I know it’s not exactly news to state that electric cars are heavy. Really heavy. Batteries are heavy things, and it makes you realize just how spoiled we are when it comes to fossil fuels. Think about it: liquid gasoline has about 100 times the energy density of a lithium-ion battery, and as that gasoline is used, the weight – about eight pounds per gallon – goes away. Not so with an EV battery, which weighs as much full as empty. Gasoline was such a huge springboard for humanity and automotive development, being energy dense enough to deal with wildly inefficient engines and crude overall design and still work. So, thank you, gasoline!
Lithium batteries are incredible technology, but if they have an Achille’s heel, it’s their weight. Well, and how slow they can be to charge. And the danger of thermal runaway. But that’s it! They’re still amazing. Amazing and heavy.
This heaviness isn’t really obvious, either; there’s a lot of modern EVs that aren’t that big, size-wise, but are actually quite dense, and if you actually look at the numbers, they’re, you know, big. But to really viscerally appreciate just how heavy this whole crop of modern EVs are, I think you need some kind of familiar comparison. And I don’t mean using a bunch of units of weight that somehow we’re expected to know, like 75 spiral-sliced hams or a six dozen full water cooler bottles – I mean comparing these new EVs to older combustion cars.
Especially smaller EVs, because the comparisons are even more dramatic. So, with that in mind, I’ve selected five small-to-midsize EVs and compared them with big-ass land yachts or vans that they, visually improbably, outweigh. And then I compared one full-size electric SUV to a modern small camper, just for fun.
Here, be wowed!
It’s weird to realize this, right? That Fiat 500e weighs more than the Dodge minivan? It’s like half the size! That Toyota with the dumb name is heavier than a freaking Town Car? A Tesla Model 3 weighs more than a Cadillac Fleetwood Brough-motherfucking-ham! And the Hummer being heavier than a whole freaking motorhome, even though it lacks a toilet or kitchen or beds? Madness! All of physics as I’ve understood it feels upended!
How can this be? But it very much is. EVs may be the future, and that future is looking very, very heavy.Â
Those cars from the 70’s and 80’s were light in part due to all the things that weren’t standard back then. Many of these vehicles did not come with AT, AC, PDL, PW, CC, and you couldn’t get an Umpteen speaker audio system, Air Bags, ABS, Huge Tires and wheels.
Take a look at what happened to the Mustang over the years, weights are for base models.
1965 2562 lbs
1975 2795 lbs
1985 2705 lbs
1995 3280 lbs
2005 3351 lbs
2015 3469 lbs
2024 3579 lbs
You used an S in the image and not a model 3. I am actually shocked by how light the Dodge Caravan was.
shit, i did. Let’s let it slide til tomorrow?
ok, I fixed it!
Me too. Like, somebody should race a Caravan at LeMans. Not LeMons, LeMans.
Meanwhile my perfectly lovely Volvo XC60 PHEV weighs 5800 effing Lbs. And it’s engineered to feel lighter than my old XC70, which I think weighed about 1000Lb less. Toecutter! Do something!
I’m surprised the ’84 Fleetwood weighed less than the smaller Panther body Town Car.
That Fiat and my CRZ with me in it weigh more than that Dodge, but I’m certain I’ll come out of a crash just fine in those little cars. In a 40 year old FCA product? Much less certain.
Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to drive EVs
Just let ‘em pick kit cars or drive them old trucks
Steer clear from them EVs ‘cause they weigh too damn much
Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to drive EVs
‘Cause they’re all overgrown and cost more than your home
And your kids won’t never learn how to clutch
Brilliant work.
But they don’t feel as heavy as they are. My 2014 pathfinder feels heavier than my 2024 EV6. I just looked it up and my pathfinder is only 300 pounds less than my EV6. They are also about the same size.
I think it’s all the weight being lower. My comparisons are giant V8 Dodges so handling hasn’t been much of a consideration in my life.
I had to take my big truck to get officially weighed. For no apparent reason, well, it is an even number, so memorable, my 1992 Ford F350 longbed dually crewcab weighs 6000 pounds.
The big take-away I’m getting from this is how light an 80’s fullsize Cadillac was. Two tons seems rather light for what it was.
I think it is more a matter of shifting perspective with time. Automotive zeitgeist, and the drift thereof.
As I remember it in the late 70s when I subscribed to three auto mags at once and wolfed down all those stats tables in the reviews like they were cake — in very round terms an average car was 3000ish pounds plus or minus, a really light car was down close to 2000, and a massive boat like a Caddy was 4000.
There is some danger in an average car being 5000 pounds if the bridges and highways were built for 60% of that. I think there was some mention of this in the reporting here recently.
Since everyone is driving F150s and Suburbans, the average car might already be over 5000 lbs.
But bridges and highways weren’t built for 3000lb vehicles, and I’m not sure where you got that idea. They’re built to support commercial trucks 80,000lb and up.
They are built to support a mixed load, or probably a variety of loads from pure car to pure truck.
While a truck may be that heavy, it is spreading that load across 18 tires, each with very large contact patches, while taking up a length af maybe 60 feet (in which three cars might drive, since four would fit bumper-to-bumper). And if that 80k number is a max GVW, it is not an average weight. For example, I would expect a bridge leading out of a mine site that is always carrying max GVW trucks to be designed more heavily than a standard bridge.
If a bridge is designed accounting for both dynamic loads at speed and static dense stopped traffic and for certain mixes of x average truck weight and y average car weight, and y increases by 67%, it could create problems.
It was the longest regular production car on the market, a fact Cadillac proudly touted
I would rather carry around an extra 1000lbs than dump 100lbs of gasoline into the car every week, though.
That’s why I retired my forester for an EV6. Last week was my first with the ev6 and it cost me 10$cnd in electricity, and the same distance with the forester would cost about 125$ish in gas.
Congrats, The EV6 looks great.
Yes, but those old cars folded up like a tin can in an accident. Part of the reason those old cars were so light, is safety wasn’t 3rd, it was 10th or 12th.
Yes. I drive a modern(ish) subcompact coupe, and it weighs essentially the same as the FIAT 500e electric coupe.
Safety was up to the driver to not crash.
Or be crashed upon
Wait? They considered safety? I thought that was swept under the rug?
Holy hell, what were the Caravans made out of, toothpaste? Yes, nice cuboids are strong, but my 944 weighs more.
You could kick the side of a short wheelbase Caravan above the rear wheel well and the window would pop out from how much the side dented in.
It’s only 300lb heavier than my 89 mr2 s/c, which seems insane to me, given how how tiny the mr2 is in comparison to a Caravan.
I got rear ended by a Suburban while driving my ‘89 MR2. Only the bumper was damaged, not the underlying structure. Toyota built those cars tough!
Damn overweight ugly behemoths…especially the pointless Hummer EV…I’d rather have the Clark or any of those old cars than new bland and boring cars especially dumb EV junk
“Cadillac Fleetwood Brough-motherfucking-ham!”
Spiral-sliced ham?!
An apples to apples comparison would have compared the Hummer EV against it’s ICE predecessor, the 2006 Hummer H1 Alpha, which weighs in at a relatively equally chunky 8200lb.
Now do this but with modern ICE cars. The results may surprise you.
one trick that bloggers hate 🙂
I would also like the survivability rate, in an accident between those comparable cars. I bet a 3k lbs ICE would fold the Caravan in half in an accident
The original Caravan was probably as deadly as a VW Microbus in a side-on collision.
The VW would be worse if its driver rear-ended someone, as a single sheet of metal and maybe a headlight were all that came between the driver and the car in front. (The bumper was about at the level of the driver’s feet.)
I did this with the Ioniq N, it outweighs my friend’s 2016 F150, supercrew shortbed, 4×4, V8. It literally weighs more than a modern Half ton truck.
I tried this. The results did not surprise me.
The thing that strikes me most here is wow, the ’84 Caravan was only 2910 pounds?
Not to mention how small it is overall. The Smithsonian American History museum has one, and it’s surprising to me how it’s basically the size of a contemporary smallish hatchback.
My local auto museum has a first year and yes they were surprisingly small.
Think more “tall, underpowered station wagon” than “large vehicle in its own class.” It’s an almost-K-car chassis with one fewer door (and associated mechanisms) than normal, front-wheel drive (so no heavy drive shaft), and under 100hp being put to the wheels.
There’s just not a lot of car there. Like, modern vehicles with power-everything probably have a couple hundred pounds of motor to move seats, climate control vents, hold the hatch up and lower it, etc. None of that with something of this vintage.
Then you take into account how quick they are. A 9000 pound SUV that can do 0-60 in around 3 seconds… That’s a downright scary amount of energy.
What’s frightening is that a novice driver could have a model 3 performance and 3 seconds later hit you with the force of that full size caddy at 60 mph.!
Why on earth does the Hummer EV weigh more than 9,000 pounds – is it made of iridium?
Nope, just lithium.
for depression
Atomic number 3, the least dense metal, and the lightest solid element, but everyone knows that. It’s the airtight packaging over packaging to keep highly reactive lithium from runaway reactions that makes them heavy.
The battery in it weighs as much as a Honda Civic.
Ultium.
I remember getting into a argument with a professor years ago about how cars were generally heavier than they used to be. Yeah, a town car weighs less than a corolla Camry, but todays town car replacement isn’t a Camry, its an Aviator. a 5600 lb Aviator.
All new cars are too heavy
Except for, of course, the Miata, which is of course Always the Answer
There’s that word again. “Heavy.” Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth’s gravitational pull?
What, the actor?!?
Without using very expensive, exotic materials, there’s really no practical way to meet modern safety standards without adding a lot of weight. So, we have heavy cars and trucks, regardless of propulsion system. I expect there will be a good supply of older, lighter cars for some time to come, if we do our part to keep them going.
In thirty-five years the Miata has gained less than 100 pounds, and the car has to meet those modern safety standards with a lot less space to dissipate energy. A car that starts heavier has to get even heavier to handle the resulting kinetic energy. I blame lazy engineering.
However, as in some other facets of American life, this debate is over, I lost, and many of the cars I love are no longer survivable on today’s roads. You won, 3-row all-wheel drive mom.
I suspect it has more to do with priorities than laziness, on the part of the manufacturers. And there are a lot more customers buying 3-row AWD vehicles than 2-seat sports cars. Even Porsche had to branch out to stay alive.
I’m sure enhanced safety regulations had nothing to do with this. /s
i’ll just leave this here regarding safety regulations and safety improvements.
1 dead after head-on crash in Streetsboro Thursday morning (news5cleveland.com)
Yup: 2019 Honda Accord driver survived, 2010 Accord driver died. Suck. It’s possible that better design on the 2019 was the factor, or that the deceased driver was 30 years older. Still, 3100 – 3500 lbs for these… a 1989 Accord DX weighed 2579.
that was just one anecdata point, between 2 cars same make and model, but a few years apart and what a difference it makes. It just struck me as how far the safety came in a decade. No accidents are the same, but it looks like the 2010 folded somewhat with the driver, and the ’19 around the driver
I am not talking about the chevy malibu front end collision 60 years apart, that chevy put out 20 some years ago
For those that don’t know the reference, or just want to rewatch the footage (as I did) here it is:
1959 Chevrolet Bel Air vs. 2009 Chevrolet Malibu
50% overlap collision test posted by IIHS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_r5UJrxcck
Which was considered a pretty unsafe car even in 1959, due to GM’s controversial “X-frame” chassis (which only Oldsmobile opted out of using, due to the division’s engineers concerns over the structural integrity). But, I’m not really sure what the whole point of that video was, duh, a car from 1959, before basically any safety standards existed, aside from safety glass and sealed beam headlights, is less safe than a car from 50 years later, who’d a thunk it? Gee, thanks Mr. Science, maybe next you can teach me how to tie shoelaces.
It may not have been instructive to you, but the general populace of non-car people do not understand how much crash safety had advanced until seeing something like this literal head-to-head comparison.
On an adjacent note, I was frustrated by people who thought airbags are softly expanding pillows because they only ever saw ads showing airbag deployment in slow-motion video. In one case I went and found a full speed video to show how violent reality is. They were surprised, and I hope I got through their skull why they REALLY needed to go get their Takata airbag replaced.
Also feet up on the dashboard, a lot of people just don’t like having shins, apparently
The X-Rays I’ve seen on the internet post accident with a foot or both on the dash is absolutely horrific. I’m nowhere close to a medical professional, but when two big leg bones turn into many smaller, disconnected leg-adjacent bones… no thanks
There are still a lot of old timers that swear the old sleds are safer. Not that a video is going to convince them. But it does a good job illustrating what we already knew.
Have we considered that perhaps the difference in survivability was not due to superior protection by the 2019 Accord, but rather due to increased damage by the 2019 Accord? It’s easy to look at this crash and say that 2019 Accord=survival and 2010 Accord=death, but perhaps neither of them would have died if they were both in 2010 Accords.
It’s possible, but I checked the weight of the 2010 against the 2019 and the 2019 is slightly lighter by no more than about 90 pounds. It’s possible that the structure of the 2019 transmitted more energy back to the 2010 model. There’s no way to know without a free body diagram of the crash and detailed structure specifications.
Note: i’m all for the better safety standards. I’d rather have a heavier car than be dead.
I’d rather just put a cap on weight.
The extra crazy part is the hybrid 2024 Fiat 500 is something like 800lbs lighter.
Its also incredible how many people still think of those old landyachts as enormous boats, while driving around every day in crew cab pickup trucks that are even longer (and taller, and wider, and heavier)
Awhile back, I came across a fairly rare sight – a ’90s Lincoln Towncar motoring along in traffic. They were considered giant back in the day, but surrounded by SUVs and pickups, it looked positively low and sleek, strikingly so.
The height thing is really underappreciated right now by most people – vehicles are very tall.
Hell, using the first example, the Ioniq5 is shockingly close in size to a B-Body Caprice/Impala (yes, I know they were downsized from peak 70’s bloat) with the rear overhang chopped off.
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/chevrolet-caprice-1976-estate-vs-hyundai-ioniq-5-2021-suv/
Grew up with these land yachts. Had a new Silverado as a rental in BC Canada last week. Handled and road much like dad’s ’90s Lincoln, just WAY higher. The sightlines were awful, would probably have enjoyed the old Town Car more.
A lot of that(except the Hummer) is modern cars in general. Compare a Ford Focus Electric(3600 lbs) to a Ford Focus non-electric (3400 lbs).
Or a Lightning (6,000 lbs) to a regular F150(5500 lbs).
Or a Chevy Bolt EV (3600 lbs) to a Chevy Sonic it was loosely based on(2900 lbs) and the difference isn’t so dramatic.
Cars in general getting heavier, even with Aluminium bodies and such.
Exactly. Older cars were lighter, to a surprising extent. This piece oversimplifies a bit. For instance, one can look at the Mercedes S Class (just to pick a long running model) gaining thousands of pounds since it was first released.
https://www.themotoraddict.com/mercedes-benz-s-class-weights/
i like my cars to fold around me, not with me!