The Tiny Heavy Car

Fiat used to sell something very close to the “tiny cars” Trump implied Americans would be able to buy (but has done nothing to make it legal to sell them to Americans).

Emphasis on “something close.”

Though it was tiny – 139.6 inches long – the Fiat 500 (last sold new in 2019) was  preposterously heavy (2,505 lbs.) for a car that tiny, which resulted in it being embarrassingly fuel-inefficient for a vehicle its size (28 city, 33 highway). This greatly reduced its appeal as a tiny car. Put another way, why cram yourself into something tiny when you could drive something less tiny that gets the same – or better – mileage?

To put the Fiat’s figures in some perspective, a 1975 VW Beetle – considered tiny when it was new – is 163.4 inches long. Practically a stretch limo in relation to the Fiat. Yet the Beetle weighed 1,830 lbs. – an astounding 675 pounds less. To put that figure in some perspective, 675 pounds is about what a full-size motorcycle weighs. It is very close to what the massive (7.5 liter) cast iron V8 engine that’s under the hood of my ’76 Trans-Am weighs. You can imagine what kind of gas mileage a ’75 Beetle might have managed if you dropped a 455 cubic inch cast iron V8 that weighs close to 700 pounds in its lap (so to speak). Instead of about 30 – pretty good mileage for a car designed in the 1930s, with a carbureted engine a non-overdrive transmission – a 2,505 Beetle’s mileage would have been not much better than the mileage my ’76 Trans-Am got back in the day. And in that case, why not just drive the TA?

Let’s try to image what kind of mileage a 2019 Fiat 500 might have achieved if it weighed the same as a ’75 VW Beetle. The latter got low 20s  in the city and about 30 on the highway, which is not that far off what the 500 touted – and that was without the modern advantages of a fuel-injected engine and an overdrive transmission. It was arguably spectacular mileage for a car that – in 1975 – was fundamentally a thirty-year-old design. It was still appealing enough in ’75 for 268,751 people to buy a new Beetles that year.

Fiat sold 3,269 500s in 2019, the last year of availability before it got cancelled.

How many more might have sold if this tiny car delivered excellent mileage? Of course, in order to do that, it’d have had to shed a lot of vehicular pannus overflowing its beltline. The general rule is that every additional 100 pounds of added weight reduces gas mileage by about 2 percent. So, if 675 pounds of pannus – it’s a term used by doctors to describe the belly fat folds of morbidly obese people – reduces gas mileage by about 14 percent then we can parking brake reverse that and fairly say that getting rid of the pannus would increase mileage by about the same percentage spread. So, our hypothetical 1,830 lb. Fiat 500 would likely have achieved closer to its touted highway mileage in city driving and would be well into  the 40s on the highway. These are probably conservative estimates. After all, there were tiny cars such as the Honda CRX of the ’80s that got into the low 50s on the highway. The early CRX was a little lighter (about 1,713 lbs.) than the ’75 Beetle, but the point stands.

It was possible for Honda – and others – to sell tiny cars that weighed less than 2,000 lbs. because there was nothing preventing them from offering them for sale. People were free to weigh the pros and cons of tiny cars and if they thought the pros outweighed the cons, they could choose a tiny car rather than larger (heavier) car.

The reverse was also true.

By 2019 – the last year the Fiat 500 was available in the United States – the government was the one deciding. Tiny no longer meant light – or efficient.

Probably the greatest contributor to vehicular pannus is the federal requirement that new vehicles come with at least two air bags. The bags themselves weigh next to nothing, of course. It is the structure that must be built around them for the Supplemental Restraint System to work effectively that adds pannus. The ’19 500 – like most late model cars – had four additional air bags. Two for “side impact” and two more for the heads of the driver and front seat passenger. Have you hefted the door of a late model car? Even tiny car doors require two strong men to manage once off the hinges. Same with the seats. Back when tiny cars were light cars, a single man of average strength could easily remove/install doors and seats by himself, because they hardly weighed anything.

Yes, of course – cue the ululations of the “safety” neurotics – if you ran into something (or something ran into you) there was not much in between you and whatever you ran into (or ran into you).

So?

Why are so many people so afraid of what might happen but probably won’t? No, that’s not quite right. Or – rather – it would be perfectly alright if the neurotics who are afraid of everything went ahead and took whatever measures they deemed appropriate for themselves and left everyone else free to do the same. Instead, they combine neurosis with pathology (busybody control freak-ism) and whine to the government (or become the government) and leverage the government to impose their neurosis and pathology on everyone. That is why a tiny car like the Fiat 500 is absurdly overweight (and fuel-inefficient) for its size and it is also why there will be no tiny cars that aren’t overweight that are very fuel efficient available for sale in this country, never mind Trump’s vague and bullshitty gabbling about them being “allowed.”

They won’t be.

It would take a frontal assault upon the neurotic and pathological and unconstitutional “safety” apparat for them to be allowed. That is to say, for people who want them to be free to buy them. That will not happen until the neurotics and pathological are understood to be exactly that, told to shut up and that they’d better go back to minding their own got-damned business.

. . .

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