Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
Walk down the street and touch a bush or any plant leaf and get a nice black hand in the process. The plants are covered, parked cars get covered and the inside of my apartment was covered.
It wasn’t until I moved out that I saw the extent of the problem. I only lived there a few years but every surface of my apartment had a coating of the same black dust. I’m now very worried my short time there considerably affected my health.
Depends on driving style of course
Hint: driving fast or tailgating both increase the odds you'll have to use the friction brakes.
Regen braking wears the hell out of your battery. That few hundred you saved on brake changes just cost you a tens of thousands of dollars on a premature battery replacement.
And this exact same thing coincides DIRECTLY with my lithium-powered portable lighting, so I'm pretty up-to-date on very top-level research, because I hire this same person.
His name is Luke. You'll see him all over the globe doing lithium EV research and testing.
I think it's fine, in an EV just give your physical brakes a good test/try out when starting a journey in the car, especially if it has been sat for a while.
For motorcycles (not using regenerative braking, but engine braking which is quite effective there) this however is a problem. Every once in a while I woke a sleepy tailgater with that. Fortunately all sleepy tailgaters did wake up in time.
E.g., Ford F-150 Ford Lightning has a curb weight of up to 6,500 lbs, which compares to the regular F-150's curb weight that ranges from anywhere between 4,021 lbs and 5,014 lbs. The Rivian R1T is 7,148 lbs.
Heavier weight alone however doesn't necessarily cause more tire wear though. The Toyota Prius came with hard-compound tires (good for low fuel consumption and high mileage, not for racing).
Single-pedal mode does the rest. Not only does this make the car easier to drive, but you can hit a sweet spot where you never really use the brakes.
It would incentivise clean disk materials and regenerative braking.
Could you clarify your position a bit?
Seems cheaping out on quality parts is more likely to be the root of the issue than emissions standards.
One day I made the mistake of leaning against the wall in a TTC subway station while in a white shirt. I didn't realize how much oil, brake dust, and other mechanical grime there was until that moment.
I had to go home and change.
I wonder what platform doors will do: the stations depend on piston effect for ventilation, but walling off the tube from the station might keep it more in the tube?
The windows facing the railway would get coated in a black grit. Slightly oily particles, just sticky enough to stick to the glass.
The windows facing the road would get coated in a dark brown slime.
According to the air quality maps of the city, the road is slightly more polluting than the railway, although the railway is carrying 100,000 passengers a day.
I used to joke someday I was going to be diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and the Doctor would ask me how many packs a day I smoked and I'd tell him none and he wouldn't believe me.
I was worried that this was a rehash of the astroturf campaign from a few years ago focusing on EV weight and how that was so bad for the environment because of tire and road wear. Unfortunately you need to read through the whole thing (instead of the headline and a few paragraphs) to see that information.
Though this is contraindicated by Tesla drivers in the extreme Regen mode that induce motion sickness in their passengers and / or are replacing their tires very often (though conflated with rapid acceleration)
It adds tire wear, but no more than traditional friction braking. I can't see how there would be any measurable wear from any other moving parts, since it's just using a magnetic field for resistance. There are moving parts that touch, but modern, sealed bearings last a ridiculously long time.
Also, none of these discussions use up-to-date information on EV tires. Consumers aren't willing to replace their tires much more often for an EV except at the high end of the market, tire manufacturers are already making tires last much longer for EV purposes. New designs are already shedding less dust per unit mass of the vehicle than they were a few years ago.
Plus, some manufacturers are now working to reduce the toxicity of their formulas. This will eliminate the issues a lot more.
Absent any evidence, I don't believe that claim. Unless you're skidding, I don't see how braking slowly and smoothly over a longer period causes any less tire wear than braking more rapidly for a shorter time.
Additionally, since this is intrinsically tied to EVs, they weigh more and thus increase tire wear in all conditions.
It seems believable that hard braking, even without leaving skid marks, could pull more rubber off a tire than gradual braking.
Hard Braking: Less experienced drivers often react late to situations, slamming on the brakes instead of slowing down gradually. This creates more friction and heat, reducing pad lifespan.
Acceleration and deceleration is calculated the same way: m/s^2. If you decelerate faster you put more stress on the system in a non-linear way - the square of it actually. This is why sport and race cars have huge brakes. The tire friction will also augment non-linearly - it will hold a certain acceleration and then quickly give up (slipping point), but the energy has to be transferred and partly absorbed all the time.
> they weigh more and thus increase tire wear in all conditions
Then get a lighter one if that is your concern. Defaulting to ICE is the wrong idea because they have much more externalities (like one ton of fuel per year that needs actually around 1.5 if you include the extraction and transport).
Part of the problem is the instant torque, but the narrow geometry is a bigger issue. Also, they did something to the formulation that achieves less rolling resistance for increased wear.
I also don’t think the weight is the main issue. The i3 is a bit under 3000 lbs. That’s the same as a Volvo station wagon, and they didn’t have this problem. (If I remember right, you could get 50K mile Michelins for them.)
From https://mechanicswizard.com/how-close-should-brake-pads-be-t...:
> Typically, the optimal gap between brake pads and rotors is between 0.5 and 1.5 mm (0.020 to 0.060 inches).
Drum brakes by contrast have springs that retract the pads from the braking surface, so the OP has a very valid point.
The wobble pushes the pads back in, right?
I mean you can hear scratching when the pistons get crusty and the don't retract like they are supposed to.
It’s even easier to see on a bicycle with hydraulic discs.
There are clips you can buy to force the calipers apart. I wonder if this negatively affects safety though.
We only ever really went to disc brakes because they were slightly cheaper and easier to manufacture and since racing vehicles used disc brakes (because they benefit from the extra cooling capacity that commuters don't need) it was easy to convince customers that they were "better" and they became standard.
There was also a time when they didn't figure out traction control very well using brake drums while they did manage it with brake discs, but part of that could be just because brake drums were out of fashion in racing where traction and stability control were invented and implemented first and nobody bothered improving drum brakes to take advantage of that tech until decades later.
Now that EV drivers can go weeks without touching their actual brakes and just rely on regen braking, disc brakes have become a liability since they aren't worn down smooth and cleaned whenever someone stops at the end of their driveway.
That does wear off the rust.
I don't think any EV that I've heard of has full-range electric brakes.
There are two interesting kinds of things that I think EVs could use...
brake resistors - if the battery can't absorb the full power of regenerative braking, maybe giant resistors can take the dissipate the rest of the energy.
eddy currents - it might be cool to use eddy currents to brake.
"Brake Disc Drying"
https://www.reddit.com/r/eGolf/comments/dhll01/egolf_brake_d...
https://f30.bimmerpost.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1782553
You probably want your disk brakes to get nice and hot every once in a while.
The only recent cars I've had with drum brakes used them for the parking brake. They tended to corrode and not work well. Also, as an emergency brake even with a pedal you could push hard on, they were beyond terrible, even dangerously ineffective.
About 140k miles in and I've replaced the pads+rotors once (but will replace next summer)
The same problem occurs if you let an ICE car sit unused for a while.
My cheap Chinese Walmart tires have lasted me 50k miles and are due to be replaced soon, but I spend zero attention to driving smoothly or in an eco mindset.
I guess an occasional ICE rental could fill the gap but they often nail you on long distances
Last year I was driving a lot of different cars for work. I was really excited once when I got a RAV4 because I've lived most Toyotas I've driven and I've never tried any of their SUVs. The car doesn't come with blindspots mirrors and it is actually impossible to see a car sitting in your blindspots.
Taking your example of a corner clip, the larger car would fare better; the smaller car will spin more. There is no better description than "arms race." I understand there are edge cases with rollover, etc. but the first rule is mass.
I suppose the second rule is where between the two cars the force is absorbed. Ideally bumper-to-bumper. Modified lifted trucks ought to be banned as far as I'm concerned; it defeats the factory design that had to comply with laws.
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/international/cheap-mini-ev...
But they still last a long time because the DSGs of that era used engine braking and lots of gears to get better gas mileage than the manual version. Which was rare up to that point. Manual almost always got you better mileage than the automatic.
Engine braking saves you a ton because the brakes wear out faster the harder you brake. I don’t recall if it’s just the pressure or if it’s the heat.
Now he did tell me the aftermarket’s don’t have copper sinters in them, which is how he clocked them as replacements. Sometime after I bought my car they banned copper in brake pads due to metal pollution.
Jevons paradox says cheap EV's are maybe not so great. Consider if a cheap car cost a $100k most people wouldn't own cars. They'd walk or take the bus or subway. You wouldn't usually have to walk far, buses and subways would come often.
Just saying electric cars not a panacea for everything.
But I can't walk anywhere from where I live (well, except down to the river in the woods) and there's no real transit system at all. If I couldn't drive, I'd have to relocate.
For example, I think of stroad as opportunities to implement public transportation by getting of a lane or two. It is also easier to add bike lanes since you aren't constrained by how wide the streets are.
Farms, factories and logistics centres generally turn a profit. Not everyone has a desk job.
Even then, it still makes sense to aggregate industrial concerns within a given area to benefit from colocation of related industrial facilities and make it easier to commute via public transit.
Farms on the other hand should be subsidized. This is also where cars usually makes the most sense.
It's actually a fairly busy connecting artery between fairly rural towns (that also leads to a small city). It's also not something effectively served by public transit.
Is the much greater weight of EVs not worse for tire and road wear?
Holistically, particle emissions from EVs are lower than gas powered cars due to reduced breaking (even above hybrids) and reduced exhaust.
At the end of the day, the vast vast vast majority of road wear and particle emissions are semi trucks. Not only do they weigh a heck of a lot more, but they also wear their tires until they disintegrate, when was the last time you saw an exploded tire remains on the side of the road and it wasn't from a semi?
EV vehicle weight definitely moves some needles in the wrong direction.
A Toyota Corolla weighs about 3,000, the Tesla model 3 weighs 3,500-4,000 depending on which model you buy. So a 16-33% increase in vehicle weight.
A Corolla will do 8.1 x 10^13 'damage points' A light model 3, 1.5 x10^14 'damage points' And a heavy model 3, 2.6x10^14
So moving to EV vehicles would move the damage done by the average commuter by an order of magnitude.
There are of course much heavier vehicles on the road as well, such as a standard empty garbage truck weights around 33k pounds and will do 1.2 x 10^18 damage points. So significantly more wear per mile traveled, but there are also far more vehicle miles traveled by those lighter class vehicles as well.
EV are probably still a net positive, but the real solution is to stop designing our cities and transportation systems exclusively around low occupancy vehicles. Walking, biking, and transit, also need to.be options for getting around.
Your typical empty semi truck weighs 35k pounds, and a lot more when loaded. There's also more miles driven by semi trucks than passenger vehicles
It was part of the astroturf effort to convince people that they are massively heavier, and you see it was successful with comments like this where it is claimed that they are “much greater” in weight with nothing quantified. Of course the hummer was heavier, but not everyone has the hummer.
> full electric versions are only around 10% to 15% heavier than their direct ICE equivalent.
https://thedriven.io/2024/05/03/are-evs-really-much-heavier-...
> Starting with the Tesla Model 3 weighing in at between 1777Kg and 1840Kg
> A comparable ICE car the BMW 3 series 1570Kg - 1965Kg
> And another ICE car the Mercedes C class 1665Kg - 2190Kg
> And finally another EV the Ford Mustang Mach-E 1993Kg - 2218Kg
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-perception-of-Tesla-cars-b...
The actual range quoted in the table at that link is 11%-17%.
> > A comparable ICE car the BMW 3 series 1570Kg - 1965Kg
Interesting that one "ICE" car can vary in weight by over 25%, or almost 400kg.
Maybe it's because that weight "range" isn't really for that ICE car. The low end of the range is suspiciously close to the 1590kg figure for the BMW 320i, an actual ICE car: https://www.bmw.co.nz/en/all-models/3-series/bmw-3-series-se...
While the upper end of the range is suspiciously close to the 1910kg of the BMW 330e -- a plug-in hybrid: https://www.bmw.co.nz/en/all-models/3-series/bmw-3-series-se...
I guess both sides can astroturf.
https://www.ultimatespecs.com/car-specs/BMW/119385/BMW-G20-3...
> Curb Weight : 4206 lbs / 1908 kg
I suspect if I looked through every model I’d find heavier ICE only but close enough I’d say.
According to the 4th power law that translates to 625x the road (and thus also tyre) wear, meaning even a fully loaded bus should produce significantly more particulates than the equivalent in cars with just one occupant each.
EVs have a faster electronic traction control system that results in less tyre spin, which results in less wear on both the tyre and, in the case of winter, the road itself, as studded tyres eat away at the asphalt.
I couldn’t tell if the study found that car brakes are more harmful than exhausts, or that car brake chemicals are more harmful than exhaust fumes - but that may not be significant because they are produced in less quantities.
None of these.
The actual linked study found that the presence of specific metal particulates (copper, zinc and iron), which are found in modern brake dust, correlates with increase risk of asthma and allergy in kids.
I'm personally wondering if the article linked the wrong article? Because the article describes the study as "researchers grew human lung cells in a lab and exposed them to dust from car brakes and from diesel tailpipes", but the linked study is a cohort study of correlation, that doesn't involve any experimental manipulation.
So if you want to model somebody being 10 meters away from the street, you might need to use different ratios than for somebody being 100m away.
This has been shown not to be true in a number of studies.
At the very least, these tires are subject to higher forces due to the heavier weights of EVs. Intuitively, consistently applying higher friction forces to an object would cause higher wear.
I’m replacing earlier given poor snow and rain performance. They can have em back when my lease is up.
It’s much worse, it actually scales quartically with weight.
EVs do generate lower brake particulate matter, by virtue of not using them as much (otherwise they'd also be prone to generating more in a (faulty) per-engagement direct comparison).
Could you link these studies?
Every study I've seen from people pushing on this uses very old information about tires, proving there's a problem really requires updated work taking these things into consideration.
(and have the tire companies been conspiring to make tires disposable?)
The complexity comes from things like sidewall stiffness (controls available grip near the lateral limit of traction, must be designed for vehicle mass), suspension geometry (tire camber affects maximum grip), tire width (affects contact patch size relative to mass of the vehicle, tire pressure, camber, and sidewall stiffness), and suspension spring rate and dampening (wheel hop, changing camber angle from body roll).
What? Was this written by AI?
Since F=ma and F_n is 9.8 N/kg due to gravity, F_f = μ * 9.81 * m and a = F/m = μ * 9.81 * m / m, and finally a = μ * 9.81 m/s^2.
Tire-related chemical responsible for salmon deaths in urban streams (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41450563 - Sept 2024 (37 comments)
EPA bans asbestos, a deadly carcinogen still in use decades after partial ban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39746806 - March 2024 (393 comments)
Vehicle brakes produce charged particles that may harm public health: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39683351 - March 2024 (302 comments)
Car’s tires are swirling donuts of pollution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36660138 - July 2023 (28 comments)
Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22517621 - March 2020 (319 comments)
Tire-related chemical responsible for salmon deaths in urban streams (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41450563 - September 2024 (37 comments)
What we need isn't to go all prepper for some kind of dark age, what we need is a new breed of intellectual that actually makes an effort to understand what life is like for the 65% of the population without a 4-year degree and then attempts to bridge the gap rather than trying to run the world from within a filter bubble.
We could also try to fix
Case in point. Go out and meet some of these people and then report back.
You can lead a horse to water. It's not my job to encourage intellectual rigor. It's political leadership's. Pushing that burden onto imaginary everyday philosophers you've conjured up is futile.
Since this is a feedback loop it's everyone's duty to help so it works as a virtuous cycle and not the poo-poo loop it has become.
To me it seems pretty obvious why someone making $40,000 a year doing some trade and/or taking off 1-2 decades of their lifespan and quality of life is pissed and opposed to the status quo when they see investors and capital owners and politicians making consistently brain dead decisions yet still raking in millions. Watching corporations buy out and legislate away small businesses and replacing them with corporate versions that cost more money while reducing their service capabilities and competence.
Its the luddite situation repeating over and over again. Groups of smart individuals working together build something greater, but someone at the top of the capital pile claims or buys all the credit while firing and replacing, or offshoring now, all the individuals who actually did the work and actual innovation, and economic imbalance results in turmoil and rage until it finally boils over and people start destroying looms. Because instead of all the auto-looms they built benefiting everyone, it mostly only benefits a handful of individuals who claimed ownership, while pushing everyone else in a race to the bottom as their old small business models get crushed by the legal and financial departments of the big cats.
The average American has correctly identified that intellectuals despise them.
That's it. Propaganda is a useful scapegoat, but the actual problem is that the average American has caught on to the sneers and derision and doesn't like being treated that way.
Redistributing resources won't help because those plans are always put forward from a place of condescension towards the less educated, and the condescension is the problem!
There are just so many arguments for public transport over cars where possible.
Therefore, the engine keeps running, but there is no combustion.
You can see your live fuel consumption go to 0 when you lift the gas pedal on a modern ICE car.
On the latest model year, which is a hybrid, the paddles control regenerative braking instead.
Until we do convince uncle Jack and his friends to stop voting for things against humanity, at least those things could be made less harmful
I'm genuinely thinking of a particular person in my family who was one of the first to have a regenerative brake (for financial reasons, probably a tax reduction by going hybrid idk) but will also be among the last to do anything for the greater good
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/8/2851
>Traffic-related resuspended dust is particulate matter, previously deposited on the surface of roadways that becomes resuspended into the air by the movement of traffic.
>Results show that the inclusion of resuspended dust in the emission and dispersion modeling chain increases prediction of near-road PM2.5 concentrations by up to 74%.
The weight, speed, and volume of traffic, are therefore considerable factors even beyond the pollutants the vehicles leave behind.
The article says that human cells react worse to dust from modern brakes than to exhaust or even dust from asbestos brakes. But this ignores the impact of exhaust on city pollution, or the hazards of asbestos production process, etc.
I guess this only tells us that dust from modern brakes can be dangerous and we should keep an eye on it. Which is valuable information, even if not as sensational.
Proximity to large roads (like US Interstates) is known to be a bit higher in PM2.5.
Also, car-shaped EVs often use regenerative braking which will reduce the amount of brake dust pollution, but with their increased weight and powerful torque, they produce a lot more tyre pollution than ICE vehicles.
Unfortunately, tyre pollution seems to be more hazardous and produced in greater quantities:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemical...
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/media/mgmeqm3b/tyre-wear-parti...
None of your linked studies even come close to supporting this claim.
I don't doubt that tire particulates have negative health impacts on humans, but we don't really know which is worse yet.
But then there are those weekend trips.
Then, with the reduction in width required for these futuristic two wheeled eco-machines, we could utilize some of the road space freed up for an even more efficient way to move people around a semi densely populated area. If only we could invent a way to allow multiple people traveling on similar routes to share a common vehicle, then we'd be able to split the capital and ongoing usage costs among many different people, reducing costs for everyone.
It's a shame, really. If only we had the technology...
While yes, a lot of the elderly continue to cycle in countries where the infrastructure exists (e.g. the Netherlands), those places also have universal healthcare. You can't just throw your average 60 year old American office worker on a bike.
Or for people with small children who need to be able to transport them. Or their groceries for a family of more than 2, particularly since American cities and towns aren't usually accommodating of the 'stop every day/every other day for food' method of food shopping that's more common in some European countries. A bike isn't really a great option for someone with a 20 month old and a 4/5 year old.
Not having universal healthcare seems like a strange argument against active travel as it's well known that active travel can drastically improve people's health and reduce the need for healthcare - it would seem more important to choose to look after your health if you can't rely on healthcare being available if you lose your job etc.
Your disability point is perfectly valid, although some disabilities make it easier to cycle than to walk. However, if we can get as many able-bodied people to use active travel when feasible, it'll clear vehicles from the roads and make it easier for the people that rely on their cars for mobility.
The healthcare point is because it means that a lot of elderly Americans have medical conditions that are unattended to, injuries that never healed properly, etc. It's common, particularly in the working class, to have your body be functionally wrecked by the time you're 55 (particularly for men). If we want the elderly to be active, we need the infrastructure to allow that rather than declaring that any health condition that won't kill you in the next two weeks is fine for the poor to deal with, actually. Heart conditions are really common, diabetes, COPD, poorly healed injuries for those who at one time worked blue collar professions, etc. Someone who lost their foot to diabetes isn't going to be cycling and sure, if they'd been more active 30 years ago that might not have happened, but it's the reality now.
I support public transit and biking infrastructure and totally agree it's great for disabled people as well - one thing I found interesting when I lived in a city with decent transit + universal healthcare is how many more physically disabled/elderly people I saw out and about going about their business.
I just find that the idea that we can just get rid of cars/that everybody who uses them just doesn't know any better overlooks a substantial amount of the population and their needs, and you need to address the needs first if you actually want to move away from the car. It has big 'everybody is a single, able bodied 25 year old man without dependents who lives in CA or the PNW' energy to assume those of us in cars are just not educated enough to know better. Like now even when I travel I don't like taking public transit because I'm immunocompromised and being jammed in with that many people is a health hazard. I'm not stupid. Neither is the exhausted mom with 2-3 kids and one hour to get across town to buy food for the week.
I think the opposite tactic is better. Make it easier for young, fit, able-bodied people to get around without cars first and allow the increasing numbers of cyclists etc. to bolster improving the infrastructure. When you make it easier for the fit people to cycle, it also becomes easier for older/disabled people to cycle. The more people we got onto bikes, the less people we have driving and increasing congestion.
Ultimately, the U.S. has gone all-in on personal cars and designed cities around them. This pretty much excludes other forms of transport and increases the distances between homes/shops/healthcare etc.
Groceries can easily fit in a top box for a motorcycle, that you usually have anyway to stove helmets.
Hoping that the ID.1 will be half as good, if it ever sees the light of day.
Oh what's this, turns out the ideal car was already invented twenty years ago, it's the Toyota Prius
Casually gets 50 mpg city and highway
Small, lightweight battery
Not a super expensive status symbol
The plugin models use very little gas for the daily commute, but you can always drive it like a pure ice car if you need to flee the country on zero notice
Unfortunately it seems to have gone nowhere
This thing I just can get in and out like with a car. I can throw my normal backpack in there. I don't need to worry about rain. Very importantly, I at least have some material around me if someone hits me.
I think as a starting point, I would expect that tire wear should remain roughly in proportion to road wear, given the same tires on each vehicle. From this, I would expect car makers to use larger, thicker, heavier tires on heavier vehicles in order to compensate.
Thus I think we shouldn’t accept claims about the replacement lifecycle of tires without knowing these details of their construction. If an electric car is twice the mass of an older ICE car then the fourth power rule would predict a 16-fold increase in road wear. I would then expect the tires on the EV to have 16 times more rubber in order to last the same duration, unless they’re made of some newer compounds which are more durable.
IMO this would be a suspect assumption to make w/o data to back it up. You've got two dissimilar materials interacting (in very different modes). E.g. rolling a metal ball bearing on a wood surface would obviously cause the wood to degrade far more than the ball bearing, (and even a wooden ball rolling on a wood surface would wear substantially less due to the mode difference).
(If I had to guess the road has a higher wear as the surface has a tensile stress around the contact patch of the tyre, causing most of the damage, but this is just armchair engineering at this stage).
given the same tires on each vehicle
I don’t endorse the broader statement which would imply the same wear regardless of tire material. That claim is clearly false.
If it were acceleration and deceleration I’d have expected the effect to be less localised, as breaking and accelerating happens over a much longer distance.
But, I have no actual idea. It’s just probably not friction…
Ideally, it'd be great if insurance companies made a big push to get some kind of standardised "black box" that drivers could fit. As well as providing extra stats, I think they'd be great for detecting illnesses. A simple driving ability stat could be produced from the typical acceleration/braking timings - smoother is better as it shows good anticipation by the driver. If their stat starts decreasing more than expected due to aging etc. then the driver could be alerted that they should consult a doctor as it could cognitive decline, eye problems etc.
e.g. https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-unexpected-problem-with-evs-t...
And EV cars tend to be heavier then comparable combustion cars.
https://www.bankrate.com/insurance/car/average-car-weight/
Model 3 Curb Weight: 3,552–4,048 lb
Model X 5,248 lbs
Model Y 4,209 - 4,363 lbs
So what’s your point?
That EV cars exist that are less heavy than the average car?
That’s not why I said, I said comparable combustion cars are less heavy than their EV counterpart.
Let’s look at some comparisons since that is your point:
> Starting with the Tesla Model 3 weighing in at between 1777Kg and 1840Kg
> A comparable ICE car the BMW 3 series 1570Kg - 1965Kg
> And another ICE car the Mercedes C class 1665Kg - 2190Kg
> And finally another EV the Ford Mustang Mach-E 1993Kg - 2218Kg
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-perception-of-Tesla-cars-b...
So there’s not much in it. EVs do tend to be 10-15% heavier for the same model in EV vs ICE but the point is brought up constantly as if they are twice as heavy, or at least significantly heavier. In reality picking a model 3 would for your next car would bring the average weight of US new cars down which I think is interesting, no?
Apart from the increased weight and torque
Yes which is due to the flexibility of EVs. The problem then is that customers are going to prefer buying vehicles with greater torque and manufacturers have little incentive to not provide EVs with high torque.
A lot of it is based on driver behaviour as it's quite feasible for ICE vehicles to be driven to burn rubber or make donuts.
The torque is real, though, but I think this is what the earlier commenter was getting at regarding bad choices made by Tesla: there is no reason "chill mode" isn't the default, which makes a Tesla drive more like an ICE vehicle. Most other EVs I've driven don't go full torque by default, so seem to have made a better choice there.
In personal experience, I went about ~45k miles on 4 new tires in my Model S before I replaced them. A bit sooner than I would have in my Prius but not much.
I also don't take off from a green light as if I were in a drag race, which probably helps.
disclaimer: I drive an electric car but would sell it in a heartbeat if I could use transit or bikes to safely and efficiently get to work, the grocery, and the doctor.
You could have software limiters, but you'd need regulatory mandates for that. Actually, I support that. 3+ ton trucks with a sub 4s 0-60 shouldn't be street legal. Or they should at least require a special license and liability insurance.
The new tyres that are coming out like Pirelli P Zero, promise a longer life span, but that remains to be seen.
For some rough numbers under normal/factory configurations to consider:
- A semi truck converts around 0.9 milliliters of tire to dust per kilometer.
- A Tesla Model Y clocks in at 0.3 ml/km
- A Honda Fit clocks in at 0.1 ml/km
Even with an overestimate of semis being responsible for 10% of total miles driven in the US, if everyone drove a Model Y then passenger cars would be responsible for 3x more tire dust than semis, and if everyone drove a Honda Fit then you'd be down to 1x.
Are there bigger concerns out there? Probably. Is the solution to bias toward ICE instead of EV? Probably not. It's not worth burying our heads in the sand when making those decisions though.
But you could just... not have such a heavy foot.
If you look at comparably sized cars the Model 3 is about the same. It's roughly the same size and weight as a BMW 3 series. And they're both around the size and weight of the average new car.
It's small electric cars that typically weigh more, because making the car smaller isn't the main way to make the battery smaller; reducing the range is. So then nobody really makes a small full electric car with a short range, because that market is served by plug-in hybrids that solve the range problem with a gas engine while still allowing you to do a few dozen miles a day as an electric car.
Maybe they all don't but some do.
Meanwhile, here in the UK, one of the more interesting alternatives - personal light EVs (ebikes/scooters) are being utterly demonized, and are never likely to be legal on the roads beyond the very limited 250W/15mph pedelec class of e-bikes. Wouldn't be surprised if even that is banned before long, too.
Now we mostly fixed it, so it's time to look at the other stuff.
Specifically: Leaded gasoline (with tetraethyllead), nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur oxides (SOx), carbon monoxide (CO), unburned hydrocarbons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_oxide , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx
Only in developed countries. The age of a typical car in my region is over 15 years. Basically, most of what you bought in 2005-2010, drove for a decade or more, and then sold for scrap eventually ends up in countries like mine. Moreover, most people take catalytic converters off their cars and sell them for $80-100 for platinum recycling.
I think most "developing" countries have the same problem. So the world at large hasn't really solved it and won't solve it any time soon.
I find it annoying that media outlets (BBC - I'm looking mainly at you!) will refer to EVs as being car-shaped and then, as you said, demonise e-bikes by lumping them in with the illegal e-motorbikes (see the recent Panorama program for a clear case of not making clear the distinction between e-motorbikes and e-bikes).
As I see it, the biggest problems with cars are their size and weight. With electric propulsion, the weight is a problem as they have to propel the vehicle and the batteries which obviously means even more weight (though they're typically only slightly more than ICE cars). This also leads to the problem of the vehicles taking longer to recharge and thus requiring upgraded infrastructure to allow people to charge them quickly.
However, if we get as many people to use e-bikes or e-scooters, then the size and weight issues pretty much disappear. It's often feasible to have removable batteries, so the vehicle can be "recharged" instantly by swapping the battery (I believe this is very popular in some countries for food delivery riders). This also means that the battery recharging can be performed using a normal power socket without requiring upgraded infrastructure although it may be wise to keep an eye on the batteries whilst charging to prevent house fires.
Incidentally, Mrs ndsipa_pomu recently bought a good quality e-bike (i.e. not one of the duck-taped conversions) and absolutely loves commuting on it as she sails past the traffic that she was previously trapped in. Though it's limited to assist only up to 15.5mph, she finds it powerful enough to cope with the hills.
The ebikes that the post refers to are a menace and should be banned. Both as a cyclist and a driver.
I've almost been plowed over by some idiot sitting on what should be a motorcycle but riding on the bike path. And I've almost had my kids run over.
Also, as a driver you just don't expect someone to be going so crazy fast in the bike lane. I've had people at insane speeds just appear from behind parked cars.
I'm all for pedal assist! But there should be strict speed limits.
I also find that people just don't take these electric motorcycles seriously. They zone out because they aren't doing anything. That's also very dangerous.
And, cars are multiple orders of magnitude more dangerous than anything on 2-wheels.
I’m sure you’re right that theres room for improvement, but instead of building infrastructure (we literally shaped cities for cars after all)- we would rather ensure that cars are incumbent forever despite the harm we see them causing.
Most fatalities of motorcycles are due to collisions with cars, not other bikes nor pedestrians.
Diligence won’t save you if a driver unexpectedly swerves into you.
Undoubtedly there are stupid people and people who are more likely to take more risks will be more likely to engage in motorcycle riding; creating an additional selection bias.
But, we’re talking about electric scooters, e-bikes and so on, the core issue remains to be that mixed use-infrastructure will have a loser. Letting cars drive on pavements isn’t permitted for the same reason e-bikes shouldn’t be in traffic (or on the pavement).
That's the point. Diligence won't save you but crumple zones might have.
It's also not obvious that most collisions being with cars isn't just because most other vehicles are cars. If two motorcycles collide with each other at high speed, the damage they do to each other isn't your problem, it's the resulting loss of control and the damage to your body when you impact the pavement.
> Letting cars drive on pavements isn’t permitted for the same reason e-bikes shouldn’t be in traffic (or on the pavement).
But then you're stuck between three bad options: You have separate roads specifically for e-bikes (implausible), you put high speed e-bikes in pedestrian zones, or you limit the top speed of e-bikes to something safe for pedestrians and then people go back to buying cars because e-bikes are too slow.
If every person was driving an articulated truck then there would be more deaths, caused not just by collisions and poor driving but by emissions too. We’d need bigger roads too- its unnecessary for everyone to do this.
To get away from this you'd have to completely redesign US cities to have people living in them instead of significant numbers commuting in from the suburbs. To begin with you'd need a massive amount of new higher density housing, the construction of which is currently inhibited by building codes where not outright prohibited by zoning. Trying to solve the rest of it before you do that is going to face massive opposition, because you'll be trying to make it harder to have a car to people who still can't realistically avoid having a car.
It is dramatically easier to screw yourself up on bicycles and motorcycles than cars. It’s frankly shocking how stupid someone can be in a modern car and survive.
It doesn’t require another car to kill someone on a motorcycle or bicycle, but the squids tend to filter themselves out pretty quickly. Many of them actively collide with cars due to their own recklessness and/or stupidity, making the statistics somewhat hard to interpret.
Was the 80 year old driving the RV ‘the cause’ of the head on collision, or the 22 year old with the 1.5l super bike illegally passing over a double yellow at 50 over the speed limit around a corner?
I can provide graphic details of who ended up winning in that situation, regardless.
If everyone had to ride instead of drive (including drunks, soccer moms, burnt out graveyard shift workers, medical workers on their second 24 hour shift, retirees, etc), you’d see a lot more dead folks overall.
Because even though cars are also more dangerous to other people, for the most part, those other people are in cars in the US, and the danger still generally cancels out.
Even head on collisions at highway speeds are more survivable than anyone should reasonably be able to expect.
Vehicle vs ped calls are still the worst though.
Protip: don’t get out of your car after an accident on the highway unless you’re really really sure you can see all other traffic. Chances are you can’t, especially at night. Especially when the drunk coming the wrong way on the highway never turned on their headlights. Wait for the firefighters to physically block the road with their rigs first. That was a gnarly call.
Population of Malmo is actually higher than Orlando, FL for example.
Yet, for Skåne (the region where Malmo is; pop: 1,421,781), 25 traffic deaths were recorded in the year 2019[0].
173 road deaths were recorded in Orange County (where Orlando is; pop: 1,429,908), during the same period.[1]
That’s a difference of 7x, and Skåne is one of the largest regions in the country, many places are car dependent - yet the major change is that urban areas are sufficiently dense so can be cycled (even during cold climates) and that there’s dedicated infrastructure for doing so, which eases the traffic burden too.
[0]: https://www.transportstyrelsen.se/globalassets/global/press/...
[1]: https://www.flhealthcharts.gov/ChartsReports/rdPage.aspx?rdR...
Seems pretty evident.
Arguably the conditions are better for personal electric vehicles and bicycles in Florida (than the comparatively frigid and rainy conditions of Sweden).
Even the topography is flat[0][1], it's literally the perfect place for cycling, but the US has chosen something else.
So, yes, if things are different they are different: comparable populations, a better climate and an equally flat topography and somehow 7x the amount of deaths; and the only difference is the approach to infrastructure by the county.
[0]: https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-c3fdcz/Orange-County/?...
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2024/02/02/discover-the...
That's rubbish as cyclists/bikers are not the cause of most collisions. Once you remove the majority of car drivers, the number of collisions will plummet along with the severity of those collisions.
(Sedentary disease such as heart disease and type II diabetes will also reduce if more people are using active travel - not so much if they're motorbiking).
My default is my manual bike.
No amount of infrastructure will make these electric motorcycles safe in bike lanes or pedestrian paths. They should be banned.
We need to find a sensible way to regulate these bikes, which may involve some sort of license, insurance, and mandatory helmets. But it needs to be less costly/more convenient than getting a petrol motorbike (or car) if we want people choosing the more eco-friendly option.
Cycling enthusiasts don't tend to consider those who are far less fit/healthy/young when they push the pure-human-powered option.
I still don't understand how they expect to solve the occupant safety issue though. Cars travel at high speeds but have crumple zones and airbags. E-bikes travel at the same speeds but if you crash, you die. And 2-wheeled vehicles are easier to crash.
The fatality rate for motorcycles is astonishingly bad and changing the propulsion type wouldn't really affect that.
There's also the possibility of creating separated infrastructure to allow the smaller/lighter vehicle riders (e.g. two/three wheelers) to not have to tangle with car and lorry drivers. However that requires political will and infrastructure investment.
Ironically, the somewhat obvious solution to this would be smaller/lighter cars (e.g. one- or two-seaters), but they can't pass the safety standards required for cars even though they would still be dramatically safer than two-wheeled vehicles.
The whole light-vehicle thing is predicated on low speeds and relatively short distances (up to about 15 miles). Most urban areas, even fairly sprawling ones, that's enough to cover a pretty substantial % of trips.
It's about using 1/10th the weight and 1/50th the power to cover a big % of the same tasks. Personally I'd say the bike/scooter/golf-buggy, and then either an owned or shared car for the last 10% of trips where you need to use the freeway is a better optimum than high-speed light vehicles, because as soon as you get to about 25-30mph you need impact protection, and the design constraints quickly escalate to "absolutely no smaller than a Fiat 500".
There's also ofc the option of mass transit for some of the longer distance stuff, at least in cities that are able to build it.
The real problem here is that as soon as you need impact protection, you get four wheels, and then it's classified as a car instead of a motorcycle and the government safety standards for cars de facto require "absolutely no smaller than a Fiat 500".
What would be interesting is to change the definition of "motorcycle" from "has fewer than 4 wheels" to "has fewer than 3 seats" and see what happens.
The problem seems to be that for most people who can legally drive a full-scale car (i.e. they're not too young or too old) getting a do-everything vehicle on finance is more attractive at that point.
They're somewhat popular with youngsters in rural areas (cheap to insure, minimum driver age is 14 I think, whereas for cars in France it's 17) and with frailer, older people who can't walk or cycle very far and don't have the stamina for longer drives, they just want an inexpensive little runabout to get to the village shops, nearby friends and appointments.
But they're expensive enough (about $10k) that you're unlikely to buy one in addition to your regular do-it-all car, where you might buy an ebike, pedal bike or motorcycle. Maybe as a second vehicle in a childless couple where one partner does almost all the driving, but unless heavier vehicles are highly taxed or restricted (city low emission & congestion zones), there's not enough advantage in one of these for mass adoption.
I've got an ebike in central london and find it quite practical on the whole. For local journeys <2miles it's faster than anything else and you can go down mostly traffic restricted roads. For intercity you can put the bike on a train. Rain is a bit of a pain.
that could be a win for the environment and I guess they replace normal vans. And I just saw a two seater ebike taxi with a roof.
What issue? I would regularly go 50km/h down hills on my road bike. That was completely my choice and if I came off I'd suffer the consequences.
The problem isn't the occupants. Nobody is forced to travel at high speeds (except on motorways). The problem is the people around and the environment. I definitely would not ever go that fast in town, even down a hill, because it's generally not safe for the people around me.
The problem with cars is the huge imbalance of power. Every car has the capability of killing or disabling you. But you can't disable them. As far as I know, carrying a portable EMP device is neither practical nor legal. Two wheeled vehicles don't exhibit this imbalance of power, not even motorbikes. I believe this is the most important reason to get rid of cars from towns.
If you're on a bike, then you should also prioritise your own safety as you're likely to come off worse even when colliding with a pedestrian.
Anecdata time: my brother (over 60 years old and a very experienced cyclist) was heading down a hill, presumably at some speed and a young boy stepped out in front of him. They collided and my brother came off and ended up with a broken collar bone, broken rib, collapsed lung and minor concussion (he's fully recovered now). The kid received no damage apart from bruising AFAIK.
Replacing cars with bikes/scooters is unrealistic and unreasonable. You're either ignoring or unaware of the actual dependence on cars that exists and that cannot be dismissed.
Secondly, ebikes are rampantly misused in pedestrian areas, often used without helmets, often upclocked, many used for delivering, or kids. And because they're not a regulated vehicle, nobody has third party insurance.
There are legal ebikes and nobody has any more of a problem with them than normal bicycles when used in the right places.
It's harm reduction - let's encourage the most irresponsible car drivers to be irresponsible e-bike (legal or not) riders and we should end up with far less congestion, pollution and collisions.
At least here in Germany, assuming it's not a tuned bike, it's covered by your regular liability insurance.
That said, I'd think we could probably do lots more to reduce the tire pollution. And, obviously, electric cars have other advantages!
Meanwhile in the Wild West (a.k.a. the United States) we have children hurling 100+ lb 750W throttle-controlled motorcycles (I'm sorry, "e-bikes") at up to 28 mph on mixed-use pedestrian trails. The best we can do is put up plastic signs on the trail begging them to slow down and be careful around other people.
Your argument is actually a strong one in favor of bicycle-favoring transportation policy: despite limited existing regulation they're still incredibly safe, and we can always tweak policy to handle the worst case exceptions as needed if they end up causing significant problems as bicycle share grows.
Yes.
> or just the 'r/fuckcars mentality'?
No.
"Recent studies have found tire particles made up 94% of microplastics in Switzerland, 61 to 79% in Sweden, 54% in China and 30% in Germany".
"If everyone just drove EVs we could merrily go on driving cars all day" is the 'r/HeadInTheSand mentality'.
Also, what you’re looking at is an overweighted responsibility on people/consumers to own the solutions to pollution. No matter what car you buy today it is emitting less pollution than ten, twenty, and especially thirty to fifty years ago. Meanwhile we still burn bunker oil (the leftovers from petroleum distillation) in shipping. It’s as if we swore off doing anything better for the planet if it inconveniences a large company.
Sure, but a single bus would emit way less than the 60-150 cars (yes, large buses here have a total capacity of about 150 people [1]) it replaces. And if you have a bikable city like about every city in the Netherlands is, there's zero emissions.
> Meanwhile we still burn bunker oil (the leftovers from petroleum distillation) in shipping. It’s as if we swore off doing anything better for the planet if it inconveniences a large company.
We do, but even there there is progress! In fact, the regulations on sulphur content going into effect showed that this actually had climate impacts on the scale of an ultra-large geoengineering project [2]. On top of that, bunker fuel is banned in many countries' 12-mile-zone or at the very least near ports, ships have to burn diesel there.
[1] https://infoportal.mobil.nrw/technik/bussemitkonventionellem...
... but not in the desired direction. Sulfur dioxide emissions from shipping appear to have actually been slowing (!!) global warming by seeding clouds which reflected sunlight.
It’s a minor issue in terms of impact. I see it over amplified because it is a tool for the anti car crowd. It’s not like we are measuring or discussing all the environmental issues from everything else people do in their lives. It’s a lopsided focus on everything related to cars, and there’s a reason why.
It seems like every month we discover some new and harmful effect, or that it was worse than initially estimated from smaller sample sizes, etc.
I don't think it's a conspiracy, just the way that discovery happens.
We also have a tendency to completely oversight the harm of new tech in comparison to older tech. People get super worked up about the supposedly super toxic lithium ion batteries, but have little concern for the far greater amount of mining necessary to build the frame of a car.
So it's good to have a baseline of the amount of harm done with current tech to compare to and center our reactions to these large population scale effects.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
[1] https://www.continental-tires.com/about/sustainability/activ...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/04/eco-friendly-tires-brid...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37727040
It really doesn’t sound all that infeasible, just would require some investment to build momentum.
The heavy metals and other particles that pollute from tires are all still there.
What we need is less toxic synthetics.
Worldwide switch-over will destroy forest ecosystems in Malaysia, Indonesia and Africa and more to replace it with Rubber tree plantations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37727040
Personally I would love to see a world of 100% transit, bicycles, walking, etc., but let’s be realistic. As long as we’ve got cars, we might as well try to do as much as we can to reduce the amount of pollution they generate.
These are two distinct issues. Tyre pollution is threatening the wastewater but at least in urban areas where the most pollution occurs thanks to stop'n'go can be counteracted by expanding water treatment (we have to do so anyway to get rid of pharmaceuticals).
Brake dust however is a massive threat for anyone living near a highly congested road.
In rural areas tire dust isn't as much of a problem because cars there keep their speed - it's acceleration and deceleration that produce tire dust.
The BMW M340i xDrive weighs about 1818 kg.
Seeing as these two cars are similar in size, capacity, and performance (0-60 mph in 4.2 s), it is nice to see that the electric option weighs about the same as an ICE car of similar specs.
edit: https://earth.org/tyre-pollution/ answers this, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
Okay so if we're veering off particulates here anyway, why ignore that electricity generation is actually a whole lot cleaner than burning contemporary fuels?
Maybe better not to rehash the obvious, I just wanted to point out that there's more to it than downsides
That seems like an overly narrow way of defining harm.
E.g. what if brake dust is bad for your lungs but your lungs can repair the damage, but diesel fumes are harmful to your brain and the damage is permanent?
I'm not saying that's the case (I have no idea), just that studying lung cells in a lab doesn't tell you anything about the full-body harmful effects.
In normal driving regenerative braking takes away most of the energy, leaving very little work for the friction brakes. Sometimes EVs even have the opposite problem — brakes rust due to very low use.
Which is to say that it may be true but it’s a symptom of improvements. Cancer rates are increasing because people are living longer and dying less of other things. Similarly, a huge amount of work has been done to reduce the harms from car exhaust, and modern vehicles burn really cleanly. It’s no surprise that other factors start to become relatively more important.
The study simply says that brake dust can cause asthma and hay fever in children. There is no comparison made to the harm from exhaust.
Exhaust is certainly more harmful than brakedust in the quantities one may encounter in the real world. Exhaust contains many chemicals that are actual poisons. Iron is not poisonous and copper can only be poisonous in large amounts. It is true that they can cause sensitivity and autoimmune diseases in the lungs especially in children, but this is much more remote harm than the actual poison in exhaust.
Nobody kills themselves by sniffing brakes but many people have done it by closing themselves in a garage with a running car engine. (They say that is harder now with catalytic converters but it still happens).
Went through a taco bell drive thru one night that had a weird tunnel portion. It was a slow line, and even sitting in that tunnel a couple minutes, my friend and I got lightheaded and a bit teary eyed. It's scary we didn't even realize it til we got through the tunnel.
That was the moment for me of realizing how awful these things are for the environment. If we have to be enclosed with our own emissions it will literally kill us, but we just blow it away in the open air as 'not my problem anymore.'
I'm glad emissions are better now, and that electric has a viable path forward. Shame we weren't at this point a few decades ago.
How about we just solve the actual problem first? The planet is burning. People used to burn coal indoors for heating, that’s way more fucking harmful than 1 micron of brake dust.
Of those emissions, the emissions from tires and brakes have the most impact.
But it is imperative that you should buy an EV and charge it with electricity from the power grid, and then take a destination trip that involves burning a giant amount of jet fuel.
There is no logic.
With AI we can use predictive acceleration to stop the car just in time.
Thank you, I'll show myself out.
Since 60 years. But they just found out today. /s
Money well spent.
Sure this limits the wear, but not the need!
Can we get rid of EGR and DPF now, and go back to diesels that worked better?
March of Dimes Syndrome here.
We're entering the end of the gasoline car era. Anti-car activists need something else in order to continue kvetching, so it's down to tire and brake dusts, battery recycling and whatnot.
When that is solved, it will be about the harms of exterior paint, and inhaling the "new car smell".
Transportation that is not powered by one's own muscles can never be virtuous.
... unless said transportation puts users in close physical proximity to strangers, some of whom are loud or dangerous. Such transportation is very virtuous: the more numerous, dangerous, or annoying the strangers, the more virtuous the transportation. This exception is not applicable to transportation that flies or floats.
This seems to be mostly a US problem, I only really see people from the US worried about this...
As someone from the UK who travels on two trains and a bus both ways (6 journeys total) most weekdays to university, I never had any problems with other passengers, I guess very occasionally there might be a loud baby or something but then you can just put headphones in, and the worst thing that ever happened to my property is my bag got accidentally handed into lost property when I wasn't paying attention because I got on really early and the staff assumed it was left there from the last trip
I've never heard of such a thing and I'd be horrified.