A Weighty Question

By
eric
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39
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Here’s an interesting – a weighty – question:

If “safety” is so important to the government – i.e., to the busybodies in Washington who force us to buy what they think is important – then why don’t they think it’s important to protect us from the consequences of what they’re forcing us to buy?

Such as two-ton-plus electric cars that are a physical threat to other cars – and the people inside them?

A subcompact-sized electric car like the Chevy Bolt – which is only 163.2 inches long – weighs 3,589 pounds. A compact-sized car like the Hyundai Accent – which is 172.6 inches long and so a substantially larger car – weighs 2,679 pounds.

The difference between the two is 910 pounds.

It’s a big difference when a 3,589 pound car pile-drives into a 2,679 pound car. F=ma and all that.

It’s an even bigger difference when an electric half-ton truck like the Ford Lightning – which weighs in at more than three tons – 6,500 pounds – which is  a ton (2,000 pounds) heavier than a non-electric F-150 pick-up – pile-drives into a 2,679 pound compact like the Accent.

Or even another F-150.

Heck, even another Lightning. See that business about F=ma again.

Whatever happened to saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety first?

The more weight rolling around out there, the greater the risk to people who aren’t driving one of these massively heavy potential pile-drivers. Perhaps this is intentional; another way to get rid of cars that aren’t electric – and perhaps some of the people who don’t want them along the way. But the risk is also greater, for everyone.

More damage – more carnage.

Intentional or not, it is going to happen.

The force imparted by a two-ton electric car traveling 35 MPH is much greater than the force imparted by a car that weighs just over a ton. This is physics, not politics.

And also economics.

A 3,589 pound car like the Bolt is more likely to total whatever you’re driving, if it hits you. The higher forces imparted at impact are more apt to trigger air bag deployment – and that is often sufficient all by itself to result in a write-off of whatever you were driving. Add in the certainty of more body damage on top of that.

F=ma, again.

Who is going to pay for that? Including the near-certainty physical of injuries being more likely – and more serious.

Well, we all will. And not just in blood.

Also via increased insurance costs.

For everyone.

It won’t matter that you don’t drive an electric car. What matters – to the Mafia – is that they’re more likely to be paying out more to fix or replace your car, if it is struck by an electric car. Probably your premiums will increase even more if whatever you happen to be driving is smaller and lighter – and thus, more vulnerable to being totaled by an EV pile-driving into it.

Actuaries aren’t imbeciles.

Someone is also going to have to pay for the costs imposed by the increased fire risk EVs present – including when they’re not moving.

Expect that fact to reflect in the upticked cost of coverage for your home as well as your car – the former being at greater risk of burning to the ground if the EV parked in the garage goes up in smoke. And – once again – even if you don’t own an EV yourself, the risks and costs imposed by others will be passed along to you. Which the Mafia can do precisely because it is a Mafia. It literally makes you an “offer” you can’t refuse – assuming you want to legally drive your car. Or not have your mortgage rescinded. The Mafia is well-aware of this fact and “adjusts” what it “offers” accordingly.

There are other aspects of interest to consider as well.

One is the increased emissions that follow in the wake of electric vehicles. They are not “emissions” in the harmless but hystericized sense – like carbon dioxide, which neither causes nor worsens air pollution. Rather, they are emissions in the actual-pollution sense: Toxic-to-humans brake dust, of which there is more emanating from EVs because it consumes more brake pad material to slow-down 3,589 pounds than it does to slow down 2,679 pounds. And vaporized rubber/kibble from tires that wear much faster because of all the weight they’re tasked with supporting.

EV tires and brakes wear out about 20 percent faster, which is great deal more than the fraction of 0.04 percent (the total amount of C02 in the Earth’s atmosphere) added to that by driving vehicles with engines rather than batteries. But for some reason, the former is much less of “concern” than the latter. Not even adding in the “environmental impact” of having to replace brake pads and tires more often, which means having to Earth-rape the materials and manufacture them into the finished product more often.

The driver of the non-electric Accent that weighs 2,679 pounds gets 40,000 miles out of his tires and replaces them every three years or so. The driver of the 3,589 pound Bolt gets two years out of his. Over 12 years – a typical length-of-life for a modern car – the Accent driver buys four sets of tires. Over the same period of time, the Bolt driver buys six sets.

He’s paying for that, too.

And so are we all.

. . .

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Related posts:
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  2. They’re Making it Worth Running. . .
  3. Reader Question: The 100 MPG Carburetor?
  4. Insuring the Driver – Not The Vehicles
  5. Reader Question: Towing With the Atlas?

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39 COMMENTS

  1. I’m not a big fan of electric cars as I think they are not ready for prime time. However, I think the tech is interesting and may have a future. However, not having owned an EV, from what I understand, the built in one pedal driving uses the magnets to slow the car down instead of the brake pads and in the process they regenerate some lost electricity. So aren’t the pads supposed to last longer on an EV regardless of it’s weight?

  2. Now you have 9000 lb EV’s with 1000 lb to 3000 lb batteries, that you can’t see out of going zero to 60 in 2.5 seconds, with a driver that is texting…lol….this is insane.

    These EV’s are very unsafe with their lithium fire bomb batteries. There has been many fires.

    ATTENTION: Far higher insurance rates coming for EV’s with their lithium fire bomb batteries…
    Insurers are becoming increasing aware of the financial disaster from such an accident, so will be preparing premiums on battery cars as necessary.

    There is another, critical contributor to the American surge in in traffic fatalities: the national penchant for tall, heavy pickup trucks and SUVs. The weight of these behemoths endangers other road users in a crash, and their height leads them to strike a person’s torso instead of their legs (it can also make it difficult to see those standing in front of the vehicle).

    American deaths among those on foot or a bicycle rose more than 40 percent during the last decade; one study found that the shift to SUVs over the last twenty years led to more than 1,000 additional pedestrian fatalities. SUV’s are bad, EV’s are way worse, far heavier. These new vehicles have horrible visibility….you can’t see out of them….

    The heft of electric vehicles is not their only safety risk. Even with heavy batteries, these vehicles’ electric powertrains allow them to accelerate unusually quickly. Chevrolet, for instance, touts its “Wide Open Watts Mode” that allows the Chevy Blazer EV, an SUV, to accelerate from zero to 60 in under four seconds—a speed that is comparable to popular muscle cars like the Dodge Charger and Ford Mustang. A Tesla Model X Plaid is even more powerful, reaching 60 mph in two and a half seconds

    Car companies are touting these acceleration rates as a selling point, there is no other way to sell these very boring EV’s, with no sound or soul and a completely, isolated, numb driving experience.

    Although supercharged pick-up speeds serve no practical purpose, they create real danger for other road users—especially those on foot or in a wheelchair who have scant time to get out of the way…..they can’t hear them coming……

    Consider the Ford F-150 Lightning. With no need to fit a gasoline engine underneath the hood, Ford could have restructured its front end to slope toward the ground, giving the driver a better view and making it more likely that a pedestrian or cyclist would roll off the top instead of absorbing a collision directly.

    NOTE: The biggest pollutant emitted from new cars because they have so low emissions are from tires wearing out while driving, tire particles polluting the air with microplastics .

    https://slate.com/technology/2022/08/electric-trucks-cars-too-heavy-inflation-reduction-act.html?via=rss_socialflow_facebook&fbclid=IwAR3mD6tEoGO2icy7Vwfy3Va49gIuKmk8CXBP1C-K7dysD6vnC5PwplfY_fg

  4. Here is pretty definitive proof that the US government is behind the roughly 200 food factory attacks. Since the government is working on destroying the food supply, triggering society wide malnutrition and possibly even famine, it’s a safe bet that it is not concerned with our “safety”. There is nothing safe about people being malnourished due to destruction of their food supply.

    “Dr Andrew Huff, the former Vice President of EcoHealth Alliance, the company contracted by Anthony Fauci to do Gain of Function research on the SARS virus and who has since become a whistleblower, he has some ideas on who may be behind the attacks on our food supply. Prior to taking the job at Wuhan, Dr Huff was a food security specialist. He had government data from the DHS’ Food and Agriculture Sector Criticality Assessment Tool (FASCAT), which can simulate an attack on the food supply. Dr Huff made an analysis of which facilities were the most vulnerable.

    Subsequent to his whistleblowing, his hard drives with the data on this topic were raided by the FBI and since then, there have been about 200 food factory attacks around the world, most of them in the US. But Huff had another backup and he analyzed the attacks and it turned out that the attacks exactly matched the most critical systems in his data set. He reported this to the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI but never received a response. He told Emerald Robinson that he suspects that a government-funded actor or a globalist group like the World Economic Forum is behind the attacks.”

    https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/02/no_author/why-are-they-killing-us/

  5. I laugh at those weights, to me, at least, a heavy car is over 2,000 lbs. I want a car to below 1700 lbs so my fuel economy is the highest possible. As far as safety is concerned, that is up to me, the driver, not the car. And not living in a big city is a plus for safety, because getting in a serious car wreck is not the only way to die. Cities are full of multicultural horrors – an intentional wedge created by elites like Soros who push unlimited immigration to make everyone miserable. Divide and conquer.

    The best way to be safe in these infernal machines is to live where there are few cars and even less people, and everyone driving slow because they don’t have to get there right now, because the locals are not up to their eyeballs in debt trying to make ends meet. I drive slow, because I like life and observing life and I do not like people driving like maniacs because they have a car with hundreds of horsepower, noses upturned, bad attitudes, and anxious for their Starbucks latte. Today I was driving the speed limit, and two deer crossed in front of me, and since I was going slow (compared to the rest of the maniacs) it wasn’t a problem for the deer or for my car.

    When humans started going faster than they could run, that is when things like serious injuries became a common accepted thing. Yes, many people die horrible deaths because they have a need for speed, like on a jet. I am a Neo Luddite, no cell phone, and don’t want one not in the least.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiekQF8-Wwk

    I found out today that Suzuki moved their Geo Metro factory in Canada, at the CAMI plant, to Pakistan, built under the Suzuki Cultus label, it has been in production until 2017, here are some used ones for sale:

    https://www.olx.com.pk/cars_c84/q-suzuki-cultus

    So there is still hope for the world, the greatest little car still lives.

    • Hi Yukon,

      Gen X and older people will remember that four strong guys could pick up a VW Beetle and move it from where it was parked to somewhere else. This was a common prank in high school. Try that with a Tesla…

  6. The public also constantly ignores the laws of energy and motion. One extra 1/2 ton, or a ton, is going to require that much more energy to move the vehicle in question the same amount of distance, period. X-mass requires y-force to travel z-distance, and physics doesn’t change regardless of the energy source, but try explaining that to the public, or worse, politicians.

    The other “illusion” is the regenerative braking & “downhill regeneration”, both of which are negated by acceleration to the same speed you braked from, and climbing the same incline to go home. Energy is always lost in heat, even in EV motors, so there is NO net gain of energy in an EV, as some people are inclined to believe. These are facts of physics that cannot be “lied” away, regardless of who does the lying.

    The one saving grace of ICE vehicles is that X-mass is reduced as the fuel is burned, actually lowering its consumption rate as it travels from point A to point B. Interior heating is also a free by-product, and even using A/C does not increase ICE fuel consumption as rapidly as both deplete EV battery reserves. Until batteries produce more energy per/pound that gasoline or diesel (and lose weight in the process) they will never even match the efficiency of the latter.
    Unless the future includes anti-gravity & anti-friction technology, which I seriously doubt will ever be achieved on a scale to meet the demands of transporting people and/or freight.

  7. But self-driving cars will bring on the end of accidents! 🙄

    All this smacks of the 5 year plans from the Soviets, and later the CCP. By tightly controlling and guiding the pace of progress everything will be wonderful comrade! The DOT is depending on DARPA to fund research into self-driving cars that don’t steer into a ditch or ignore black people crossing the street. The DOE is funding research into unicorn battery techology. Neither of these have panned out just yet, but every connected automaker wants to be ready when the time comes, so they cobble together existing tech, even though it doesn’t work, so that when (hope!) the R&D pays off they’ll be able to integrate it into the stuff that’s worked for the last 100 years. There’s no downside to this strategy. If it doesn’t work out, blame the government. If it does, take major profits. Besides everyone else is on the same self-distructive path. The goal for the modern CEO is to be the cleanest dirty shirt.

    • RK, Fortunately Murphys Law is supreme. It will go wrong. Whatever might happen won’t and as an addendum it will be different. The wanna be controllers are done they are history. The future belongs to us the doubters, the intransigent the pains in the asses to others the survivors. All 15 Billion of us.

  8. ‘A Chevy Bolt weighs 3,589 pounds. The Hyundai Accent weighs 2,679 pounds.’ — eric

    A classic study in the 1950s found that road damage increases with the 4th power of axle weight. So in Eric’s example, the Chevy Bolt’s 1.34 times higher weight, raised to the 4th power, implies it causes more than three times more road wear than the Accent.

    https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-our-roads

    To be fair, freight truck axle weights are so much higher than cars as to render the cars relatively unimportant.

    Nevertheless, if one wanted to tax cars and light trucks rationally rather than arbitrarily, registration fees that escalate with the fourth power of weight would tax a 6,000-lb EeeVee pickup at (2 x 2 x 2 x 2) = 16 times more than a 3,000-lb ICE car.

    ‘Weigh a lot, pay a lot‘ — that’s my motto for the [sadly nonexistent] War on Automotive Obesity.

  9. Good stuff Eric.
    And why I put my wife and young kids in Suburbans in our metro area. Used, lease, didn’t care at the time, whatever gave them an edge-up in our risky driving environment. And it’s way way worse now with cell phone, etc…. More head-on’s than I can count now.

    Looks like some are trying to go after our big trucks now, again for ‘saaaaafety’. But this time saaaaafety for those without the big truck. yawn…………………………
    https://www.axios.com/2023/01/23/pickup-trucks-f150-size-weight-safety
    I have no idea who axios is though.

  10. Car makers are either very very stupid, or have some very very evil intent toward us. Or both. In fact, I would say both, because nobody running such a big business is really that stupid. Are they? To base their “business” on a thing few can afford, and fewer still want?
    I don’t think I’m from this planet, and I want to go home.

    • Hi John, I think both. the stupid part is just normal for most gov employee’s. They are most likely there because they couldn’t make it in the real world, like most professors.
      The evil part is recent. Pretty simple to understand, as gov has grown and grown it is now at the point where it’s way too big and their only way forward is with force and deceit.

      • I’m sorry John, i misread your quote above. Sad I did so, that my brain read ‘gov’ instead of ‘car’. but it applies to gov for sure.

  11. 3500 lbs. for a subcompact….. My uncle Tony’s old ’67 Fairlane wagon weighed right around 3500 lbs….but unlike the “advanced high-tech planet-saving” subcompact EV, it could carry 8 people, or sheets of plywood or a million other things. It only got about 16.5 MPGs, but they weren’t building them for economy in the days of ultra-cheap gas. Had that wagon had just a few slightly more modern upgrades, like a 4 or 5 speed OD tranny and radial tahrs [-Jim Varney], it could easily have gotten around 21MPG (My much heavier 92 Town Car used to get 23MPG!), which(the former) is about what that 3500 subcompact EV gets when one considers what it takes to generate the electrons needed to power it- only that EV can’t carry 8 people nor sheet of plywood nor much of anything else other than a virtual signaler or two en route to a cubicle farm or Cheryl Crow concert.

    An honest EV slogan would be: Do Less With More!

    • It only got about 16.5 MPGs,…..the average EV gets 20 mpg…in ideal conditions….in not ideal conditions….it is probably less then 16.5 mpg….this is without factoring in the 3% to 5% energy loss daily….

      Tesla says it’s normal to fully discharge itself in under 3 weeks. Keep this in mind when parking it somewhere….an anticipated daily 3%-5% stationary range consumption….just sitting parked…..lol

      The EV is worse then your 67 Fairlane wagon….lol

  12. Odd that you didn’t mention the Hummer. At 10K lbs it makes that Lightning seem like an F1 car in mass. At the lower case PG where I work they had to replace a majority of the hoists in our bldgs. to safely lift them up in order to work on them. You won’t stand a chance when some dumbass hits you (unless your in an Abhrams) with it testing out the 0-60 capabilities the company touts so much : (

  13. I’ve always thought some basic physics should be understood as part of getting a driver’s license, as Eric noted F=ma matters when driving an overweight behemoth. Too bad the public schools are so busy indoctrinating everyone in woke ideology and “climate change” that there’s no time for actual education.

    • What, ya think Physics and Science are more important than 17th century Belgium lesbian theology and queer black dance theory? What’s wrong with you /s

      So glad I graduated back when I did, the 2000’s weren’t as batshit crazy, and we offended without giving a fuck, plus the cars were actually cool during those days

    • > F=ma matters
      Yes, and it is essential to realize that:
      1. Force, F, and acceleration, a = dv/dt, are *VECTOR* quantities.
      2. Kinetic energy varies as the *square* of the velocity, v.

      Most people who read or post here already know this, and understand the consequences, but I’ll wager that more than 50% of the general public do not. Some of them pay with their lives for their ignorance, which is sad, and totally avoidable.

      One such offed himself on my front bumper, more than 30 years ago, when he crossed the double yellow into opposing traffic on his motorcycle, and hit my Ford pickup head on. Both vehicles were totaled, as was the driver of the motorcycle. I walked away from the accident, with very minor physical injuries. Emotional consequences are another matter, which I do not care to discuss, as they have long since resolved themselves.

      The point, as I see it, is that this is a tragedy that need not have happened, nor would have, had the motorcyclist not been ignorant of the laws of Nature, in which case he would have realized that steering a motorcycle into opposing traffic is fundamentally suicidal.

    • Now you know that wouldn’t be fair, Mike. If you make people actually learn something before getting their license, half the population would have to take the bus.

      “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
      ― George Carlin

  14. ‘Here’s an interesting – a weighty – question’ — eric

    And here is another …

    ‘Tesla said last week that it would begin building the Cybertruck by the end of 2023. The use of stainless steel for the Cybertruck’s body has industry experts shaking their heads.

    ‘Stainless steel resists corrosion and doesn’t need to be painted, eliminating a cost and the need for environmentally toxic chemical coatings. But it is also expensive and difficult to shape and weld.

    ‘Only one car company has ever tried to mass-produce a car with a stainless steel body. That was DeLorean, which went bankrupt after building fewer than 10,000 cars.’ — NYT

    https://archive.ph/bZVBz#selection-725.0-737.188

    Knowing nothing more than the above, one can predict that the Cybertruck is gonna be a scale-buster.

    Just for grins, take a look at the [literally] butt-ugly rear view about one-third down in the article. The truck resembles a shiny dumpster with a red LED strip under the lid. To me, it recalls East German brutalist architecture of featureless concrete apartment blocks.

    Calling Eeeeeeelon Z DeLorean …

    • DeLorean failed mostly because he got dazzled by the Northern Ireland (British) government’s handouts, which also came with a big spider web of stipulations that had nothing to do with building cars. This was at the end of the Labor/socialist rule of Great Britian so pretty foolhardy to do any manufacturing on the northern end of the Emerald Isle.

  15. We’re a recession/depression away from blunting and hopefully killing off or delaying this EV Nightmare

    People will barely afford their cars to begin with, fugeddabout these rolling crematoriums

  16. Darwin awards all parking 1,000 lbs of individually networked chemical cells, each one with a murderous tendency towards entropic blaze, right next to or within structures we live and play.

    2023 is far cry from The Jetsons when all we see is the battery-hugging-Left hungering for the grilling of my family’s lives and property on their Alter of Marxist-Ecology.

    • Far more than 1000 pounds in that new Hummer abomination. Probably close to 3000…

      It would be a GLORIOUS sight to catch one of them going full “battery fault” on video. I betcha it’d melt clear through the pavement.

      Will dental records suffice? I’d suggest a new form of identification for EEeeeeveeeee drivers! A tungsten necklace etched deeply with all your particulars. It’s the only way to be sure your final blazing signal of virtue is appreciated by your Twatter followers.

    • Hi X,

      Incredible – especially in context. Ford just posted dismal earnings… does it occur to the people in charge there it’s due to EEEEEEEEEVeeeeeeees pricing people out of the car market?

      The Mach e I test drove recently is a $50,000 vehicle. To start. It costs twice as much as an IC-powered small crossover such as the Crosstrek my sister just bought for $25k. The Crosstrek sells really well. The Mach e doesn’t – because it can’t.

      • Eric;

        Did your sister get the manual Trans? I ordered one for my wife after your article. Should arrive this month. About 25K. Of course the dealer wanted all kinds of add ons like stain gard, soory I’ll spray it myself for a couple bucks and save $250.00.

    • Jim Farley quotes from a couple of sub-linked Ford Authority articles:

      “Like Tesla has shown us, you have to approach the creation of the product through a conquest methodology. You design the product so they are actually incredibly painfully advanced. You over invest in electric architecture and embedded system, the way they look, the digital experience inside of them. It’s probably not going to be comfortable for our current customers who buy an Explorer.

      “We’ve shrink-wrapped our ICE business around segments that are often kind of self selected out of EV and the real passion brands,” Farley said. “I’m going to allow the team to invest in those passion brands, because we’re in the emotional business.”

      https://fordauthority.com/2022/06/ford-ceo-farley-says-ice-business-will-focus-on-passion-brands/

      Well, Jimbo, I’m in the emotional business too, as most of us meat puppets are. ‘Shrink-wrapping’ your ICE business sounds like mummification. Do you still build hearses?

      Frankly, Jim, you’ve managed in the last few weeks to antagonize me even worse than your airheaded peer EeeVee Mary. Imagine my schadenfreude as Ford crashes and burns.

      • @Jim H,

        I’ve mostly been a Ford/Lincoln guy as long as I can remember. These bean counters are making it so I may never buy their product again. If I end up living full time in my BOL I might just get a couple AQHs and call it good. At least then my conveyance wont be bloated and overweight.

      • “self selected” It costs to much and does not do what I need it to do. Sell all your Ford stock and invest in Bankruptcy lawyers, they will make a killing.

  18. Well after all Eric, those who are forcing people into overweight cars and trucks, and not just EVs either, aren’t too bright, except when it comes to abusing people. Don’t expect them to understand math. Math is hard, you know. Especially if it doesn’t produce the desired result. Easier to just hire someone to write an algorithm that DOES produce the desired result.

    • John,

      Writing an algorithm is easy.

      Writing an algorithm that accurately depicts reality is very, very difficult.

      Writing an algorithm that accurately depicts reality even and extrapolates well is damn near impossible, if not actually impossible, and really only potentially doable if the boundary conditions are well defined, which is only really ever true in a few cases.

      The rest is just snake oil.

      • Actually if the conversation does not include things like “acceptable level of approximation” and “fortuitous cancellation of errors” (and how to avoid such a thing) I would venture to say it is entirely unserious.

    • John, *they* understand the math just fine- they’re just betting on the fact that the masses don’t, and so they can proffer that fuzzy math to support their alibi of ‘saving the planet’ while hiding their real motives- i.e. the total control of the world population via world government. Remember, corporations are artificial ‘beings’ which exist only by grant and decree of government.

      And for those who see the obvious flaws in their math, they’re hoping that such will merely think them to be stupid, rather than evil/treasonous.

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