597
Cars are like horses: people will soon realise EVs are just better, claims VW boss
(www.autoexpress.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
597 points (96.0% liked)
Technology
85196 readers
5708 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Battery weight isn’t as much a deal as you think it is. It can actually be beneficial. For example, instead of the weight being in the front of the car, you can have a lighter motor and have all that weight in between all four wheels. It really does wonders for winter traction.
It does wonders to increase ur inertia so u can't stop as well in snow too, and makes it harder to change direction. I live in a snowy mountain range and my 2900 lb shit box runs circles around the Tesla's and big trucks and suvs around here lol. Weight is the enemy of range, speed, efficiency, and gobbles up tires. I'm not saying the weight is an end all be all to things, but it is imo one of the major hurdles left to make EVs so much more competitive than they are. I mean shit a mid 90s geo metro is about as efficient as a brand new Prius. Why? Weight. Once evs can be produced in the 3k lb range they won't need as much battery for a 300 mile range, or the heavy EVs will have some fucking crazy 800 mile range. THAT is what will knock ice out of the park and get them all replaced. The next big leap in battery tech will about kill gass cars, and only ice left on the road will likely be diesel 18 wheelers. But what do I know? I just work on these things every day.
Honestly the only point you have is tires and not for the reason you think. No matter how stiff the rubber, it’s still flexible. So when you accelerate hard, which everyone with an EV does because it’s incredibly fun and we can’t help ourselves, the rubber will in the center of the tire and the rubber outside in the tread deform and go out of sync. It causes that tread the stress and bite harder, wearing much faster. It’s much more damaging to the tire than the weight difference from an ICEr.
There are 2 solutions to this: 1, implement a reduced acceleration rate from stop programmatically. Simple to do but it takes away a selling point on the car so you might introduce that as a “tire saving mode.” 2, self discipline. That’s never going to happen.
Considering there’s really nothing to break or wear on these cars aside from tires and wipers, manufacturers aren’t in any hurry to fix the tire issue.
As for reduced weight vehicles, look into the aptera. They are attacking this problem like you suggested, and the vehicle is so light and efficient solar panels become useful.
If you put the same tires on a 3k lb car as a 4k lb car and drive exactly the same, the 4k lb car will wear them quicker. Trust I'm no stranger to high power cars burning tires up, that's not what I'm talking about lol. And it was just one example. If you have 2 cars with same kwh batteries, but one is lighter, which is going further? This is basic physics to the point of bordering on common sense. I absolutely love the torque of EV cars and I can see how it would be hard to stay off the skinny pedal on a merge lol. The aptera looks freaking awesome and is imo sort of the next evolution of things. Simply, the lighter you make a transportation device, the less energy it takes to move. Humans are a pretty insignificant part of the weight of a car, the vehicle is mainly trying to move itself and with or without a driver in it would have quite similar range. The easier you make it to move the vehicle, the faster and further they will go. I think that this threads conflating my critique of battery weight for saying EVs are bad, which I'm not. I'm simply saying the energy density of batteries per lb is pretty far away from fuel right now, and as that gap closes with newer battery tech the argument for ICE cars gets increasingly more feeble. I personally am waiting for batteries to get LIGHT and CHEAP enough to make 200 mile range motorcycles an affordable and viable option for me! We are damned close and I think the future of electric transport is going to be awesome. I'd love to have a small array of pannels on my roof to charge an EV and never have to worry about spending a buck on range, and simplify my maintinence to making sure the tires have tread and none of the suspension components are falling off from getting after it on the dirt roads here LOL. My gas car doesn't ask for too many parts but of the repairs it has needed in the last 2 years, maybe 1/3rd of the components even exist on an EV.