It seems like each generation of new cars comes with more of everything: airbags, sound-deadening, screens, and even the motor under the hood. Electrification alone has added hundreds of pounds of batteries to vehicles that never carried batteries, while decades of safety mandates have piled up reinforced structures and additional restraint systems.
Automakers also keep piling on the tech, from powered everything to larger infotainment setups, and none of it is free in terms of mass. It all adds up, and it shows up on the scale. The average new car sold in the US today weighs 4,354 pounds, according to EPA’s 2025 Automotive Trends ReportThe model covers final data up to 2024.
The last two model years are essentially tied for the heaviest weight ever – 4,372 pounds in 2023, 4,354 in 2024 – and still early calculations for the year 2025 put it even higher, at 4,441 pounds. For scale, the 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 a number.
A car has at least four different weight measurements: curb weight, gross vehicle weight (GVW), gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR), and payload. Clever suspension and sharp steering can hide most of that mass, but they can’t defy the laws of physics. Here’s what carrying extra weight really means to how a car drives and feels, how much it costs to run, and how it copes when things go wrong.
Why are heavy vehicles a problem?
JD Power Weight is directly linked to survival chances: “For every 1,000 pounds lost, the mortality rate increases by 40%.” The inverse also applies to the pump – losing 100 pounds of weight equates to about a 1% to 2% increase in fuel economy. There is problem even when applying brakes. A car with more mass simply needs more space to stop completely, because that extra mass has to be overcome by the brakes, no matter how good they are.
Even the tires feel it. Take the BMW 4 Series: Its electric i4 eDrive35 carries about 761 pounds more weight than the gas-only 430i — 4,553 pounds versus 3,792 — a jump of nearly 20% that comes almost entirely from the battery pack, and that kind of mass difference is one of the biggest reasons why EVs eat up tires faster than their gas counterparts.
Weight doesn’t just pose a threat to the people inside the car. Once a vehicle surpasses the fleet average of about 4,000 pounds, an extra 500 pounds does almost nothing for the person driving it – IIHS data That represents only one fewer deaths per million registered vehicle-years – but the people they kill pay seven times more by the same measure.
Trucks are penalized particularly heavily: Get hit by a truck, and your chances of dying are about 200% higher than getting hit by a car. Although this is an improvement from the roughly 250% difference seen in earlier crash data, it is still a brutal number. Purchasing an extra heavy vehicle does not increase driver safety; This increases the risk to everyone else on the road.
Why are heavy performance cars a problem?
For a car to go really fast, it usually needs to check a few boxes. The most obvious is power, which is why fast cars typically come with large, powerful engines that provide plenty of pulling power. But weight is equally important. To really understand the difference between a heavy car with a lot of power and a light car with enough power, you have to look at the power-to-weight ratio.
Some cars, like the 2019 BMW 330i xDrive Gran Turismo, offer 248 horsepower and weigh 4,017 pounds. It might seem like the BMW should easily beat the 2019 Mazda MX-5, which makes do with a smaller 181-horsepower number. However, the MX-5 weighs only 2,339 pounds, and that difference is enough to overcome the far more powerful BMW.
In other words, the BMW carries about 16.2 pounds for each horsepower (0-60 mph in 5.9 seconds), while the MX-5 only carries 12.9 (0-60 mph in 5.7 seconds) – and that lighter weight doesn’t matter as much as the raw power figures suggest. Car lovers also criticize modern performance cars for increasing weight over generations.
The BMW M5 is often a target for weight criticism: the latest G90 M5 weighs approximately 1,190 pounds (540 kg) more than the existing F90 M5 Competition, an increase of approximately 28%. of caravan Test yourself. Even with more than 100 extra horsepower, when CarWow prepared the two for a quarter-mile drag race, the new M5 still couldn’t beat the older, lighter car, passing the line by 11.3 seconds to the F90’s 11.1.
