a collision with a moving 3,000 pound vehicle. In the former case, you just have to have enough crush zone to spread out the impact and the weight of your own vehicle doesn't matter much as long as there's cushioning and appropriate safety features (seatbelts and airbags). In the latter case, if you're a lot lighter than the other car you get knocked around, and if you get squeezed between a heavy car and an immovable object, you get crushed.
- laurencerowe 6y agoI’m not sure whether you mean older teslas or older cars generally here. Small cars in the 70s and 80s weighed just over half as much as they do now. The Golf Mk 1 was 795kg while a Mk 8 is 1255kg. Much of that increase in weight is safety equipment and they are much safer for it.
- sgc 6y agoI was thinking older than that, of the 50s and 60s, and early 70s. But regardless of the exact timeline, it's pretty well known than engineering trumps raw weight, even if quantity is a quality all it's own, as they say. Thus comparing apples to apples (names don't matter, size and weight and features do), the same weight car today is far safer than it was in the decades you referenced, and the average weight across all models has remained relatively stable during the same period as well other than the dip in late 70s early 80s due to the oil embargo crisis.
- laurencerowe 6y agoI suspect growing up in Europe this difference is more pronounced since smaller cars were always more popular and they are the ones where structural reinforcement for crash safety has made them so much heavier.
- sgc 6y agoPerfectly reasonable hypothesis.
- globular-toast 6y agoSome of the increase is safety equipment. Some is just the fact they they are bigger in just about every way. The Golf Mk1 wasn't even a particular small or lightweight car. The Mini was about 600kg, for example.
- laurencerowe 6y agoIndividual models do have a tendency to grow in size over time so perhaps the current Polo is a better comparison to the Mk1 Golf and even that weighs in at 1164kg.