Brandon Woyshnis/Getty ImagesEvery generation of new cars seems to arrive with more of everything: airbags, sound-deadening, screens, and even motors under the hood. Electrification alone has added hundreds of pounds of battery to vehicles that never used to carry one, while decades of safety mandates have piled on reinforced structures and additional restraint systems.Automakers keep stacking on tech, too, from powered everything to bigger infotainment setups, and none of it is free in terms of mass. All of that adds up, and it shows up on the scale. The average new car sold in the U.S. today weighs 4,354 pounds, according to the EPA's 2025 Automotive Trends Report, which covers final data through model year 2024.The last two model years have essentially tied for the heaviest ever — 4,372 pounds in 2023, 4,354 in 2024 — and a still-preliminary count for year 2025 puts it higher still, at 4,441 pounds. For scale, EPA has been logging this number since 1975, when the average new vehicle weighed 4,060 pounds. And weight, it turns out, isn't even one number.AdvertisementAdvertisementA car carries at least four separate weight measurements: curb weight, gross vehicle weight (GVW), gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR), and payload. Clever suspension and quicker steering can disguise much of that mass, but they can't defy the laws of physics. Here's what carrying all that extra weight actually means for how a car drives and feels, what it costs to run, and how it holds up when things go wrong.Read more: Here Are The Worst Car MythsWhy heavy cars are a problemGeneral MotorsJ.D. Power ties weight directly to survival odds: "for every 1,000-pound drawback, the fatality rate is over 40%." The inverse holds at the pump, too — losing 100 pounds is worth roughly a 1% to 2% bump in fuel economy. Braking suffers as well. A car carrying more mass simply needs more room to come to a full stop, because that extra mass has to be overcome by the brakes, no matter how good they are. Tires feel it too. Take the BMW 4 Series: its electric i4 eDrive35 carries about 761 more pounds than the gas-only 430i — 4,553 pounds versus 3,792 — a roughly 20% jump that comes almost entirely from the battery pack, and that kind of mass difference is one of the biggest reasons EVs eat through tires faster than their gas counterparts.AdvertisementAdvertisementWeight doesn't just threaten the people inside the car, either. Once a vehicle crosses the fleet average of about 4,000 pounds, an extra 500 pounds does almost nothing for the person driving it — IIHS data shows only one fewer death per million registered vehicle-years — but the people they hit pay for it seven times over in the same measure.Trucks carry an especially steep penalty: get hit by one, and your odds of dying run nearly 200% higher than being hit by a car. Although that is an improvement from the roughly 250% gap seen in earlier crash data, it is still a brutal number. Buying an extra-heavy vehicle doesn't add safety for the driver; it just adds risk for everyone else on the road.Why heavy performance cars are a problemBMW GroupFor a car to go really fast, it usually needs to check a few boxes. The most obvious one is power, which is why fast cars typically come with big, powerful engines that offer plenty of pulling power. But weight is just as important. To really understand the difference between a heavy car with lots of power and a lightweight car with just enough power, you have to look at power-to-weight ratios.Some cars, like the 2019 BMW 330i xDrive Gran Turismo, offer 248 horsepower and weigh 4,017 pounds. It might sound like BMW should easily beat the 2019 Mazda MX-5, which makes do with a smaller 181-horsepower number. However, the MX-5 weighs just 2,339 pounds, and that difference is enough to outrun the much more powerful BMW. AdvertisementAdvertisementIn other words, the BMW carries about 16.2 pounds for every horsepower it makes (0-60 mph in 5.9 seconds), while the MX-5 only carries about 12.9 (0-60 in 5.7 seconds) — and that lighter load matters just as much as the raw power figures suggest. Car enthusiasts also criticize modern performance cars for piling on weight generation after generation. The BMW M5 is a frequent target for weight criticism: the latest G90 M5 weighs about 1,190 pounds (540 kg) more than the outgoing F90 M5 Competition, a jump of roughly 28%, per CarWow's own testing. Even with more than 100 additional horsepower on tap, when CarWow lined the two up for a quarter-mile drag race, the new M5 still couldn't beat the older, lighter car, crossing the line in 11.3 seconds to the F90's 11.1.Want more like this? Join the Jalopnik newsletter to get the latest auto news sent straight to your inbox, and follow us or add us as a preferred search source on Google.Read the original article on Jalopnik.
