Curb weights have climbed relentlessly for thirty years, and the reasons are mostly defensible in isolation but ruinous in aggregate. We walk the safety-regulation mass that crash structures and airbags add, the battery penalty that pushes EV pickups past three tonnes, the comfort and footprint creep, and the unintended costs: tire particulate, road wear that scales with the fourth power of axle load, longer stopping distances, and a lethal danger asymmetry to everyone in a lighter vehicle or on foot.
Tires
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Why Modern Cars Are So Heavy -
Tire Engineering Every dynamic input your car receives from the road comes through four patches of rubber the size of your hand, and almost everything good or bad about how the car drives is decided by their compound, construction, and tread. We walk the rubber chemistry, the contact-patch physics, the honest trade-offs the UTQG ratings encode, why "all-season" means "bad at both," and how to actually choose tires.