If we’re really going to talk about vehicle safety and technology, let’s start here:

• EVs didn’t invent mass.
  Cars have been heavy longer than some people have been alive.
  
• The real innovation isn’t that cars weigh a lot.
  It’s that they move, stop, and protect occupants in ways that would have been science fiction to their predecessors.
  
• Heavy cars aren’t new.
  Heavy cars that behave predictably and protect you?

That’s progress.

Heavy cars aren’t new. What’s new is our expectation that they protect us quietly, reliably, and without drama. And maybe that’s the real discomfort here—not the technology itself, but how easily we forget what came before.

Continuing my rant on EV weight… here’s the point most critics miss: weight isn’t the enemy. Uncontrolled weight is.

Mass only becomes a real danger when a vehicle can’t manage it under dynamic conditions — sudden stops, sharp turns, emergency maneuvers. All modern cars (including EVs) have far better capacity to do that than anything that came before.

Yet when nothing bad happens, nobody tells that story. If a modern EV performs a perfect panic stop, there’s no drama. There’s no spectacle. Well, apart from being absolutely astounded that it stopped so quickly. People just go home alive and complain about the temp of their coffee or that they dropped their phone while posting something on Tik Tok or Instagram.

That’s the tragedy of good engineering: when it works, people assume nothing changed.

Once you look at weight through the lens of control, the debate starts to shift. At that point, the real question isn’t whether cars are heavier—but whether we’re judging them by the right standards.

That combination of safety, control, and performance didn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of decades of unsexy, incremental engineering:

• Metallurgy that lets steel bend the way we want it to
• Crash structures that absorb energy on purpose
• Control theory baked into stability and braking systems
• Tire chemistry that makes a contact patch grip like crazy
• Software that watches and corrects literally thousands of things per second

And a frankly absurd amount of testing — simulated, physical, repeated.

We didn’t just make heavier cars. We made heavier cars that behave better, stop shorter, and protect people far more effectively than anything in the past.

None of these changes are flashy, and most drivers never notice them working. Which might explain why so many people think nothing meaningful has changed at all. But if that’s true, why do modern crashes look so different from the old ones?

EV batteries are heavy, sure. But conventional cars have always carried a lot of mass — it was just in the engine block and frame instead of a battery pack. That historical baseline gets lost in the conversation.

A dual-motor Tesla Model Y weighs about 4,400 pounds curb weight. That’s roughly where a full-size family sedan from the 1960s sat. The difference is that the Model Y is stiff where it needs to be, controlled where it counts, and designed to manage that mass with far more precision.

The Model Y’s brakes can drag it down from highway speed faster and more predictably than any big sedan from fifty years ago. Its tires stick in corners that would’ve dumped a 1960s cruiser into the weeds. Its electronic stability systems intervene before many humans even realize they’re sliding.

In a crash? Coming from a 1960s land-yacht, the crash survivability looks like freaking witchcraft.

The weight didn’t disappear—it moved, and it changed how it’s distributed and controlled. Which leads to a more interesting question than “how heavy is it?”: what changed in the way cars are designed to deal with that weight?

What better way to spend New Years Eve than continuing a rant?

Right. Nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a trap!

People remember the feel of old machines, not the consequences. They talk about how a vintage boat of a car “soaks up the road.” They don’t remember the ways it needed 200 feet to stop on a wet road. They don’t remember bias-ply tires squirting out from under you in a rainstorm.

Nobody waxes poetic about lap belts, bias-ply tires in the rain, or steering columns aimed at the sternum. Funny how that part never makes the highlight reel.

Modern cars hide their safety systems well because when safety works, you don’t notice it. That’s the paradox: progress is invisible when it works.

Memory has a way of sanding down sharp edges. But modern cars don’t rely on memory or luck—they rely on engineering. So how did we get from hopeful mass to managed safety in the first place?