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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.

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Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- Telodzrum@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  consumeraffairs.com/…/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.
  
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  - fyzzlefry@retrolemmy.com ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Because they’ve gotten physically bigger?
    
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    Telodzrum@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    That’s my thought. The dimensions are bigger and almost all of them are extended cab or at least third door.
    
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  - Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Thanks for that. Drawing a line between cars and SUVs helped clarify average vehicle weight as the sum of two different trends.
    
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- boonhet@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    What’s really jarring is to see the old, American land yachts back in the day on the road next to the grotesquely-oversized pickup trucks we see everywhere. 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.
    
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