Stu wrote: ↑09 Jan 2022, 13:37
There is a tendency with EV manufacturers to reduce tyre width to reduce mechanical friction, for the purposes of range, primarily. When you look at comparative ICE vehicles (by mass), they (pretty much) always have much larger tyres.
There is also a tendency with ICE manufacturers to artificially increase tyre width to feed the ego of some owners, even if they will never use a 70% of that tire perfomance, even if that increases fuel consumption (and emissions), and even if that tire is a considerably more expensive than a more reasonable size for the car
Same could be said about ICEs (lots of >200hp cars out there wich will never accelerate under 10s in any 0-100km/h acceleration), about SUVs (wich will never leave tarmac), about motorbikes with MotoGP engines...
Production vehicles are far from reasonable engineering pieces quite frequently, too frequently probably. Reducing tire width to increase range reducing consumption is one of the few sensible decisions I´ve seen in a while in the industry
(exaggerating, but you get the idea)