Sorry but you're not correct either. The mass makes the car stop slower, makes it corner worse. 100% of the time. Weight is the enemy of performance. You don't see race cars adding weight. Less weight makes everything function better.

Potholes are less disturbing, that is true, but that's because the car is so heavy it won't dip into the hole as quickly. It's still harder in your whole suspension.

We had big huge heavy cars in the 60s and 70s. They rode great, but nobody ever said they handled well or were fast.

>The mass makes the car stop slower, makes it corner worse. 100% of the time.

Adding weight increases stopping distance under most circumstances. Who said anything about that? Corning "worse" is a dumb metric, this is not about performance in a sports car, but about the characteristics of a consumer vehicle. They are designed for comfort, not to corner fast, obviously.

>Less weight makes everything function better.

Completely false. A heavy car is generally more comfortable.

Why you are brining up sports car is a mystery to me. Every single sports car would make a horrible and painful 500 mile drive. Obviously the engineering tradeoffs for speed on a track and a desirable consumer car are radically different. Sports car reduce weight for track performance, applying the same principle to a family SUV would be lunacy.

>Potholes are less disturbing, that is true, but that's because the car is so heavy it won't dip into the hole as quickly. It's still harder in your whole suspension.

Wrong explanation. The weight of the unsprung mass makes the difference. Higher unsprung mass means moving slower into the pothole.

>They rode great, but nobody ever said they handled well or were fast.

Sure. Engineering tradeoff.