Originally Posted by
NicFromLA
I agree. There's two big problems: one is wheels are getting bigger and heavier which adds unsprung weight and requires larger wheel wells leaving less room on the inside, but marketing needs the car to have certain dimensions on the inside, hence the cars get bigger. The other problem is almost every country has different safety regulations (most ridiculous) and since car companies can't build a completely different car for each market, the safety systems are over engineered. Cars would be lighter, safer and more use less fuel if there was an international set of safety regulations.
Larger wheel are also detrimental in acceleration and braking as far as rotational inertia is concerned.....even if a larget 19" is lighter overall, there is a good chance that it still carries more inertia as more of that mass is located further away from the hub(a fair assumption). And that will hurt braking and accelerating....
The primary issue is still safety and manufacturing. The safety regulation is ever more stringent, not only for pure safety point of view, but even insurance point of view(regulation like minimum speed impact.). That drives the designer to go with more robust design like stronger impact structure. In a perfect world they would all be made with the latest lightweight material, but manufacturing cost drives that down because no one can afford to mass produce a car with exotic material, thus it is much easier to just make
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