Electric vehicles are becoming too heavy and too powerful, says security chief

Enlarge / The Hummer EV has become the benchmark for oversized and overweight electric vehicles, and it's been called out by the government's top traffic safety adviser. Jonathan Gitlin

If you're worried about on-road vehicles getting too big and heavy, especially as we transition to electric vehicles, you're not alone. On Wednesday, National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy sounded the alarm during her keynote address at this year's Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

"I am concerned about the increased risk of serious injury and death to all road users due to the higher curb weight and [to] the increase in size, power and performance of vehicles on our roads, including electric vehicles," she told attendees. .

The model child of excessive electric vehicles is the GMC Hummer EV, a monster truck with a monstrous curb weight of 9,063 lbs (4,110 kg). The vehicle is still powerful enough to rush to 60 mph in three seconds. Appropriately, this feature is called "WTF mode". Indeed, Homendy drew attention to the gigantic Hummer in his speech.

“Its gross weight rating is 10,550 lbs. The battery alone weighs over 2,900 lbs, which is about the weight of a Honda Civic. The Ford F-150 Lightning weighs between 2,000 and 3,000 lbs more than the non-electric version... This has a significant impact on the safety of all road users," Homendy continued.

The problem is a simple physics problem: all other things being equal, a heavier vehicle transmits more energy in a crash than a lighter vehicle. Speed ​​matters too, of course - small increases become large increases in kinetic energy during a crash. But while municipalities and states set speed limits, there is no similar restriction on the curb weight of passenger vehicles.

An F-150, a 3 series and a mini drive in a bar

To help visualize the problem, it helps to look at some examples of our vehicles gaining mass over time. Take, for example, the American bestseller, the Ford F-150 pickup truck. There are myriad powertrain, cabin, and powertrain combinations, but let's look at examples that come closest to today's F-150 Lightning, Ford's excellent EV pickup. When a breakdown of curb weights was given, I exercised caution and chose the heaviest.

Enlarge / A graph showing the increase in curb weight of the Ford F-150 vehicle over time. Eric Bangman

As you can see, in 1993 an extended cab F-150 weighed just under 2 metric tons, at 4,218 pounds (1,913 kg). A decade later, and now with a slightly larger Supercrew configuration, that number had increased by 18%, and in 2013 a similar truck was 35% heavier than two decades earlier.

In fact, Ford has put the truck on a diet for the current generation; a gas-powered 2023 F-150 Supercrew weighs 4,948 lb (2,244 kg). But the books are piling up if you want a hybrid F-150 or the all-electric version.