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by audunw 959 days ago
The issues talked about here are mostly about size (width, length), not weight.

Yes, the higher weight of EVs is a bit of an issue. But not as much as people make it out to be.

But there are a lot of big EVs now. I think it’s mainly due to all car manufacturers coming out with a new generation of EVs and the first models they make are the ones with the highest margins. I.e. big cars.

In the previous generations you had cars like Hyundai Kona EV which is completely reasonable size. But the first in Hyundais new generation is Ioniq 5 which doesn’t look like a monster but is surprisingly big.

2 comments

> Yes, the higher weight of EVs is a bit of an issue. But not as much as people make it out to be.

Not to detract from the discussion‘s topic but weight is an issue. Road damage scales with fourth power of axle load. That’s is, a car with 2t instead of 1.5t does three times the damage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

True but that should also tell you that road damage comes almost exclusively from commercial-sized vehicles, coming back to the main point: Added EV weight in passenger cars is a non-issue.
Three times the damage of a tiny number is still tiny. Vans, garbage trucks, plows, tractor trailers, pickup trucks, all do significantly more damage. A single garbage truck is going to do more damage than 4000 EV cars in one pass.

That's what people mean when they say EV weight isn't as impactful as people make it out to be.

There's also the assumption that most road damage comes from vehicles. I don't know how it proportions out between vehicles and weather, but weather, particularly freeze and thaw, is very damaging to roads.

> Road damage scales with fourth power of axle load.

Why? That's not intuitive to me. (I'm not saying you're wrong, just want to understand.)

Thanks, I updated my comment with a link to Wikipedia.
ID.3s are also big in terms of size, it's just that they're not branded as CUVs/mini-SUVs and that's why they get a pass. For example they're bigger than a Mazda CX-3, which is branded on wikipedia as a "Subcompact crossover SUV (B)".