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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".