Electric car sales drive toward cleaner air, less mortality
news.cornell.edu
news.cornell.edu
The best really would be to keep cars out of highly populated areas and provide good public transportation and provide walkable and bicycle-safe infrastructure.
Doesn't regenerative braking reduce both tire and brake wear?
> Tires on a modern electric car will wear down much slower than in a car with a traditional internal combustion engine. This is due to good traction control. The driver assist systems reduce slipping by utilizing the electric motor's rapid power adjustment. This system is much quicker than in ICE vehicles, where it is based on braking and limiting engine RPM, Liukkula says.
I dunno if anyone's done a good scientific study on this.
The heavier car + much better acceleration created more tire wear than any improvements to traction control from faster power response (though I'm not sure intrinsically why that would reduce wear - ICE cars can apply brakes to a slipping tire just as well as an EV, and instant torque doesn't feel like it would do anything positive for tire wear).
Fitting lower rolling resistance tires on ICE cars would provide any of the same benefits that EVs receive.
That Tesla is pushing run-flats may be why they wear out so ridiculously fast.
I suspect "ludicrous mode" will be less likely in semis. Truckers have a pretty good incentive to maximize cost savings; they don't need crazy acceleration like a high-end consumer sedan might want.
As a result, while not skidding, it's easy to accelerate, brake, or decelerate enough to scrub the tires hard enough to wear quickly.
It's pretty well known that Teslas are hard on tires. One benefit is I rarely use brakes instead of regenerative braking. Having AWD does seem to help on that front.
How much time do you spend spinning your tyres and braking so hard you skid?
From the skid marks I've seen on the highway, rare skids seem to pull off a significant amount of rubber in one incident.
What you're saying, that when you do press the brakes that a computer decides how much to apply regen vs friction, is true, but again, my point is that I don't touch the brakes.
So it sounds like regenerative breaking would covert ~75%-85% of kinetic energy into stored chemical energy. I'd expect to see similar reduction in tire and brake wear as well, maybe even more it probably depends on how break dust is generated, if it has a curve where more is generated with greater breaking force applied, by dropping the force on a break pad to 15% of it's previous value we might see an even greater reduction.
This is all speculation though, I am not a physicist.
Tire wear should be unaffected provided the e-car has a "freewheeling" feature whereby braking is not applied unless the driver hits a brake pedal. If the e-car is set to always run in a regenerative braking mode (brake goes on if driver eases off the "gas" pedal) then the braking will actually increase tire wear.
The LEAF curb weight is 3,516 to 3,919 lbs, while the Versa is 2,599 to 2,729 lbs
At the midpoint, the LEAF is over 1000lbs or about 40% heavier.
Nissan Rogue (similar sized ICE): 3457# (2WD S) - 3713# (Platinum AWD)
1328 lbs, 37% more.
2020 Tesla Model 3 = 1584 kg curb weight [1]
2019 BMW 320i = 1470 kg curb weight [2]
[1] https://www.cars-data.com/en/tesla-model-3-standard-range-pl...
But that's not really true, either with an EV with regen braking or standard brakes. With standard brakes, it's the friction and heat at the brake pads that causes deceleration. With regen braking, the energy of deceleration is going to charge the batteries.
After all, energy can't be created or destroyed. So if you're storing it in batteries, it's coming out of your forward momentum.
100%. Brakes do not stop a car, tires do. Brakes just manage the energy. Putting it back into a battery so it can be used to accelerate again is great, but it's still the tires stopping the car.
Now in the case of regenerative braking, the losses from the charging do also dissipate the energy, but most of it goes back into the battery to be used for driving which, over time, is transferred into the tires and the air.
It's important to remember that ideal wheels are not actually moving with respect to the surface they roll over. From the tire's perspective the road is not moving in any direction other than up and down, repeatedly touching the tire and then not touching it again at different points. As long as you maintain static friction when braking and don't start skidding, for ideal wheels, you're not transferring any energy to the tire or to the road.
Now, real tires are not ideal wheels so there's some differences, but those are minor components compared to the majority of energy being dissipated in charging the battery or into heating up/wearing down brakes. And indeed when driving, the majority of loss of energy is from air resistance, not the tires.
Sure, from a lay perspective. Though I stop my car routinely without ever touching the brakes. Even my gas car does a non-trivial amount of braking without using friction pads. But the point stands. Brakes don't touch the road, the tire does, so it matters not at all how you apply force to the wheel, from the perspective of the tire-to-road interface it's all the same.
If we want to have some fun with the physics, brake pads don't use dynamic friction to stop the car, either. Not most of the time, at least. Which is why they last as long as they do.
> Brakes don't touch the road, the tire does, so it matters not at all how you apply force to the wheel, from the perspective of the tire-to-road interface it's all the same.
This is not the case. Brakes (or regenerative braking) absorb the energy of motion into heat or stored chemical energy. The tires are not doing the stopping.
> brake pads don't use dynamic friction to stop the car
This is also incorrect. Brake pads are using almost completely dynamic friction to stop the car. From the perspective of the brake bads the tire is moving and from the perspective of the tire the brake pads are moving. There's no static friction involved there.
However it would not stop a vehicle on a zero friction surface, as a simple example, so no it doesn’t take away from the friction heat losses on the road.
This study estimates that the disability adjusted life years lost by PM2.5 are orders of magnitude higher than from NO2: https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/pdf/10.1289/ehp.1104035 see figure 3
I'm fully agreeing that electric cars reduce pollution, I also ordered one myself. But they do not fully solve the pollution problem and reducing our dependency on cars is the most effective way to reduce negative effects.
I've had people tell me that campfire smoke is more deadly than cigarette smoke, because the campfire has more particles.
The amount of particulate that would build up on everything in just an hour was pretty dumbfounding.
A lot of the particulate consists of petroleum parts, catalytic converter, etc. Components that EVs just don't have.
I think that's kind of obvious, as most tailpipe emissions are gaseous, not particulates. What really matters, instead of blindly counting particles, is health outcomes. Nox fumes are strongly associated with negative health outcomes, even if it isn't strongly associated with a particulate count.[1]
There's a reason warehouse forklifts - which drive around inside completely enclosed buildings - run on propane.
From my understanding a lot of the pollution is just from heating up the incoming air containing nitrogen. Unless you're taking your oxidizer with you rather than using the air to burn that propane, you're still going to produce toxic-to-humans nitrogen-based oxides (pollution) from exploding the gas in the presence of nitrogen. In fact depending on how you do it (for example if the combustion temperatures end up higher) you could have significant increases of such compounds versus gasoline combustion.
Best to keep the combustion vehicles to antiques/collectables and make all daily drivers use electricity.
You can actually measure this.
It burns leaner than petrol resulting in complete combustion so there's no CO or HC in the exhaust, either. Indeed, if there's enough CO and HC in the environment from other vehicles you'll actually be burning that too giving it (in a sense) negative emissions figures.
If these work and scale, it might behoove us to start requiring them in new cars, and maybe require retrofitting old cars.
It's possible there is a lot of low hanging fruit here, as tire particulate emission is not regulated.
or trucks and buses, as a cyclist the difference is even worse, but speed regulation really helps for that fear
I've no need for it myself, we just charge at regular old 32A from a 14-50 wall socket, but it's interesting to watch the market evolve. Maybe 19.2kW will become the new normal.
I've been 100% bike for all my adult life 20 years long, half of it commuting, half remote work, groceries up to 20kg (I carry crates on my handlebar), rain is annoying, but it's like people on motorbike, with proper clothes it's fine, but it's indeed less easy than a personal car. but not so much about natural elements, more because the cities are built for cars
I lived in Italy for a couple of years and it appears to be the case there. The most popular SUV-ish car back then, as explained to me by my Italian friend, was the Qashqai. Anything larger is just awkward.
Also for cars they often shop local, because Italian brands know their customers well and offer vehicles which out of context are just plain weird, like the 4x4 Fiat Panda.
There's still a lot of congestion, but smaller cars manage it better because you can squeeze three of them in two lanes on intersections if need be.
Also with few SUVs on the road you see many more other modes like scooters and even Tuk-Tuks.
People drive pickups to the office. Laptops must be a heavier load than I remember.
Ford won't even sell anything smaller than a compact SUV in North America.
Even discounting electric cars, imagine the environmental savings that could have been made if subcompacts became the norm instead?
It's easier to meet US fuel efficiency standards with larger cars. There's ramps on the standards, so small cars are disappearing; small trucks are already gone.
An 80s s-10 or similar with a regular cab and small engine is low weight, fairly small footprint, decent mpg, etc. A 2020 small truck built in the same footprint, but with a 40 year newer drivetrain would be pretty useful, but nobody will sell those in the US. Yes, you couldn't fit more than two people comfortably and three if you squeeze; yes, you couldn't (or shouldn't) tow anyhthing of stature; but it would be great for people who need an ocassional truck for furniture or dirt or etc, and don't need people carrying capacity. Light pickup truck hybrid could sip gas, and stuff the batteries under the bed for plug-in range, and also keep weight on the rear.
Kei trucks look fun too, but hard to import them.
Because we have a free market and that's what people buy. Unless you think you can gain enough political advantage to force people to bend to your will, persuasion is probably the best strategy. The top three vehicles by sales in the US are all light duty trucks, so to a rough approximation the people you need to convince are "everybody."
https://www.hotcars.com/heres-how-to-write-off-mercedes-g-wa...
Homeowners will need a large vehicle with some regularity. Doubly so if you have kids. For people without the money to have multiple cars laying around, it makes sense to buy the one most useful vehicle - an SUV.
Did they stop selling the focus? It’s among one of the best selling vehicles of all time.
First, there's the price. I know that some countries subsidize the purchase of an EV but without such support, electric cars are still targetting the upper end of the market when compared to traditional cars of the same size and with comparable features. Added to this is a latent feeling of mine that an electric car might lose value even faster than traditional cars already do. I mean, we all know from experience with battery powered devices (of the hand-held kind), how batteries deteriorate over time, and I think this impression is inevitably associated with electric cars, too, whether it's actually relevant in practice or not.
Second, but perhaps equally important, is that I currenly live in Europe. And unlike what you may be used to from suburban North America, I neither have a driveway here nor does my house come with an underground parking garage for its tenants. I park on the road. Sometimes quite a distance away from my house. So, charging over night is out of the question - which means that the only option for charging would be at the equivalence of a traditional gas station. Except, short of any super charger infrastructure in my vicinity, I have a hard time imagining spending 30 minutes every time the car runs empty. I have a larger family, and although 30 minutes might not seem much to you, it's definitely a considerable amount of time to me.
I realize there are quite a bit of advantages to EVs, and I would really love to enjoy them. But I just feel that these two points alone are sort of a deal breaker at the moment. I hope things are going to get better, though.
If gas spikes again like this year and some pending ICE sale and area bans come to fruition... I have trouble seeing ICE valuations keeping up with electric.
That said I'm a bigger proponent of investment in transit over perpetuating car dominance, but that's a different thread to pull on.
It’s all heavily subsidized.
Most office buildings, malls, and (tourist)attractions have stations.
There are downmarket electric cars, such as China’s $5000 Wuling Mini EV (https://www.wired.com/story/review-wuling-hongguang-mini-ev/...), which could perhaps best be described as “a golf cart with doors.”
Also keep in mind that many electric cars have a range in the neighborhood of 300 miles, but the average European drives around 20 miles a day, so you'd only need to charge once every two weeks.
I don't think EVs have commoditized and hit true economies of scale. Aside from the supply issues related to the pandemic, the only thing I see slowing it down is if governments fail to push Automakers to start making more.
Millions upon millions of ICVs will remain on the road regardless of any sort of ban on the sale of new ones in the next decade (if that actually comes to fruition). If you can get an EV then more power to you, but a future where enough EVs are on the road that particulate pollution is nearly gone is much further away than people think. This is especially true if existing electrical infrastructure proves to not support millions of electric vehicles charging. I've heard people make up reasons for why the infrastructure isn't a problem, but something about California's handling of the electrical grid doesn't give me confidence.
In the meantime, ICVs should be kept on the road as long as they can no longer function without serious repair. If it's both particulate pollution and climate change people are concerned with, then we can make more progress during the gradual shift to EVs by converting existing ICVs to run ethanol-based fuel like E85.
Hold on to your butts, because there is a TON of misinformation about ethanol fuel. Here's my case for why we should be converting existing ICVs to support ethanol:
- Ethanol is produced from fermenting the starches and sugars from plant material. Those plants pulled carbon out of the atmosphere to make its structure and the carbohydrates.
- Ethanol burns far cleaner than gasoline. The carbon returns to the atmosphere where it just came from, whereas burning fossil fuel releases carbon that has spent millions of years underground. There is always some carbon from ethanol production that doesn't return to the atmosphere. In other words, it's far better for the climate than gasoline.
- Leftover grains from fermentation of ethanol make excellent animal feed. Ethanol production doesn't compete with food production. It creates better food. Anything remaining can be either hydrolyzed to make more ethanol or burned to contribute to the distillation process.
- The vast majority of vehicles manufactured after 2000 can handle a substantial ratio of ethanol with no other changes to the vehicle. Most can run E30 (30% ethanol) without any problems at all, and some even go up to E50.
- Most gas cars are capable of running on E85 with either a conversion kit or even a software update to the ECU.
- Most gas cars don't require changes to the fuel system to run E85. Outside of high performance applications, the only thing that may need to happen is the fuel injectors need to be on a wider pulse width.
- Your vehicle may already be a "Flex Fuel" vehicle and you don't even know it. Many people are unaware of or forgot that they own a Flex Fuel vehicle.
- The gas in your car today already contains 10% ethanol. Modern fuel systems are designed to tolerate ethanol extremely well.
- Unlike gasoline, ethanol doesn't need to contain added carcinogens like "BTEX", benzene, tuolene, etc.
- No, ethanol will not rust your fuel tank or your fuel rail. Ethanol from a gas station is anhydrous.
- No, ethanol won't blow up your engine because of water. Ethanol has to sit a long time to absorb enough water to create a bad situation for your engine. In Brazil, they run cars with hydrous ethanol (~95%) just fine. If there's too much water, it has to have been added when it shouldn't have been.
- Ethanol is a good cleaner. Your engine may have a longer life on ethanol because you won't get carbon deposits like with gasoline.
- Ethanol burns cooler than gasoline. Cooler = better for your engine.
- Ethanol resists engine knocking and early ignition better than gasoline.
- Ethanol production can be decentralized and done on smaller scales.
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Like I said, I think EVs probably will be the eventual future. I don't see them being the majority of vehicles on the road any time soon. Maybe, idk. Until that happens, we need to rethink ethanol fuel if we want to mitigate climate change and air pollution.
I've had the opposite problem. I just bought another car, and I saw some great ICE options that seemed really appealing. Very long range, great utility, etc. But when I priced in the cost of gas (currently $3.5 here but it's been much higher as recently as a year ago) versus the cost of the electricity (4.2 cents/kWh in the middle of the night), I couldn't make the numbers work. Given that it's an appliance for the family and not my personal hot rod, I couldn't justify spending extra for ICE. We'll suck it up and deal with DC fast charging on road trips.
The average car is around 12 years old, implying that if we replaced all new cars with electric, we'd have replaced at least half of them within 12 years.
Finding a good deal on a used electric car isn't that easy right now because there aren't that many of them, which changes the more new cars are electric.
That's simply not factual for ethanol.
Also, the blanket term "biofuels" isn't particularly useful here because it can mean many things. I'm talking strictly about ethanol. Not biodiesel, not methanol, not LPNG.
> Electric vehicles are now viable specifically because they have a lower cost per mile than gasoline.
Even if that were to remain true, sorry, I'm not getting another car loan to replace a car that's already working. That's the reality for the vast majority of people. EVs need to come further down in price by far.
> The average car is around 12 years old, implying that if we replaced all new cars with electric, we'd have replaced at least half of them within 12 years.
Half of people aren't going to trade in for EVs within 12 years unless the price is right. The prices for even used EVs aren't anywhere near where they need to be for people who live outside the elite bubble. As long as used cars and aftermarket parts can be sold, people will run all the remaining ICVs into the ground, and that can take a very long time with modern vehicles even when treating them like crap.
> Finding a good deal on a used electric car isn't that easy right now because there aren't that many of them, which changes the more new cars are electric.
Those deals have never been easy to find, but the promise of affordable EVs has always been "just around the corner." I'll wait for EVs to make financial sense in the short term future, but I won't count on it.
It is if you take away the subsidies.
> Even if that were to remain true, sorry, I'm not getting another car loan to replace a car that's already working. That's the reality for the vast majority of people. EVs need to come further down in price by far.
The base Model 3 costs less than the average new car. You don't have to get another car loan, you can keep driving the car you have for another ten years, then buy a ten year old EV which someone else is buying new today.
It's the elites who buy new cars. You still end up driving an EV in ten years.
> Those deals have never been easy to find, but the promise of affordable EVs has always been "just around the corner."
EVs have only very recently been produced in volume and are still only ~6% of new cars, and a far lower proportion of used cars. The thing that makes them affordable as used cars is to be a high proportion of new cars and then wait five or ten years.
There's already multiple companies making cash flow positive money, without government subsidies, on recycling the very few EV batteries that are on the market (keep in mind that most EV batteries that have been manufactured are currently still in EVs). This is a great mini-documentary from CNBC on EV battery recycling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLr0GStrnwQ
It's just not economical to just dump EV batteries so I find this common fear to be rather unfounded and I personally suspect it's rooted in campaigning by oil companies to prevent EV adoption.
(I also suspect a significant portion of the "what about EV externalities?!" concern got seeded by the oil industry.)
Governments need to realize that just pushing EV is not going to make it alone.
Further, even with a high CO2 content electricity grid it is still cleaner to produce that electricity in power plants, because of the significantly more efficient burning that happens in large power stations versus the over 50% of energy wasted in an internal combustion engine.
In Mexico's case though with it's high natural gas content grid, switching to EVs is vastly better for CO2 pollution and general road pollution in general.
Old lead battery are highly recyclable but AFAIK the type used in EV's (and in many electronic devices such as laptops and phones) such as Li-Ion are not (easily) recyclable right now.
Hopefully by the time discarded batteries will increase in number there will be solutions, but right now there are only some "pilot" plants/technologies, see:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56574779
And:
Electric is so much cheaper that the only reason EVs haven't abruptly taken >50% of the market is because capital cost remains fairly high and charging availability is still low compared to liquid fuels. Normally, efficiency improvements significantly smaller than the EV advantage result in dramatic movements in buying patterns.
No. The 500ish mile range on these roughly corresponds to the maximum amount of time drivers are legally permitted to do in one go, and most trucking is short-haul routes.
I think we should spend a lot more effort on last-mile trucking first. To be fair, I think that's exactly what's happening. With the arrival of the Tesla semi, there are now two class 8 electric trucks, but there are definitely more than that already in the medium duty space.
US truck drivers work under a 14 hour daily limit. A full diesel tank can cover that. Can electric do the same without decreasing the cargo capacity in favor of bateries?
11 hours of that is permitted to be driving time, and you must take a 30 minute break after eight. (Good time to charge!)
8 x 55mph average speed = 440 miles. Perfect.
https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/sites/fmcsa.dot.gov/files/docs/Dri...
> This window is usually thought of as a “daily” limit even though it is not based on a 24-hour period. You are allowed a period of 14 consecutive hours in which to drive up to 11 hours after being off duty for 10 or more consecutive hours.
> The hours-of-service regulations require that if more than 8 consecutive hours have passed since the last off-duty (or sleeper-berth) period of at least half an hour, a driver must take an off-duty break of at least 30 minutes before driving. For example, if the driver started driving immediately after coming on duty, he or she could drive for 8 consecutive hours, take a half-hour break, and then drive another 3 hours for a total of 11 hours. In another example, this driver could drive for 3 hours, take a half-hour break, and then drive another 8 hours, for a total of 11 hours.
FTFA