US official warns of risks posed by heavy electric vehicles | Hacker News Reader

US official warns of risks posed by heavy electric vehicles

apnews.com

15 pointsVagueMag13 comments

Not to mention how these heavyweights will crush the hell out of our highways. Road damage is to the 4th power of axle weight. Will a fleet of electric cars and trucks we will be spending a huge amount on new concrete and tar. Both are significant CO2 sources.

I mean anyone who legitimately drives an EV to help the environment is deluding themselves. Not only is car pollution a negligible fraction of overall emissions, but it's far more harmful and resource intensive to get materials required to make EVs, and there are plenty of second order effects such as this and power generation required that result in even more emissions.

This is basically the Big Oil propaganda line, and it's been pretty thoroughly debunked. EVs are way more environmentally friendly than ICE vehicles over their lifespan.

One semi-truck does the damage of over 200 Hummer EVs. As long as semis are allowed on highways, I think the effect you're describing will be negligible, especially since the really heavy EVs like that are expensive luxury ones, and the mass-market ones are all way lighter.

200? Did you pull that number out of a hat?

The hummer EV is around 9100 lbs.

If we assume the higher end of GVWR for a tractor trailer at 80,000 that’s 8.8 hummer EVs.

Tractor trailers are also typically size limited not weight limited for their loads, which would bring down the ratio much further.

Lastly having the weight distributed to many more tires (typically 18) instead of 4 must ease the load on the pavement, no?

> Did you pull that number out of a hat?

Damage to roads is proportional to the 4th power of axle weight, which is about 4500 pounds for the Hummer EV and about 17000 pounds for a semi, and (17000/4500)^4 is a little over 200.

TIL!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

As long as 40-ton semis are allowed to drive cross-country instead of freight being carried by rail and semis only used for last-mile transit, I don't want to see a single new weight-related rule that would affect passenger vehicles below 5 tons.

It's worth discussing. The likelihood of you being creamed on a residential street or main thoroughfare is much higher from the passenger vehicles. How many crashes are there between semis and passenger vehicle per year and how many passenger-to-passenger are there?

Mind you, I agree about the importance of good and more-utilized rail transit.

How long does that semi take to accelerate, how long to break, and how well are its drivers trained? At least where I live, Euro specced semis are slow to get going, have extremely good brakes and decently trained drivers. Same cannot be said for your average SUV driver.

Make licenses based on weight as in EU? But hey, then you would not be able to drive your massive trucks...

As long as the first weight category went from 0 to 5 tons, this would be reasonable.

It's crazy to me that penalties for moving violations are set completely irrespective of GVWR.

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