It’s not simply you: American automobiles have gotten greater. Over the previous 20 years, rising numbers of US patrons have turned of their sedans for SUVs and pickup vehicles. And these SUVs and pickups have grown ever extra hulking. The electrification of driving isn’t slowing the expansion spurt. Batteries are heavy, and lots of carmakers are prioritizing their hottest autos to transform into EVs—specializing in bigger pickups and crossovers.

Larger autos require extra supplies to make and extra vitality to propel, they usually put on down infrastructure faster. Researchers have steered they could have prompted the soar in US street deaths for the reason that pandemic, particularly of pedestrians, that’s unequaled elsewhere on the earth. The legal guidelines of physics imply heavier automobiles trigger extra injury once they hit issues, and greater autos can have larger blind spots. (Plenty of other factors, together with smartphone use and dangerous street design, affect street security.)

Ned Curic is chief engineering and know-how officer at Stellantis, the globe’s fourth-largest automaker, which owns manufacturers together with Jeep, Chrysler, Ram, and Alfa Romeo. He acknowledges that the large automotive state of affairs will not be supreme. He elicited happy murmurs this summer time from street security specialists—not all the time carmakers’ largest followers—when he mentioned that he was annoyed by automobiles’ ballooning sizes. (The phenomenon has even crossed into Europe.) In a latest interview, he informed WIRED that his engineering groups are on the lookout for lighter-weight applied sciences, in regards to the smaller autos he’s enthusiastic about (spoiler: you possibly can’t purchase them within the US), and what will be accomplished about street deaths. This interview has been edited for size and readability.

Aarian Marshall: Does automobile weight matter to you and to automakers?

Ned Curic: I’m a educated engineer, and since I used to be a pupil supplies and weight has been an curiosity. One of my first jobs was within the protection trade the place we take care of satellites and issues shipped into house. That weight, the payload, is a very huge difficulty. You’re optimizing grams of weight.

In new electric-battery-powered autos, the battery provides a major quantity of weight. And with that, you get greater tires, you get greater suspension, you get a much bigger body. It’s a unfavorable vortex that drives further weight. Then we’ve this push to cut back carbon and the entire influence on the planet. We need to take care of the environmental influence in the end, so why do not we get forward of it?