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Watch a 7k-LB Rivian R1T Destroy a Guardrail in Eyebrow-Raising Test
- jtriangle 3y agoMuch better article from AP directly: https://apnews.com/article/electric-vehicles-crash-test-guardrails-nebraska-3ec299a7ad87d0f63a6dd9357f663fce https://apnews.com/article/electric-vehicles-crash-test-guar... and archived: https://archive.is/44P6q https://archive.is/44P6q
- CoastalCoder 3y agoGood grief! Back in the 90's I was in a Dodge Viper that crashed into a guardrail (probably at about 45°), and all it did was push the guardrail out of position a bit. That Rivian must pack a lot of kinetic energy.
- sandworm101 3y agoAs a pickup truck, a Rivian also holds that mass/energy much higher off the ground than a Viper, resulting in greater deflection upwards.
- johnea 3y agoThis whole news wave seems like propoganda to me. This is all about the weight of the vehicle, it has nothing to do with the fuel. This will be the same for a premium escalade: Premium Luxury 4x4 2022 Cadillac Escalade Gross weight, 7,600 lbs
- tptacek 3y agoIt's worth noting that EVs aren't the only vehicles that crest the 5,000-pound mark. Any full-sized, heavy-duty pickup on the market will easily surpass 6,000 pounds, with some like the Ford F-350 and Silverado HD 2500 even exceeding 7,000 pounds. Even the Chevy Suburban, a fairly common vehicle for families, can tip the scales at over 6,000 pounds depending on its powertrain. But EVs are universally heavier than gas cars of equal dimensions thanks to their batteries, and many of them are already beyond the limit.
- falcolas 3y ago> But EVs are universally heavier than gas cars of equal dimensions thanks to their batteries, and many of them are already beyond the limit. And this definitely matters. The energy required to stop a vehicle is a linear correlation to the mass, and our ability to stop vehicles quickly still relies on creating heat using friction; it has not progressed nearly as quickly as our ability to accelerate vehicles.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoEven a junker can lock its wheels under hard braking, right? AFAIK the limiting factors are tire grip, ABS control and of course mass.
- MadnessASAP 3y agoI wouldn't assume that. I've definitely been in a few junkers that couldn't do it on warm, clean, and dry pavement. Although you've already got pretty good braking performance in those conditions anyways. Even then though, the travel of the brake pedal may be such that the time to full braking power is significant. Fortunately brakes are fairly straightforward and getting them back to good performance usually isn't a complex or expensive process.
- conk 3y agoHybrids and EVs can also stop (to some extent) with regenerative braking.
- snovv_crash 3y agoThat's not true, even in hard braking a large fraction of the kinetic energy is converted back via regen braking.
- giantg2 3y ago"and our ability to stop vehicles quickly still relies on creating heat using friction; it has not progressed nearly as quickly as our ability to accelerate vehicles." We've had a lot of innovation in braking - including better tire compounds, disc brakes, anti lock, better brake compounds and design, etc. Most people just don't talk about them or compare braking stats.
- tyleo 3y agoIt does seem a bit propaganda but I think it highlights a larger issue and doesn’t go far enough! So many cars are so much bigger now. The entire guard rail system probably needs to be reexamined in the face of new vehicle sizes.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoOr maybe cars for commuting shouldn't be 7,500 lb?
- ponector 3y agoIn Europe car over 3500kg requires another driver's license class. It is not a car, it is a lorry!
- colechristensen 3y agoOr more simply just taxed like commercial vehicles. Make the tabs cost $1000 per year for anything with weight or height exceeding some limit.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoYeah, this is what I meant. Slap taxes above a certain weight, and you will see manufacturers drop the weight to right below the threshold faster than you can blink.
- CharlesW 3y ago> This is all about the weight of the vehicle, it has nothing to do with the fuel. It does in the sense that an EV weighs 50% more than its ICE comparable. (For example, the Volvo XC40 ICE is 1,690 p̶o̶u̶n̶d̶s̶ kg, while the XC40 Recharge is 2,520 kb with battery modules.)
- Kirby64 3y agoYou should double check those numbers. The XC40 combustion car is 3800-3950 lbs. The EV version is 4600-4800 lbs. 20% more, which is certainly something but not nearly 50%. Comparable cars in the sedan category are only typically 10-20% more than their combustion counterparts, unless they’re just designed poorly.
- CharlesW 3y agoThanks, I corrected the units in the post above. Source: https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-/media/applications/pdpspecificationpage/my24/xc40-electric/pdp/volvo-cars-lca-report-xc40.pdf https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-/media/applications/pdps..., page 12.
- Kirby64 3y agoPage 12 says 2170kg for the EV version. Not 25xx.
- CharlesW 3y agoI added the weight of the battery modules (listed on the same line) because https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/models/xc40-recharge/2023/specifications https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/models/xc40-rec... lists Total Weight as 2480 kg (so within 40 kg).
- Kirby64 3y agoThat total weight is the GVWR number, which is intended to be the maximum design weight, beyond which the manufacturer will tell you you’ve overloaded the vehicle. It’s not the actual weight of the car.
- hnav 3y agoThe Rivian's _curb_ weight is 7k. Not that the Escalade is light, but in its diesel, long wheel-base version it's 6.2k.
- giantg2 3y ago"This is all about the weight of the vehicle, it has nothing to do with the fuel." It's not all weight, but also energy and density. It's slightly related to fuel, at least until batteries get significantly lighter. Gross weights are misleading in this conversation because most passenger vehicles are not driving nor tested at their gross, but only slightly above curb weight.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoMy beef isn't with EVs, but ballooning car mass in general. Modern cars are just so huge, and have so much junk in them. I get a large fraction of the mass is for safety, but (for the same money) I'd much rather have a tighter, lighter, stripped down car than a clunky infotainment system, seat coolers, fragile wood trim, motorized ac vents and handles. I'll even sacrifice some sound deadening and rear AC. And EVs, of course, just make this issue worse. Their "fuel" is such a large fraction of their mass that they more-or-less suffer from the tyranny of the rocket equation, where they need more battery to haul more stuff around, which in turn requires more battery, and now the chassis and suspension needs to be reinforced to handle the weight, and now that needs more battery and so on.
- hnav 3y agoIf de-contented "race edition" cars are any indication some of those extras being stripped amounts to a 100lbs at most. Only cheap way to reel in the mass while keeping the safety is to make them smaller.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoI dunno. If you look at modern supercars, they are loaded with luxury stuff, and their mass is noticeably higher than supercars of old when that shouldn't be the case. I suspect the "race edition" stripped version of many cars are still hauling around the fundamental design features they need to accommodate luxury features.
- sandworm101 3y agoSmaller, or slower. So many cars are out there running engines that are far too big, capacity that they never actually use. North American drivers seem to want cars that glide away from a stop or pass another vehicle without making a fuss, resulting in overcapacity engines. If we allow engines to actually rev to their potential, we can all do with much smaller overall designs.
- krunck 3y ago> a large fraction of the mass is for safety To protect against other high-mass vehicles?
- whartung 3y agoThe current design of the concrete dividers stemmed from problems with the guardrails of the day. The issue wasn't cars shredding them like tissue paper, the issue was that they were bouncing off the guardrails, and back into traffic. The current design of those concrete ones, with that angled base, is to basically let the car hit the barrier, and keep it there, so they grind to a stop rather than ricocheting across lanes of traffic. There used to be these old, I dunno, public service videos or something that they'd play on TV at 5am that I'd watch, and they had all sorts of ones about traffic barriers and what not. This was back during the rise of breakaway obstacles, toll booth buffers, large cans filled with sand and water, etc. It was all quite fascinating. They also had films on the local water projects and what not: huge tunnels, dirt moving explosions, monster earth movers. Right up the alley of a young man at the time. Whatever fills the air time I guess.
- EdwardDiego 3y agoYeah, in NZ they use a lot of wire based barriers to slow you / stop you while sacrificially dispersing your energy by propagating failure along the barrier. We like to use them to prevent (or minimise the impact of) the head-on collisions our two lane main highways often lead to. They're far cheaper to install and repair than other forms, and easy and fast to fix after an impact, but have a significant caveat that they'll mince you up if you're a motorcyclist who hits them, other types of barriers aren't exactly great for riders either but they offer more chance of survival than the wire barriers, to the extent that riders know the wired ones as cheese graters.
- throwup238 3y ago> Yeah, in NZ they use a lot of wire based barriers to slow you / stop you while sacrificially dispersing your energy by propagating failure along the barrier. We like to use them to prevent (or minimise the impact of) the head-on collisions our two lane main highways often lead to. The barrier type you see in the video are backed by steels cables that attach to the sheet metal and anchored at the ends so same idea. You can kinda see them in the video in the side view.
- bloody-crow 3y agoI just want to point out that my brain tripped over trying to parse "7k-LB" part of the submission subject. The unit symbol for pound is lb/lbs, so why isn't it 7k lbs? Or just "7k pounds"? 7k-LB is just wrong on so many levels. Edit: I just realized that the original title of the article has the same mistake, so I guess it's their fault primarily, not the submitter.
- wongarsu 3y agoIs it common in the US to weigh vehicles in kilo-pounds, or is that just because it sounds more impressive in this instance? I would have expected people to describe it as a 3.5 ton vehicle.
- pacificmint 3y agoIt would be common to say 7000 pounds. It’s less common in everyday usage to say 7k pounds.
- bloody-crow 3y agoI wouldn't say so. In speech people just say "seven thousand ponds" or "seventy one hundred pounds". Using "k" as a substitute for "thousand" is more of an internet written communication artifact that is rarely used offline.
- geoelectric 3y agoI’m starting to think we need weight limits on standard passenger vehicles so that designers have a constraint to work within. Of course there should be exceptions granted for commercial and similar usage, but I fail to see the logic in allowing 7000 lb Suburbans or Escalades on the road as daily drivers. I’m not even talking EVs here. Why is a Hummer legal to drive when it causes disproportionate wear on the streets, can’t fit adequately in a lot of parking, and will essentially obliterate any other vehicle it hits? It doesn’t even have a reasonable commercial purpose beyond wrapping it with advertising and using it as a parked billboard as far as I’ve seen. And as far as EVs go, my Ioniq 5 is a little over two tons and has the wheelbase of a Palisade already. Do you really need a whole other ton and a half to add a third row? On my car I’m pretty sure you just have to square off the roof and allow some overhang in the back. It’ll need more battery, but a ton more? Empty pickup truck beds aren’t all that heavy either, for that matter. I can’t imagine this type of mass inflation has been as rampant in Europe and other areas that value small cars. We Americans have always been in love with displacement, whether it’s coming from the engine or the chassis.
- rokkitmensch 3y agoBecause for historical and cultural reasons, many folks will object strenuously to an America where the default is not to beg forgiveness when you fuck up, but to ask permission before doing anything interesting.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoEven non-EVs are crazy heavy. The old Ford Ranger truck (2011) weighed 3700 lbs in its heaviest configuration. There are many non-hybrid/EV sedans, even "small" sport sedans, that push well past 4000 lbs nowadays.
- concordDance 3y agoI'd recommend appropriate weight taxes rather than going for a ban, you never know people's specific situations that cause them to acquire/desire a particular car. Calculate approximately how much a marginal 100lb costs in road wear, tire pollution and loss of life and limb (use EPAs $8 million per life figure) and increase road tax by that much for heavy vehicles. Then if people really need that big vehicle for whatever reason they can pay the $10k/year extra it's costing the rest of society.
- daemonologist 3y agoI couldn't find any information about this specific test, but it seems likely that it would be based on NCHRP recommended procedures: https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_rpt_350-a.pdf https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_rpt_350-a.... . Of interest is the table on page 16 (pdf page 26) - if they used the test designed for the 2000P vehicle (2000 kg pickup, see page 10/20) that would probably mean an impact angle of 25 degrees.