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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.