Nobody Told EV Owners How Quickly They Burn Through Tires | Hacker News Reader

Nobody Told EV Owners How Quickly They Burn Through Tires

thedrive.com

28 pointspeutetre40 comments

You don't have to drive like a maniac. We're at 65,000 km on our EV and still on original tires.

That’s not super impressive… CR’s top all-season tire pick under $150, the General Altimax RT43, got an estimated 70,000 miles (112,000 kms) of tread life in its testing.

I think the main difference between EV tire consumption and something like a V8 mustang is that the tire consumption is essentially silent.

If you floor it on a mustang you likely will squeal the tires and make a ton of racket. Especially older cars where traction control was much less effective. You know you’re doing something bad to the tires, so it’s on you.

On an EV, you can hit the accelerator and accelerate faster than that mustang without ever even chirping the tires. It still wears them out much faster, but I think the lack of “chirping” or tire squeal lulls people into thinking it’s safe. So if you do it repeatedly at every intersection or something you’ll burn through a set of tires mighty fast.

EV tires usually have poor grip in the interests of low rolling resistance/increased range. This would result in more chirping at the same acceleration. Plus, since there’s no engine, there’s no sound when driving (besides wind) to cover up the sound of tire wear. So I’m not sure this explanation holds up.

Because you have an electric motor, you can modulate traction much much more rapidly and precisely than a mechanical engine. This allows you to be able to take the tires to the very very edge of grip and stay there. When they’re in that state you’re essentially putting the maximum possible shearing force on the rubber, so they wear out much faster.

Also, despite being low rolling resistance, many EV tires also offer phenomenal grip. There’s also some performance EVs that come stock with quite grippy tires. Michelin Sport cup 4S tires are stock on some of the “hot” Teslas, for instance.

Lots of luxury vehicles are heavy and high powered, causing them to eat through tires that are $600 each.

My boss was just complaining about his wife going through rear tires on their X6 in 8-9,000 miles

How quickly do GTOs burn through rubber if one drives like a teenager? Same thing with similar behavior an EV. Saying it's a defect is a bit silly.

Are you serious?

Yes. EVs are by nature high torque vehicles. High torque combined with aggressive driving burns through tires. Most people don't actually drive that way.

It wasn't about that. It was putting in the "teenage"-mode of driving GTO comparison. Like for one I was not aware (as someone who doesn't know much about cars, other than driving) about this. So am I expected to know about this? What else?

But good to know!

That's a fair point - I probably shouldn't have disparaged teenagers.

I know that I drove much more aggressively as a young person, that it isn't good for your cars or the people around you, and I realize that many other young people don't have this same predilection.

if you have a lead foot, torque will absolutely munch rubber. And even more so on a heavy chassis.

My motorcycle tires last about 6 track days, on a 400lb bike. (that accelerates to as fast as 130mph and then decelerates to as slow as 15mph about 45 times an hour for 8 hours per track day...)

> automaker buzz about EVs tends to blind customers to the potential downsides

It's phrased like EVs are some gimmicky new fridge feature that will be gone next season.

We need to switch to using EVs to avoid the severe consequences of climate change that will damage our way of life.

My friend, it is far too late for these fingers in the dike.

We can't prevent a flood, but we still have time to choose between a small flood and a big one.

The math around cost of ownership is just vague for EVs. (Tires instead of oil changes mentioned in the article is worse than vague though, at least with respect to cost.) But even if there was good data — and there might be — long term ownership costs won’t be known for quite a while, for example what does a 300,000 lifespan cost? Which leads to another question: Isn’t EV a vague way to describe cars? What might be better is economy EVs vs luxury. Luxury car owners might expect to use up tread quickly, but cheap EV cars might come with different expectations even if those are wrong.

They mention ~$200/tire as if its some big expense way out there compared to most other cars. Lots of EVs have 19" rims. 235/55R19's on my ICE cost like $230/ea. Good 215/55R17's for my old 2000 Honda Accord are $170-200.

I'll probably get ~35,000mi on the OE tires on a Mach E AWD. Lots of city driving, some amount of having a lead foot. If I had babied it a bit more I'd probably have gotten ~40,000mi. I was changing the tires on my Accord every 40,000mi or so. I was just looking at tires, and they were all ~$200-220/ea, even for EV specific tire models.

I cannot imagine getting so little mileage out of tires. My last car I lost at about 48k and I’d used about half the tread. My mechanic was also blown away that my brakes were “practically brand new” (unchanged since purchase).

People drive terribly, and I cannot figure out why. I get honked at because I don’t accelerate up steep hills, but then I always end up passing those people when it levels out… why be so wasteful?

With an ICE, accelerating at higher power is likely to be more efficient than accelerating at lower power (this isn't a reference to your statement about hills, it's a general statement about driving style). The nature of the beast is that there's a best efficiency point, and then they also do some work to make cruising efficient.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175675 --> https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/environment/climate-c...

Almost exact same issue 2 months ago. These are nothing but hit pieces on EVs, cherry picking the worst possible drivers and their issues.

I got 40k miles out of the factory tires on my Chevy Bolt. My last ICE car (WRX) only got 25k.

I think EV weight is a genuine problem, and tbh most people really don't need 300 mile ranges, especially if they can charge at home and/or work.

We need EVs with smaller batteries, and much more ubiquitous charging facilities. And possibly portable range-extender batteries or small ICs for longer trips.

My motorcycle goes through $250 rear tires in 2,500 miles. High torque chews up rubber. If it didn’t your tires would spin and the vehicle wouldn’t go anywhere (known as a burnout).

These cars have way more acceleration than any car should.

Too much acceleration and far too high a mass, as confirmed by the accident statistics. Tesla routinely leads the pack.

No it doesn’t

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2023/12/18/tesla-ha...

and their source: https://www.lendingtree.com/insurance/brand-incidents-study/...

> Tesla drivers have the highest accident rate compared with all the brands analyzed. During the period analyzed, Tesla drivers had 23.54 accidents per 1,000 drivers. Ram (22.76) and Subaru (20.90) were the only other brands with accident rates over 20.00 per 1,000 drivers.

> It’s hard to nail down why certain brands may have higher accident rates than others. However, there are indications that certain types of vehicles attract riskier drivers than others.

“Accident rates per 1000 drivers” is not a particularly meaningful metric, though. If you look at the per-state breakdown, or the incident rates, the states with the most Teslas (CA, e.g.) don’t have Tesla in first place.

More interesting would be accidents per million miles (a standard metric here) and similar. These are less biased by “who owns what kind of car” and include “who drives a bunch with them”. But of course there are many reasons to want one metric over another, and none is perfect.

Accidents per driver is the only metric that matters, because the one tells you how risky a certain class of drivers is. Accidents per passenger mile is not even meaningful, because you do not decrease the risk by by making more miles.

Ah, except it does not tell you that. Consider this extreme example: if Honda drivers on average drive 200 miles a week and 10% of them get into an accident each year, while Lamborghini drivers on average only take their cars out for a single 10-mile spin once a year but also 10% of them get into an accident each year, it would a poor conclusion to say that these are equivalently risky driver classes.

> Accidents per passenger mile is not even meaningful, because you do not decrease the risk by by making more miles.

Er, right, it is meaningful because you obviously increase the risk by driving more miles. Very easy to own a car and have 0 accident risk: never drive it.

This is easily solved by selling a lighter vehicle. Normal commuters dont need 300 miles of range.

The balance of the impact across weight and driving style isn’t necessarily clear…

As a diesel engine mechanic, you never get a free lunch. Forklifts and loaders eat tires because torque, so I always imagined electric cars might too.

How long do the motors last? They can't be sound after 100k. Or are they?

Akshually ... they eat tires because of the application of torque. Drive sedately and get great tire life.

Why would you think an electric motor would wear out in 100,000 miles? Brushless AC motors can last tens of thousands of hours of operation.

> Drive sedately and get great tire life.

Defeats purpose of owning EV

Pretty much as long as any 3 phase AC motor lasts. I.E. forever.

The motors are physically very simple and will likely outlive the rest of the car. According to Tesla they should last a million miles.

> They can't be sound after 100k

Why wouldn't they? Other than a couple of bearings there's no friction involved, and they're well sealed. Assuming they're only ever driven at designed capacities, they should last darn near forever.

Apparently in Tesla cars the common cause of motor failure is coolant leaking in.

As we head into the "EV future", the tail pipe emissions take a nose dive while the tire wear particles released into environment increase 1000x fold. Bye bye clean water supplies.

We don't need personal vehicles or solutions to placate personal vehicle ownership. We need solutions to diversify transportation options beyond existing car centric transportation. No more parking garages. No more parking lots. No more parking lots with EV chargers. We need sane city design combined with investment in public transportation that is reliable and runs 24/7; and infrastructure to support alternative forms of transportation such as bike, scooter, walking. Remove street parking for personal vehicles. Remove and tear down useless ~~~car housing~~~ parking garages and replace with mixed use residential + commercial housing.

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