> That electric car is still creating a lot of particulate pollution from the tires on the road
And brake dust, which includes a lot of metal
And brake dust, which includes a lot of metal
I can’t find an English wiki article, but here is German
It's definitely preferable to grinding brakes to slow the vehicle both because of the reduced wear/pollution and extended range gained from the small bit of charging that occurs.
Also to give a personal anecdote, in my Volvo XC60 PHEV, I've just had the inspection done and after 24k miles the brake pads are 5% worn. That's insane for a 2.2 tonne SUV with 400bhp. If it wasn't a PHEV I can guarantee that the pads would be nearly worn by now.
This is not true. At least for Teslas, the brake pedal only controls the friction brakes (they are hydraulically coupled). Same with a Chevy bolt. Unsure on other EVs
Almost every other EV (and hybrid) on the market does blended regen with the brake pedal. Regen is applied when you first press on the brake pedal. As long as the pressure is mild to moderate, regen is used. If you press hard (as in emergency braking) the friction brakes are engaged. When you get below about 10mph the friction brakes are also applied as regen is minimal at that speed. The result is that these cars will do regen whether you are using one pedal driving or not and their brakes will wear much less often.
I’m not sure why Tesla doesn’t do blended regen. Early one the manufacturers didn’t have the algorithms tuned and you could feel the transitions but that has not been the case for several year. It seems that Tesla just never bothered. They seem to expect you to only use one-pedal driving and some people do.
One think to watch for if you only use one-pedal driving, your friction brake pads can get rusty from disuse. Then when you do press on the brake pedal, the brakes may grab or may not decelerate as quickly as expected. Some people find that their brake pads are actually frozen from rust and don’t work at all. It is a good idea to once in a while use those friction brakes to scrub off the surface rust.
So with regen I get variable braking, but I get a reward (more range and less brake wear) if I plan ahead enough to make it work. However if there is surprise or immediate need for more braking then the brake pedal is there. So it's pretty much the best of both worlds, once you get used to it.
I generally drive only using regen, because I can tell. If you remove the feedback it's going to be harder, especially since the level of regen available can radically differ based on temperature and level of charge.
So do you want regen to be invisible? Or do you want better range, efficiency, and brake wear?
It looks like this:
https://www.swedespeed.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,onerror...
On a Tesla you just lift the throttle, and if that's not enough you are aware of it, and change your driving patterns accordingly.
With a mixed setup, how do you know when and how much the brakes are involved? Doubly so when it's too cold, or the battery is too full for regen.
Of course it's depends on how you drive, but if you are not getting 100k miles out of your brakes the problem is not the car but the driver.
This is just false. If you get 100k in your non-EV before having to replace at least your front brake pads, you must be racking up highway miles.
EVs are a couple hundred pounds heavier in average than an equivalent ICE car. In terms of road wear, it's still a rounding error compared to industrial trucks.
Seriously, a Model 3 is ~500 lbs heavier than Honda Accord, and a Model Y is significantly heavier than a Model 3.
But to your point, a bmw 430 is also around 500 pounds heavier than a Honda Accord. Nobody sees a BMW and freaks out about tire wear. But people seem to hyperfixate on any small negative of EVs.
At the heaviest weights, yes, but the heaviest Accord weight and the lightest 430i weight are only 148 lbs apart... and the Model Y can weigh in almost 400 lbs heavier than the heaviest of 430i's.
> Nobody sees a BMW and freaks out about tire wear.
You mean, so long as it's not an EV? ;-)
Seriously, nobody freaks out about a BMW 430i's tire wear, because that of the branding of the car. It's like freaking out over coffee increasing your heart rate.
> But people seem to hyperfixate on any small negative of EVs.
We're obviously talking to different people. At least the folks I know talk about how crazy heavier cars keep getting across the board (case in point: https://www.capitalone.com/cars/learn/finding-the-right-car/...).
The non performance models are similar as well, the current BMW 3141-4023 pounds (the AWD are of course on the heavier side, and the Tesla model 3 is 3814 pounds.
That means you deal twice the damage by increasing weight by only 20%. Seems in line with electric car weight difference.
A typical garbage truck has 2 or 3 axles. Let's assume 3 to be conservative. A fully loaded garbage truck weighs around 50,000 pounds. That's 16.6k pounds per axle, vs a Tesla Y's 2.2k pounds per axle.
Doing the math, a single garbage truck does as much road wear as ~3,300 teslas.
My guesstimate is if they can increase the energy density of batteries by 30-50% the weight penalty will disappear. Some of the reduction is the weight reduction of the battery and some is due to cascading effects on the rest of the car.
Complaining about the 9000lb EV hummer makes for some great circle jerks among the demographics that hate people who drive normal hummers but the road basically doesn't care about them.