My car is 945kg and the biggest issue with longer trips is that the chairs aren’t that comfortable. Although at higher speeds it feels a bit dodgy. It does 170 no problem and that feels quite fast already. Top speed is 190 which I only tried once on the autobahn but that’s quite scary. At about 170 acceleration drops significantly and it takes a few minutes to go from 170 to 190. Won’t ever try that again. Cruising at around 150 for several hours is perfectly fine.
At the time I lived in Plymouth, Devon and my parents live in Exeter and still do. In between is the A38, which is a dual carriageway and quite a lot of fun to drive. Halden Hill is a good test of a vehicle!
My old Fester managed about 60mph at the top of Halden Hill, going from Exeter. My current EV can be doing 120mph at that point.
The fester used to start chattering at about 65 and then quietened down at 70-75. After 75 (which of course I never achieved, what with that being illegal) it made a strange whining sound, which was not unpleasant. It passed away at M5 J30 (Exeter Services) with at least two shot cylinders.
I had no problems going 190-210 on a motorcycle. It's just like boat hull speed, after some limit no matter what you do it just won't go faster.
Why would you think that? Well, you sort of explain it, but you don’t have any evidence or experience to back it up, so I’m still not sure why you think it?
Back in the day (think 1990s) plenty of small European hatchbacks weighed less than or around 1000kg, and noise at highway speeds was not a problem: Peugeot, Citroen, Renault, VW, Fiat, and others all had small hatchbacks that were absolutely fine, and perfectly comfortable, at motorway speeds for long distances.
My first car was a used 1998 Renault Clio: depending on which engine and trim level you bought they either weighed a bit less than 1000kg, or a bit more. I looked mine up and it weighed 1050kg.
I did about 50,000 miles in that car, including lots of long journeys. Back then I had a far too heavy right foot - which eventually got me a speeding fine - and even then noise wasn’t an issue on the motorway.
There’s so much more to how noisy a car is inside than merely sound insulation. Aerodynamics are a huge component, but so are shut lines, seals, and panel gaps. Materials and surface finishes also matter. Even things like the shape of the wing mirrors, or how the shape of the front corners and headlights direct air around and past the wing mirrors[0], can have a massive impact on whether or not a car is noisy at speed within the cabin.
This is Hacker News. We all to a greater or lesser extent work or dabble in incredibly detail oriented disciplines. Why would you assume disciplines outside those in majority representation here aren’t equally, or even more, detailed?
[0] I want to say either the Nissan Note or the Nissan Leaf had nobbly protrusions on its headlights specifically to reduce cabin noise by changing the way air flowed around the wing mirrors.
Because there's literally a market carve-out for city-driving electric cars like the Leaf and the BMW i-series. As much as I would love for a group of engineers to go hard on specs out of passion, I also believe that corporations are run much more by MBA-brained types than engineers now and any over-engineering outside of strict business criteria will be immediately vetoed and dumped
> My first car was a used 1998 Renault Clio
And these days the over-reliance on plastics for structure and cost reduction in combination with large scale production sourcing issues that are hangovers from a global pandemic and an increasingly aggressive imperial trade regime by certain bad actors means there's little chance you are getting similar quality standards like those from 20+ years ago
Enshittification is a real thing and I'm not the kind of corporate brand loyalist who still believes these companies are going out of their way to make a car better than it needs to be
And? Do you think these cars are incapable of highway driving? What do you think happens when manufacturers release cars that are terribly noisy in the cabin at highway speeds?
I’ll tell you: what’s always happened. Reviewevers and consumers will slag them off and people will vote with their wallets.
A lightweight car is not a car that inherently has to be unpleasant to drive at speed.
And you think cost cutting is new? Robert McNamara and his “whizz kids” near ruined the reputation of the Ford Motor Company due to quality issues stemming from his relentless cost cutting in the 1950s and 1960s. What he and, really, what the rest of Detroit were doing enabled the success of Japanese manufacturers in the USA because they made a higher quality product and charged less for it.
> And these days the over-reliance on plastics for structure and cost reduction
People have been complaining about this since the 1980s. Plastics have been used extensively in cars for decades, including in ways that compromise the durability of critical components and sensors. This is not a new problem.
It is sheer ignorance to claim that any car weighing less than a ton will inherently be unpleasant to drive at highway speeds.