Electric cars are heavy. SUVs are heavier.

Hi, this is Gregor, co-founder of Datawrapper. This week I looked into how much extra weight an electric car carries — and how it compares across sizes.

Electric cars are no longer niche. In July 2026, for example, a record 29.3% of all new passenger cars registered in Germany were fully electric, up from 18.4% in July 2025, according to the KBA. Across the first seven months of the year, roughly every fourth new car was a battery-electric one.

Here's a side effect of that shift that had slipped my attention: cars are getting heavier. A battery pack with enough capacity for a few hundred kilometers of range weighs several hundred kilograms, and nothing else in the car gets light enough to make up for it.

Why weight matters

That matters beyond fuel consumption. In a collision between two cars, the lighter one absorbs the bigger impact, and the force of the impact is the single best predictor of whether someone in it dies. Economists Michael Anderson and Maximilian Auffhammer put a number on it: being hit by a car that is 1,000 pounds (about 450 kilograms) heavier raises the risk of a fatality in the struck car by 40 to 50%. Heavier cars also wear down tires, brake pads, and road surfaces faster, and the tiny particles they shed make up a growing share of traffic-related pollution.

So, how much heavier are electric cars, really? Conveniently, the European Union keeps a record of every single new car sold. I pulled every registration from 2020 to 2025, which adds up to a total of 61 million cars across the EU. When the cars are grouped by how they're powered, the picture is clear:

Cars with nothing but a combustion engine weigh 1,479 kilograms on average, while fully battery-electric cars reach an average of 1,878 kilograms. That's 400 kilograms more, or about the weight of five adult passengers. But fully electric cars aren't the heaviest: plug-in hybrids come in at 1,974 kilograms, because they carry a battery and an engine, and because they are overwhelmingly sold as large, well-equipped cars.

How I built the chart

I wanted to show each group's distribution, not just its average, so the chart is a bar chart in disguise. The bars themselves use a fully transparent color, which makes them vanish. Everything you actually see is drawn with range overlays: a light band for the 5th-to-95th percentile, a darker band for the 25th-to-75th percentile, and a line overlay for the mean.

That left one problem. Datawrapper knows this is a bar chart, and bar charts always start at zero — for good reason. But no car weighs 200 kilograms, so two-thirds of the chart was empty space. My workaround: subtract 1,000 from every value and rebuild the axis by hand, with annotation lines for the grid and text annotations for the weight labels.

The trick works, but it isn't free. Since the underlying numbers are now off by 1,000, I had to switch off the automatic value labels and the tooltips, and write the labels I wanted as annotations too. If you only need to show one range per category, save yourself the trouble and use the range plot chart type instead, which doesn't force a zero baseline.

One lens never shows the whole story

Whenever I visualize data in groups, I try to ask myself: Is this the only sensible way to group it? Is there another variable that deserves to be in the chart?

For cars, there's an obvious candidate. Nobody chooses between a small hatchback and a three-row SUV based on the way it's powered. So I sorted the same 61 million cars into three size classes — small cars, medium to large cars, and SUVs — and split each of them by drivetrain:

The car's drivetrain — combustion, hybrid, or fully electric — seems to matter much less than size. Within every size class, going electric adds weight: small electric cars average 1,420 kilograms against 1,134 kilograms for small combustion cars. But that's a smaller penalty than the gap between size classes. The average small electric car remains lighter than the average combustion-engine SUV (1,529 kilograms) or medium-to-large car (1,484 kilograms).

Two more things I noticed in this chart. In the small category, there is no row for plug-in hybrids, because carmakers barely build them, and non-plug-in hybrids (at 1,184 kilograms) come out only slightly heavier than pure combustion cars. The mild hybrid systems that dominate this class add very little weight, and the small cars that get them tend to be light to begin with.

So, does going electric put more weight on the road? Yes, a few hundred kilograms per car. Does it put on more than the shift to bigger cars already has? Not even close.

That's it for this week. Next week you'll hear from my colleague Jona.