Has anyone here ever lived near a freeway or even moderately busy road?
I made the mistake of renting next to the freeway. Noise was perfectly tolerable, but I could not use my back porch, because after just a few weeks, everything had a fine coating of black dust. I could not keep my windows open in the summer. I was certainly breathing this vile shit the entire time I lived there.
This doesn't surprise me in the least. Every time it rained you could see streaks of black sediment trails where rivulets would collect and concentrate it. It flowed completely unfiltered straight into the ocean. Poison.
The negative externalities around cars are incomprehensibly huge. And yet, we have more of them than ever, they are getting bigger and bigger, and they laugh in our face with "green leaf" or "PZEV" decals. It's demonic.
It's always this circular logic where "I need my car because the supermarket is an hour walk" but the supermarket is an hour walk because everyone drives.
It's mind boggling how much resources get poured in to cars and car infrastructure only to provide a slower, inefficient, more expensive, and toxic system. Feels like the next generation is seeing this now and things are slowly starting to change in some countries. Not sure how fast we can undo decades of damage and corporate brainwashing though.
That paradise is unsustainable without mechanized agriculture and industry and a way to transport people and goods to those work sites. People aren't going to give up the conveniences of modernity for higher principles when they can't afford to.
That's why so many people are cautious about "EVs to save us all", to put it mildly.
We are so focused on climate change and greenhouse gases that we do not see a lot of other issues and may exacerbate some of them in the process of decarbonisation.
This sentiment is just contrarianism, I think. I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life and the difference that clean air standards make is obvious. The black dust isn't just tire and brake dust. It's also soot and it used to be much much worse.
Nothing is a silver bullet but I'll be much happier when we're done with ICE noise and exhaust.
> That's why so many people are cautious about "EVs to save us all"
Certainly no, that's not why people are "cautious". They are hesitant about EVs because they fear running out of "gas" mid-trip.
Most people don't give a shit about anything except their plans and needs (and not necessarily unreasonbly so). You can just look around at what kinds of cars most people purchase to reason what their priorities are (or are not).
Reducing greenhouse gasses are not on most people's priority list.
Decarbonization will have negative externalities. Yes, even environmental ones. I'd argue that those externalities are necessary and delay to mitigate them is going to be worse than fixing them later.
Exactly. Moving to EVs was a huge mistake. We would have had to practically abandon personal vehicles at some point. This was that chance. Blown. These things will keep us in this same pattern for at least another 50 years leaving this problem for a new generation.
If anyone was serious about any of this, wfh for anyone that can is such an obvious solution with by far the lowest cost. Its a solved problem, we just don’t like the solution enough.
Yeah, EVs are the minimum possible change that at first glance looks like it might work, of course without disturbing the global capitalist system or our cultural values.
Wow, people are going to be pissed off in thirty years. "Why didn't that fix it all? We have to do more?"
EVs could "save us all" if we got over the meme of "range anxiety" and realized that a majority of Americans (who drive more than anyone else) drive less than 40 miles a day, and sized batteries appropriately, especially in dense urban environments. https://electrek.co/2023/03/22/wink-motors-test-drive-electr...
There's no reason that an EV needs to weigh as much as a Sherman tank.
Agreed. Even solar + wind - when the buzz started it was all rainbows and butterflies because we found a silver bullet to energy!
There is no such thing as free lunch. If you start absorbing massive amounts of solar, you will have some effect on the environment that we have absolutely no clue about. Same with interfering with wind patterns and ocean currents, which would happen with energy generation at true humanity-scale.
I lived in West Oakland for 10 years. Not immediately adjacent to a freeway, but surrounded on 4 sides by a freeway within a half mile. All flat surfaces are eventually are covered in black grit unless it rains. I assume it was not just tire dust but also diesel soot.
Cars have fairly clean tailpipes these days. Older Diesel train engines still in service are disgusting. Construction vehicles are also pretty bad. The worst are large ocean going vessels burning bunker fuel in port which is illegal but very cheap.
Can confirm; lived about 300 yards away from the 10 freeway in Culver City for several years. The balcony would get coated in fine black dust in just a couple weeks' time. Literally no one would grow vegetables outside--that would be madness. I knew then it was brake dust and tires. Disappointing that this stuff turns out to be even more toxic than I thought.
In Nederland, Texas you're in a small community right in the middle between Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange, Texas, which are known as the "Golden Triangle". These have been major refining and petro-chemical centers dating back to the wild oil gusher known as Spindletop over 100 years ago which really made Texas known as an oil producing state.
Now each of the towns' refineries and chemical plants have grown in response to consumer demand for automotive fuel, but these are not really big cities and they don't have the number of cars you get in Dallas or Houston.
But you still get some fine particulates that build up after a while, like when you wake up and find a layer on your car after you just washed it the day before.
Even when it was black it wasn't tire dust, and sometimes there would be brown, white, grey, or yellow. You never knew what you were going to get and when. Depending on the wind it could be a discharge from Mobil in Beaumont, Texaco in Port Arthur, or DuPont in Orange.
This is what you get before the fuel even makes it into your tank, so that everyone can spread their tire dust all over the rest of the country.
I've also spent time near the 10 freeway, in Texas. A major cross-country thoroughfare for 18-wheelers.
There is no such thing as a sustainable future that centers around automobiles. The US might not internalize this for a generation or two, but it's true. It doesn't matter if they're electric or ICE, or if they're driven by humans or AI, they just don't fit in a sustainable future. There are 278m cars in the US, roughly 83% of the population. To scale to the world, that means 6.7b cars. That's completely absurd and wildly unsustainable, even at half the scale. Here's what's unsustainable:
- sourcing rare earth materials needed for batteries and computer components
- powering them
- handling the waste cars when owners upgrade or crash them
- putting tires on them
- the space needed to operate and store them
- the amount of time people spend in them
- the amount of labor required to build and maintain them
- the amount of labor required to maintain roads for them (maintenance, snow removal, etc.)
Doing any of this arguably involves human rights or ecological disasters. But that aside, barring widespread fusion reactor deployments, it is impossible. This above all else is why I just can't agree that Tesla will save the world or that self-driving cars are the future. They simply can't be, unless the future is absolutely terrible.
The western world is due for a reckoning. If we flatten out living standards across the world, GDP per capita is $12,414. If you want to be extraordinarily generous/cruel and leave out everyone except the US, Canada, Europe, India, and China it only goes up to $17k. That doesn't leave room for things like car ownership, air travel, Macbooks, college, eating out, child care, health care, etc. etc. It also doesn't help (to put it lightly) that the overwhelming majority of population growth is going to occur in poorer parts of the world.
The simple truth is either the western world figures out how to make do with far, far less than it currently does (and notably its elite essentially learn to be poor) or we suffer a prolonged period of intense violence while everyone else either quietly suffers/dies or loudly makes us pay for hoarding. There's a sliver of a chance where we figure out how to generate enough clean energy to raise everyone's living standards enough to pacify them, but it seems inevitable that the inequality that characterizes the current arrangement will apply to that as well, i.e. 1% to Africa 99% to Europe. It's possible they're just used to it and won't complain, but my guess is that climate change will force the issue.
I lived near 880 in Oakland and always had massive amounts of this super fine sticky dust. They call that 880 corridor cancer corridor. My friends who lived next door who I was renting from, their son got leukemia and they think that had something to do with it.
That sounds like a really easy thing to study. (Does living near a highway significantly increase risk of cancer?) A single anecdote like that isn't very convincing.
Do tires shed more dust at higher speeds? I wonder if this has always been a known but unstated problem, or if increasing highway speeds are causing it to get worse.
Vehicle weight is also a significant factor, so EVs will make this particular problem worse. Still worth the tradeoff, but obviously not using a car at all is the best option.
Great question, I have no idea. I wish the nationwide 55mph speed limit were reinstated, if only to reduce oil consumption. Added bonus that it might actually encourage more public transit and walkable cities. Nobody will take this idea seriously, the US is far too addicted to cars and lacks the density.
I used to live four houses from a freeway and never saw any black dust, probably because of the twenty foot high wall around the freeway. It's possible to build them better.
I used to live on a busy parkway in Brooklyn and the grime that would collect on our 4th floor window sill was gnarly. I'm guessing each floor downward would have been worse.
I'm also guessing that simply walking around the city and being in the subway is also pretty bad. Separating the tracks from the platform with doors would probably help with that.
That can't be from tires tho, a farm field won't have tires in it more than 3 or 4 times a year. And it probably smells like manure because pumping manure onto fields is one of the most common methods of fertilizing.
The only real solution is mandating light and heavy rail. California was hit hard by the car companies that bought out the rail and got replaced it with roads. And now we have even more reason to use rail everywhere we can. Maybe after the nimby boomers die off, we can actually made things make sense.
Why do you think younger property owners are actually going to be any more interested in giving up their land to the government to build more rail lines? I get that it's fun to blame the boomers for everything, but it sounds more like you're complaining about human nature.
If we wait for the Boomers to die off to start making change, things might gain traction by the time GenZ runs things. We really have to start now because the gears of change grind slowly and reluctantly.
I really don't think you meant to use the word externality here. And the other replies so far are not about positive externalities.
Perhaps roads are an indirect positive externality - roads are useful for bikes and buses, also useful for demarcation between properties or areas and addressing!!!
>The positive externalities are even more enormous
What do cars specifically positively provide? NOT including the positives that exists due to constructing infrastructure around that mode of transportation (artificial issues).
I worked on a phd for 4 years looking into this problem indirectly and for a decade at Ohio State they have had working solutions to the tire dust issue but it is IMPOSSIBLE to get funding.
A Billion dollar industry and NO ONE cares about cleaning it up if it means increasing costs by 5% or more.
It has been WELL KNOWN for 50 years! We are basically aerosolizing carbon in MASSIVE amounts right where we live and work. Almost like we are purposefully manufacturing microplastics and dumping them in the air as fast as we can. Imagine taking every new tire and just grinding it down into a fine dust then blowing in into the air and dumping it into the rivers. That is what we are doing, AS FAST AS WE CAN.
(For anyone that cares, the solution is natural rubber, which costs slight more than synthetic rubber but lasts longer. So its better for consumers, cheaper all around, and 1,000x better for the environment but Goodyear, Firestone and Michelin flat out refuse to fund research or even block innovation in natural rubber.
> the solution is natural rubber, which costs slight more than synthetic rubber but lasts longer. So its better for consumers, cheaper all around, and 1,000x better for the environment
Is it? I'm Googling but can't find any evidence for that.
Natural rubber tires still produce tons of dust, I can't find any reference to it being less harmful in our lungs, and even natural tire rubber seems to biodegrade on the order of thousands of years.
Natural tire rubber is still extremely processed. It's nothing like the raw latex that comes out of the plant.
So how is it 1000x better for the environment? Or even 2x better, honestly?
I'd love to believe it, but I'm surprised I can't find any references easily. Everything I can find refers to it being more sustainable to manufacture. Nothing about its effects on pollution.
> I'm Googling but can't find any evidence for that.
I'm sorry, but the parent poster said they have been studying in this domain for 4+ years (including PhD research), and you present doubt because your Google searches are unconvincing?
What would it take to convince you?
You do realize that what you find on the first 10 pages of Google (or other) search engines could be junk or intentionally targeted misinformation, right?
Can natural rubber be made as soft as synthetic rubber? What kind of rubber is used on race cars (and dirt bikes)? Cost is much less of an issue for those markets.
Natural rubber is used extensively in higher-end applications (race cars, trucks, aircraft). However, almost all tires are some hybrid of the two. Generally, natural rubber is used in the construction of the tire "carcass" and sidewalls while synthetic rubber (compounded with a gazillion and one other things) is used to construct the tread.
The basic issues are pretty intuitive:
* The supply of natural rubber is constrained by the ability to grow the plants which produce it.
* It's hard to make synthetic rubber with polymer chains as long as those in natural rubber (isoprene), so natural rubber tends to be more pliable and stronger, while synthetic rubber (styrene) tends to sheer off into microparticles.
* However, natural rubber degrades more rapidly when heated and cooled, and is more difficult to control in order to achieve a desired level of stickiness at a given temperature (which is basically what tires are aiming for).
I think that OP's research would be quite interesting to learn about more, as my understanding is that tire manufacturers employ hundreds of chemists who are dedicated full-time to attempting to replicate natural rubber synthetically in an efficient way.
> (For anyone that cares, the solution is natural rubber, which costs slight more than synthetic rubber but lasts longer. So its better for consumers, cheaper all around, and 1,000x better for the environment but Goodyear, Firestone and Michelin flat out refuse to fund research or even block innovation in natural rubber.
I’m skeptical. Wikipedia says:
> Synthetic rubbers are superior to natural rubbers in two major respects: thermal stability, and resistance to oils and related compounds. [1]
There are two main working solutions that have ALREADY been used and proven to work since WWII.
First: a fungal disease has wiped out ALL the rubber trees in south america, thats why we cant grow in it the Western hemisphere, a fungus. If we could grow it here we would and it would drop the price by A LOT. But, we already have a solution, a transgenic species that is resistant, nonsense Government regulation and moronic "public opinion" is the only thing stopping this from fixing the rubber problem overnight.
Second: sounds funny, but ever break a dandelion stem in half and see the white stuff come out? That latex, PURE high quality latex. Let that latex air dry and you rubber! No refinement necessary. During WWII they supplied most of the war effort with rubber from dandelions! Yes, it works, its not efficient but progress has been made and with ANY funding at all it could easily produce enough higher quality natural rubber for ALL our need and enough to export.
The ONLY problem is that companies make too much money producing low quality "disposable" tires that they will NEVER switch.
Why would natural rubber be better then synthetic rubber for this problem? Asbestos is natural and toxic as hell.
Natural rubber currently has the property of being mostly inside trees not being ground up into a fine powder - but there's no obvious reason at scale it would be any better except in terms of "slightly less wear over time".
Great question! Its super simple, it is ONLY the length of the hydrocarbon chain, a better quality natural rubber has really long chains (10,000+ atoms long) that last a LONG time and are VERY stretchy. Synthetic rubber (or plastic) is shorter (1,000 atoms long) and doesn't last as long.
Thats it, it is the exact same "product" just a chain that gets longer and longer and changes its physical properties as it grows.
I wonder if there’s a conflict between companies being willing and able to produce natural rubber tires yet marketing them would also implicate themselves in knowingly destroying the environment. It’s a tough line to straddle.
I'm curious to hear some thoughts of an expert - how much does natural rubber reduce the pollution for 100 miles driven by a tyre? Can you think of any alternative technical solutions? Can you think of any political solutions?
With the continued shift to EVs, petrol taxes just don't make sense as a form of taxation to pay for roads. I think we should be shifting entirely to a gross curb weight tax for all vehicles. The fourth power law states that the greater the axle load of a vehicle, the stress on the road caused by the motor vehicle increases in proportion to the fourth power of the axle load. Meaning heavier EVs cough hummer, are doing x^4 damage over my already heavy car.
Capturing vehicle taxes by weight should incentivize lighter vehicles, and therefore, less tire wear.
The Ford F150 is the best selling car in the US by a long-shot and it's a gas guzzler. Given that, I don't think consumers care a lot about how much they pay in taxes when deciding on a vehicle to purchase.
I don't think this'd have the incentive that you're suggesting it would unless something else is done, such as increasing the tax overall.
The most popular F150s are significantly less gas guzzling than my 2005 sedan that I replaced with an F150. Not to mention that my F150 is more capable in winter conditions (major importance in Michigan) and more capable for the DIY stuff I do (I actually do regularly get lumber, plywood, drywall and other things that only fit in the 8ft bed that I actually bought). All while using less gas... Efficiency has gone up markedly in the 13 years between that 2005 and the 2018 F150 I bought. The weird thing is that you can get an F150 with significantly better real world mileage than an Escape, which is massively smaller, lighter, more aerodynamic, etc. Consumers are smarter than you're giving them credit for here.
at least in the US, and i believe most countries, gas taxes haven't really paid for roads for a long time. Gas taxes go into the general fund, and road maintenance and construction comes out of the general fund, but gas taxes cover less than half the cost of roads.
Just let’s please not require a government-approved mileage tracking device to make sure that each vehicle is charged it’s fair share. That’s one really nice property of gas taxes they will be hard to replace without going full dystopia, and there is a significant contingent that doesn’t give a shit about the privacy and security implications.
You'd just have a self reporting system which is then periodically corrected by vehicle inspections. If you underreport you'll end up paying it all back in the future at a likely higher rate than the present rate.
Yeah, my car should be tracked by its manufacturer, my cell carrier, my phone, the mapping software in my GPS, the four random apps I gave location permission to and forgot about, the traffic cameras, my neighbor's door cameras, but god forbid the government actually trying to reduce pollution by getting a raw distance number once a year.
I keep seeing people bringing this up, but what this misses is that a significant portion of road construction and maintenance costs are not due to damage from tires, but other factors like weather (especially freeze/thaw cycles) and the need to widen roads to accommodate the amount of space cars take up while driving.
I support the idea of factoring in axle load to any future road use tax, but it's definitely not the only factor or even necessarily the biggest one.
Isn't the proper tax on tires? The more you shed, the faster they need replacement. So cars which shed a lot of microplastics would both use up more tires, AND would pay more tax. So as the tax increases we correctly linearly decrease tire use.
It would be a mistake to over-punish EV users compared to ICE just because the average weight of an EV is heavier. (We know the weights, we don't need to average by class)
This would reward companies for inventing tech which would wear our fewer tires, leading to less pollution.
Road use tax is intended to be used to pay for road maintenance and infrastructure. It's why if you live on a farm you can get tax-free diesel that is dyed red. You aren't using the road/infrastructure, so you shouldn't need to pay the tax.
If the goal is to reduce tire microplastics, the tax should be specifically based on tire lifespan, which is already well known. It's called UTQG.
Today we tend to conflate tax on pollution and tax on infrastructure though, since gas guzzler cars use much more gas (and cause more pollution, theoritically, all else equal) than the wear on the roads themselves. If this was truly about taxing externalities, it would be 3 taxes. Tax based on weight, tax based on efficiency, and tax based on tire tread life.
That's the same tax someone would pay for 1000 gallons of gas. A typical 25 mpg car driven a typical number of miles will use more like 600 gallons a year. The Texas EV tax is deliberately high.
> With the continued shift to EVs, petrol taxes just don't make sense as a form of taxation to pay for roads.
In New Zealand soon EVs will face Road User Charges, which mean they pay a per km tax as all diesel vehicles do today. The tax is based on the class of vehicle and so EVs won't be charged more than a diesel cars.
All vehicles in NZ pay road user charges; EVs have just been exempt to encourage uptake. There are RUC weight classes but they only exist to separate light (<3500kg) and heavy (>=3500kg) vehicles rather than distinguish between a Nissan Leaf (1600kg) and a Ford Ranger (2100kg).
It’s great to bring this problem up. But the focus on EVs is a distraction.
> EVs tend to shed around 20 percent more from their tires due to their higher weight and high torque compared to traditional internal combustion engine-powered vehicles.
Fleet operators don’t see any significant difference in tire wear. EVs have higher torque but that doesn’t matter unless to drive like a mad-man. EVs also allow you to drive very smoothly with no sudden jerk in torque.
Cars have been getting heavier long before EVs came around. One of the problems is that EVs are all new. Too many of them are bigger than they need to be. But that also goes for new ICE vehicle models.
I’m not too worried about the weight of EVs long term. Batteries are expensive. Increases in energy density, increase in vehicle efficiency and decrease in weight tends to have very significant effect on the amount of batteries you need to cover a certain range, which has huge impact on the price.
What we need to focus on is infrastructure for walking, biking and public transportation. An E-bike has made it just possible for me to bike to work in a reasonable time. So I drive our EV less and less to work.
> EVs have higher torque but that doesn’t matter unless to drive like a mad-man
Its not torque that matters. Its simply friction and normal force. And that's directly caused by weight. Tire Wear is something like (weight^4), so small increases in weight will have huge increases to wear-and-tear.
---------
I think the real issue is that 3000lbs to 4500lbs, while a significant increase in tire wear, is still small compared to the big 5000lb to 8000lb vehicles that people use in practice. I'm sure a 4500lb EV is bad, but I'd expect a 6000 lb SUV or Truck to be worse (and a 8000lb electric-SUV to be the absolute worst).
But beyond just consumer cars are semi-trucks, which almost certainly are the top tire-wear vehicles on the roads. I'd expect almost all of the plastic from "tire wear" to come from a semi-truck (again, weight to the power of 4), given their grossly increased weight.
> walking, biking and public transportation
Semi-trucks are replaced by trains. Not by walking and biking. I mean, I want more walkable paths and all. But this _particular_ problem is solved with freight trains.
Last-mile is difficult. Do we want 100-people in a neighborhood driving 100x cars to a store? Or would we rather have 1x large truck deliver a (heavier) package to 100x different people? We're screwed in both cases, and rail can't save us.
But trains don't use rubber and trains wheels / rails are made from steel. I'm sure some particles fly off as iron (or iron-oxide/rust), but surely much less than rubber given how much stronger steel wheels / steel tracks are.
>Do we want 100-people in a neighborhood driving 100x cars to a store? Or would we rather have 1x large truck deliver a (heavier) package to 100x different people?
Why can't the majority of the people walk to a store and the rest can be serviced by a smaller truck?
I was in the market for a small electric city car and found out that we're not allowed to have small cars in the US. Europe and Asia have really nice small city cars under 2,000lbs but none of them are available here. I believe the smallest car sold in the US is the Mini Cooper around 3,000lbs. I actually ended up with a souped up street legal golf cart and it's worked out well for my purposes of picking up kids and groceries within a 5 mile radius, though I'm in the Bay Area where the weather is not too extreme most of the year. I'm not sure why this market is neglected.
My Bolt EV has a curb weight of 3624lbs; there are examples of vehicles that could have dramatically lower impact, but it's frustrating that GM doesn't seem inclined to keep cars like this in production. (Yes, they're hinting at producing the Bolt EV in the future, it's unfortunate that they can't just keep producing the current Bolt until then)
Honest question how does shear force proportional to torque not factor in? Coefficient of friction is shear over normal.
Mechanical properties are a function of temperature and quick startups assuredly contribute to wear. An extreme example is drag racing. Cars are highway driving in steady state cruising for more miles and time but in the US around town driving has stop lights.
Or people just get their groceries delivered. Way more convenient, not expensive anymore (I get unlimited deliveries for a fairly paltry annual fee), and saves on journeys as the truck just loads up on lots of people’s deliveries all at once.
It also scales better - if more people are having groceries delivered then each trucks stops become more closely clustered (unless the computers involved are just doing a poor job).
> What we need to focus on is infrastructure for walking, biking and public transportation
And busses, light rail, intercity trains.
But America associates one-car-per-person with all kinds of twisted politics and self-esteem anxiety.
We need a psyops program to wean people off cars, and it will take a decade or more. Just look at the anger in any HN thread that is critical of cars, it runs deep.
> We need a psyops program to wean people off cars, and it will take a decade or more. Just look at the anger in any HN thread that is critical of cars, it runs deep.
Be willing to enforce civility in public. In Japan 7-year-old kids can ride the subway; here we have junkies burning fentanyl, vagrants with pitbulls, and "showtime". Gee, why wouldn't I want public transit to be an inseparable part of my life?
// But America associates one-car-per-person with all kinds of twisted politics and self-esteem anxiety.
America offers various lifestyles, from big cities like NYC, Boston, etc where a car is a liability, to near suburbs that are well served by transit (eg, NYC tri-state area) where you probably need a car but your daily commute doesn't involve it, to more spread-out and rural living where car is absolutely necessary.
This speaks to a trade-off between density and car-dependence. People across the globe face similar trade-offs (eg: 50% of Dutch persons own a car, 86% of French households do...)
Exactly. Designing transit systems around cars was a colossal mistake. Now that the data are clear, it's time to rebuild. Over the next few decades, we need to tear down existing car infrastructure and replace it with walking/biking/transit.
A side benefit (aside from the particulate pollution, energy waste, noise pollution, high death toll, increased inter-destination distance, decreased QOL) is that it'll be like an order of magnitude cheaper. Cars are a rather expensive way to get around. The Netherlands actually considers biking to be +17cents per mile (as in, considered revenue), because of reduced healthcare costs.
Transit systems are designed around cars because people want to use cars. This idea that it was some kind of a massive conspiracy from the auto manufacturers is just bullshit.
Yes, cars are expensive. We can afford cars today. No one wants to get poorer and go back to walking.
I think your final point is key. Apart from curb weight, the reason to emphasize EVs might be just to remind people that they're not a panacea for the environmental collapse we're speeding towards. Instead of inventivizing car-free and car-light living, policymakers would rather not distrupt anything, simply swapping EVs for ICE vehicles in the same miserable sprawl. Yale's findings underline that this can't happen.
The important point is there are far greener alternatives than EV's. EV's cost a lot of resources to build, which means a lot of environmental destruction and carbon output. Plus as we see they still contribute to this tyre dust problem. They are not the holy grail. Rail, public transport, e-bikes and better city design is.
This argument about EV resource use for construction is fossil fuel industry FUD. The difference is outweighed within a year or two of driving versus an ICE vehicle.
> Cars have been getting heavier long before EVs came around. One of the problems is that EVs are all new. Too many of them are bigger than they need to be. But that also goes for new ICE vehicle models.
I’m not too worried about the weight of EVs long term.
Given the rate of climate change / ecological damage, what definition are we using for "long term"?
That aside, you've might have buried the lede. The switch over to EVs should represent an opportunity to revisit and evolve what personal transportation could look like and should look like[1]. Instead we've taking the same *old* bigger, stronger, faster paradigm and replacing petrol with a plug. Humans' role in the bigger broader picture isn't changing. It's the starus quo with a solar panel.
There's a better than fair chance we're going to regret squandering this opportunity.
[1] Similar happened with the pandemic...an opportunity to revist and rethink was quickly swept aside for back to the status quo. ASAP please. That's great for the status quo but certain a concern for the long term.
> Fleet operators don’t see any significant difference in tire wear. EVs have higher torque but that doesn’t matter unless to drive like a mad-man. EVs also allow you to drive very smoothly with no sudden jerk in torque.
Time-to-replace-tyre is insignicant. If tyre manufacturer is tasked with making EV tyre with same durability as normal tyre they will just make rubber and grooves thicker.
Also technically heavier car on wider tyre might use them up at similar rate than lighter car on skinnier tyre (as load-per-cm2 would be similar) but obviously produce more dust.
> Cars have been getting heavier long before EVs came around. One of the problems is that EVs are all new. Too many of them are bigger than they need to be. But that also goes for new ICE vehicle models.
It took ~20-30 years for average ICE car to get ~30% heavier. EVs add another ~30-50% on top of that increase.
> Too many of them are bigger than they need to be. But that also goes for new ICE vehicle models.
That's a very American centric claim. The gap between ICE and EV weight is relatively much higher in many other places where smaller cars are more popular.
For instance, the VW id.3 (small-ish EV) has a curb weight 250-450kg (550-1,000lbs) more than my wife's gasoline VW Passat, a quite spacious estate wagon.
The downside applies to "heavy vehicles" more generally, which includes most battery-bearing EVs in addition to most pickup trucks and SUVs driven in the US.
> Fleet operators don’t see any significant difference in tire wear.
Larger vehicles have larger tires. The size of a tire on a Tesla is a lot bigger than on my small sedan. They may both go 150,000km but one surely pollutes more.
Yeah this is something that probably will start outside the western world. In poor countries as solar and batteries keep getting cheaper we will start seeing new shapes for vehicles which wont look the same as cars of today. Such vehicles will have a hard time getting cleared for the streets in the developed world because of decades of laws and red tape.
A kia Nero EV is ~200kg heavier than the ice version. That's equivalent to two passengers. The weight delta of large vehicles is far more of an issue than drive train differences.
FWIW, chemical batteries won't ever match the energy density of fossil fuels.
Of course they don't need to, so it's not really an interesting comparison. The range/mass of the entire drivetrain is probably a reasonable comparison.
... for the same capacity. Isn't it funny how people focus on per-vehicle numbers for one segment? There are more oversized gas-burning pickups and SUVs than electric anything, plus millions of diesel-burning vehicles that are even heavier. But somehow those all get left out of most stories on this topic. Truly a strange coincidence, everyone forgetting the same thing all at once.
I’m not surprised. Americans alone traveled a staggering 3.26T (yes, TRILLION) miles (5.24T km) in 2022. [1] That’s a metric shit ton of tire wear particles leaking into the environment.
This is a direct result of how shitty our cities are designed. Single zoned swaths of land. High dependency on car centric transportation. None to minimal alternatives for anything else. Massive subsidies for various road infrastructure across all levels of government. Billions of dollars of handouts (sorry, “subsidies”) for O&G industry which generates trillions of profits collectively…
There’s only so much a single person can do. We need regulation at all levels of government. O&G and auto industries need to start paying reparations. Producers of plastics need to be taxed, regulated, monitored. Cities need to be redesigned/rebuilt.
This is a strong a warning as any for people not to get too hang up on greenhouse gas emissions as the holy grail of sustainability. It creates the wrong mindset.
What we have drifted into is a tech supported civilization that is covering the planet from corner to corner with myriad of footprints (emissions, particulate and chemical pollution of all types, habitat alteration or destruction etc).
The story of ozon layer depletion was an early warning. Greenhouses another dimension. Microplastics and nitrates another etc etc, with no end in sight.
Imagine homo sapiens communities spread around in the billions and a steady stream of polluting stuff emanating from them, not temporarily but continuously and forever.
This is the challenge we are facing and its monumental. How to take that out-of-control, scant regard for externalities tech enabled economic "growth" mindset and turn it around.
Bold ideas are welcome. Burrying heads in the sand not an option.
> Bold ideas are welcome. Burrying heads in the sand not an option.
It's simple. It's more mobility options, especially safe active transportation. EVs are still cars. It's a change in the margin. What is really needed is people biking, walking for their daily errands instead of using a car.
As for the safe part, it does not require anything special. The aspirational world of the future will be made real with bollards and trees. The american brain today cannot comprehend this. Yet it is a certainty.
You're basically saying that you want to force everyone to live in a city - a super dense developed area where all your daily needs are within walking distance. Not everyone wants to live in a city!
I'm glad people are looking at how to reduce the impact of tire dust. I expect we can make big improvements because it's not something we've optimized for yet.
Not mentioned in the article is that EVs also dramatically reduce brake dust because the brakes are hardly used compared to an ICE car.
Surely brake dust must be negligible compared to tire and asphalt dust?
I recently replaced the brake pads on my Land Cruiser; 70,000km (45,000 miles) since they were last replaced. This is a large, heavy 4x4, yet the amount of brake liner worn from the pads must have been on the order of a pound, if not less.
> Surely brake dust must be negligible compared to tire and asphalt dust?
Brake dust is kinda different problem. Yeah it puts particles in the air, but most of it is pretty biodegradable (carbon and iron), and rest of it could probably be made that - technically loss of efficiency here could be compensated for, which is far harder for tyres.
I worked on this indirectly for 4 as as part of a pdh at Ohio State. We have had the solution to this problem since then but because natural rubber is slightly less profitable for the companies (it lasts too long and it too high quality) they use synthetic rubber.
Tire dust is a problem becuase we WANT it to be a problem the solution is available but it is impossible to get funding because the tire companies don't want to use it.
Thats it, that is how capitalism works. Make millions upon millions of people sick so that 3 companies can make slightly higher profits.
Can you link to this research? Is there any tire company using this technology? If the people cared we could either pay a premium for them, or regulate
Also EVs have no tail pipe emissions. At all. An ICE vehicle converts 100% of it's fuel into toxic tail pipe emissions. The tire dust is marginally the same for the same weight. We are not talking a new set of tires every other month for EVs. And there is very little brake dust indeed. So, what are we really talking about here exactly?
Well that's more complicated. Articles like this don't come out of the blue. There's an extremely well funded effort by fossil fuel and ICE car manufacturing companies to spread FUD about EVs. They are looking at double digit percentage drops in demand for their product in the decade ahead. That's going to impact them financially in a big way and they have a huge financial interest in slowing that down. And their tool of choice is misinformation. Little white lies, lots of half truths, twisted facts, lies by omission, etc.
That's not to say tire particles in ocean water aren't an issue. But the reality is that most of those particles come from ICE vehicles right now.
Do they? How does that work? Why does it matter in what way the friction on the axle is generated? Whether I am grinding two metal on metal to generate friction or I'm charging a coil shouldn't matter to how much dust the tire generates, for the same amount of deceleration, should it?
Unless people are just slamming on their brakes and leaving tire marks when they have the option of coming to a gentle stop, which I don't think anyone would do?
EDIT: Apparently I misread "brake dust" for "tire dust", sorry!
I think GP is referring to the dust generated by brake pads. Since EVs can use regenerative braking, there should be less use of the brake pads, and therefore less brake dust.
I would assume that the tyre dust will remain the same
Parent post brought up brake dust, which is not what this article is about. EVs definitely put less wear on brakes but that has nothing to do with microplastics.
> Indeed, the scale of these emissions is significant. Particulate emissions from tires and brakes, particularly in the PM2.5 and PM10 size ranges, are believed to exceed the mass of tailpipe emissions from modern vehicle fleets, as per a study published in Science of the Total Environment this year.
This simply cannot be true. Tailpipe emissions have more mass than the gasoline that gets burned. A car uses several liters od gasoline per 100km. I am pretty sure no car loses several kilograms of tire or brake matter over 100km.
Exactly. Not saying this is good news either way, but I can go multiple years on a set of tires, and majority of the mass is still there when I go to charge tires.
Perhaps they mean just the mass in the pm2.5-pm10 size spectrum?
Readit News
I made the mistake of renting next to the freeway. Noise was perfectly tolerable, but I could not use my back porch, because after just a few weeks, everything had a fine coating of black dust. I could not keep my windows open in the summer. I was certainly breathing this vile shit the entire time I lived there.
This doesn't surprise me in the least. Every time it rained you could see streaks of black sediment trails where rivulets would collect and concentrate it. It flowed completely unfiltered straight into the ocean. Poison.
The negative externalities around cars are incomprehensibly huge. And yet, we have more of them than ever, they are getting bigger and bigger, and they laugh in our face with "green leaf" or "PZEV" decals. It's demonic.
Only motorized vehicles allowed are a handfull small electric transporters for logistics (and construction vehicles, ambulance).
Turns out the space gained from lack of car infrastructure increases space efficiency by a lot (not that that wasn't obvious from theory).
It really was bliss and it makes me despise the status quo so much more fervently. Paradise is so close and yet so far away...
It's mind boggling how much resources get poured in to cars and car infrastructure only to provide a slower, inefficient, more expensive, and toxic system. Feels like the next generation is seeing this now and things are slowly starting to change in some countries. Not sure how fast we can undo decades of damage and corporate brainwashing though.
We are so focused on climate change and greenhouse gases that we do not see a lot of other issues and may exacerbate some of them in the process of decarbonisation.
Nothing is a silver bullet but I'll be much happier when we're done with ICE noise and exhaust.
Certainly no, that's not why people are "cautious". They are hesitant about EVs because they fear running out of "gas" mid-trip.
Most people don't give a shit about anything except their plans and needs (and not necessarily unreasonbly so). You can just look around at what kinds of cars most people purchase to reason what their priorities are (or are not).
Reducing greenhouse gasses are not on most people's priority list.
Would be better to walk, bike, take public transport or similar or course. And if your area makes that not viable, consider fixing that.
(All the famed bicycle paths in Copenhagen are relatively new - they can be added anywhere.)
If anyone was serious about any of this, wfh for anyone that can is such an obvious solution with by far the lowest cost. Its a solved problem, we just don’t like the solution enough.
Wow, people are going to be pissed off in thirty years. "Why didn't that fix it all? We have to do more?"
There's no reason that an EV needs to weigh as much as a Sherman tank.
There is no such thing as free lunch. If you start absorbing massive amounts of solar, you will have some effect on the environment that we have absolutely no clue about. Same with interfering with wind patterns and ocean currents, which would happen with energy generation at true humanity-scale.
Critical thinking left the room a long time ago.
The windows on the railway side gained a gritty, black dust. On the road side it was an oily black film.
Now each of the towns' refineries and chemical plants have grown in response to consumer demand for automotive fuel, but these are not really big cities and they don't have the number of cars you get in Dallas or Houston.
But you still get some fine particulates that build up after a while, like when you wake up and find a layer on your car after you just washed it the day before.
Even when it was black it wasn't tire dust, and sometimes there would be brown, white, grey, or yellow. You never knew what you were going to get and when. Depending on the wind it could be a discharge from Mobil in Beaumont, Texaco in Port Arthur, or DuPont in Orange.
This is what you get before the fuel even makes it into your tank, so that everyone can spread their tire dust all over the rest of the country.
I've also spent time near the 10 freeway, in Texas. A major cross-country thoroughfare for 18-wheelers.
- sourcing rare earth materials needed for batteries and computer components
- powering them
- handling the waste cars when owners upgrade or crash them
- putting tires on them
- the space needed to operate and store them
- the amount of time people spend in them
- the amount of labor required to build and maintain them
- the amount of labor required to maintain roads for them (maintenance, snow removal, etc.)
Doing any of this arguably involves human rights or ecological disasters. But that aside, barring widespread fusion reactor deployments, it is impossible. This above all else is why I just can't agree that Tesla will save the world or that self-driving cars are the future. They simply can't be, unless the future is absolutely terrible.
The western world is due for a reckoning. If we flatten out living standards across the world, GDP per capita is $12,414. If you want to be extraordinarily generous/cruel and leave out everyone except the US, Canada, Europe, India, and China it only goes up to $17k. That doesn't leave room for things like car ownership, air travel, Macbooks, college, eating out, child care, health care, etc. etc. It also doesn't help (to put it lightly) that the overwhelming majority of population growth is going to occur in poorer parts of the world.
The simple truth is either the western world figures out how to make do with far, far less than it currently does (and notably its elite essentially learn to be poor) or we suffer a prolonged period of intense violence while everyone else either quietly suffers/dies or loudly makes us pay for hoarding. There's a sliver of a chance where we figure out how to generate enough clean energy to raise everyone's living standards enough to pacify them, but it seems inevitable that the inequality that characterizes the current arrangement will apply to that as well, i.e. 1% to Africa 99% to Europe. It's possible they're just used to it and won't complain, but my guess is that climate change will force the issue.
Vehicle weight is also a significant factor, so EVs will make this particular problem worse. Still worth the tradeoff, but obviously not using a car at all is the best option.
I'm also guessing that simply walking around the city and being in the subway is also pretty bad. Separating the tracks from the platform with doors would probably help with that.
And at certain times of the year, the "dust" smells like manure.
demonic?
spare us the histrionics
I really don't think you meant to use the word externality here. And the other replies so far are not about positive externalities.
Perhaps roads are an indirect positive externality - roads are useful for bikes and buses, also useful for demarcation between properties or areas and addressing!!!
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/externality.asp
What do cars specifically positively provide? NOT including the positives that exists due to constructing infrastructure around that mode of transportation (artificial issues).
Perhaps you don't know what an externality is. Congrats, you are one of today's lucky 10000.
A Billion dollar industry and NO ONE cares about cleaning it up if it means increasing costs by 5% or more.
It has been WELL KNOWN for 50 years! We are basically aerosolizing carbon in MASSIVE amounts right where we live and work. Almost like we are purposefully manufacturing microplastics and dumping them in the air as fast as we can. Imagine taking every new tire and just grinding it down into a fine dust then blowing in into the air and dumping it into the rivers. That is what we are doing, AS FAST AS WE CAN.
(For anyone that cares, the solution is natural rubber, which costs slight more than synthetic rubber but lasts longer. So its better for consumers, cheaper all around, and 1,000x better for the environment but Goodyear, Firestone and Michelin flat out refuse to fund research or even block innovation in natural rubber.
[1] https://hcs.osu.edu/our-people/dr-katrina-cornish
Is it? I'm Googling but can't find any evidence for that.
Natural rubber tires still produce tons of dust, I can't find any reference to it being less harmful in our lungs, and even natural tire rubber seems to biodegrade on the order of thousands of years.
Natural tire rubber is still extremely processed. It's nothing like the raw latex that comes out of the plant.
So how is it 1000x better for the environment? Or even 2x better, honestly?
I'd love to believe it, but I'm surprised I can't find any references easily. Everything I can find refers to it being more sustainable to manufacture. Nothing about its effects on pollution.
Plant a seed that grows to a dry weight of 1 lb. That is basically 1 lb of carbon.
Turn that into 0.5 lb of rubber. Grind that rubber back down to carbon and we are back to where we started minus the waste.
Deleted Comment
I'm sorry, but the parent poster said they have been studying in this domain for 4+ years (including PhD research), and you present doubt because your Google searches are unconvincing?
What would it take to convince you?
You do realize that what you find on the first 10 pages of Google (or other) search engines could be junk or intentionally targeted misinformation, right?
What's in it for them? Keeping bad press about tires out of the public view? Fear of lower profit margins?
The basic issues are pretty intuitive:
* The supply of natural rubber is constrained by the ability to grow the plants which produce it.
* It's hard to make synthetic rubber with polymer chains as long as those in natural rubber (isoprene), so natural rubber tends to be more pliable and stronger, while synthetic rubber (styrene) tends to sheer off into microparticles.
* However, natural rubber degrades more rapidly when heated and cooled, and is more difficult to control in order to achieve a desired level of stickiness at a given temperature (which is basically what tires are aiming for).
I think that OP's research would be quite interesting to learn about more, as my understanding is that tire manufacturers employ hundreds of chemists who are dedicated full-time to attempting to replicate natural rubber synthetically in an efficient way.
I’m skeptical. Wikipedia says:
> Synthetic rubbers are superior to natural rubbers in two major respects: thermal stability, and resistance to oils and related compounds. [1]
What are they missing?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_rubber
First: a fungal disease has wiped out ALL the rubber trees in south america, thats why we cant grow in it the Western hemisphere, a fungus. If we could grow it here we would and it would drop the price by A LOT. But, we already have a solution, a transgenic species that is resistant, nonsense Government regulation and moronic "public opinion" is the only thing stopping this from fixing the rubber problem overnight.
Second: sounds funny, but ever break a dandelion stem in half and see the white stuff come out? That latex, PURE high quality latex. Let that latex air dry and you rubber! No refinement necessary. During WWII they supplied most of the war effort with rubber from dandelions! Yes, it works, its not efficient but progress has been made and with ANY funding at all it could easily produce enough higher quality natural rubber for ALL our need and enough to export.
The ONLY problem is that companies make too much money producing low quality "disposable" tires that they will NEVER switch.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6073688/ [2] https://hcs.osu.edu/our-people/dr-katrina-cornish
Natural rubber currently has the property of being mostly inside trees not being ground up into a fine powder - but there's no obvious reason at scale it would be any better except in terms of "slightly less wear over time".
Is it's chemistry fundamentally different?
Thats it, it is the exact same "product" just a chain that gets longer and longer and changes its physical properties as it grows.
Capturing vehicle taxes by weight should incentivize lighter vehicles, and therefore, less tire wear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
I don't think this'd have the incentive that you're suggesting it would unless something else is done, such as increasing the tax overall.
at least in the US, and i believe most countries, gas taxes haven't really paid for roads for a long time. Gas taxes go into the general fund, and road maintenance and construction comes out of the general fund, but gas taxes cover less than half the cost of roads.
I support the idea of factoring in axle load to any future road use tax, but it's definitely not the only factor or even necessarily the biggest one.
It would be a mistake to over-punish EV users compared to ICE just because the average weight of an EV is heavier. (We know the weights, we don't need to average by class)
This would reward companies for inventing tech which would wear our fewer tires, leading to less pollution.
Road use tax is intended to be used to pay for road maintenance and infrastructure. It's why if you live on a farm you can get tax-free diesel that is dyed red. You aren't using the road/infrastructure, so you shouldn't need to pay the tax.
If the goal is to reduce tire microplastics, the tax should be specifically based on tire lifespan, which is already well known. It's called UTQG.
Today we tend to conflate tax on pollution and tax on infrastructure though, since gas guzzler cars use much more gas (and cause more pollution, theoritically, all else equal) than the wear on the roads themselves. If this was truly about taxing externalities, it would be 3 taxes. Tax based on weight, tax based on efficiency, and tax based on tire tread life.
Also, some tires and brakes emit far less than others[O], so it would be much better to tax by level of non-exhaust emissions (just like CO2/km).
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9178796/
In New Zealand soon EVs will face Road User Charges, which mean they pay a per km tax as all diesel vehicles do today. The tax is based on the class of vehicle and so EVs won't be charged more than a diesel cars.
> EVs tend to shed around 20 percent more from their tires due to their higher weight and high torque compared to traditional internal combustion engine-powered vehicles.
It’s covered in this panel discussion on Fully Charged: https://youtu.be/LeHakmL6eEc?si=ebBAn8RSDhmmLfHI
Fleet operators don’t see any significant difference in tire wear. EVs have higher torque but that doesn’t matter unless to drive like a mad-man. EVs also allow you to drive very smoothly with no sudden jerk in torque.
Cars have been getting heavier long before EVs came around. One of the problems is that EVs are all new. Too many of them are bigger than they need to be. But that also goes for new ICE vehicle models.
I’m not too worried about the weight of EVs long term. Batteries are expensive. Increases in energy density, increase in vehicle efficiency and decrease in weight tends to have very significant effect on the amount of batteries you need to cover a certain range, which has huge impact on the price.
What we need to focus on is infrastructure for walking, biking and public transportation. An E-bike has made it just possible for me to bike to work in a reasonable time. So I drive our EV less and less to work.
Its not torque that matters. Its simply friction and normal force. And that's directly caused by weight. Tire Wear is something like (weight^4), so small increases in weight will have huge increases to wear-and-tear.
---------
I think the real issue is that 3000lbs to 4500lbs, while a significant increase in tire wear, is still small compared to the big 5000lb to 8000lb vehicles that people use in practice. I'm sure a 4500lb EV is bad, but I'd expect a 6000 lb SUV or Truck to be worse (and a 8000lb electric-SUV to be the absolute worst).
But beyond just consumer cars are semi-trucks, which almost certainly are the top tire-wear vehicles on the roads. I'd expect almost all of the plastic from "tire wear" to come from a semi-truck (again, weight to the power of 4), given their grossly increased weight.
> walking, biking and public transportation
Semi-trucks are replaced by trains. Not by walking and biking. I mean, I want more walkable paths and all. But this _particular_ problem is solved with freight trains.
Last-mile is difficult. Do we want 100-people in a neighborhood driving 100x cars to a store? Or would we rather have 1x large truck deliver a (heavier) package to 100x different people? We're screwed in both cases, and rail can't save us.
But trains don't use rubber and trains wheels / rails are made from steel. I'm sure some particles fly off as iron (or iron-oxide/rust), but surely much less than rubber given how much stronger steel wheels / steel tracks are.
Why can't the majority of the people walk to a store and the rest can be serviced by a smaller truck?
https://www.systemiq.earth/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Breaki...
It also scales better - if more people are having groceries delivered then each trucks stops become more closely clustered (unless the computers involved are just doing a poor job).
And busses, light rail, intercity trains.
But America associates one-car-per-person with all kinds of twisted politics and self-esteem anxiety.
We need a psyops program to wean people off cars, and it will take a decade or more. Just look at the anger in any HN thread that is critical of cars, it runs deep.
That 10 billion of car ad spend per year adds up.
On the other hand: https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckcars
America offers various lifestyles, from big cities like NYC, Boston, etc where a car is a liability, to near suburbs that are well served by transit (eg, NYC tri-state area) where you probably need a car but your daily commute doesn't involve it, to more spread-out and rural living where car is absolutely necessary.
This speaks to a trade-off between density and car-dependence. People across the globe face similar trade-offs (eg: 50% of Dutch persons own a car, 86% of French households do...)
A side benefit (aside from the particulate pollution, energy waste, noise pollution, high death toll, increased inter-destination distance, decreased QOL) is that it'll be like an order of magnitude cheaper. Cars are a rather expensive way to get around. The Netherlands actually considers biking to be +17cents per mile (as in, considered revenue), because of reduced healthcare costs.
Yes, cars are expensive. We can afford cars today. No one wants to get poorer and go back to walking.
I’m not too worried about the weight of EVs long term.
Given the rate of climate change / ecological damage, what definition are we using for "long term"?
That aside, you've might have buried the lede. The switch over to EVs should represent an opportunity to revisit and evolve what personal transportation could look like and should look like[1]. Instead we've taking the same *old* bigger, stronger, faster paradigm and replacing petrol with a plug. Humans' role in the bigger broader picture isn't changing. It's the starus quo with a solar panel.
There's a better than fair chance we're going to regret squandering this opportunity.
[1] Similar happened with the pandemic...an opportunity to revist and rethink was quickly swept aside for back to the status quo. ASAP please. That's great for the status quo but certain a concern for the long term.
Time-to-replace-tyre is insignicant. If tyre manufacturer is tasked with making EV tyre with same durability as normal tyre they will just make rubber and grooves thicker.
Also technically heavier car on wider tyre might use them up at similar rate than lighter car on skinnier tyre (as load-per-cm2 would be similar) but obviously produce more dust.
> Cars have been getting heavier long before EVs came around. One of the problems is that EVs are all new. Too many of them are bigger than they need to be. But that also goes for new ICE vehicle models.
It took ~20-30 years for average ICE car to get ~30% heavier. EVs add another ~30-50% on top of that increase.
For any comparable ICE, EV will be heavier.
That's a very American centric claim. The gap between ICE and EV weight is relatively much higher in many other places where smaller cars are more popular.
For instance, the VW id.3 (small-ish EV) has a curb weight 250-450kg (550-1,000lbs) more than my wife's gasoline VW Passat, a quite spacious estate wagon.
Larger vehicles have larger tires. The size of a tire on a Tesla is a lot bigger than on my small sedan. They may both go 150,000km but one surely pollutes more.
And better tires.
Deleted Comment
There is even discussions to start using concrete for roads to handle the increased weight of EVs.
Of course they don't need to, so it's not really an interesting comparison. The range/mass of the entire drivetrain is probably a reasonable comparison.
Tire particles have been a problem since forever but recently its a big concern now that EVs are rapidly dethroning combustion cars. I'm suspicious
Indeed.
> EVs tend to shed around 20 percent more
... for the same capacity. Isn't it funny how people focus on per-vehicle numbers for one segment? There are more oversized gas-burning pickups and SUVs than electric anything, plus millions of diesel-burning vehicles that are even heavier. But somehow those all get left out of most stories on this topic. Truly a strange coincidence, everyone forgetting the same thing all at once.
This is a direct result of how shitty our cities are designed. Single zoned swaths of land. High dependency on car centric transportation. None to minimal alternatives for anything else. Massive subsidies for various road infrastructure across all levels of government. Billions of dollars of handouts (sorry, “subsidies”) for O&G industry which generates trillions of profits collectively…
There’s only so much a single person can do. We need regulation at all levels of government. O&G and auto industries need to start paying reparations. Producers of plastics need to be taxed, regulated, monitored. Cities need to be redesigned/rebuilt.
[1] https://afdc.energy.gov/data/mobile/10315
What we have drifted into is a tech supported civilization that is covering the planet from corner to corner with myriad of footprints (emissions, particulate and chemical pollution of all types, habitat alteration or destruction etc).
The story of ozon layer depletion was an early warning. Greenhouses another dimension. Microplastics and nitrates another etc etc, with no end in sight.
Imagine homo sapiens communities spread around in the billions and a steady stream of polluting stuff emanating from them, not temporarily but continuously and forever.
This is the challenge we are facing and its monumental. How to take that out-of-control, scant regard for externalities tech enabled economic "growth" mindset and turn it around.
Bold ideas are welcome. Burrying heads in the sand not an option.
It's simple. It's more mobility options, especially safe active transportation. EVs are still cars. It's a change in the margin. What is really needed is people biking, walking for their daily errands instead of using a car.
As for the safe part, it does not require anything special. The aspirational world of the future will be made real with bollards and trees. The american brain today cannot comprehend this. Yet it is a certainty.
Not mentioned in the article is that EVs also dramatically reduce brake dust because the brakes are hardly used compared to an ICE car.
I recently replaced the brake pads on my Land Cruiser; 70,000km (45,000 miles) since they were last replaced. This is a large, heavy 4x4, yet the amount of brake liner worn from the pads must have been on the order of a pound, if not less.
Brake dust is kinda different problem. Yeah it puts particles in the air, but most of it is pretty biodegradable (carbon and iron), and rest of it could probably be made that - technically loss of efficiency here could be compensated for, which is far harder for tyres.
Tire dust is a problem becuase we WANT it to be a problem the solution is available but it is impossible to get funding because the tire companies don't want to use it.
Thats it, that is how capitalism works. Make millions upon millions of people sick so that 3 companies can make slightly higher profits.
[1] https://hcs.osu.edu/our-people/dr-katrina-cornish
But we don't live in a pure capitalistic society.
Where is the govt's role in this? We pay 30-40% of our earnings for govt to do nothing while politicians become rich enabling this?
Deleted Comment
Well that's more complicated. Articles like this don't come out of the blue. There's an extremely well funded effort by fossil fuel and ICE car manufacturing companies to spread FUD about EVs. They are looking at double digit percentage drops in demand for their product in the decade ahead. That's going to impact them financially in a big way and they have a huge financial interest in slowing that down. And their tool of choice is misinformation. Little white lies, lots of half truths, twisted facts, lies by omission, etc.
That's not to say tire particles in ocean water aren't an issue. But the reality is that most of those particles come from ICE vehicles right now.
Unless people are just slamming on their brakes and leaving tire marks when they have the option of coming to a gentle stop, which I don't think anyone would do?
EDIT: Apparently I misread "brake dust" for "tire dust", sorry!
I would assume that the tyre dust will remain the same
Deleted Comment
This simply cannot be true. Tailpipe emissions have more mass than the gasoline that gets burned. A car uses several liters od gasoline per 100km. I am pretty sure no car loses several kilograms of tire or brake matter over 100km.
Perhaps they mean just the mass in the pm2.5-pm10 size spectrum?