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.
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.
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.
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.
That Tesla is pushing run-flats may be why they wear out so ridiculously fast.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've had people tell me that campfire smoke is more deadly than cigarette smoke, because the campfire has more particles.
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.
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.