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It’s not just you: American cars have gotten bigger. Over the past two decades, growing numbers of US buyers have turned in their sedans for SUVs and pickup trucks. And those SUVs and pickups have grown ever more hulking. The electrification of driving isn’t slowing the growth spurt. Batteries are heavy, and many carmakers are prioritizing their most popular vehicles to convert into EVs—focusing on larger pickups and crossovers.
Larger vehicles require more materials to make and more energy to propel, and they wear down infrastructure quicker. Researchers have suggested they may have caused the jump in US road deaths since the pandemic, especially of pedestrians, that is unequaled elsewhere in the world. The laws of physics mean heavier cars cause more damage when they hit things, and bigger vehicles can have larger blind spots. (Plenty of other factors, including smartphone use and bad road design, influence road safety.)
Ned Curic is chief engineering and technology officer at Stellantis, the globe’s fourth-largest automaker, which owns brands including Jeep, Chrysler, Ram, and Alfa Romeo. He acknowledges that the gigantic car situation is not ideal. He elicited pleased murmurs this summer from road safety experts—not always carmakers’ biggest fans—when he said that he was frustrated by cars’ ballooning sizes. (The phenomenon has even crossed into Europe.) In a recent interview, he told WIRED that his engineering teams are looking for lighter-weight technologies, about the smaller vehicles he’s excited about (spoiler: you can’t buy them in the US), and what can be done about road deaths. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Aarian Marshall: Does vehicle weight matter to you and to automakers?
Ned Curic: I’m a trained engineer, and since I was a student materials and weight has been an interest. One of my first jobs was in the defense industry where we deal with satellites and things shipped into space. That weight, the payload, is a really big issue. You're optimizing grams of weight.
In new electric-battery-powered vehicles, the battery adds a significant amount of weight. And with that, you get bigger tires, you get bigger suspension, you get a bigger frame. It’s a negative vortex that drives additional weight. Then we have this push to reduce carbon and the total impact on the planet. We have to deal with the environmental impact sooner or later, so why don't we get ahead of it?
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Weight is also a significant cost. If you project the cost of the vehicle with the growth of the income, you see essentially two lines diverging. A lot of it is driven by what we put in the vehicle. The more mass, the more stuff we put in, the higher the cost. Sellantis has a very clear mission, which is freedom of mobility for all. You can build expensive cars that few people can afford, but how to build a car that everyone can afford?
If adding weight has all those drawbacks, why have cars gotten so big?
Generally, vehicles have become bigger because of comfort needs and customer demand for larger vehicles. The weight has increased with the size of the vehicles. Sometimes it's balancing between the cost and the materials. Different alloys are much lighter, but they’re expensive, so you’re dealing with affordability issues. At some point, we said, OK, now let’s figure out how to make vehicles weigh less. But then electrification will make them even heavier, so we have this additional challenge ahead of us.
Size has also increased with more safety requirements that protect people. In Europe, if you’re going to achieve a five-star safety rating, you need to add side protection and front protection. You need specific parts of the vehicle to be able to handle certain loads. So you have to reinforce a lot of the vehicle’s body with additional materials. Some of that is done by structuring the vehicle differently, but at some point, you just have to add mass. It’s pure physics you’re dealing with.
How is Stellantis making cars weigh less?
Everything is on the table for us. We build these very small electric mobility devices, the Fiat Topolino and the Citroën Ami, which are very popular in Europe. They’re not cars. You see the Ami everywhere in Paris; it has a range of 75 km (47 miles). If you’re in a city or close to the city and you need to get in and get out, it’s very popular. The impact of that vehicle on the environment is exceptionally low. There’s a tubular steel frame. The battery is also very small. Often people say they want a 1,000-kilometer (620 miles) range on their battery, but daily rides are much shorter. In America, people on average go 30 or 40 miles a day, and it’s similar in Europe. With these vehicles, the range is not so great, but it’s fantastic for the city, and you charge it every few days.
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We’re also looking at all kinds of different alloys. Carbon fiber is lighter than aluminum and much lighter than steel. The problem with these newer materials today is they’re not used so much in manufacturing, and the production is quite expensive. We’re looking into ways to partner with people who can massively produce these materials at scale so we can drop the price.
There are also super-interesting materials that are in academic papers today. Carbon fiber–reinforced plastics are very easy to mold, very inexpensive, very light. We’re working with a number of labs to identify materials and looking at the complete lifecycle. And then with batteries, the chemistry used today will change. We’re doing a lot of research and investing in sodium-ion batteries, for example. It’s going to be much lighter. There is so much effort being put in right now that I’m confident people will come up with better, lighter materials.
Some researchers and advocates have argued that automakers should push customers to understand that they don’t need a long-range electric vehicle with a big battery to meet their daily needs. Do you see customers changing the way they think about battery range?
I'm a big believer in freedom for the customers to choose what's best for them. Having that selection is critically important. Stellantis is in really good shape from that perspective. We have a broad range of vehicles. We have the Ami and the Topolino. We have the Jeep Wagoneer. We do need to work on the Wagoneer, to put it on a diet a bit. [The gas-powered 2024 Jeep Wagoneer is around 6,000 pounds, depending on the specs; an electric version, the Wagoneer S, will be available in 2024.] I wouldn't say we’ll push customers. For some of them, range is always going to be important. But we’ll have the selection, and eventually customers will be educated and decide where they want to go.
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We talked about making sure cars are safe for their occupants, but what about pedestrians? Advocates worry that big vehicles cause disproportionate harm to people outside of cars. US regulators have proposed new rules that would push automakers to comply with the same kind of pedestrian safety standards that already exist in Europe.
A lot of progress is going to be made on advanced driver-assistance features enabled by sensors and cameras. Most of our vehicles are now very, very smart. If you try to brake, and the system picks up that you’re about to hit something, it will add more pressure on the brake system to slow down and stop the vehicle. I think the biggest progress in pedestrian safety is going to come from that kind of active safety.
We have to be very smart in deploying active safety for vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. The industry and different countries’ governments are dropping the ball on vehicle-to-vehicle communication and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. For me, personally, this is very painful to observe. Active safety is one area where the whole industry should get together and have the regulators make it very easy for carmakers to communicate between cars, to understand traffic more. Right now we do a lot of experiments with vehicle-to-vehicle communication, but you need to have more cars on the road with the technology to make it useful.
