It’s 1992. Your mom just took you through the Dairy Queen drive in after supper. It was 30C today, and it’s going to be 35C tomorrow. You’re going to go swimming at the local outdoor pool with your mom, little brother, auntie and favourite cousin, tomorrow though. Mom will probably put on that Blue Rodeo tape on the way back. It’s not your favorite, but you find yourself waiting for the song hooks.
Life is simple and life is good.
Hasn’t the weight of cars been increasing? Pick a model and track the curb weight over generations. It seems to be going up.
Seriously. This is a 10th generation Oldsmobile 98, with a 4,000 pounds curb weight. That puts it in the same range as smaller crossover SUVs these days.
Except for EVs (which are heavy af because of the batteries) curb weight is down significantly from the 70s to today. It has been steadily trending upwards, but slowly, since around 2012. It’s hard to make a car as heavy as they used to be back when everything was steel and weld joints. Engines were bigger back then too — because they were less efficient.
Thanks for the input. Is there a model of car we can use to show this trend? I tried doing it with a VW Golf, but that just showed the upward trend.
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/average-car-weight.html
Here’s an article about it. Thanks for making me look it up, it has an important little fact at the top, which is the pickups have trended steadily upward over that same period which I didn’t know. However, other vehicle types have trended steadily downwards, and are still below their previous figures.
Thanks for that. Drawing a line between cars and SUVs helped clarify average vehicle weight as the sum of two different trends.
Definitely a lot more people swapping to SUVs now too
It’s mostly that the old American land yachts are no longer as big. Look at the fifth generation Lincoln Continental vs any after it. Or the 1960s Cadillac Eldorado, a 2.2 ton 2 door car
European and Asian cars have been trending up in size meanwhile but there have been instances where a new generation model is lighter than the old one due to the materials used.
What’s really jarring is to see the old, American land yachts from back in the day on the road next to the grotesquely-oversized pickup trucks we see everywhere today. They look, well, not exactly small, but nothing at all like the bloated whales in our memories. Heck, my grandfather’s Cadillac seemed enormous at 225 inches long (the longest ever production car at the time), but the base model of the Ford F series is now 232 inches.