I have recently dug deeper into making balanced cars, lightweight track toys or just grippy bois with snappy handling, therefore experimenting with weight reduction and so on. I find that the game has a strange mentality on weights in general. If you remove a front differential in the new Italian Offroader, it makes no difference. If you reduce everything that you can whilst having the smallest engine in the covet and make everything lightweight it still is around 900 Kilograms, making it even heaver than a stock VW Golf MK2 with the smallest engine but everything still in the car. Some cars have light weight glass, others don't, a rear seat bank for a car has less delta weight than removing the door panels, while other things, such as bumper supports and inner fenders often have a realistic weight set to them. I think it's sometimes fairly irrational, so that one basically needs a scale to see if it is even worth, removing certain stuff that in the right mind would have an effect in real life.
The weight of interior parts is often lower than it would be irl to compensate for some of the components (especially the wheel hubs and other parts of suspension) being a lot heavier than irl which is required due to the limits of the game engine (it's a really complex explanation). There is no possible workaround for this I'm afraid, stripped cars in game will always be much heavier than they would irl. As for the differentials, on solid axle suspensions the logic is that the diff is built in the axle so you can't really remove it, visually it will be still there but not functional. On the Stambecco similarly it is built in the chassis. Maybe they should make them not removable.
I get what you mean, and that explains a lot for many things and their associated weight. But I wonder why the base stuff isn't lighter then: Like the base car body, with everything stripped, no doors, axles, motor. Compare the Covet Body (rear bumper support in contrast to the front bumper support not removable by the way) to the naked body of a VW Golf 2. The Covet Shell weighs 330 Kg and the Golf 2 (2Door) roughly 230 Kg. If you start with a shell thats 100 kg to heavy it makes sense why a stripped but working street machine Covet still weighs 945 Kilograms (1.3 Motor). Here, 845 kg would be much more reasonable, even and because of the things you have explained. because some parts have to weigh more than they would, the car weighs 845 KG instead of like 750 KG. That would be fine... Maybe we'll see some changes sometime with aluminium fenders, tailgates, wiper deletes ( which delete the reservoir tank, the wipers and motors to just skim off 7 Kilograms or something )
Basically to make the car lighter it would need to be more flimsy, so they have to strike a balance between correct weight and correct strength.
2 reasons: Base bodies are supposed to include stuff like heat insulation, wires, electronic modules, etc. Presumably also the weight of the driver is counted. Sometimes also unremovable spare tire weight. You can't strip every component off of the car. Although I do wish you could. It makes more sense to make the interior unrealistically light than to do the same to the body, as the interior doesn't collide directly with anything so it doesn't need fully realistic deformation physics, if they did the same to the body it would affect the way it deforms, and deformation must be finetuned for a complete car rather than for a stripped one. You probably don't know this but changing the weight of a single node can drastically change the physical behavior of the whole car. Which sadly means that making it possible to remove smaller components could come with a cost of the car body not behaving 100% realistic with them removed.
