Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars | Hacker News Reader

Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars

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523 pointstzs764 comments

Report: https://www.eiturbanmobility.eu/knowledge-hub/mastering-mobi...

I suppose the same should apply to hybrid cars, which outnumber pure EVs significantly [1]. The effect comes from converting the kinetic energy back to the battery charge via generation instead of wasting it via friction, which is the whole point of hybrids.

[1]: https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/how-many-electric...

And manual transmission cars kinda, though the energy is still wasted of course

Depends on how you drive. I never engine braked on my manual. Brakes are easy to replace. Clutches are not.

You need not burn your clutch to engine break.

engine braking does not have any effect on the clutch, other than while downshifting, which if you're blipping/rev-matching has practically no effect

Exactly, if your clutch suffers abuse when you are shifting gears (unless you're trying to aggressively accelerate of course) you need to rethink what you're doing.

Not saying it's smart but when predictably decelerating on the highway I sometimes shift gears by rev matching and changing without even touching the clutch, for the fun of it.

Same on a motorcycle. My current bike has a quickshifter (for both up and down shifting) but even without one you can shift up and down without ever touching the clutch just by pushing on the shift pedal while blipping the throttle off-and-on (for an upshift) or on-and-off (for a downshift). That’s all the quickshifter is really doing anyway, it’s just quicker at it than you are.

I’d wager bordering on 100% of my clutch use is when coming to a complete stop.

You don't engine brake with the clutch, you engine brake by downshifting and using the higher engine RPM in lower gears to brake the car via wasted compression.

And that downshifting involves a clutch operation, moving the engine into a higher RPM. That most certainly wears down the clutch, talking as someone who's replaced quite a few of them.

Are you really shifting so much that your clutch slip in the middle of the shift effects clutch lifetime?

I've seen an interesting A-B test with this seeing the difference in clutch wear between the Ferrari F1 transmission in the 599 and 612 and the DuoSelect transmission which is essentially the same box in the Quattroporte. The shifting strategy and technique is more of a controlled variable here because the shifting is automatic though it's a somewhat traditional manual gearbox with hydraulic actuation. The QP is a bit heavier but the Ferraris make a lot more power. From what I saw the cars that fared far worse were the Quattroportes, and those that ate the most clutches by far were the ones putting around the city, especially in San Francisco, Marin, Los Altos Hills, etc. where people are slowly creeping into parking spots on hills. On the Ferraris that are weekend warriors that get driven hard the clutches could go 30k+ miles no problem, Quattroportes would come in with smoked clutches in a few thousand miles sometimes.

Sorry, ain't native: Which car use downshifting to help braking? Cannot wire in my brains whether this example is pro-downshift braking or not.

I think their point is that you eat clutch when you slip it e.g. when you’re getting in and out if parking on hills, or in city stop and go traffic. When the clutch is fully engaged there’s little wear even hard-driving, and doing a straight in-and-out does not bother clutches much.

Hence Quattroportes eating clutches like nobody’s business while the harder-ridden higher-power Ferraris don’t.

As such downshifting would not wear clutches much.

And anecdotally I’ve never suffered from or heard of engine braking causing clutch issues.

I semi-daily drive a DuoSelect Quattroporte, but usually in light traffic. The clutch-eating problem is sorta inherent to the car. First off, it uses extra clutch to smooth out shifts in non-sport mode, and you don't always want sport mode because it stiffens the suspension a lot. But even in sport, you can't always get it to behave predictably. So given an experienced driver with both cars in city traffic, the DuoSelect will eat clutch faster than a stick. Some install an aftermarket box (Formula Dynamics) to improve this, but still.

Idk how the Ferraris are different. They're lighter at least. Think they also have a different version of the "Superfast" software.

Anyway... I do engine-brake it. The real brakes appreciate not having to stop that limo by themselves.

Forgot to clarify, there is a clutch-eating problem when driving the car properly, but it's not THE clutch-eating problem people talk about where it dies in 10-15K miles from treating the car as a regular automatic.

Everything on the QPs was always breaking.

I've never driven an automatic Ferrari or paddle shifted Ferrari to compare, but the QP that I drove (Ferrari V-8, I think that it even said Ferrari on the valve covers maybe) didn't have anything outstanding about the transmission that I remember. I thought it was a regular hydraulic automatic with a torque converter, so they really did tune it nicely. The robotic Toyotas I could feel. Maybe had they not tuned it so nicely it might have lasted longer?

Only the 2004-2006 and maybe some 2007 QPs came in automated manual. Anything after was regular automatic w/ torque converter.

The clutch wear on a standard downshift must absolutely negligible when compared to accelerating from a full stop and especially when compared to slower-that-idle operation, i.e. parking.

Also, I have never ever had to replace a clutch, and I drive my cars way past 100k miles.

My 300k km Volvo S60 still runs on its original clutch, and I changed the brake pads only once. Engine braking is the way.

I didn't quite get if you think changing gears for the purpose of engine braking wears the clutch more than normal or not. Are you using the force from the clutch to force the engine to go from a low RPM to a high RPM? In cases like that where the difference in RPM is significant, I would press the clutch pedal, then speed up the engine by pressing the gas pedal, downshift, then release the clutch. Rev matching, basically. It does wear the clutch a teeny tiny bit, but not more than any other gear change.

If your comment wasn't meant to imply that engine braking wears the clutch more than normal gearing, if you just want to avoid gear changes as much as possible, disregard this comment. (Although... I'm not sure that that's a valid worry, modern clutches last a LONG time when used properly)

You might not execute the rev-match perfectly every time, esp if you're doing a heel-toe. I think it's also harder on the synchro.

Sure, and I definitely don't rev-match close to perfect every time. I'm just saying you don't have to use the clutch to accelerate your motor all the way from minimum RPM, which it sounded like my parent comment might be suggesting

I think that suggestion was that you're holding the clutch pedal in longer while you bring up the RPMs, compared to upshifting which is faster. The clutch does wear a bit even when "fully" disengaged. But I don't think it matters enough here, just don't leave it like that during a red light.

Most of clutch wear comes from making it slip, while accelerating from a standstill.

You don't make it slip when shifting gear.

Yes but actually no.

It wears the clutch but clutch wear is massively dominated by starts from a stop or other cases where you actively slip it any noteworthy amount so just rowing the gears up and down doesn't do much.

It's a negligible amount, especially if you (or your car) does rev matching. My last car (BMW 328) made it to 300k miles on the original clutch.

Clutch wear occurs when the clutch is slipping so you always want to minimize the slipping time.

Actually you'll get some engine braking by just letting off the gas and stepping on the break. Fuel will get cut off in these cases in most cars (unless you're running a very old carburetor car)

Yep, years ago I had a friend with a VW Beetle and he'd never use the brakes unless he had to. I thought it was cool and carried the story with me. One day I mentioned it to a mechanic friend and that was his exact response. I've never changed a clutch, but I've changed plenty of brakes and yeah, not hard or expensive.

You don't need to touch your clutch to do engine breaking. If you wear out your clutch by shifting gears you're doing something wrong

You engine brake every time you lift off the throttle and don't depress the clutch. I know what you mean here of course, but I suspect your driving habits are saving you less than you think.

Surprisingly you can get nearly same effect in automatics. I put around 60k miles on my first automatic (after120k+ on my first two cars, manual transmissions) and when i got my brakes checked at 63k they noted my brakes were still "brand new". I do gamify reading traffic to try and brake as little as possible (to help pass time etc), but was still surprised how far this takes you given i do plenty of stop and go traffic driving. This was a v6 sedan so lighter than an suv / truck. I expected it to not work in automatics but it does to at least some extent. I swapped for an EV before taking it the usual distance and curious if anyones pushed further and how far.

It's not "nearly". It's exactly the same effect. Compression braking. Even if you're not on the throttle the engine is still rotating as it's connected to the wheels. If the engine is rotating it is compressing air. If it's compressing air but not igniting fuel (throttle closed) then it will suck energy out of the wheels to compress the air.

You can do it in an automatic, you just have to force it to select a lower gear using the gear number options (1, 2, 3, 4) or using the tiptronic mode. The lower gear means the engine will displace more air in the same amount of time, increasing the rate it pulls energy from the wheels.

People think you can't do it in automatics because they try very hard to keep engine RPM low where the effect is diminished.

If it takes energy to compress the air in the cylinder - doesn't it also release most of that energy when that compressed air is expanded on the subsequent stroke?

If you release the compressed air without pushing the cylinder down you would lose that energy, but you would need a extra device to do so (by lifting a valve at the right time). This option does exist for large vehicles like trucks as a compression release engine brake [0], but this isn't something you'd have on a family car.

In a petrol engine you always want the same ratio of petrol to air in the mix that is taken into a cylinder. As you want to vary the amount of fuel, and therefore power developed, you have to be able to therefore limit the amount of air that is sucked in. Otherwise the engine would always run at full power.

There is a mechanical restrictor called a throttle plate that lives inside the throttle body that restricts how much air the cylinder can pull in (and therefore how much fuel is injected to get the same fuel/air mix). This is controlled by the throttle. When you are coasting, this plate is in its most closed position. This creates significant resistance on the intake stroke, and is where the majority of energy is lost during engine braking. This is also known as a pumping loss.

Diesels always intake the same amount of air, so they can compress it enough to autoignite the fuel. They vary the amount of fuel injected to the same volume of air. This means no throttle body or plate, so unless an extra exhaust restrictor has been added there is minimal engine braking on a diesel engine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_release_engine_bra...

You're right. Petrol engines are air pumps so I should've realised the explanation wasn't correct.

Though the ECU would be doing the AFR management on modern EFI engines as the injectors aren't vacuum operated like Carburetors were. You should be able to cut fuel injection when coasting in a modern engine, can't run lean if there's no fuel at all. Not sure if carbs could do the same.

On all the fuel injected engines I have owned there is a physical cable that controls the position of the throttle plate. There is an airflow mass sensor the other side of the plate to measure the amount of air and therefore how much fuel needs to be injected. So interestingly in these sort of engines you're really just controlling airflow to the engine rather than fuel/air mix like on one with a carburettor.

More modern engines have electronically controlled throttle plates, and this is definitely somewhere you could do something clever like you suggest - cutting fuel flow but also maximising airflow when there is zero throttle input.

I assume engine braking is generally considered a beneficial thing by manufacturers, but it could be fun to be able to customise the amount. Or do something like have the braking come on gently at first then harder. Maybe even try and have a linear or flat response curve vs. engine rpm.

> Or do something like have the braking come on gently at first then harder.

You can do this by letting go of gas pedal slowly. I have "current amount of fuel used" info in my car (liters/100km), it shows pretty clearly, that when going fast and slowly letting go of gas, amount of fuels slowly goes to 0. If I let go of gas fast, the engine is intelligent enough to not close throttle as fast as possible, still probably takes 1 second.

> More modern engines have electronically controlled throttle plates, and this is definitely somewhere you could do something clever like you suggest - cutting fuel flow but also maximising airflow when there is zero throttle input.

They cut fuel flow and close throttle plate almost completely but still allow some small amount of air, in order to actually do engine braking. If you need to coast, you can apply clutch in manual. Don't know that much about automatic, but from what I've driven, they use "lift gas" as a "engine braking" signal, so probably they can't really coast that good.

I've got both at the moment on my two Hondas. Both manual, one with a throttle cable and one with throttle-by-wire. There's quite a bit of difference in how they handle off throttle. The cable will just slam the throttle shut if you just jump off the pedal (obviously) and it jerks pretty hard. The throttle-by-wire car hangs the throttle a little when letting off and doesn't just immediately start decelerating. Then it's much smoother once it does start slowing down. The ECU definitely doing something to smooth it out.

Funny because the cars build dates are only 2 years apart, 2005 and 2007, and they're both K20 engines but the engines handle so different.

The ECU is doing that because rapid changes in state are bad for emissions. Letting you just slam the throttle closed could result in a tiny, but measurable at OEM scale, amount of extra fuel going half burnt out the tailpipe. Slamming it open can cause too lean combustion and oxide byproducts which.

The OEMs try real hard to prevent this because the amounts of emissions byproducts that aren't water or C02 they're allowed to produce are on the order of single digit grams per multiple miles (you can mentally file it as "about the baseline air quality in urban areas" though the rules are hugely more complex than that) so these edge cases matter.

An idling I4 has about 10 injection cycles per second. And the ECU clocks injection time corrections at least at that rate, more likely at double that rate or more. So I think that the smoothing is mostly there for the owner's wellbeing, not emissions.

> it could be fun to be able to customise the amount

Some recentish motorbikes have an option to customise the amount of engine brake, I suppose cars could have something similar, too.

> cutting fuel flow but also maximising airflow when there is zero throttle input

You don't want to do this. Much of the engine braking effect is from pulling the intake air charge past the mostly closed throttle plate. On a car with a wide open throttle plate [even with no fuel], the engine is acting more like a spring than a damper. On the intake stroke, it will pull an intake air charge past the small restriction of the open intake valve(s), then compress it on the compression stroke, then release that compressed energy on the "power" stroke, then exhaust it past the small restriction of the open exhaust valves. Pushing air past the valves will cost energy, but it's not much.

This is why diesel trucks' engine braking works differently. (Diesels don't have a throttle plate.) They can open the exhaust valves to prevent the energy recovery in the "power" stroke to create a higher net braking force. Jake Brake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_release_engine_bra...

What everyone is missing is that a petrol engine is sucking against a vacuum behind the throttle blade.

It's basically like an air compressor that just keeps running despite hitting max pressure and every pump just goes out the blow off valve.

I'v bee downshifting manually with automatic especially when riding downhill. The effect with Chrysler T&C 2009 was very noticable and effective.

Toyota Sienna 2015 - the braking effect is unfortunately minor.

Many modern automatics are smart enough to do this for you if you tap the brakes while rolling downhill.

An aside on your last point: In the D gear, a lot of auto transmissions will be set up to allow for the wheels to spin somewhat independently of the engine (in any gear) when you aren't accelerating, which accounts a lot for how well an automatic will coast when you release the throttle, even if you're not going fast enough for top gear (especially apparent with older four speed boxes).

Using the numbered gear options will enable clutches/bands that provide more engine braking.

Huh, interesting. I had thought it was just from the higher gears being used. Vast majority of my driving is with manual, I've only really driven modern autos with 5+ gears (and a Toyota hybrid, which don't really have gears at all).

It depends on the implementation. I ride an automatic motorbike which will downshift if I grab the brakes a bit harder, even if I'm only slowing to a speed to which it wouldn't otherwise shift.

For example, if I brake somewhat hard from 130 km/h to 90, it will downshift from 6th to 5th. When riding normally, it would stay in 6th down to around 50.

Auto trans downshift is designed for long hills, not downshifting frequently to stop signs etc like you'd do with a stick.

Even with paddles, there's a delay, or it briefly goes neutral, or it doesn't rev-match well. Or you can't double/triple-downshift, which is worse when you have 8-12 gears. Allegedly wears them down faster too, which idk but would not be surprised if it were true given how unhappy it feels.

No reason for it not to work, even more so if you think to downshift. It’s more common with manual as downshifting is a lot more natural but not fundamentally different.

It’s just trivially easy with electric thanks to regen braking.

Though with modern cars getting heavier if you have a small ICE these days you have almost no engine brake which makes some cases more difficult (unless it’s a mild hybrid with an electric kers like some of the small engined fords). SUVs tend to have giant engines and pretty high rolling resistance, which I’d think would somewhat compensated for their higher inertia.

It’s all about learning your car’s behaviour and planning for it.

I don't know about today's engines, but some early fuel injected engines would actually use more fuel when engine braking. In those early designs spark could not be cut off, so if this extra fuel were not added then the mixture would run very hot and risk pre-ignition and damage. I don't know about carbureted vehicles.

It only applies to mechanical injection and carburettor engines. With electronic injection, which is the norm since the 80s, this is not a problem.

To some extent, but not really. Effectiveness of regenerative braking depends on having an extremely large battery that can sink enough current to stop the car. An EV can do that, hybrids at best help the brakes out some. You just can't charge the battery fast enough doing anything but a very slow rolling stop. My model Y can effect a very reasonable stop in traffic without touching the brake pedal except to hold the car at the end.

In normal driving hybrid regen is more than enough to do the job. Just look at the front wheels of any Prius. There are reasons all the Uber drivers choose the Prius.

We finally gave up our Prius after 12 years, and we never changed the brakes once. The brakes were just peeking into the yellow on its last service upgrade. I was really impressed with how well the "normal" hybrid could take advantage of regenerative breaking, honestly.

I first changed the brakes on my Mitsubishi Space Star (combustion) after 13 years. It is a small car, less than 1000kg, so there is little for the brakes to do. If we produced more percentage of small cars, many environmental risks would be reduced. And btw.: The tires are now 19 years old and still good (less weight, less abrasion!).

Rubber degrades with UV exposure, even if the tread depth is ok. Be careful, esp at higher speeds.

Beware of dry rot. Rubber that old is likely not in as good shape as it might appear, and could fail catastrophically in the right conditions.

That's not OK by any means, you don't have mandatory periodical technical inspections? This would fail immediately in any half-decent country. An example - wife's older Seat has 6 years old winter tires which were given for free when buying it second hand a year ago. Technician just told us even those are beyond acceptable here in Switzerland and we need to change them before next inspection.

Your very old tires makes you a serious threat on the road while completely oblivious about this fact... not cool, please change them if you drive on public roads, if not for you just for the sake of others.

We are in Germany, which has the highest inspection standards. The tires have passed every inspection. They look like new, but I will still replace them soon, just in case. I am writing this because most people cannot imagine that a 900 kg car puts very little pressure on tires, so they are hardly used.

Seriously, you should not use tires older than 10 years. They degrade over time.

Time based degradation is mostly a factor of exposure to the sun and the weather.

I just trashed some 15yo Firestones last month, after wearing them completely bald of course.

> My model Y can effect a very reasonable stop in traffic without touching the brake pedal except to hold the car at the end.

My manual car could do this 20 years ago. My fully ICE motorcycle can do it today.

I know engine braking is cool but it’s not some amazing new thing only EVs can do. Altho granted it only produces heat and noise in petrol vehicles. But it also makes your heart sing so that’s nice

The difference is neither of those generates gasoline on an ICE vehicle.

Yup. For example on a round trip today in me EV (2025 Hyundai Kona) on the out here are the stats:

     2 kWh for the drivetrain
   809  Wh regenerated

On the way home:

     2 kWh for the drivetrain
   547  Wh regenerated

For the round trip that's 33% less energy use than if the car did not have regenerative braking.

I'm mostly happy about that but there is one thing that annoys me. 33% is close to how much a kilometer is shorter than a mile (38%).

Why the fuck would I care that these two numbers are that close? It is because of a mystery in the Hyundai app. When you look up the trip details for an EV trip it gives you mileage, duration, and energy use (drivetrain, climate, accessories) and regeneration.

The mileage is substantially less than what the car shows. For example for the aforementioned trip home that trip odometer shows 8.0 miles but the Hyundai app shows 5 miles. The car odometer has the correct distance.

There are two theories to explain this.

1. The app is showing how many miles worth of energy you used rather than your actual trip mileage. All the other data it shows (except for the duration) is energy related. For my 8.0 mile trip I got 3 miles worth of the energy the drivetrain used back via regeneration, so I only actually paid for 5 miles worth of electricity.

Based on the Wh given it should actually be 5.4 miles, but the app only displays integer mileage so 5 it is.

2. It's a botched unit conversion. E.g., the car uploads the data in miles but the expects the data to be in km, so it is doing a conversion. That would turn the 8.0 into 5.0, which would be 5 in the app and so matches what theory #1 predicts.

I've checked several of my trips and they have always happened to have the right amount of regeneration so that the two theories match due to the app only showing an integer mileage.

I did a test today to try to tell them apart. I changed the car's settings to km and took a trip. The idea was if the car had been uploading in miles that would hopefully change it to upload in km, matching the app's expectation, and so the miles shown in the app would match the actual miles of the trip if theory #2 was correct, and show the regeneration corrected miles if theory #1 was correct.

The result was that the app still showed miles consistent with theory #1. So mystery solved, right?

Maybe not. When the car was set to miles everything showed in miles. Speedometer, odometers, efficiency (mi/kWh), speed limits it read from traffic signs, and speed limits it gets from the map data when using navigation on highways.

I expected than when I switched it to km all of those would be in km, and I would not see miles anywhere. Also, I expected that when it saw a speed limit sign that said say 60 it would interpret that as 60 km/hr.

What actually happened is that miles mostly did go away, except on the speedometer it added a smaller mi/hr display under the km/hr display. For the traffic signs it still knew they were in mi/hr and it converted them, so when I got on the freeway as soon as I passed the sign that said 60 the speed limit sign shown on the instrument cluster said 97, and the red dot on the speedometer showing the current limit was placed in the right place.

That suggests that the car knows it is in a country that uses miles, and doesn't just go by whatever the units setting in the setup screen is set to. It could be that in miles countries the car also uploads in miles all the time, and so switching the units setting to km would not change the results if theory #2 was true.

Now my plan is to find a big parking lot that is mostly empty overnight, such at a Walmart or Home Depot or a mall, go there and turn the car off and then back on which starts a new trip, set regeneration to 0 which turns off automatic regeneration on the accelerator so the car only regenerates when you use the brake pedal, and then drive around the parking lot for about 10 miles without using the brakes, then coast to a stop and turn the car off the end the trip.

Then I'll turn it back on, drive home, and check the trip details in the app. If theory #1 is right then the miles in the app should match the odometer miles. If theory #2 is correct the app miles should still be 38% shorter than the odometer miles.

And how often did you engine break with that ICE car when driving around the city? Because I did it only when driving down extreme slopes. It also cannot do a full stop.

With an EV I don't touch breaks unless in situations I fail to/couldn't predict (maybe up to 10% of all speed reductions and even less stops).

> And how often did you engine break with that ICE car when driving around the city?

Oh all the time. I used to drive like a typical youth. I've been in USA for 10 years now and still hate driving automatics because they shift into too high a gear and then you have to constantly use the brakes. It's annoying.

Most autos have an override to shift manually and engine brake more, hardly ever see people use them except if they tow frequently though.

A lot of CVTs have virtual gears for that even, although others like the prius only have B mode.

I have an ICE car and motorcycle, and an EV. The EV slows down much more quickly when slowing down, to the point where it's a good replacement for the brake, as opposed to the ICE vehicles, where you need to use the brake a lot more. It's not comparable.

> The EV slows down much more quickly when slowing down, to the point where it's a good replacement for the brake

Are you comparing to an automatic ICE or a manual?

In my experience of driving EVs their engine braking is sub-par to what I'm used to at least from my motorcycle. Bikes have silly high compression compared to their weight. You def have to be careful about chopping the throttle.

An automatic, with a manual you can shift down to whatever you want, so there's no standard there, really.

Agree the engine braking on automatics sucks. If you re-read my original post, it specifically talked about manuals :)

And I mean if drifters can use shift lock to literally skid their wheels, then clearly engine braking is effective.

With manuals I don't tend to downshift to brake. I certainly could, but it's so jarring (mostly the sudden rev) that I tend to just use the brakes, and what matters is what people do, not what they could do.

I am talking about what I do do :)

Also I learned in driving school in Europe (and during the motorcycle course in USA) to downshift while braking so your engine helps the brakes and you’re always in the right gear. There shouldn’t be any sudden revs if you’re gentle with the clutch.

Then again as a young idiot I also learned how to heel-and-toe on public roads so I could rev match more effectively while braking into corners. Maybe I’m just a weird driver with unusual habits. It’s ok.

Can’t really compare the engine braking of a Model Y and a ICE vehicle to be honest.

I also like the noise, but it is noise pollution that is very annoying to everyone else.

I test drove an EV and the regenerative braking was difficult to get used to. You have to constantly ride the gas pedal. I would buy an EV if it weren't for this feature.

You can toggle off regen braking on most EVs

Some EVs allow different levels of regenerative braking to be selected. The Hyundai/Kia E-GMP-based cars have level 0-3 plus a 1-pedal mode, and also an "auto" mode that slows down more based on radar proximity to the car ahead.

We have owned 4 EVs and each allow you to configure the regen braking strength. You'll need another reason to not buy one.

Tesla is a quite common EV brand. They do not allow configuring regen braking, except for the behaviour at stand-still.

(They also don't do blending between friction brakes and regen, so the cars behaviour when letting of the accelerator is highly inconsistent depending on temperature and charge level).

One of the reasons I long for the lease on my Model Y to end so I can replace it with a less stupid vehicle.

I agree with the general sentiment, but this isn't relevant in the context of making a purchasing decision. Simply buy another brand.

I have learned my lesson on regen. Lots of people online (and offline, for that matter) told me that you'll get used to the Tesla behaviour in no time and not to worry about it feeling weird during the test drive.

Many thousands kilometers later I hate it almost as much as at the start, so lack of regen configuration will be a dealbreaker next time I pick a new car.

Hmm, what do you hate about it? I have a BYD and I always leave it at "strong", as otherwise it's too little braking (same as an ICE).

There are two aspect I don't like:

1. It is inconsistent, especially during winter and when fully charged.

2. Crossings with shrubbery/objects that hides approaching pedestrians/cars/bikes and it is rare that there is anyone actually crossing. I encounter these several times per day.

My preferred way of approaching #2 is to reduce speed well ahead, start gliding and put my foot on the break pedal to be ready for a complete halt in the rare case (once in a 500 maybe) that I need to give way to someone. In the Tesla I must reduce speed to almost standstill and creep slooooowly, since it would take half a second to move the right foot to the break.

I understand it sounds like an extreme corner case, but for me it is all the time every day. Central Scandinavia.

Hmm, I don't really understand what you mean. If I want to reduce speed far ahead, I just ease up on the throttle pedal a little, and the car slows down a little. If I ease up a lot, it slows down a lot. I'm not sure what you mean...

I want to glide at roughly constant speed for some distance. Some mild breaking is fine. I cant glide if I let off the accelerator, then I come to a fairly firm stop.

I want my right foot on the break pedal, ready to brake hard and fast in the rare case that something comes across the road.

I don't want to reduce speed any further than is necessary to have a safe breaking distance at fully ready state.

With any other car (that I have driven) than the Tesla, I can approach a situation like this at between 20kmh and 40kmh, depending on the specifics. In the Tesla I need to go at between 5 and 10kmh.

Ah OK, I see what you mean. Yeah, on my car, that's a setting I can toggle.

regenerative braking can be uncomfortable for passengers as the car is constantly alternating between accelerating (or constant speed) and braking. It isn't even light braking, it is significant braking.

I generally turn off the auto regen braking because i find it uncomfortable.

Importantly, regenerative braking is a danger on icy roads. I disable it entirely in the winter in eastern Canada because it often causes the tires to lose grip.

There must be some connection between traction control and regen braking in newer Teslas, because I didn't really have any problems with it during the past winter. A friend working in auto industry was involved with doing competitor analysis and was shocked back in 2014 or something like that, the Teslas they tested simply spun out of control when letting go of the accelerator in slippery conditions.

They didn't care much for convential wisdom and car building competence in the early days of Tesla.

I agree about the icy roads, but for the braking, that's easily remedied by just not completely releasing the accelerator. I just modulate how much I want to brake with the accelerator pedal.

Is that not what "Chill Mode" is? I've activated that on my car to relieve some of the jerkiness and it seems to have worked well

> test drove

> was difficult to get used to

To ask the obvious, how used to something are you going to get on a test drive? It takes time.

I don't think this comment should be down-voted since it is indeed a real point of difference and it is worth discussing.

The key takeaway is that there are differences to driving an EV to driving an ICE vehicle. Equally those differences are in fact easy to adjust to given a bit of practice.

Of course cars have always had different control options. Automatic and Manual gearboxes spring to mind. When I first learned some cars had a gear selector as an arm on the steering column, and so on.

EVs like a somewhat gentler foot, because the torque is instant, so a heavy foot is likely to be a more uncomfortable ride.

So yes, different cars, different styles. But of course we adjust very quickly, and its not really difficult to drive anything- it just takes a bit of practice.

Many electric cars are also overpowered. For those with a more reasonable ~100kw, gentleness hardly matters.

Except it's not a real point of difference. Just because some cars are programmed to act that way doesn't mean we should treat it like a universal constant of EVs. EVs can be programmed to only engage regenerative braking when the brake pedal is pressed, no riding the gas pedal needed.

To be constructive, took me a little over a week to get used to. Also i test drove four, and absolutely hated 2 of them. One felt very similar to my ICE car (VW ID4). Eventually settled on ioniq and after a week, it quickly became my favorite driving car ever (which coming from sporty manual transmissions, is not at all what i expected or why i bought it).

All to say, check out a few to be sure, im still shocked how much i love driving this thing (and how criminally fast it is, totally absurd).

Firstly, most EVs that have strong regenerative braking ("one-pedal") setups allow you to adjust the strength or turn it off. Tesla, as usual, is the outlier in this respect.

Secondly, I rented an EV for a week and by the end of it actually preferred the strong regen setting. It was convenient in stop-start traffic, and on a twisty road, you could use it to tighten the nose as you entered the corner.

As another data point, I've owned PHEVs and EVs for gosh 6 years now and I still prefer the "weak" regen with the Chevy paddle brake to modulate. Sometimes when I have a clear path, e.g. a down hill on a highway, I just throw it in neutral for a pure coast and shift back into drive when I need to.

> you have to constantly ride the gas pedal.

Are you not? Do you drive by blipping the gas every few seconds?

I've had Uber drivers do this and it is annoying bordering on nauseating as a passenger. It is probably pretty bad for mileage and transmission wear as well (constantly taking up and releasing the backlash in the gears).

I’ve got regenerative breaking on my EV without one pedal driving, it acts just like my other car does.

Take a look at more EVs. There are many that aren't as opinionated about how you should drive as the one you drove (a Tesla, by any chance?).

For example here is how it works in Hyundai EVs (and I'd guess Kia too). It is easy to set them so that they drive very similar to an ICE. I believe several others also work similarly. There are only a few that try to really push you to one pedal driving.

1. When use explicitly use the brake pedal that car uses regenerative braking unless you are trying to stop faster than regeneration can handle in which case it will also use the friction brakes.

There may be a setting somewhere in the settings menus where you can adjust how strong the braking is, but I don't remember because the way the car comes from the factory the brake peddle feels a lot like an ICE car's brake peddle.

2. There is a regeneration level setting that controls what happens when you ease up on the accelerator or remove your foot from it. This setting has 6 possible settings: Level 0, 1, 2, 3, i-Pedal, and Auto.

There are two paddles on the steering wheel that let you move through these settings quickly and easily, and you can do this while driving so you are free to pick whatever setting fits the conditions and your mood the best. Here's what they do.

• In level 0 there is no braking associated with the accelerator. Take your foot off and the car coasts is if it was in neutral.

• Level 1 provides a small amount of automatic braking when you let up on the accelerator. In ICE terms it is similar to the engine braking you would get on level ground going fast enough to be in 3rd gear in a 3 speed automatic. You slow down faster than coasting, but not so fast that if you were on the freeway and your felt the need to shake your right leg around a little it would slow enough to be a problem.

• Levels 2 and 3 step up the amount of automatic braking. 3 is enough that in city driving most of the time you can be quite leisurely when it comes to moving your foot from the accelerator to the brake at most stop signs, but it will not bring your car to a complete stop. It will get quite slow and then creep at that speed.

• i-Pedal is one pedal driving mode and corresponds to what that EV you test drove was doing. In this the braking is similar to level 3 as far as aggressiveness goes, but it will take you all the way to a stop most of the time. Once you get used to it you should be able to do most city driving and most highway driving without touching the brake pedal. About the only times you would need the brake pedal (outside of emergencies) is if a light changes on you when you are too close to the intersection.

• Auto mode automatically switches between 0, 1, 2, and 3 based on the distance to the vehicle in front (using the same system that adaptive cruise control uses) and the slope of the road. If you are on the freeway for example with a good distance between cars it will be in 0 or 1. In the city where you are close to the next car it might be in 2 or 3.

• If you press and hold the "increase regen level" paddle for at least 0.5 seconds it will switch from whatever your current setting is to i-Pedal and stay in i-Pedal as long as you continue to hold the paddle. Release the paddle and it switches back to whatever your previous setting was.

This system gives you plenty of flexibility and you should be able to easily find a setting you like. Some people really like one pedal driving and so they can just put it in i-Pedal and leave it there (with a slight annoyance...when you turn the car off in i-Pedal it comes back on in level 3, so you will have to hit the regen up paddle once).

Some people set it to one of the numbered levels and leave it there (again with slight annoyance at startup where it comes on at 1 so they need a paddle flick or two).

Some people use the paddles instead of the brake pedal, mixing levels to get the kind of deceleration curve they want.

I normally drive in level 0, with an occasional day or two in i-Pedal just for a change of pace, but if I'm coming up on a series of roundabouts I might switch it to i-Pedal. That's great for say a 35 mph road with 10-15 mph roundabouts every couple of blocks. (If it is just one roundabout I'd probably use the "hold regen up paddle for 0.5 seconds" option to just turn on i-Pedal for that intersection.

> Effectiveness of regenerative braking depends on having an extremely large battery that can sink enough current to stop the car. An EV can do that, hybrids at best help the brakes out some. You just can't charge the battery fast enough doing anything but a very slow rolling stop.

This seems a bit exaggerated. Staying regenerative-only does require sticking to about half or so of how fast I could stop, but so far that seems to work fine unless a light turns right in front of me or traffic acts up. Usually it says it gets high 90's or 100%, and it didn't go below 50% even when a stoplight did turn at exactly the wrong time. (2022 Ford Escape non-plug-in hybrid, recently bought used.)

100% of possible system capacity to accept regenerative charge on a smaller battery system will be a smaller absolute number than 100% of possible on a larger battery. If you assume everything else is constant, motor, inverter, battery C-rating etc.

The manual says it's energy recovered (ie, not something relative to system capacity), and this seems consistent with the other indicator that shows instantaneous braking power with a distinction between what the regenerative system is doing vs what (if anything) the traditional brakes are doing.

which car? i think the number you're referring to is relative to electrical system capacity.

It's NOT relevant to overall (tyre, brake system & engine braking & regen braking) braking system performance since that's a dynamic value variable over many factors constantly.

I'm not sure what you're arguing here.

Bigger battery is more capacity sure. But their point was that even without a big battery they have enough capacity to get close to maximum effectiveness, contrary to ajross saying that a hybrid's capacity is "not really" effective and "at best" helps "some".

just mistaken about maximum effectiveness

braking system = circa 1G of deceleration possible (depending on tyres, coeff of friction, temperature, ... etc etc)

So max effectiveness is unreachable for any regen system on a consumer car hybrid or ev, by a factor of around 6x i believe?

With recognition of the mistaken framing (near max effectiveness) we're back to the larger ev pack has a greater ability to sink current, a larger ability to slow the vehicle than does a smaller battery (obvious considerations about inverter capability, wire gauge etc etc aside)

I think you might be using a very different definition of "effectiveness" than they are.

Their definition of effectiveness is the percentage of braking force that turns back into electricity and goes into the battery. If your regen system can only do .15G, but 90% of your braking is under .15G, then you'll have about 94% effectiveness by that definition. 94% is not max but it's near max.

It's not about what happens during peak braking, it's about what happens over entire drives.

And when they say "half or so of how fast I could stop" they're underestimating, that's a comparison to a normal but aggressive stop, not pushing the pedal into the ground.

And when regenerative breaking is not enough, a series hybrid can still apply compression breaking, before resorting to brakes.

It's just that Tesla didn't spend skill points on brake blending tech unlockable. Some people confuse it as being a piece of technology of its own.

Every other EVs and HVs assign first half of brake pedal for regen and bottom half for mechanical brakes. Tesla uses bottom half of gas pedal for the same, which eliminates the need to accurately determine the appropriate pedal force that corresponds to intended braking force to be added up with regen to match intended deceleration. Mapping regen to gas is `set_motor_torque(1.25 * gas_pedal - 25);` and that's much simpler.

They didn't spend skill points because back when they did it they wanted to lean hard into the "oooh, fancy futuristic EV, look at this cool new driving experience" brand image. Same reason performance cars get loud exhausts even thought they could have quit ones with no decrease in performance.

This is something that's always baffled me about Teslas. I have a Prius, and regenerative breaking being tied to the break pedal is easy and intuitive. It also means I can easily lift my foot of the gas pedal to coast. IDK it just seems like a much better design to have one "stop" pedal and one "go" pedal, vs one "stop" pedal and one "go/stop" pedal.

Counterargument is that it's even easier to have only one pedal you use to accelerate and decelerate. Having owned a Prius and a Y, the Tesla is actually smoother to control, by a very significant margin. It's actually a superior way to drive, though it is surprising the first time you see it.

I won't speak to your '22 Escape, but I've driven countless hybrids going back to a '04 Prius and none of them were brake-free in general use. EVs really are.

That's because the regenerative braking is applied on the brake pedal, not by lifting up the accelerator. My '14 Prius has a dashboard option to show how much of the regenerative breaking capacity is being used, and it's very easy to stay well below that limit by just gradually slowing down. The friction brakes are only really used when you suddenly stop, which is something you want to avoid anyway.

You can just waste energy on eddy currents, and then use the car's cooling system to conduct away the heat. After all, dynamic brakes on locomotives just dissipate the generated electricity using resistors.

Hybrid makers just don't really care about that.

If your Model Y is like my Model 3, then it seamlessly switches to friction breaking below 20 kph. That said, I'm at 110,000 km and the brakes look like new.

> You just can't charge the battery fast enough doing anything but a very slow rolling stop.

And it's not a problem when you get used to regenerative-only braking distances, which are surprisingly long at highway speeds.

It only becomes a problem when idiots thinking "the shorter the distance between first and last car, the smaller the traffic" start cutting you off when you leave enough distance for regenerative braking.

which is the whole point of hybrids

Part of the point, not the whole point. Regenerative breaking is absolutely a win; but there can also be a significant benefit from allowing the ICE to remain in the RPM "sweet spot" rather than moving around a larger range.

This is how diesel-electric locomotives work too.

They also use the electric motor(s) for braking, but instead of going into a battery it goes into a bank of resistors.

I think you meant capacitors. Resistors would just dissipate the energy as heat.

edit: Thanks for the correction. They do indeed use resistors and just dump the energy as heat. Unfortunate.

Hopefully this will change as supercaps continue to improve. Maxwell tech's modules are already used in light rail, and looks like some work towards smaller locomotives in Switzerland here:

https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/20823697

Nope, resistors. The energy is dumped as heat.

Dynamic brake

Capacitors have pitiful energy storage capacity. Resistors is correct, unfortunately.

To add to the other comments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_braking

I heard about that long ago but couldn't find more, so IIUC chemically it's easier and more efficient to have a "one mode" combustion engine and let the electric engine deal with the variations, to the point that the reaction produces near no toxic byproducts, is that right ? I was wondering if there was research to keep improving that part. Even though it would help sustain the fossil fuel industry..

Nissan hat the e-POWER system where a petrol engine is just used to recharge the battery of your electric car and nothing else. In theory they could run that petrol engine at the sweet spot where it produces the least amount of carbon emissions.

i believe there is also a chinese company which is making such a car, their cars have nearly 1000 miles range.

Diesel-electric engines in trains and tanks worked like that during WW2.

AFAIK this is about engine efficiency. ICEs have highest momentum and efficiency sweet spot somewhere in the middle of available revs, which depends on the engine construction and was being altered by different mechanisms (like turbocharging and variable valve timing) but since the electric engine (I'm speaking of Toyota solution) is able to keep the ICE in the sweet spot with its eCVT, the engine can be simplified and even work on different combustion cycle (Atkinson's cycle)

> ICEs have highest momentum and efficiency sweet spot somewhere in the middle of available revs

Close: they have the highest efficiency at about 90% of maximum torque for most of the RPM range. So if you want double the power, you want to be able to double the RPM; and if you want half the power, you want to be able to drop the RPMs in half. To pull this off, you either need a very quick shifting gearbox or some sort of CVT.

This is also why automatic transmissions, despite being ~80% efficient versus ~95% manual transmissions, are not much worse on mileage. Because they can quickly switch between low RPM and higher RPM (first by torque converter lockup, second by switching gears).

Afaik that’s pure series hybrid and that’s almost non-existent in cars (outside of range extenders, not that there are that many of those).

There are a handful but most hybrids are either parallel or series-parallel. I assume because the power range is so low that the conversion losses are way too noticeable compared to a mechanical drivetrain.

That's something I wish there had been more focus on, instead of focusing on massive heavy batteries, develop the hybrids further.

Not sure about the US, but the Japanese didn't stop focusing on hybrid development. More than half of all sales in Japan are hybrids, whereas electric is only a few percent [1].

Honda even recently announced that they're scaling back on electric to focus on hybrids:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/japans...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-19/hybrid-ca...

Yes but Honda seems to be doing this because they can’t make batteries. BYD can, ever cheaper, and they’re expanding their plug-in offerings much faster than Honda is scaling them back. I’m worried for Japanese car makers.

Yep. Hybrids are a dead end, they’ll be obsolete in a few short years

But series-parallel has the very same advantage - can keep the RPM in sweet spot.

No, the entire point of a series-parallel hybrid is that it can offer the advantage of a series hybrid.

The Toyota Prius powerchain has two motor generators, and can take part of the ICE power from one and transfer it electrically to the other, remapping the engine RPM into more efficient power bands at the same time. It has a mode that can do this even when no power is being used from the battery.

It’s kind of a best of both worlds. They can avoid the extra weight of a full series hybrid, because they don’t need a motor generator pair that handles the full engine power.

Actually, power bands remapping is essential for the Prius to operate.

There is no clutch, there is no neutral gear, there is no torque converter. The ICE is always connected directly to the wheels with a fixed gear ratio on a planetary gear set. (Which improves transmission efficiency over a automatic/CVT gearbox, and actually reduces maintenance costs)

One of the motor-generators is on the 3rd input of the planetary gear. For the ICE to idle (during warm up, or when you have the heater on), the motor-generator much be spinning backwards at the exact same speed so that the wheels stay stationary.

Power band remapping can also be used for reversing when the battery is empty.

Current Honda hybrids are like that. The only time the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) is directly connected to the drive train is when the speed gets to above around 60MPH. The rest of the time the ICE is used to power a generator which then sends power to the electric motor and/or the battery pack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLUIExAnNcE has more info.

Another part of the point is that you can pack a much smaller and more efficient ICE and then substitute the missing power and torque from electric motors when needed. Most cars are not used at max power all the time. You need max power only at short times when accelerating. With pure ICE there is the tradeoff - a bigger engine will get you more max power / max torque but is going to be less fuel efficient because of internal friction.

And, you can make much lighter and lower range electric cars without all those heavy batteries, and boost the range with diesel when needed. Very attractive in principle. Most cars are not using their full range all the time, for a lot of people a 50 mile range car would be more than enough 98% of the time, but that remaining 2% means that people end up buying 200 mile range cars instead.

But then, do you end up removing enough battery weight to offset the weight of a whole ICE?

Smaller cars have always been available, but people have shown a preference for bigger cars where they can sit higher up, even though it costs them more.

I'm not talking about size, I'm talking about range and weight. You can have a huge car or a smaller car, going from a 90kWh battery pack to a 30kWh battery pack is gonna have the same weight saving in both

Maybe they should be at least charged for the catastrophic externalities that that "preference" results in.

does "preference" equate to endless, manipulative advertising from car manufacturers? Or, perhaps, the "preference" of higher profit margins from larger cars, pushing manufacturers to entirely abandon reasonably sized cars?

"Everyone who doesn't want what I want them to want has been brainwashed by corporate interests" is not a robust assertion under even the most casual scrutiny.

I hate to break it to you but something like a Rogue or HRV does circles around an Altima or Civic when it comes to daily flexibility and utility for a fairly paltry additional cost. It doesn't take a degree in rocket surgery to figure out why they fly off the shelves. For the average person they're a good combination of attributes.

The North American market now only includes a handful of sedans. Meanwhile, Hyundai and Toyota somehow manage to sell “tiny” cars in Korea, Japan and lots of developing countries.

A practical car is a station wagon, not an SUV, many of which have less storage space.

Please, cut the needless snark. People do buy vehicles for edge cases but the lack of smaller, practical vehicles is driven is large part by manufacturer profit.

Many of those tiny foreign cars are unfortunately not economically useful to sell in the regulated markets of the rich west, and even when they are they often aren't without the developing nation sales volume to amortize a lot of the fixed costs over.

I agree that there's a lot of stupidity going on when it comes to station wagons vs crossovers vs compact SUVs and the OEMs really do SUV-ify a lot of things that ought not to be.

The shape of these vehicles is fairly preordained by the nature of the fuel economy regulations and wind resistance and other regulations that apply equally to all of them. You're not gonna find "more space" in something like a Subaru Outback by squashing it on the vertical axis unless you stretch it in another dimension or find somewhere else to find space. Maybe you might be able to eek out a slightly better angle on the hatch or something but it ain't gonna be much. Fuel economy regulations make cars with thicc asses like the big sedans and station wagons of yesterday nonsensical.

The snark is not needless. It is tautologically impossible for the overwhelming majority of people do be "doing it wrong" on a matter that is in large part a subjective one of preference. If someone wants to assert that then I will talk down to them.

People buy these small SUVs left and right because they're seemingly the best option when it comes to well rounded boring A to B vehicles.

I think the crossover is pretty much the modern station wagon. I suppose they get marketed as SUV's but they're basically just a bit longer and taller car vs what I'd consider a "real" SUV; an enclosed truck chassis.

also once everybody else is obstructing your view with a bigger car it becomes necessary to have a bigger one, it's a race to the metaphorical bototm

I thought about PHEV but in the end went full EV simply because it seemed to me with two whole power trains that's 2x the components to go wrong/need maintenance.

This. This times 100x . Also, it’s not like each powertrain has an independent failure mode. If either break, your car is a brick until it’s fixed.

I have a friend who drives a Chevy Volt with a dead ICE engine; she just charges the battery and uses it as a (rather short range) pure EV vehicle. Not ideal, but it works for her until she gets something else.

If she was in California she wouldn't be able to pass smog at her next inspection, which is a funny problem considering she drives in pure EV mode now.

Oh I agree completely. I'm driving an old diesel now but I have no desire to get a hybrid, I'd get a pure EV if I were to buy a new car. But there are some tempting things in principle about plug-in hybrids

That same insight applies to regular hybrids, and yet Toyota’s hybrids are legendary for their durability. There’s a reason half the cabs where I live are Prius station wagons, and it’s not their efficiency, judging by how they’re driven.

Consumer reports found that HEV's were the most reliable, and PHEV"s the least reliable. That's nonsensical, there's little difference between the two.

Toyota is the biggest seller of HEV's, Stellantis of PHEV. That's the difference. EV's on paper should be the most reliable, but Tesla is the biggest seller of those. If you want reliability, choose by brand rather than engine type.

I was comparing a Hyundai Ioniq EV with a Hyundai Ioniq PHEV and was surprised to find more problems reported by the owners of the Ioniq EV.

Mostly issues with 12V battery, it seemed like.

In the end I bought a Stellantis EV so I probably deserve everything I get - but they are cheap!

12V batteries dying in EVs has been a consistent problem. I think it got better for Tesla when they moved from lead acid to lithium ion for the 12V (like the much bigger battery).

>Consumer reports found that HEV's were the most reliable, and PHEV"s the least reliable. That's nonsensical, there's little difference between the two.

Eh, it's not so much nonsensical, as it is that you're just misinterpreting the data.

This conversation here is specifically about powertrain reliability, but that isn't what consumer reports measures. They measure complaints about any feature on the vehicle, including ancillary accessories unrelated to the vehicle's ability to transport people.

But also as you point out, shitty engineering (Stellantis's specialty) is a bigger issue than any particular drivetrain type.

Toyota's success with the Prius proves that this fear is unfounded. You will regularly find second hand prius models for sale with 500,000 km on the odometer.

Just think - if two drivetrains were less reliable, wouldn't you see that with the Prius?

That's a common misconception, but hybrids are almost never as complicated as an ICE powertrain plus an EV powertrain. E.g. most hybrids are able to eliminate many parts that ICE vehicles require, like, starters, drive belts, multi-ratio transmissions, alternators, etc. Because of this, many hybrids surpass ICE-only vehicles in reliability.

In some ways it’s more complicated. The battery management and cooling is a point of failure. It’s also heavier and so wear and tear on suspension is greater.

On the other hand, a Toyota hybrid doesn’t have a gearbox at all, not even a CVT. Instead it has something similar to a differential, it’s mechanically simple and very reliable. It uses the electric motor in place of a turbo, so that’s another common failure point removed. It doesn’t have a starter motor, and the Atkinson cycle engine should suffer less stress than an equivalent petrol.

Practically the biggest problem is finding a 3rd party garage who will inspect the hybrid parts as part of a service.

You're right in principle, but it's important to remember that tradeoffs exist. You can very much trade off engineering effort and time to improve reliability.

Commercial aviation is a great example of taming extreme inherent unsafety of aircraft by applying a lot of resources to the engineering side. Another is space programs.

And car power trains have nothing on those ;) As Toyota has shown, it's totally possible to make reliable hybrid cars with enough engineering thrown at the problem.

So if all things were equal, you'd absolutely expect an EV to be more reliable than a hybrid, but all things are rarely equal.

On paper, yes, but did that ever happen? Sorry for being sarcastic, but where I live the frugal hybrid is exceptionally rare and the "same big engine, but driving a much heavier car" hybrid is omnipresent. The kind of people who might buy the frugal one buy second or third hand while almost all buyers of factory new pick the "same big engine" option, and those are the ones who decide what's available on the second hand market.

Omoda 9 (SUV) is sold in Europe only as plug-in hybrid with small-ish 1.5L 143HP engine + 394HP electric (145km of pure electric range, 35kWh LFP battery).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exeed_Yaoguang

> did that ever happen?

In 2010 with the Chevrolet Volt.

I think the question is "is that overall effect the reality, or do most people buy a very heavy hybrid?"

Which only had a 1.4l engine. It was not as efficient as the gas only Prius but could be more efficient overall as the Volt of 2010 had a 40 mile EV range.

I wonder whether people actually understand that they need a smaller engine for the same performance?

Despite my overall low estimation of people's ability to fluidly reason about engineering tradeoffs, I think they generally do understand this one well enough, at least for the decisions that they will face. They're only deciding which car to buy, not what engine specifications are required to make a car successful in the market.

They go test-drive cars, probably glance at performance specifications and/or read/watch a test drive review of the cars. They can look at the 0-60mph/0-100 kph times and get a feel for "this car will be able to get out of its own way" vs "this car will be a rolling roadblock".

So "actually understand"? Maybe not, but "understand enough to guide their purchasing decision?" and therefore enough for the actual automobile product teams to design to accommodate? I think they do.

Yes, every single prius for example? The biggest engine that was produced with seems to be a ~100 bhp engine which isn't much for a 1.5 metric tonne car

In most countries, yes. Despite the push for SUV-styled cards (which are heavier than a regular city car, but not by that much), engines have been small.

Toyota Yaris - HSD - 1.5L 4cyl Renault Clio - E-Tech - 1.6L Hyundai Kona (SUV) - 1.6L Honda Jazz - 1.5L Peugeot 208 - 1.2L Peugeot 3008 (SUV) - 1.6L Peugeot 5008 (Family SUV) - 2L And the list goes on. Even BMW with it's xDrive puts out 1.5L engines.

Huge engines are only common in two places: sports cars (and even then, only a specific category like AMGs and friends, because even a Porsche 992 only has a 3L engine) and the US.

The info is useful, but those do not seem to be all that small. There were smaller engines available for the ICE version of the Clio, for example.

There was, and it was shit. The Cléon-Fonte, despite all my love for its BBBBRRRRRRRRRRVVVVVVVVVVV was becoming wildly insufficient for the already ever heavier cars simply due to electronics and safety measures, and it was already a 1.2L. The smallest ever put on a Clio was a .999L, and anyone driving a Twingo knows how it behaves the moment there's... a slight incline, or two people in the care.

1.5L is an incredibly small engine, especially when previous versions required much larger. The Renault Scénic IV is a 1.5 ton brick that is happily running on a 1.2L engine. The Scénic II's most sold motorization was a 2L engine.

I feel like I remember a pickup being available that was a 6L v8. So one cylinder in that engine had almost the same volume as all the cylinders in a 1.5L engine combined. That's pretty crazy to me.

edit: oh it was mine heh, my first car was a 1979 ford with a 460 ( 7.5L v8 ). It was a hand me down from my grandfather, he said if i could get it running i could have it.

A 6 liter 4-cylinder would have the same volume in a single cylinder as a 1.5L engine. A V8 of that size would have half the volume in a single cylinder, not almost the same volume.

A 1.5 liter is incredibly small. You’ll struggle to accelerate up slight inclines with that. If you’re in the mountains it will be even worse.

>On paper, yes, but did that ever happen?

Like absolutely, unless you consider 1.4L petrol engine large for something with over 170KW (over 220hp). Such kind of offerings are quite common at the East side of the pond.

I'd consider engines with HP in the two digits range not big. Few ICE cars (hybrid or not) are ever accelerated at the rate you could achieve with a 75 HP engine revved into the high but still safe range. People buy big engines so that they can get all their acceleration needs served at half throttle. And that's for stick shifting, those on automatic pick engine size so that they can accelerate on quarter throttle or else the car shifts back and it sounds all x "small engine working hard" (which would be so much less inefficient!).

Our family owned a Mercedes 240D (71 peak horsepower at sea level) for many years. That car's performance was lackluster on a good day and trying to merge onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike (with very short acceleration lanes) was IMO quite unsafe. From that experience, I'm pretty sure that people are dipping into more acceleration than that car could ever muster.

I have no doubt that some people behave as you describe, but I think some of that is driven from a rational position of not wanting to buy a car that is incapable of anything more than their normal daily driving. If you need to accelerate quickly to merge safely into traffic, bringing only 75 [or 71] peak horsepower to the table isn't a comfortable position to be in.

Hybrid one - 0-100km/h sub 7sec. The most important part is not 0-xxx but being able to take trucks in relatively short distances b/c most roads features just two lanes. Pressing pedal to the metal and engaging both engine does that.

The sub 100 power doesn't mean much if the engine has a turbine, e.g. TSI of volkswagen

Fiat 500 hybrid 999cc engine, 69bhp (51kW).

I hired one on holiday and it worked fine. Maybe I'm getting old but I see less point in getting something that does 0-60 in 4 sec when most traffic goes from 0-40 in about two minutes and doesn't get much faster. It still has a top speed over 100mph.

BMW i8

The vast majority of hybrids use simulated atkinson cycle... while their cylinders might be the same size as N/A vehicles, they leave the intake valve open past the end of the stroke, so they effectively are displacing less, even though the cylinder dimensions might be the same size. The advantage is that atkinson cycle is more efficient. But it has too poor performance characteristics for an ICE-only car.

Yes, check out BYD's hybrids. The petrol engine is 46% efficient, which is pretty damn amazing. This is more efficient than most power plants (combined cycle plants are better- but most power plants are not combined-cycle).

So what is the well to wheel efficiency of this vs. pure electric? There are fuel transportation losses in one, and transmission line losses in the other. In many cities electricity is quite a bit more expensive than gas so hybrids are a better deal financially.

Which cities are those? I can think of maybe a few in the Middle East with subsidized gasoline, but I’m coming up blank after that.

I've never seen a car where the hybrid and pure gas versions have the same size engine; the hybrid engine is almost always lighter and makes less power.

Dunno if you consider plugin hybrids hybrids, but I believe the Audi Q5 PHEV and ICE-only engines are the same.

There’s a few luxury cars that use the same or larger engines for the hybrid. Lexus did it with the LS, hybrid 600h had a larger engine (5L) than the gas 460 (4.6L).

Those are super rare though.

This reminds me of the short lived dilbert cartoon when Dilbert is complaining about how pokey his Prius, and when he hands the car over to Dogbert, he somehow is able to rip out of the parking lot at high speed.

Seriously though, hybrids seem like a bad compromise to just getting an EV. Hybrids have an electric drive train with an ICE drive train, and somehow that double complexity will be worth it? In the long run, EVs are winning on cost alone (especially in China where making cheap EVs is a thing).

> […] but there can also be a significant benefit from allowing the ICE to remain in the RPM "sweet spot" rather than moving around a larger range.

Which is why I'm surprised electric cars with range extenders aren't a bigger thing:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_extender

Have the powertrain be all-electric, and have a battery pack, but for those with range anxiety have a small generator as an option that would go in the frunk (front truck). A (proverbial) small Honda EU2200i would be less maintenance than a traditional engine.

Maybe because people don't want to have oil changes, emission checks, exhaust gas etc. on their EV. If they really need a long range, they will probably just buy a combustion engine car.

Perhaps, but other than the upcoming Scout, I’m not even sure it’s an option for EVs, in the US.

BMW i3 has/had a REX version and when I researched it people seemed to agree it’s the least reliable part about owning it. But that might be it!

The newer London black cabs do that

> The LEVC TX is powered by a full-electric hybrid drivetrain. It drives in full-electric mode all the time, but is recharged by an 81-horsepower (60 kW; 82 PS) Volvo-sourced 1.5-litre turbocharged three-cylinder petrol engine.

This does not make any sense. It's a cab, it's going to stay 100% of the time in a city or really near, moving around. If it ignites a petrol engine to recharge the battery, what's the point? Surely a cab driver can pause 20 minutes every 4 hours to go to the restroom and fast charge their EV, no?

Diesel REX vans would be a MASSIVE hit if a company would just decide to start making them.

The #1 reason for (european) companies not buying full EV vans is range, they need to drive a LOT during the day.

REX would solve that with minimal emissions. And depending on the battery size, they could drive on full EV in city centres and only allow the REX to charge the battery during longer drives.

The BMW i3 REX is a fantastic car, if you can find one, buy it.

They are the cheapest hybrid out there currently, at least here in the USA. I think the average American prefers a larger vehicle.

I think a Diesel indirect injection REX would be awesome. It could burn vegetable oil, which is more viscous, but indirect injection doesn't need to atomize the fuel as much.

BMW tried that with the i3, it wasn't particularly popular. An engine, fuel system and a generator are all relatively complex additions compared to just putting the same cost and vehicle space into more batteries, and the public charging networks are definitely up to the task by now (having been EV-only for almost 5 years now).

I've ridden in one and this was basically a case of "you get the worst of both worlds". The engine was small and running at a constant RPM, leading to an annoying noise in the cabin. The range extension was not particularly huge. Worse, when we did eventually run out of battery on one trip, the range extender was unable to recharge the battery after refueling the car, forcing us to scramble to find an available charging station with the car on the tow truck...

I've been driving one for a while. On the trips I've driven, even on the highway, the engine was able to keep up with the energy draw. I think it's around 60HP. If I'm on a long trip, I'll start the engine once I reach 75% of my battery capacity. That gives a significant buffer for the engine. It's a serial hybrid.

>> the range extender was unable to recharge the battery

Could you expand on this? What was the actual problem? For example, did the range extender start and run? Did it put any energy into the battery at all?

The original BMW i3 had/has a lockout that prevented the range extender from charging the battery until it reached 6% in order to meet California's ZEV BEVx regulation.

facepalm

I don't know what to call this.

"Legislated fragility"

We ran out of battery and fuel (I was on the backseat so I don't remember the exact sequence, I just remember the car basically losing power without much warning on the autobahn). The car was towed to a gas station were we proceeded to refill the tank, but the range extender would not start and the car computer was adamant we had to recharge. Which led to a quest to find a public charger in the middle of the night, after 2 failed attempts, we gave up and asked to be towed to our destination instead since it was close enough.

Yes, the Volt was a better balanced version of that. It had a longer EV range and the range extender was larger. It was much less likely to need the range extender and when it did, the larger (1.4l) engine was no more noisy than any gas engine.

> An engine, fuel system and a generator are all relatively complex additions […]

And yet that's what an ICE car is.

So a range extender (RX) should be no worse than ICE: in fact a little less complex because you don't have a gear train and transmission.

For a Honda 2.2kW to aid with range anxiety, you'd have to split range anxiety into two categories and I think it only addresses the second/lesser of the two.

Assume the car gets 4 miles per kWh delivered and the charging cycle is 90% efficient (measured from generator output). The 2.2kW generator can add 8 miles/hour of generator runtime (2.2 kW * 0.9 * 4 miles/kWh).

For range anxiety of the form "we're driving to a destination pretty far away and I'm not sure we can get there", that's not very helpful. For range anxiety of "I'm driving to a destination that's over half my range and then going to spend a full day [or overnight] there, but I'm not sure there will be working chargers available there", charging 8 mph times 8-10 hours is very helpful.

Worrying about being stuck in the boondocks without a charger is addressed by an 8 mph on-board charger, but I think that's the less common form of range anxiety.

The Chevy Volt range extender was 75kW; the i3's was 26.6kW. 2.2kW is literally an order of magnitude too small to replace those.

Posted something very similar above. It’s worse than 2200 watts: that’s the allowable overload draw, not sustained. After about 5 minutes, it warns you to reduce power to <= 1800 watts.

Also, something I didn’t mention in my post; at full power they’ll suck their tank dry in a little over 3 hours. You’ll get about 20 miles of range (using your assumptions above) from one. Tbf you can also parallel two of them, or buy a slightly larger model (EU3200i), but either way, it’s still not going to be anything other than an emergency backup where you have a lot of time to kill.

The EU2200i can sustain 15 amps. That charges most EVs at something like a few miles of range per hour. The biggest one that’s small enough for a frunk is the 3200i, which still only sustains 21.7 amps - plus, that’s from an L5-30R socket, so you’d need an adapter for the EV, and a custom chip to limit charging current below that, since the ones I’ve seen for that socket assume they can pull 24 amps.

Re: maintenance, small engines typically are pretty needy. That one wants an oil change, spark plug gap adjustment, and spark arrestor cleaning every 100 hours of use. The latter two are only usage-based, but the oil is time-based as well (6 months) since it oxidizes, and suffers from fuel dilution. Then there’s the fuel: god help you if you put ethanol gas into a small engine and let it sit for any period of time. It’s often difficult to find E0 fuel, and while there are external fuel tanks for generators that can hold quite a bit, they also tend to vent vapor in the heat (as does any tank, including a car’s), which is unpleasant when it’s in your frunk.

Finally, engines of all kinds really don’t like being left sitting for months on end unless prepared to do so. Generally you want to run them monthly, getting them up to operating temperature, putting a load on them for a bit to fully exercise all components.

I say all this because I have an EU2200i and dearly love it, but am also painfully aware of its limitations and needs. I got it when I lived in Texas because the power outages were getting to be absurd, and my house wasn’t plumbed for natural gas, so a whole-house was out of the question. The 2200i was plenty to power two fridges, a deep freezer, TV, fans, and my server rack. I got really good at quickly running extension cords (which is a whole other discussion on ensuring proper amperage ratings and calculating voltage drop, something most people ignore).

> The EU2200i can sustain 15 amps.

proverbial

I’ve ran mine at nearly that for hours without any issue. Honda generators do what they say they’ll do.

Range anxiety seems to go away after your first week of EV driving.

It isn't really "range" anxiety, rather "no charger available" anxiety.

Today, if I run out of petrol|gasoline somewhere, even if I'm in the middle of nowhere and don't have a gas can, I can still recover from that situation within an hour or so (hitch a ride to the next gas station, buy gas can, fill with gas, hitch back to my vehicle). With an EV the density of fueling/charging locations is orders of magnitude lower than for gas, and if I end up discharged I'm looking at finding a flat bed truck, or perhaps a mobile high power generator.

Disclosure: I own both kinds of vehicles.

I'd say more that it evolves rather than goes away. We've had our BEV for over a decade and it's the car we tend to choose to drive for short distance errands. We like it by all means, but when one of us needs to take the hybrid car for a weekend or a local business trip, we still have to plan out to make sure the other can manage whatever we need to do with just the BEV.

As dboreham says in the sibling comment, the range anxiety morphs into charger-availability anxiety. Even if I know a charger physically exists at my destination, if it's 45% or more of the range away, I still need to worry that it will be working, that my access will work, that it won't be occupied or blocked, etc.

In nearly 40 years of driving, I almost never researched gasoline availability (through the Nevada desert and in Central America, I did).

In a little over a decade of BEV driving, I've done a lot of EVSE (charger) researching.

Eh, I'd say it goes away after your first road trip, unless you're going somewhere remote.

I've had my BEV for about 5 1/2 years. My first road trip (Portland -> Santa Clara, ~560 miles each way), I planned it out ahead of time with ABRP. These days, I'll just let the nav figure it out.

First time I did an EV road trip, I just plugged it straight into the car screen and followed directions. I didn't have anyone with me, and was willing to accept some degree of "adventure". I did about 800 miles in a day, and had zero real issues.

I have been totally unconcerned about it since.

One 120V 2.2kW generator isn’t going do much at all. It’s really actually 1.8kW which is 15A at 120V.

You’d need to tow around a 7.2kW 240V for 30A at 240V (more likely a 14.4kW generator for 240V 60A).

Using the small Honda inverter generator (which is amazing for plenty of stuff!) is akin to covering your car in solar panels to get range extension, the math just doesn’t work out.

This is the thing with good hybrids.

The "gas pedal" becomes a "I want to go faster/slower" pedal, its position has zero impact on the RPM.

As an anecdote: A security company I know only buys Toyota Hybrids for their guards just because of that. They have a habit of driving cars like they stole them and normal ICE cars break down from that kind of abuse. Hybrids won't let you abuse them, they pick the RPM and you deal with it.

(They also swap the passenger seat for a plastic box because the guards threw heavy crap like safety boxes on it, wearing down the seat in months)

Do all Toyotas do that? I'm pretty sure that my dad's Corolla will rev the engine when I press the gas if the engine is already running.

I'm also surprised for the first few minutes when I drive it how little "engine braking" it has (my habit is from riding a big motorbike).

Dunno. My both Priuses did it and the company was specifically using the Yaris Hybrid.

Both will rev on neutral, but when the gear selector is on Drive there is no link between the pedal and RPM.

And on Brake it's even the opposite: above a certain speed, you press the accelerator and the RPM decreases to remove engine braking.

Depends on the configuration. If they are equipped with a CVT+electric engine on the shaft, then that's the case: they rev to the sweet spot (which on gas engines is 4000-5000 rpm on acceleration? Depending on expected engine load I assume) and the speed is controlled by hydraulic force applied on the CVT.

With other hybrids: depends on the generator they have installed, but it matches the consumption in amps by the engine in order to "go" if it is not directly coupled with the transmission, or they just downshift to accelerate with help of the electric engine.

I am assuming a lot here: Toyotas (specially RAV4) mount CVTs among others, assuming pure electric generator by the ICE or coupled to it... So it depends a lot on specific configuration.

Even CVTs will rev the engine if you floor it, no? They typically allow for wanting to be in a few sweet spots. I prefer to keep it near the max efficiency speed. That said, my wife is a bit more aggressive and spends more time in the max power mark. It has a predictable change on the MPG reported by the vehicle.

I know for a fact you can neutral-drop a prius.

I know it's not exactly the same, but I was a teenager and curious, and you can rev them and shift into drive with some heel-toe finesse. Not sure if this works on the newer ones, this one was an early 2010s model.

Thank you for performing the experiment I didn’t even know I wanted to know the results of before now.

I performed many experiments on that family prius and with complete honestly, my experiments weren't even in the top ten worst things that car survived.

Trees, multiple motorcycles, final destination esque road debris, an accident that should have totalled it if not for an insurance mistake, leading to repairs worth more than the car. Three teenage drivers and two adult drivers with heavy feet. Not to mention many many hardware store runs hauling various sacks of yard materials, baby trees, lumber, etc.

My favorite times were rallying on compacted un-plowed snow. The thin tires and light weight meant it absolutely shredded.

It's my opinion that the Toyota Prius is one of the greatest vehicles ever built and they should be respected and feared.

That's an amazing testimony to its grit. I could stand to hear more of those stories over the appropriate beverage.

it's possible that the engine rev is just the speakers. a lot of cars are doing fake engine sounds.

The dash has an RPM gauge which moves. Also, the noise is horrendous, not sure why they would have chosen that when they could have used a nicer-sounding tone. This is a tame small car, not something you'd buy to impress your friends.

They're programmed to rev in situations like that, because people are used to it. Under normal operation, RPM is decided by power needs. If you start accelerating on the freeway, for example, the engine might jump from 1100 RPM to 3000 RPM with just some pedal, while a manual transmission obviously changes very little.

The whole "pas pedal" becomes faster/slower (one pedal driving) is coming to an end. Its being banned as default in the world's largest EV market (and largest EV export country).

I'm curious what you mean? I'm fairly confident the post you are responding to was only talking about newer transmissions. Which, I can't imagine those are going away?

The post is talking about most people drive with BEV , which is one pedal driving. My Tesla does one pedal driving my default.

China has banned "one pedal driving" as a default.

I took it to be people that are far more aggressive with the gas pedal than they really need to be. That is, it was more the heavy foot than it was letting off to brake.

Regardless, your point stands. People that have gotten used to not directly using brakes to indicate you are slowing down is a dangerous thing with how reliant we are on the standard indications that you are slowing. All the more so if you need to rapidly lose a ton of speed, where even regenerative brakes often fall back to friction.

> People that have gotten used to not directly using brakes to indicate you are slowing down is a dangerous thing with how reliant we are on the standard indications that you are slowing.

Most, if not all, EVs will light up the brake lights when you're slowing via regen braking as long as the deceleration rate is above a certain threshold. I know my Tesla does.

This addresses the signalling to the people behind you problem. You still should have the foot nearer the brake so that you can fully stop, if you need to do so rapidly.

Emergency brake systems probably help a lot with this problem, of course. Still seems wise to follow some of the older practices that we used to drill into people.

So you just type in the speed you want and hit enter?

Huh, that's interesting. Apparently China will be banning cars from having one-pedal driving as the default.

Losing muscle memory of pressing the brake pedal. Makes sense, actually.

This is less a hybrid thing and more a new transmission thing. It, of course, isn't free. The efficiency of a CVT is a good 10-20 percent lower than previous transmissions. That said, currently, the win from keeping the engine at either the max power or the max efficiency speed is substantial.

There are some really good videos out there going over how newer CVTs work. Looks like some people are working on ones that are teeth driven, to reduce the loss from being free belt driven. Borderline magical stuff, all told. (Obviously, not magic magic. But very very impressive designs.)

I have a Subaru (ten years old w/ >200k miles on it's chain-type CVT), and I thought the justification for it was that it was more efficient than previous systems.

From a mechanical engineering standpoint, the Subaru CVT uses a fairly conventional lock-up torque converter at the input, but that gets locked as you pass something like 15-20 mph (once the lowest gear ratio is satisfactory w/o the torque converter function) and beyond that all shifting of the CVT is done w/ the torque converter locked. In addition, the clamping force of the sheaves is adjusted per the torque load of the transmission to minimize the frictional losses.

Anyway I'm curious about data comparing efficiency of conventional and CVT automatics.

My understanding is that the overall system is more efficient. It is only the transmission that is less so.

The videos online that look at various CVT systems is truly an amazing resource that I regret not having when I was younger. :D

If overall efficiency is what you see reflected in the EPA mileage numbers (or similar European tests), in what scenario would a lower efficiency transmission (lower Pout/Pin over some range of operating points?) lead to or even allow better overall efficiency?

I'm not sure I understand the question? You get the engine to hit its sweet spot and to hold it there. That gain outweighs the loss from the new transmission.

This would be similar to hitting the optimal torque point. The idea there would be that you can get out of the acceleration phase faster, so that you can transition to a more efficient gear to maintain the speed for longer.

The wikipedia looks to cover this well. One of the cites is specific on the efficiency of the CVT. I think I overstated how much higher the loss is, so maybe that is confusing things? I thought it was 10-20, but the cite on the page shows it solidly around 10.

Ah, thank you, I see the argument. I'm still a bit skeptical though when many non-CVT automatics are 6 or 8-speed models that there would be much "sweet spot" benefit left by being able to make relatively small changes in engine speed. Like many things probably depends on exactly what comparison is being made.

I mean, we are comparing 6-8 to effectively infinite? Question then comes into just how much is lost by being outside of the sweet spot for an engine. Which, I agree that I would not have thought it would be that big of a deal. Just going off modestly paying attention in my car, I see massive benefits keeping the car around 300 rpms lower.

Interestingly, my car gets better gas mileage around the 40ish speeds than I do at full highway speeds. That somewhat surprises me. It is very dependent on not having a heavy foot, of course.

Generally speaking your car will get better fuel economy at 40mph than it will at 60 or 70mph. Your car gets so much more wind resistance the faster you go.

The main reason why city mileage is usually lower is because of all the stopping.

I think I just mentally had this idea shifted up about 10-15 mph. I'd expected 55 to be the sweet spot, for some reason.

Best efficiency speed can be understood by considering impact of fixed losses like HVAC, lights, computing, which consume more energy the longer you drive (so the total energy for those would be minimized by going faster) and the aerodynamic losses in which force goes with speed squared, power w/ speed cubed, energy over a fixed distance back to squared because at higher speeds time is reduced (this component is theoretically minimized by going very slowly). In between is rolling resistance which requires a fixed energy per distance, so it doesn't care about speed.

For EVs, the drivetrain efficiency is so high that it's variability with operating point doesn't affect this calculation much, and so the most efficient speed of an EV is around the speed at which the fixed losses equal the aero ones. This will vary greatly with environmental conditions since AC or heating load can be large in hot or cold conditions but at the right temperature will go to near zero.

In ICE cars, the drivetrain efficiency is much lower and so the drivetrain efficiencies are a much more significant part of the optimization problem, but the basic physics of the aerodynamics are the same.

The model I used to use in my head is that for an ICE, the most efficient operating point is probably around the lowest speed the car can operate in the highest gear, so maybe around 40 mph / 60 km/h? Obviously a rough heuristic though.

The post you commented on was talking about Toyota hybrids though, who don't use a CVT in the sense you're talking about.

They use a series-parallel hybrid transmission which is sometimes called eCVT, but works completely different from a classic CVT. There are no pullies, belts, chains, none of that. What they do have is a couple of motor-generators and a differential to link the system up with the engine and the drive shaft. No friction losses like CTVs have.

See https://prius.ecrostech.com/original/PriusFrames.htm, or look up "Hybrid Synergy Drive" on Wikipedia or Youtube or your favorite search engine.

Ah, totally fair in that this particular transmission is better than the belt driven CVT stuff. I had thought they were still a bit worse than other transmissions, but it looks like if they are, it is on the order of 1% or so.

Is fascinating to watch these things work.

Most hybrids on the road are parallel and have a mechanical connection to wheels and vary rpm as needed, although the CVT implementations may hold rpm due to gear ratios like any CVT hybrid or not.

A direct mechanical connection is more efficient at highway cruise speeds than a mechanical->electric->mechanical conversion.

The main win a gasoline hybrid has is in running the Atkinson cycle gaining efficiency while losing torque which the electric motor makes up. This brings the gasoline engine up into diesel efficiency territory.

This is also why you don't really diesel hybrids, the engine is already very efficient but it is more expensive and heavier and hybrid adds more expense and weight.

That's the case only with CVT transmission

Are there still a lot of hybrids without CVTs?

Hyundai/Kia use a traditional 6-speed auto in their hybrids. I drive one, the engine stays at a few RPM stepping points during most driving (it likes ~1600RPM, ~2200RPM, and ~3600RPM). I had a Prius previously, and I like this different setup because it reduces "engine droning noise", which was terrible on the Prius.

Though H/K have recently introduced a new hybrid system with a CVT, so maybe 2026 or 27 model years will be different.

Since I'm only making one comment, I also want to say hybrid cars are better than ICE because there are fewer belt-driven accessories. Aircon in particular on an electric motor is a big improvement. Without the idling engine producing heat, hybrids are much nicer in hot stop-and-go conditions!

Also my Prius made it its whole life (200k miles and ~20 years) without ever changing the brake pads... amazing!

I'd say that the market is very fragmented.

Toyota and Lexus, obviously, use eCVT in their cars.

Honda is also in eCVT camp for most of their models but for example new CR-V has weird setup. It acts as an BEV until ~80-100kmh and then shifts completely to ICE with a single gear. While in EV mode the engine is constantly charging batteries.

Then you have KIA and Hyundai with their dual clutch setup in all HEV and PHEV range.

Lots. BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Porsche, Volkswagen, Volvo for example.

I find it a pity that Lexus uses CVTs as I would probably sell my BMW 330e and get a Lexus.

Diesel engines with all their turbochargers, EGR, SCR, DPF etc equipment, work pretty well as part of a hybrid system. All that stuff works much better in steady-state operation. Diesel hybrid buses and trucks are much smoother and cleaner than non-hybrid.

In order to do this with a gas engine, it can be done but you need to completely mechanically decouple the gas engine from the drivetrain. The gas engine needs to do one thing and one thing only which is charge the battery. The gas engine has maximum efficiency at about 80% throttle.

The efficiency of the entire system is more important than the efficiency of the engine itself. Charging the battery and then discharging it also incurs losses. Many series hybrids will prioritize generating electricity when some of it is also required to directly drive the motor. They usually don't sit around at low-load situations just generating electricity, unless SOC is low.

> The gas engine has maximum efficiency at about 80% throttle.

ICE efficiency varies in multiple dimensions based on load and RPM, and in a series hybrid, you have some ability to dynamically influence these... throttle would be one of those inputs.

There do exist serial hybrids where the engine produces electricity while maintaining the ideal RPM, and then is connected to a battery+electric motors.

However in practice the vast majority of hybrids do not use this approach and have motors that vary RPM with road speed (depending of gearing of course).

The common case of maintaining ideal RPM is the CVT, which most folks dislike, so much so that some models have a switch to pick how many fake gears you have to break up the boring drone of a constant RPM engine.

BTW, the chevy bolt was advertised as a serial hybrid, right up to the day it shipped.

I believe the most common serial hybrid today is an EV with a range extender.

> a significant benefit from allowing the ICE to remain in the RPM "sweet spot" rather than moving around a larger range.

I remember buying plans from the Whole Earth News for such a car back around 1980. That was the selling point - keep the ICE running at an optimal point. I've not seen those same plans reproduced online.

Aha! https://store.motherearthnews.com/products/hybrid-car-bluepr...

The rear brake rotors on my Yaris hybrid are basically always rusty because they get used so little. After some time you just know when to start braking so you only use regen instead of the brakes.

I confirm and that’s an unpleasant surprise. Already had to replace the rear rotors and pads on my Highlander… because of rust. They should add some “brake cleaning” mode to temporarily disable regenerative braking.

> They should add some “brake cleaning” mode

Also known as breaking. You could just do that once in a while.

Yup, my Golf GTE is mostly used to fetch groceries, but every now and again I'll blast down a faster road and brake harder than just regen to keep the brakes themselves in good condition. It's almost second-nature at this point.

If you don't break hard enough, it might still be the recuperation doing its work.

Car producers can and do resolve this, e.g. iirc Audis don't use recuperation for the first breaking of the day. That way you don't have to remember to use the no-recuperation/break cleaning mode or break unnecessarily hard every now and then.

The manual recommends putting the car in neutral and then braking every once in a while to keep the brakes in good working order. Putting the car in neutral disables the recuperation and makes sure you really use the friction brakes.

(When I say "the manual", I mean both the manual of my previous car which was a hybrid Toyota Auris, and my current car which is a fully electric Volvo XC40.)

Sure, gonna slam on brakes while in front of you.

It's 2025 and hybrids have enough software to automate some non-hybrid braking action.

Modern EVs tend to do blended braking (at least by default) in which case pressing the brake pedal gently will likely just do more regen braking. It’s only when you request more than regen braking can provide that physical brakes engage.

*braking

* https://www.dictionary.com/e/brake-vs-break/

The two words are:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophone

Many of the cars with regenerative braking already do apply the brakes once in a while to prevent them from rusting.

There’s been a few suggestions that drum brakes should make a come back, for EVs.

They’re enclosed so they don’t get dirty, the inner face of drum will rust less than discs, fade is not an issue thanks to regen braking, and before they get too hot and fade drums will brake harder than disks (thanks to a higher pad surface area). And they’re enclosed so they also keep the brake dust inside the drum, making it easier to dispose of safely.

Drums are heavier tho.

Drum brakes are cheaper, too. The VW ID4 has rear drum brakes for all of these reasons and it seems to work out very well.

Also forget about that bit:

> They should add some “brake cleaning” mode to temporarily disable regenerative braking.

Some manufacturers do that (iirc tesla calls it burninshing, others will switch regen off completely if you switch to neutral or something).

I've read that Audi and Porsche will use regular brakes once or twice at the start of every drive instead of regen, I assume using electronic control to imitate the current state of regen braking.

It does. My Volvo XC60 T8 PHEV is a 400bhp 2.2 tonne SUV and after over 5 years of ownership the pads are about 20% worn. And I don't drive like a granny either. The car just does most of its braking with the EV motor.

Same here, XC40P8 and the pads are 10% used after 2.5 years.

But I understand the factory tires are a bit stickier to create a quieter ride which may be throwing more rubber dust into the air. High torque launches don't help either. ;-)

I came across a really interesting video yesterday (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aubi3cK8Ym0) that touches on brake-dust pollution. It also explains how regenerative (kinetic-energy) charging can cut down on heat pollution, something I hadn’t realized before. That’s actually a big deal for underground metro systems; for instance, the London Tube keeps getting hotter every year.

Yes indeed the London underground does use regenerative braking on many of their lines. The cool thing about a direct rail power system is that the voltage generated from trains that are braking can be fed back into the power rail to instantaneously power other trains on the same line that are accelerating. No need to carry the extra weight of a battery or flywheel. And like you say, it helps keep the tunnels cooler.

It has to be the same segment, which is a bit of a pain to manage. The amount of power being fed in is getting close to megawatts.

UK stats are different: https://www.zap-map.com/ev-stats/ev-market , possibly due to the shorter max travel distances.

> As of the end of June 2025, there were 2,450,462 plug-in cars, with over 1,585,000 battery-electric cars and nearly 865,000 PHEVs, registered in the UK.

> There are more fully electric cars than there are plug-in hybrids on UK roads and the gap has been widening. In 2021, fully electric cars accounted for 60% of all plug-in cars but with the increase in options, range and popularity of fully electric cars, and by May 2025 this has increased to 65%.

(That stat does exclude non-pluggable-hybrids, but those are kind of pointless stalling of the transition off petrol)

Your source doesn't consider non-plug-in hybrids also known as HEVs because zapmap are a company that sell charging services. The number of HEVs in the UK is about twice the the number of PHEVs so the total number of hybrids is still higher than the total number of BEVs. In 2024, 6% of vehicles on the road were hybrid compared with 3.7% fully electric.

https://www.smmt.co.uk/more-than-a-million-evs-on-uk-roads-a...

I wonder which vehicles that is - is that predominantly the non-pluggable Prius?

There is a wide variety, MHEV is quite popular here due to lack of home charging, as many people live in terraces, etc

We have a selection of smaller popular hatchbacks with MHEV available (ie, the Hyundai i20) that I believe were not released in some markets

The leasing culture for "luxury" cars is quite prevalent here too, and many new cars from popular brands such as Land Rover are at minimum MHEV from new nowadays, in order to get fleet emissions down

Many hybrids are not driven to max regenerative breaking. You need to drive and look ahead to make good use of the regeneration. Short distance breaking is still fast and using the discs.

Hard braking is an insane power. Eg. A typical 4,400 lb car emergency stopping from 80 mph has a braking power of 940 horsepower.

Hybrid cars have smaller motors, inverters, and battery packs - and none of those components can absorb 940 horsepower!

A 2nd gen prius battery for example has a max in/out of 30 horsepower.

Always sketches me out using regen for a serious grade decent while laden or towing. I have a sneaking suspicion that one day it's gonna error out and disable itself because too much power and I'll be down to just normal brakes.

It will disable itself if your battery is already full...

Some cars it's quite an abrupt change from the regen braking to the hydraulic brakes.

On both my Volvo PHEVs I often look at the brake discs and find them rusty from the amount of regen braking. it almost completely eliminates conventional braking unless it's for collision avoidance.

My EV turns regenerative braking off for the first use of brakes after beginning a journey, to avoid the rusting disc syndrome.

What car brand is it? I've read that Audi and Porsche do that.

Also is it only pedal braking? Or does it "fake" things out if you use one-pedal driving?

So your primary and emergency brake system elements are rusty and that is now somehow a good thing?

Brake rotors will noticeably rust overnight if left in wet conditions.

Yes, but only to some degree.

Quote from the actual report:

> As the level of electrification of a vehicle rises, the dependence on regenerative braking also increases, thus lowering PM emissions from brake wear. Based on recent evidence [30], regenerative braking can reduce, in the worst- case scenario (i.e. highest usage of mechanical brakes or equivalently lowest usage of regenerative braking), brake wear emissions by 10-48% for hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), 66% for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), and 83% for battery electric vehicles (BEVs

This makes sense since vehicles with bigger batteries can absorb more energy with regenerative braking.

I remember decades ago where they figured out the horsepower of a high-end porsche to go 0-100-0, and if the acceleration horsepower expended was 500hp, the deceleration horsepower absorbed by the brakes was probably 1000 hp.

I wouldn't be surprised if hybrids could only absorb 10 hp, while bigger cars could absorb 50.

One thought - if any of these manufacturers provided "braking resistors" like diesel-hybrid locomotives use, regenerative energy could be electrically turned into heat, instead of mechanically by wearing the brakes.

using resistors would be "green".

I have not seen many if any Hybrids that use regen to the same degree as an EV.

Good to have more data points and evidence, but this seems extremely well established by now?

Zero tailpipe emissions, drastically removed brake dust, slightly higher tire wear (due to weight), but much better overall than ICE.

I am just excited because the more EVs mean fewer idiots in hot rods running without mufflers.

I think these will switch last and will found new opportunities to annoy you once switched.

Exactly. What people really hate are loud young people from lower class than them backgrounds. Civics with stupid exhausts are just an example implementation of that. They'll just find something else to hate if you remove that implementation.

When loud engine noises cut through my neighborhood from blocks away, I'm not thinking about the age or class of the person driving the vehicle. I'm thinking about how they're a jerk for modifying their car to be louder and intentionally revving their engine to create noise. If an old billionaire decided to make their private jet louder and then buzzed over my neighborhood, I'd be pissed as well.

Well there are new classes of idiots I see pretty frequently - a typical tesla driver going 90 in 120 region of highway without any reason, presumably saving last bits of battery (that has at least some rationale, if they do it due to ie fear then they should not be driving or having license).

Over say 50km part of highway, maybe 2000 cars need to overtake such almost stationary object (to regular traffic which generally moves exactly at the speed limit). Fine if you have 3+ lanes, but most highways in Europe have 2 only. Then you have all the trucks, buses and rest of traffic trying to overtake via that 1 free lane, which in heavier (but still cca smooth) traffic will create a massive moving traffic jam immediately.

If I didn't see this every other day (and for some reasons its 90% tesla drivers where I live and rest is caravans) I wouldn't believe it to be so common, but it is. Summer now makes it even worse with all holiday drivers.

> going 90 in 120 region of highway without any reason, presumably saving last bits of battery (that has at least some rationale, if they do it due to ie fear then they should not be driving or having license).

Was very concerned until I realized you were talking about kilometers and not miles.

Otherwise, I'd hope the average driver would firce themselves to drive slower than 120mph out of some sense of fear, or at least a sense of self-preservation.

Miles are bigger than kilometers so the guy doing 90 among traffic that wants to go 120 might actually be worse in miles because it's a larger speed differential.

...that...that was his point...

it'd tell you what speed to travel at if you want to get to where you want to go lol, chances are they're low and just trying to get to their destination

Are you saying it's not ok to drive 90km/h in a zone where 120km/h is allowed?

80km/h is the usual maximum allowed speed for trucks, at least in Germany, so no idea how a car driving 90km/h is such a big problem. That's not a "stationary object" at all, far from it. You are even allowed to drive vehicles with a minimum speed of 60km/h on the Autobahn.

If a car driving 90km/h is the cause for a traffic jam there are definitely other factors at play. Not just in zones with a limit of 120km/h but everywhere even without limits.

I think it's a hilarious example in how buyer demographics effect things. Every Tesla is a potential rocket ship if the driver wants it to be yet they're rarely if ever not driven circles around by laden work vans.

You see this on the 400 series in Ontario, Canada and it's not just Tesla drivers. Some people don't want to go that fast(speed kills) and others cannot. It's a non issue if they stay right as expected.

> 90 in 120 region of highway

so just like any truck.

if you think it's a problem, you're the problem. sorry.

Depends on what lane you are in...

"Artificial engine sounds" is the next step in that evolution pipeline. Or just blast advertisements.

See the Ioniq 5 N. But those sounds are piped inside... not blasted to the neighbors...

Can it be disabled? I love quiet

I mean, no one would buy the Ioniq 5 N specifically if they didn't want the zoomy car sounds! (OK maybe they just want the fastness! Fair enough)

But yes, they can be turned off.

There's probably a federal or local law requiring some sound. Like the Waymos that incessantly beep beep beep when backing up at the recharging station at 1 mph. You're about five years away from hearing beep beep beep everywhere you go due to the proliferation of driverless vehicles.

To be clear, the exterior sounds hybrids and EVs make is different from the "engine" sounds the Ioniq 5 N pipes inside the car.

The N-line is Hyundai's high-performance designator, like Type R for Honda. It has way more power than you would ever need for normal driving, hopefully to be used on a track and not street racing. The normal Ionic 5 has no faked engine noise (beyond the low-volume external sounds required by law).

I love the look of the Ioniq so much, I wanted to reward the guts it took to create such a unique looking car! I wanted to buy the new one but I just couldn't not get a Tesla because of FSD. Cars without FSD are fighting for second place imho.

I like Hyundai's HDA much more than Tesla's.

With Tesla it's all-or-nothing, and when it inevitably drives poorly, I can only turn it off. It physically resists me turning the steering wheel while it's driving, and overcoming the resistance results in an unpleasant and potentially dangerous jerk.

OTOH in IONIQ I can control lane assist and adaptive cruise control separately. The lane assist is additive to normal steering. It doesn't take over, only makes the car seem to naturally roll along the road.

I don't touch the steering wheel period in my Tesla though. Literally from door to door.

The kids will find a way to be flagrantly annoying. Always has been always will be. Taking their fart can exhausts will be a minor bump in the road. It's not like EVs don't come factory equipped with tons of power to drive the kind of audio systems that people like you also hate.

>drastically removed brake dust

It will be very interesting to see the data for the same car that has many powertrain versions for example the Lexus UX with the UX 200 (ICE), UX 300h (hybrid) and UX 300e (EV) to test which one the best and the worst in term of brake dust residue.

My hypotheses is that for brake dust residue the best is hybrid, 2nd will be ICE and the 3rd will be EV. This is due to the fact that the EV version has at least several hundreds kg extra weight (about 400 kg extra), that makes the brake dust residue comparable to ICE if not worst based on the approximately 30% extra vehicle weight for the battery. The hybrid however only has approximately 5% more weight or extra 80 kg different compared to the ICE version.

Yea, but the EV need not use the disc brakes to stoppe.

My hypothesis is that in normal driving the EV with 30% extra weight will be using its brakes 90% less, making it beat the ICE version by a lot.

EV versus hybrid I couldn't say, it comes down to exactly how strong the hybrid regen is and how aggressively the owner brakes in comparison.

Why is your hypothesis so different from mine? How much use do you expect the EV brakes to get?

EVs don’t really use the brakes during normal driving being mainly used for emergency braking.

You could achieve the same with engine braking with ICE but most don’t bother.

My EV doesn’t use the brakes in normal driving. It can pull ~ 0.3G of regen before the physical brakes engage.

It will regeneratively brake all the way to a stop.

The brake disks are there for emergencies and spirited driving.

I think buyer demographics are gonna play hugely into it. Some makes and models are highly popular among the drivers who are on the low side of the bell curve and basically never hit the brake when not stopping because they're almost never coming upon slower traffic. Some makes and models are highly popular on the other side of the peak of the bell curve where the drivers are always hitting the brake way more than the median or average. An ICE Tacoma may very well use way less brake than a EV Altima because the venn-diagram of people who drive like a bat out of hell and the people who buy Tacomas is approximately two circles.

> that makes the brake dust residue comparable to ICE if not worst based on the approximately 30% extra vehicle weight for the battery.

Did you miss pretty much all data on EV brakes, notably that they get used so little they’ll rust to slick and manufacturers have to implement de-rusting cycles to ensure they can actually do something? Your hypothesis is nonsensical on its face. Calling it a hypothesis is insulting. Even to flat earthers.

Your hypothesis has already been tested multiple times. It has always failed.

Much better at what ? Do you have decent data for what it takes (CO2, child labour , cost of supply chain, ...) to make your Lithium based battery VS melting an ICE ? Same question for recycling ? Comparing only the lifecycles of products doesn't make any sense if you don't put in perspective creation & destruction and this is where the massive lie is, no EV constructor has ever been transparent about this because it's overall just way dirtier by no way cleaner !

Extracting rare metals from Africa, sending to China for transformation into batteries and back to US/EU for putting into an EV (that we cannot properly recycle yet) just cannot be cleaner than melting an ICE with processes that are 100+ years old and that can be done locally without the use of ships to make 3 roundabouts on earth.

Yeah established on a truncated view of reality !

Ships are actually much more fuel efficient than trucks, by weight/volume.

Saying it must be inefficient because it includes ship transit instead of trucking "locally" is innumerate.

I'm saying it's inefficient because of a combination of many things not only shipping. Also add to this the fact that your electricity in the US cames from fossil fuel and you'll see how clean your EV is !

From your own source:

> In countries that get most of their energy from burning dirty coal, the emissions numbers for EVs don’t look nearly as good—but they’re still on par with or better than burning gasoline.

Trump's own EPA calls your argument the #1 myth about EVs. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths

Myth #2 numbers from graphical representation are totally off from the 80% initial C02 difference in the MIT study. IDK where these numebrs come from but I'd tend to trust the MIT more than some propaganda from your beloved president.

Same goes for myth#1 IMO numbers are Trump related propaganda and have nothing to do with reality. Furthermore on myth #1 they talk about efficiency of EV vs ICE but totally forget to mention the efficiency of generating that said energy : 33% efficiency for coal based electricity generation VS 90% for petroleum refinement .... In the end when you sum up overall efficiencies are identical so I call bullshit and propaganda ...

Ah, we've journeyed quite a ways from "I'm saying it's inefficient because of a combination of many things" to "when you sum up overall efficiencies are identical" in just one comment!

I also trust MIT more than Trump (I'll trust a poodle over him), especially on EVs. The point is even Trump's loony EPA clearly states they're better for the environment, inclusive of coal power. (Which MIT agrees with; I quoted your source!)

> Ships are actually much more fuel efficient than trucks, by weight/volume.

Ships are indeed more efficient if you look at it on per mile comparison but distances are much bigger. Shipping things from one side of the planet to the other is not something too efficient imo. It's just makes sense if you look at economics and differences in price of labor, regulations and so on but these do have externalities that eventually cancel out the benefits.

> Do you have decent data...?

> just cannot be cleaner...

Someone doesn't!

MIT : https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/are-electric-vehicles-defini...

Quote : This intensive battery manufacturing means that building a new EV can produce around 80% more emissions than building a comparable gas-powered car

Show me anything else if you have ; just don't troll dude...

The very first line of your article says "yes… they more than make up for it by driving much cleaner under nearly any conditions".

It seems you agree with the poster upthread, who stated "much better overall than ICE".

First of all don't forget the important 'Over the course of their driving lifetimes' before your quote; it changes everything. So yeah this MIT article says EV is 80% more CO2 expensive to build but makes up over it's lifetime not quite exatcly what you are saying.

Also this article does not take into account recycling of batteries which is way dirty that recycling ICEs.

And my initial remark was show me data, show me interesting stuff and you just dumbly troll (quoting truncated stuff) on what I have shown you. Nice man, u smart !!!

> it changes everything

It changes nothing. People buy cars to drive them.

> Also this article does not take into account recycling of batteries which is way dirty that recycling ICEs.

I'm sorry you can't be bothered to read your own link. This is in the footnotes as a source for it:

Erik Emilsson and Lisbeth Dahllöf. "Lithium-ion vehicle battery production: Status 2019 on energy use, CO2 emissions, use of metals, products environmental footprint, and recycling." IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, in cooperation with the Swedish Energy Agency, Report C444, November 2019.

'People buy cars to drive them' : how long did you own your last EV car ? enough to pass the limit for the EV to become interesting ? You think all Tesla & BYD owners do that ? Don't think so ! So in the end your ownership (and 95% of the other) of an EV was more CO2 intensive than equivalent ICE because you don't keep it enough to become efficient. And don't talk about second hand use because this is clearly not the way our society is going; it's all about buying new stuff and changing cars every couple of years; huge hyprocrisy when you say that EVs need time to become more efficient than ICE.

'I'm sorry you can't be bothered to read your own link. This is in the footnotes as a source for it:' just click on the damn link, use google trad, find the paper and READ (not just troll as if I didn't) the recycling chapter by yourself ! It does not include real-world data, it's theoretical/research data IF batteries were recycled in EU/US with up to date processes. As of today 2025 all batteries are 'recycled' (joke..) in China/India by underqualified people with a CO2 cost WAY higher and this is NOT taken into account in the study. So yeah I'll say again : real recycling, the one we do right now IS NOT ACCOUNTED FOR !

Useless discussion anyway, you don't add any argument or source, just trolling on my words, nice !

> how long did you own your last EV car ? enough to pass the limit for the EV to become interesting ? You think all Tesla & BYD owners do that ?

Again, I reference your source:

"Yet when the MIT study calculated a comparison in which EVs lasted only 90,000 miles on the road rather than 180,000 miles, they remained 15 percent better than a hybrid and far better than a gas car."

Both of my cars have 100k+ miles on them, with plenty of life left. Modern vehicles seem to do 200-300k miles regularly.

I am not an outlier: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/americ...

"The average age of U.S. cars and light trucks this year rose to a record 12.6 years, according to the report by S&P Global Mobility on Wednesday, up by two months from 2023."

The average American drives 12k miles a year.

I'm not sure why you zeroed in on a source that openly debunks all of your arguments, but I do appreciate the assist.

> slightly higher tire wear (due to weight)

And thus higher tire particle pollution. And it's not slightly, EVs are on average 10-15% heavier than similar ICE vehicles. We've now found that a lot of the various small particle pollution (e.g. in bodies of water) come from tires.

So, while still drastically better than ICEs, they still have externalities (pollution, time wasted in traffic, vehicle accidents) and there should still be efforts to try to reduce the number of cars on the roads instead of just replacing them 1:1 and calling it a day.

I'm sure you feel the same way about cutting down on cell phones right? How about we just let people keep their cars (preferably EVs), but feel free to go live in a dense cell block and eat bug juice if that is what floats your boat.

> feel free to go live in a dense cell block and eat bug juice if that is what floats your boat.

That this is considered a valid response to someone suggesting we need more mass transit is a sign that our discourse has fallen off a cliff. You can and should do better.

Why is it that these "do better" suggestions always feel like an attempt to shut discussion down. Being anti-car does not make you some moral authority

"You want everyone to live in a prison cell and eat nothing but bugs" is not discussion.

It is though. Do better

It's hard to share a cell phone. If there are opportunities to make them more environmentally friendly (longevity, production processes, better batteries, etc.) we should absolutely try to do those things.

EVs are better than ICE cars, but shared-use buses/trains/etc. are often even better. We can do more than one thing.

It's really not hard to share a cell phone, you and eg your spouse could alternate days and have one phone for example. It is just a tradeoff you are not willing to make. But, not having a car is a tradeoff YOU are willing to make so your are ok with pushing it on others.

> But, not having a car is a tradeoff YOU are willing to make so your are ok with pushing it on others.

Nobody is trying to take your car away, you scared person who cannot fathom not being attached to a car.

I'm merely saying there must be alternatives to driving. I don't care what they are, they will be location dependent. If you want to drive, as long as you pay your externalities, nobody cares. But it's fundamentally wrong to gatekeep all of society behind a fundamentally inefficient manner of transport (individual cars). It's wrong socially (no social mobility), it's wrong ecologically (cars are still the most polluting way of transportation, even EVs), it's wrong economically (very inefficient), it's wrong from the amount of people dying from cars, it's wrong on every possible measurable metric.

So, alternatives should be present, so that those that wish to do so, or for whom it's better/faster/more efficient/can't use anything else because of mobility issues/can't afford anything else, they can take them. Bike lanes, trains, buses, whatever, doesn't matter.

Don't be afraid piglet, I won't take your phone. Nobody is trying to outlaw public transport- but there absolutely people advocating for an end to private ownership of cars

> Nobody is trying to outlaw public transport

In Anglophone North America, a lot of people ate trying and succeeding in crippling it to such an extent that only those who literally have no other choice use it.

> there absolutely people advocating for an end to private ownership of cars

A fringe of a fringe, maybe.

> I'm sure you feel the same way about cutting down on cell phones right

How many people die in cell phone accidents yearly where you live? How many have reduced lifespans due to the pollution of cell phones? And how many hours can be saved per year per human with good cell phone sharing? I would guess the number is 0 for all of those, but quite a bit higher for cars alternative transportation options.

If you feel personally offended by the mere idea that there might be alternatives to cars, and that at the scale of a human settlement, they're often better, you need to take a step back and consider why you identify yourself with cars so much. And if that doesn't help, consider that more people having alternatives means less cars on the roads, so more space for you to vroom vroom around and less people bothering you on the road!

Do you have any idea how many hours the average person uses their phone? There is no other object that has been a greater detriment to mental and physical health in human history. This is just another instance where someone is willing to push something (only using public transport) on someone else because it fits their viewpoint, but you can't even consider something that would have a similar impact on yourself in return (giving up your phone).

> Do you have any idea how many hours the average person uses their phone

Irrelevant on the topic of there being more efficient modes of transportation of humans in dense environments.

> There is no other object that has been a greater detriment to mental and physical health in human history

While potentially true, that's entirely ignoring all the extremely useful things people do with their phones.

> only using public transport

The fact that you take a mention of providing alternatives to cars as a stance on "only using public transport" indicates to me that you're not interested in having an actual discussion, and your car is part of your core identity. None of that is healthy, so again, step back and consider the benefits. Even purely selfishly, more people out of cars because they can bike or take the train is better for you because there will be less traffic for you.

For your own mental health, you need to take a breath and try and not take alternative viewpoints as personal attacks. The post I responded to referenced "efforts to try to reduce the number of cars on the roads instead of just replacing them 1:1 and calling it a day." i.e. reducing personal car ownership. Don't ignore the fact that people do extremely useful things with their cars- lifesaving activities. You obviously are attached to your phone, the same way people are attached to their personal cars. A little bit of empathy would go a long way here

> For your own mental health, you need to take a breath and try and not take alternative viewpoints as personal attacks

Like jumping to prison cells and bug juice at the hint of reducing the amount of cars on the roads?

Like taking the logical leap to the conclusion that I identify myself with cars?? Pot meet kettle

After you jumped to bug juice, yes, obviously cars make a big part of your identity.

> How many people die in cell phone accidents yearly where you live?

To be fair: thousands. https://www.ncsl.org/transportation/distracted-driving-cellp...

Tire wear isn't as great -- since tires have a lot of bad polymers in it.. hopefully we can solve that one soon.

For DIY EV conversions (I built some cars) you usually hook up the "regenerate braking" to the brakelight switch.

So as soon as you tap the brake pedal just a little, you start regenerating and see the amps flow back into the battery (I have a little display on my dashboard). Only when you press the pedal further, do you start engaging the friction brakes.

I have no statistics on brake pad differences because we didn't build enough cars/didn't cover enough mileage to measure, but it is obvious that you would cut down on brake pad usage.

Everything I know about EVs and the tech behind it I share on: youtube.com/@foxev-content

With a manual car, it was common to downshift and use the engine to decelerate. I’m wondering if electric vehicles might actually cause a return to a third pedal to re-add some of the fine tuned controls that a manual transmission allowed. Maybe the “downshift” could engage the regen brake specifically.

Some EVs have single pedal mode, where if you let off the gas it will bring you to a complete stop,

Some EVs have that. Anecdotally, once you get used to "one pedal driving" having that sort of control (via extra input mechanisms like steering wheel pedals) is just plain annoying.

Cool idea. Perhaps a better idea would be to borrow from the brake balance adjustment in race cars, wherein an adjuster dial/knob allows the driver to alter the balance between the front vs rear brakes when the brakes are applied (very useful in wet vs dry conditions, high-speed vs low-speed sections, etc.). So, instead of adjusting the F-R brake balance, the dial could adjust the regen-vs-mechanical braking, up to the limit of the batteries to accept power input.

Another way of further reducing brake dust might be to have a higher regen setting that dumps excess power to a heat sink and cooling system, up to its limit before engaging the mechanical brake pads/discs.

Most of the dynamics like that are abstracted away in EVs (i.e. dumbed down) or buried in menus and not readily accessible. I think this is done in part because the majority of people don't know or care about them, and if they were readily accessible would toggle them unknowingly and be confused or upset. In the Nissan Leaf it was done intentionally to make the car feel as much like a traditional ICE as possible.

In the first gen Nissan Leaf you can toggle between two levels of regeneration by toggling "B mode" which mimics automatic transmission car's behavior in "Hill mode" or when disabling "Overdrive". In the Leaf it just increases regeneration strength when you let off the accelerator. Similarly you can adjust the acceleration curve by disengaging "Eco mode".

Turning Eco mode off and Hill mode on makes the Leaf a lot of fun to drive on winding mountain roads. Unfortunately you only get like 15 minutes of drive time...

>>the dynamics like that are abstracted away in EVs (i.e. dumbed down) or buried in menus and not readily accessible.

Exactly, they already do regen first, then mechanical braking, and just hide all the details.

I would like to see those details available so I can tune them (it'd be ok if they put safety limits on where they know the capabilities of the batteries, electronics, etc. far better than I ever could). Just a nice to have...

Pretty much all hybrids already do this, but automatically. When you press the brake pedal, they will command regen first, and only the hydraulic brakes under conditions when regen is not enough.

Series hybrids also have the ability to dump excess power just like you are suggesting as well. Instead of resistor banks (like trains) they often dump energy by using the generator to spin the engine… literally engine braking.

I did this with manual, and my EV does this with a single pedal control. Letting off of the pedal will engage regenerative breaking to the extent that you let off the pedal, it does not engage the brakes. I find that in a lot of city driving I don't need the brakes, but they do work fine when I need them. I really like this functionality. The car can also creep along at 1-2 Mph when necessary - so I don't need brakes to deal with slow traffic. (With a manual, first gear would sometimes suffice for this.)

So the premise in the title of the article does not surprise me, but I thought that the primary pollution complaint about electric vehicles was tire pollution and not brake dust.

I used to do that with a vintage 70's sportscar… later learned that it was pretty bad for the long-term life of the transmission so had to train myself out of it.

It's gentle on the transmission and clutch if you rev match on the downshifts.

Or see the hill coming and downshift before it is needed

Also fun! Half the fun of a manual for me is double-clutching (totally not necessary unless you have no synchros but it's a fun challenge) and nailing the rev-match on a downshift.

'common'? When I was a young'n, I was taught that that was basically an emergency procedure to use if the brakes failed, to force the car to slow down. I can't imagine wanting to do that routinely.

If you drive down any significant hill, you either use engine braking, or you overheat your brakes. It's a fairly basic part of driving tuition and the driving test for a good reason.

When I visited a nearby observatory it was fun driving on the mountain and seeing the signs telling you to use engine braking on the way down and trying it for the first time.

?! - I'm clearly missing something because I'm failing to understand how people don't know about engine braking or have just tried it for the first time, and actually have a licence. It's approximately lesson number four in typical driving tuition.

My car (an old Jetta) lasted ~20 years and was still good to go when I got rid of it. Only the body itself had any issues. I suppose the use would vary based on terrain? It was useful to get to a gear with more torque for taking off again. And I guess you’re not doing it from really high revs — so it was just using the engine to slow things

My Bolt has a hand paddle behind the steering wheel that engages regenerative brakes (and only the regenerative brakes). I make use of it extensively. When in "single pedal" (where the accelerator acts as a speed selector, i.e., the car brakes when you step off the 'gas'), it's a lot more aggressive than just lifting my foot off the pedal, and when in "simulate an automatic transmission" 2 pedal mode, I find the paddle is easier than figuring out exactly where the threshold is on my brake pedal between regen and friction brakes.

I love my bolt, but I wish it allowed you to choose a less aggressive setting when using the steering wheel paddle. My old leaf had that option.

Was it that common? Where I’m from that’s “winter driving mode” because it’s safer on slippery surfaces, but rarely anyone would do that in the summer time.

My EV is set on max regen mode though, and I sometimes drive without pressing the brakes, as there’s a paddle I can use to use regen for all my braking needs bar an emergency. It even has a name - single pedal driving.

Can't speak to if it's common, but it was how I was taught and drove in California... so there was rarely any winter conditions to speak of.

I preferred downshifting VS braking, personally

Some vehicles repurpose shift paddles as a way to trigger regen braking. But they're pretty gimmicky and not really useful for driving. If you want to use regen in a vehicle that supports it, the brake pedal does that. And when regen is not enough, the hydraulic brakes are also used. But a "sometimes brake" pedal that only support regen sounds like a bad idea. Vehicle controls as essential as braking need to be consistant in how they respond to input behavior.

I've been driving a Chevy Bolt for over 8 years now, and I regularly use the regen paddle. I drive in "L" mode, which engages partial regen when the accelerator is released. When I need more slowing, I pull the paddle, and that increases the aggressiveness of the regen. I only press the brake for quick stops, or to hold the car once it has stopped.

I also use the built in "hilltop reserve" feature, which limits charging to 90%. This ensures that there is always regen resistance, and therefore a consistent experience.

The bolt EUV has a paddle on the wheel above the turn signal stalk that is used to invoke regen braking in normal drive mode, and when used in one-pedal drive mode adds an extra bit of regen without having to use the brake pedal. It also doubles to cancel cruise control. It's in the perfect location too. And it feels very well blended, precise, constant, and smooth.

Every other EV should have this. I often get EV rental Hyundais, which have 4 levels of iPedal - 3 regen levels and "max" aka one-pedal drive. They're managed by paddle shifters on the wheel. They don't default back to one pedal and any extra re-gen is still managed by the brake pedal.

I googled to find a link to share in this comment to discover how much love (or superiority complex) the chevy regen paddle has -- https://www.chevybolt.org/threads/regen-paddle-the-superior-...

An an EV owner, I can testify that the tyre wear more than makes up for the reduction in brake dust. I’ve had to change tyres every 10K miles.

We went 70,000 km on our first set.

Are you constantly accelerating quickly? Haven't had this experience.

From the article:

> "Even when summing up emissions from tires, brakes, and road wear, BEVs produce 38% less particulate pollution than gas-powered cars before even considering their lack of tailpipe emissions."

Presumably this is a joke. Mine lasted 5 years, 50k miles.

No, it’s not a joke. EVs are heavier vehicles, and it’s common for EV owners to have to change tires much more frequently.

https://www.cars.com/articles/do-evs-wear-through-tires-more...

It's only common because Tesla is popular. Other brands put reasonable tires on.

Anecdotally, I own a Kia EV6, and had to get new tires within two years, under 20k miles.

I leave it in eco mode, so acceleration is nerfed, too.

We’ll see how long the new set of Michelin Defenders last.

Some models of the EV6 come with Pilot Sport 4S tires which is absurd.

I have a model 3 and still running my original set of summer and set of winter tires. 6+ years. I just don't put pedal to metal every time I accelerate.

The tires that came on my Kia EV9 are bad in several dimensions (Kumho Crugen HP71) -- poor longevity, poor winter performance. People seem to get 15-20,000 miles out of them. (I replaced them with CrossClimate2s.)

I assumed instead they were soft compound tires with a low treadwear number. Nice for "sport" driving but they wear very quickly.

All the people claiming EVs wear tires faster probably don't have the slightest idea that tires even have treadwear ratings. That coupled with the total uselessness of personal anecdotes...

Performance oriented EVs, just like performance oriented ICE cars, are going to have softer, stickier tires that wear faster.

> Performance oriented EVs, just like performance oriented ICE cars, are going to have softer, stickier tires that wear faster.

brtkwr has a Kia Niro, not a Taycan. It's not a performance vehicle.

That said, I agree he's likely got tires with shit longevity.

Do you accelerate with full power every time or something?

What are you doing to your tires that they only last 10k miles? I think that might be a driver error issue, because my EV (a heavier sedan) basically never needed tire replacement barring me running over a screw or something.

Just normal driving, it wasn’t quite so bad on our previous car which was a Nissan Leaf (with 30kWh battery) but our current Kia Niro just has a lot bigger batter (64kWh) and it is a lot heavier I suppose, the tyres just don’t seem to last as long. I’m pretty sure I’m using summer tyres all year round (I live in the UK) this was recommended by the dealer

Some tyre compounds wear a lot faster than others (though often with better grip). I wonder if that's contributing.

The other thing is poor alignment (especially toe settings) which cause the tyres to fight each other constantly. It can be a very small difference, almost imperceptible but still accelerate the wear.

10k miles is very short for a tyre.

Often you can tell a lot from the tyre temperature after a drive: if they're getting very warm, it can indicate problems, e.g. if one axle has much warmer tyres than the other (hard to give an objective standard on that, though, so many factors)

Aren’t higher speed rated tires softer? Maybe try swapping for a lower speed rating unless they plan on driving it at extreme speeds.

I have the Hyundai Kona, which I'm pretty sure is just their version of the Nero (same 64kWh battery at least). I'm on my original tires after 44k miles.

I also have a Kona and I had to replace mine at around 30k.

My numbers are probably better than average since, living in a rural area, a lot of my driving is either freeway or long stretches of rural road without many stops, so I do less accelerating/decelerating/turning corners than someone driving in a city, which, as many people point out in this thread, is where most of the wear happens. Your experience is probably more typical than mine is, but even yours is a heck of a lot different than every 10k miles.

Are you driving fast(er than with a ICE vehicle) in corners? Since EVs have a very low center of mass, drivers tend to take corners a lot faster than they would in ICE vehicles which is very hard on the tires.

A friend got hit by this as well and since readjusting his driving style (read: not flying through corners for the fun of it) he gets more (but still not equal) miles on his EV's tires before he needs new ones.

I'm sorry but I've got two EVs and I'm not seeing anything like what you're reporting. On my first set of tires for a model S I got 60k miles which is longer than I usually like to run tires but they were still in good shape. My driving pattern is about 80% grandpa-mode and 20% speeding to loud music.

I assure you. If your EV tires are only lasting 10K miles you have one of the following cases:

- You are driving VERY aggressively

- Your car has an alignment issue or some sort of torque vectoring problem

- Your tires are absolute shit

He (like me) is in the UK - unless you go for a brand name, many of the tyres people run here are low quality import tyres - while 10k is low, my ICE has occasionally only got 20k from a set, but that is mainly due to the tyres cracking from sun damage (still got over 4 year out of them before that happened).

Cheap tyres are often a bad investment, but I drive country lanes with a higher risk of punctures and I was burning through brand name tyres, a full set is worth more than my car!

Mine lasted 11k km before I was seeing interleave.

Alignment is fine, had it checked when I had a new set of continentals fitted.

My problem is purely that I drive like an asshole, on very windy, empty roads. Every day is track day.

Decent tyres, too, continentals - soft compound, hard roads. Means it corners like a dream right up until the tyres are bald.

remember, your regenerative braking comes at cost of tire life.

If driving Tesla, you can reduce the regenerative breaking from Maximum setting to Medium.

this will reduce regeneration and will increase the "breaking distance" when you just let go of accelerator pedal.

but it will increase your tire life significantly.

also make sure to buy the "commuter tire" models - tires with high mileage warranty (50k miles+) and harder compound. Even if it wears out faster, tire manufacturer's warranty will make up for it by giving you discount for the replacement tire purchase

Huh? What do you imagine is the tradeoff between regenerative braking and tire life? Are you suggesting that stopping the car with conventional iron brakes is somehow easier on the tires?

the level of regenerative braking directly impacts your accelerator pedal behavior.

by reducing regeneration, you will increase tire life by virtue of modifying your acceleration behavior. Its hard for me to explain, but I just suggest trying the medium regenerative setting and you will see it yourself.

You will feel it, because the most of the tire wear happens when car decelerates. On less regeneration your car will decelerate less and will wear out tires slower

That's a whole lot of assumptions based on what?

I could come up with a list of plausible sounding reasons why regenerative braking leads to less tire wear. Unless you have some actual measurements, I wouldn't trust either one.

I'm reading it as referring to a setting where the car will brake some amount (instead of coasting) if you completely let go of the pedals, and as being a claim that the commenter can't maintain speed but gets stuck in a cycle of accelerating and then letting the car brake.

I've never driven an EV, only a hybrid a few times, but I thought for all cars with aggressive regenerative brake settings, you just kept the accelerator pedal slightly depressed to coast.

I use one peddle driving all the time and manage to keep a steady speed as I'm doing it. Why would you be constantly taking your foot off the accelerator unless you need to slow down?

I'll also throw another anecdote in for this thread, 500hp EV, 50k miles on the tyres.

most of the tire wear happens when car decelerates

Is this generally true? I imagine it depends on the car/driver to a certain extent, but still I'd be curious what numbers are out there.

when car decelerates, the kinetic energy has to go somewhere, large part of it goes to battery as regeneration (60%), the rest goes to tire/road friction and wear

That doesn't answer my question even a little bit.

From the physics perspective, where does kinetic energy go in E=1/2mv^2 ?

Up to 60% goes back to battery, part goes to air resistance and rolling tire resistance (can be ignored for our case as its the same regardless of regen setting), the rest goes to friction of tire/road due to slowing down tire speed

Your claim was that most of the tire wear for cars was due to deceleration. Acceleration could be to blame too. I asked for a source for your claim, not math equations.

No one is debating that deceleration results in tire wear.

The two claims you've made are that deceleration results in more tire wear than acceleration, and that regenerative deceleration results in more tire wear than non-regenerative deceleration. These are what people are questioning you about.

acceleration is irrelevant because you need to accelerate to move regardless.

what is relevant to prolong the tire lifetime is reducing the unnecessary tire friction against the road.

There is constant component that depends on the weight * velocity * mileage - you gonna encounter it in all scenarios

There is also a variable component that is driven by 1st derivative of speed (rate of acceleration/deceleration).

The high regeneration allows you faster acceleration/deceleration, but medium/lower will (1) change your driving behavior so that you accelerate more smoothly, and (2) change your deceleration so that you coast more and decelerate less

remember, car's kinetic energy is not a perfect energy storage, so that you could freely move energy from battery into car speed, and regenerate it back into battery.

apart from air resistance, there is 60% loss on the way back + tire wear penalty depending on accel/decel curve (1st speed derivative)

remember, your regenerative braking comes at cost of tire life.

No, it doesn’t. The tires don’t care if it’s the car’s motor slowing things down, or some friction material grabbing a disc.

I guess they are saying that the sharper braking curve that is default on Teslas is going to cause more wear than a slower braking curve. The logic makes sense, but I have some doubt's that sharp regen breaking is more to blame for tire wear vs. Sharp manual braking and acceleration.

Some EVs have low rolling resistance tires to increase the range. I think they will wear out faster, especially if cornering sharply.

I heard Kia Niro has the front wheel drive issue and the tires wear on the front very fast. So you should swap front wheels and rear wheels every year to get best wear result. I drive very poorly and fast, but usually mid-range tires last for at least 30k miles on different cars.

This is known as rotating tires, and is a good idea to do periodically for other reasons as well.

The additional battery weight would be something under 250kg (having handled a few Leaf battery packs), and wikipedia says the Niro EV is about 1700kg

I too am UK based, but I have a Zoe, which is not as heavy as the NEO.

But my inlaw has a neo from new and hasn't replaced the tyres yet, and hes an auto obsessive. He lives in the midlands and drives 18k a year.

Perhaps do an advanced driving class? Assuming no mechanical issues the next place to look is your driving. 10k is way too low, something is not right.

10k per set of tires seems like a high "smiles per gallon" number to me.

The factory fitment LEAF tires seem to be made of cast iron, based on the unimpressive levels of cornering grip but also on their impressive long-wearing nature.

I'm likely to end up replacing mine based on age-related degradation rather than wear.

Either you're lying about your driving habits, or there's something wrong with your car.

I've got a Model 3 Performance which came with the Michelin Pilot Sport 4 tires which are only warrantied for 30,000 miles. I had them for 5 years and 35,000 miles and they STILL had plenty of tread left. I had to replace them anyways because I hit a nasty pothole that caused the tread to separate.

I can roach a set of economy tires in 20k but I slide through four ramps a day if there's no traffic. I can see someone in something modern that has 3x the power, 1.5 the weight and takes a way softer lower profile tire roaching them in less.

Lower profile rims also beat up tires way harder if you drive hard because the lack of sidewall flex lets you put more force to the ground which has to go through the tread of the tire to get there.

Modern tires for modern cars also bias toward soft and high wearing because there's pretty much no other way to keep higher end vehicles stuck to the ground with the power to weight they're making these days.

EV owners aren’t exactly rare around these parts. Neither are people who drive cars of a similar weight, such as midsize SUVs.

There’s no good reason why you should be changing your tires at 10k miles.

When you can see interleave that’s a good reason to change your tyres. My stock tyres on a model Y lasted 11,000km - but my daily drive is a tortured ribbon of tarmac with nothing but corners.

I don’t know what interleave means in your country but the way to measure tire wear is replace when tread depth gets below 1.6 mm.

Next time get tires with a 50k mile warranty, like Pirelli Scorpions.

Interleave is the woven metal below the rubber.

This is not at all my experience after 2.5 years and 20,000km. It’s kinda obvious that it’s completely up to the driver.

Rivian?

If you're on a Tesla, it might be because of incorrectly set cambers out of the factory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1kdxm5cKfA

There is something seriously wrong with your tires if that's actually the case. I drive a pretty heavy EV myself (an AWD ID.4) and your wear is ludicrous.

How is tire wear related to the method of power? It could be a steam engine for all it mattered.

Accelerating and decelerating, in regards to the tire, don't care what is causing the force.

It's related to vehicle weight, electric cars can be significantly heavier.

My understanding is a model X is 20% heavier than a similar size mid-range suv like a telluride, which I would consider the same size SUV.

The Model X's curb weight ranges from 5,148 lbs to 5,531 lbs, while the Telluride's curb weight falls between 4,112 lbs and 4,482 lbs.

Model X is somewhat smaller than a Telluride, but close enough.

Mass. Electric cars are much heavier. F=ma.

For tire degradation I believe it's actually something like the 4th power of the mass, same as for roads.

The tire isn't constant like a road is though. Tires intended for bigger heavier vehicles get harder rubbers.

If the steam engine were to stop faster then it would put more wear on the tires. Imagine if it were floating through space. You hit the brakes. Did it help?

The tires are doing the stopping. As you said the engine is the part that doesn't matter. But if it increases the stopping power, it's doing that by increasing the load on the tires.

To be fair EV's can have some very high initial torque delivery, and are heavy = tyre shredding beasts.

I know I know, people aren't supposed to be taking off from every light at full chat, but, given the capability some people can't help themselves.

The biggest problem for new EV drivers, in my view, is that EVs generally have extremely good traction control systems that prevent chirping due to the ability to cut back power to the motors much more quickly than you can with a gas engine.

What this means is that you can push tires to the absolute limit and not chirp them (which, is best for traction anyways) which absolutely roasts them. Most people associate chirp = too fast, but with EVs you can never hear a chirp even when you stomp on the accelerator so they might think everything is ok.

Nobody should be shredding a set of tires in 10k miles in any EV unless they’re super low tread wear (poor tire choice, hard to do that bad), there’s an issue with the car suspension, or they’re just being idiots.

I went through my first set of tires in 10k miles. By doing car racing (on official tracks!) every month or so.

Though it might fall under the "being idiot" category.

I guess I should have caveated it as 'you won't go through a set of tires in 10k miles unknowningly'.

If you're track racing, it should be obvious you'll blow through a set of tires much faster than the treadwear ratings would suggest.

You can absolutely get them to chirp, you just have to be, uh, brave. Or stupid. I deposited my tyres along my daily commute over four months - it’s like having one of those racing line markers in a game.

Although I may drive a bit more sensibly for now as €4K a year on tyres wasn’t in my budget.

That’s very likely due to the tyres having less tread depth - a common trick with EV tyres to reduce rolling resistance. Michelins are the main culprit.

Of course the tyre companies love that little trick as they can pretend they are being green while selling more tyres.

Always check how much tyre you’re buying

I have a 2019 model 3. 200,000 miles. I'm about on my 3rd set of tires.

Are you racing? I haven’t had to change our tires on our EV for 30k miles (we just hit that on the odometer; these are dealer tires).

There are three things at play here:

- evs have a reputation for fast acceleration, and many drivers use it. More wear.

- evs are heavy due to large batteries trying to match ICE range. More wear.

- evs often come with low friction tires to improve range, they wear faster

The second two issues should gradually go away as battery (and charging) tech improves.

Low friction tires wear slower, not faster, on account of being ... Low friction. Friction is what wears tires.

> Low friction tires wear slower, not faster, on account of being ... Low friction. Friction is what wears tires.

They're not low friction tires, they're low rolling resistance tires.

Friction relates to the grip, rolling resistance relates to the heat generated by the deformation of the tire. A less compliant, often narrower tire may wear faster than a more compliant wider one.

It depends.

"Tyres account for about a fifth of the energy required to power a car. They provide friction, so that the vehicle can grip the road, but some of the power supplied to the tyres is then lost as heat. Indeed, Michelin, a French tyremaker, estimates that this “rolling resistance” accounts for 4% of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions. Tyre designers have therefore sought to improve fuel economy by reducing rolling resistance. However, this not only reduces a tyre's ability to grip, making drivers take corners sideways, it also wears out the tyres more rapidly."

from: https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2009/12/02/ro...

without login: https://archive.is/TiIUk

>They're not low friction tires, they're low rolling resistance tires.

Those two attributes are pretty decently tied together, can't get one attribute maxed out without a solid showing of the other.

Sure, but how big is your contact patch? They’re low friction for a reason.

> low friction tires to improve range, they wear faster

Some of the lowest rolling resistance tires also last 80k+ miles. It's not a tradeoff in the way you're claiming.

Mine did more than 25,000, just get better tyres. The basic premise is that EVs are heavier and have more torque than average cars, but it's a 20% difference in real life, so your tyres may last 20% less.

Is it a linear relationship?

I know road damage is far higher (fourth power of weight) so maybe wear on tires is also worse than linear?

heavier vehicles are also worse in many other ways (e.g. less safe for pedestrians, require more space for parking,...) and we really should be encouraging smaller vehicles.

Don’t accelerate like a maniac.

Switch tire brand and type or get some advice. Whatever you are currently getting isn't the right tire for your car, obviously. You should be seeing much longer lives for your tires. Even with an EV. So, something is off.

And tires of course aren't created equally. There are many different types of tires and they are optimized for different circumstances. If you mismatch your tires to e.g. weather conditions, you are going to have issues. Not just with EVs, but with any car.

Agreed parent needs to get advice from 2/3 different tyre shops. Changing tyres every 10k means something is wrong.

That or just slow down. I swear 90% of the people that complain of tire wear drive oblivious and are flooring it after every stop. Even a Kia Beri which what the parent has, has more kick than a ICE.

Maybe, I think the tyre shop is encouraging premature tyre changes. My local tyre shop recommends changing the tyres at 3.9mm. The tyre’s data sheet says it’s ok down to 1.6mm. You’re wasting 2.3mm of tyre, which is 30% of the life of the tyre.

That’s not normal. You’re either doing something incredibly wrong or you’re changing your tires when you don’t need to.

I'm not sure I can agree with this. I have 2 EVs, and the tire looks almost brand new after like 10k miles. I think the driving habits matter more than whether the car is EV or not.

It's probably the specific tire being awful, or alignment.

I have 42k km / 26k miles on the tires Tesla equipped me with and they are in good condition.

I own one EV, at 40k miles, and have had to change the tires only once so far, and even that was more because of damage to one that required replacement than due to excessive tire wear.

I can vouch for the very low brake pad usage as well.

The article says that even including tire and road wear, EVs generate 38% less particulate pollution than ICE cars before considering the lack of tailpipe emissions.

But tires are black, and black carbon has additional climate effects — even once the aerosol lands, it can still have effects like black carbon on snow.

On that topic, Norwegians have been reporting that the piles of snow at the sides of their roads are noticeable cleaner since EV adoption took off.

It's not like brake dust is white...

Guess what comes out of petrol and diesel exhaust? Guess what color brake dust is. I guarantee the EV is going to be a lot cleaner.

Wonder what that ratio will be when battery tech advances enough that BEVs weigh the same as, and eventually less than, ICE cars.

> An an EV owner, I can testify that the tyre wear more than makes up for the reduction in brake dust

How could you possibly measure that just from your personal experience?

Sounds more like a wild guess that is in contradiction with actual studies.

>How could you possibly measure that just from your personal experience?

Simple napkin math by comparing longevity of parts with volume of parts consumed.

Sure, but your personal experience could very easily be on the higher end of the distribution. You simply CANT confirm something like that based on personal experience. Either your personal experience lines up with some statistical fact or it doesn’t, either way, without the proper statistical context it’s borderline useless.

Sure, but if the napkin math spits out results orders of magnitude higher than reasonable personal variance then you're still on the way to a decent answer.

FWIW I think the qualitative difference between tire and brake dust is going to mean a lot more than individual variance.

I wonder if you got unlucky with tires. Seems some mfgs are playing with new recipes and eco friendly ingredients causing the tires to dramatically miss their stated lifetime. My last tires were Michelin Defender somethings from Costco and they lasted about half the expected mileage even with regular rotation and proper inflation.

I think there might be something peculiar about the driving or environment. I have put 50,000 miles on my EV over the course of a few years and only changed the tires twice in that time. The car is MOT-tested every year so I have precise measurements of tread.

You are an anomaly. The overwhelming majority of EV drivers say their tyres last very long.

I was just reading an article where an electric car had the original brakes on it for 250k miles

I am firmly in the camp that problems like these have less to do with being an EV and more to do with one of the following:

1) Aggressive driving which is easier to do in a number of EVs due to instant torque. 2) tire compound, a lot of oem tires are soft 3) something wrong with the cars drivetrain or suspension.

10k is comically low, my model y oem tires lasted to 30k before tread depth passed the safety threshold. I also keep it in chill mode.

In four years of plug-in hybrid ownership, and maybe 50k miles, I haven’t even had to replace pads, and the car wasn’t new when I bought it. I even commented on the longevity at the dealership the last time I took it for a service, and they said they see it a lot with hybrids. The regen braking really does make a huge difference.

Is 50k a lot? I drove my ford fiesta 120k without changing the pads. I'm certain the motor helps, but assuming it's a relatively lightweight vehicle I don't think you should be changing pads that much unless you're an aggressive driver

> aggressive driver

Hi.

Although I’d call it spirited rather than aggressive. I’m not out to intimidate people or drive dangerously: but when I have the space and time I enjoy throwing a car around.

From what I've heard there's a countervailing effect for EVs, though - they end up generating more particulate pollution from tire wear because of greater vehicle weight and greater torque.

The number that I've seen bandied about is ~20% greater tire wear.

That was my first thought. Fewer brake particles is great, but I’m guessing it won’t be enough to counter the increased tire wear.

Not sure about that. If you accelerate a 2t vehicle to 60mph and then decelerate it back to 0mph then they would stress the tyres in the same way, no matter if you do EV & regen, EV no-regen or ICE, right? (I am keeping the weight constant).

Prompted by your comment I had a look at vehicle weights and two facts stood out

- ALL new cars are getting heavier EVERY YEAR because we keep adding more stuff (average car weight, and average SUV weight trend upwards from 2016 to 2023)

- The average electric car is heavier than a petrol equivalent but is lighter than an SUV

Weight certainly a problem, but the focus on EVs for weight is generally blown out of proportion.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-13588773/Ne... https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/weighty-issue-of-e...

They address this briefly in the article (though inadequately) , that tire particles are heavier and doesn’t end up in the air like brake dust.

But you do raise a good point at the holistic condition, and assessing a broader population with less than ideal configuration.

They are looking at lightweight EVs at lower speeds. But Americans drive heavier EVs at highway speeds. The rotors & pads are huge.

> They are looking at lightweight EVs at lower speeds. But Americans drive heavier EVs at highway speeds. The rotors & pads are huge.

Perhaps other EV drivers can chime in but, if anything, I think I use my friction brakes less at highway speeds where, in general, you're not really supposed to do a lot of braking. I'd say, overall and regardless of speed, my friction brakes are really used only to bring the car to a complete stop or for emergency braking to avoid a potential accident.

> Perhaps other EV drivers can chime in but, if anything, I think I use my friction brakes less at highway speeds where, in general, you're not really supposed to do a lot of braking. I'd say, overall and regardless of speed, my friction brakes are really used only to bring the car to a complete stop or for emergency braking to avoid a potential accident.

Some people are very responsible with money - they have an emergency fund, contribute to their retirement fund, and don't carry a credit card balance.

Other people (who have a choice) spend to 0 every month, don't save, and have maxed out credit cards.

In the same way, some people drive very safely; they keep a responsible distance between them and the driver in front of them, and don't tend to speed much. I think this style of driving would naturally lead to what you say - less use of friction breaks in general, and especially at highway speeds.

And other people are constantly speeding, and tailgate the person in front of them when their path is blocked. For the people who drive this way, the greater acceleration of EVs just lets them drive that much more recklessly. Which ends up necessitating even more usage of friction brakes.

I'm one of the chill EV drivers too. but imagine the distribution over vehicles that are 30-75% heavier, and the range of drivers from chill to agro (leaning toward agro), and you can see the benefits and costs start to cancel out.

I still expect EVs to be a net improvement on brake dust. just not as massive as the study. maybe about 1/2 - 1/3 of the study's results

We should obviously ban combustion engine cars, at least starting with cities. I can’t think of a single clearer win for air quality.

I would love to have gone electric (bought a car in September) but I rent and don't have any way to charge at my residence. How do we solve the renters-that-cant-charge-their-cars problem?

And everyone you ask has a slightly different situation so no generic solution does it. We’ll have to spend some money and retrofit at least where possible. We’ll need free level 2 chargers wherever people congregate. And folks will probably have to adapt their expectation toward mobility in a way. Things change.

All our local Tesla drivers park their cars partially blocking the alleyway each evening.

They can't make it into their garages on the narrow road, and there are no curb side plugs in the front (NEC safety rules.) Funny until the Garbage truck rage mashes the horn at 6am... lol =3

Public EV chargers are pretty widespread nowadays. Not as much as gas chargers obviously, but for most people in the country if you don't have a way to charge at home it's not fundamentally that different from not having a gas pump at your house.

Plus, most people can charge at home with an extension cord. It's not particularly fast, but you should be able to get 4-5 miles an hour. In the worst case scenario where you can only charge at home and can only charge for 10 hours overnight, that's still 40 miles of driving which is enough for a lot of commuters. Even if it falls short—again—you can use public chargers.

Lastly, eliminating the sale of ICE cars will be a pretty rapid forcing function on the deployment of EV chargers. Still, I'd be all for locations that ban combustion engines mandating that landlords provide EV charging facilities.

Popularity has costs, some are waiting in line for 45 minutes to use a fast charger.

EV is not for everyone, but those Rivian are nice though. =3

Well given Rivians rank among the worst EVs in the world efficiency-wise, maybe if you care about not spending your life at charging stations, don't buy a Rivian? Or a Tesla for that matter, since Tesla lies about their efficiency numbers and the real-world numbers are middling at best.

It is the low temperature performance that make most EV impractical. A Tesla power pack heater means the charge will be completely depleted if left outdoors for more than a week in winter.

EV are meant for people that live in 4'C to 42'C weather, and have excess capacity on their solar installations. Everyone else is getting subsidized by their neighbors paying for excess electrical capacity. =3

Someone needs to tell all those people in Norway.

NY and Chicago are a little closer... =3

Walmart has some gigantic amount of sites under construction or in permitting at many of their stores, and many are being built by other operators too. Charging proliferation hasn't slowed down.

Indeed, the entire community is paying to upgrade the grid to support that infrastructure. =3

> Not as much as gas chargers

In the UK at least, there are more EV chargers than gas/petrol stations: https://www.vertumotors.com/news/there-are-more-charging-poi...

Also after you divide the amount of time required? So if an average charging session is 100 minutes and getting petrol is 5 minutes, you'd need 20 times more chargers to break even on availability. And I'm not sure that even works the same when considering that these events are probably bursty (most people will arrive at an energy station at a similar time of day)

In case it sounds like I'm gas station lobby: I'm not against EVs at all and don't own a car, I'm just wondering if this is a fair comparison

I don't think it even includes the ones at people's homes where probably "most" charging happens. No one has a gas station at home.

FWIW a fast charge is like 10-15 mins usually while you grab a coffee or something - in modern EV cars you have 100-200kw (or more!) charging where you can get like 400 or 500 miles in an hour, so 15mins gives you 100-125 miles extra range etc. If you time it, filling up a gas tank and going in to pay and all that is not like 40 seconds but more in the 5-10 mins mark, so 15 mins top up on a longer journey is not that much longer than filling up.

It's a bit of a different mentality really - with petrol/gas I'd fill up to the brim then drive until I was almost empty, but with an EV I wake up with a full tank and just do a quick top off here and there during the day (assuming I ever need it which 99% of the time I don't) until I can get home and charge overnight where is way way cheaper.

With petrol I'd never stop to just put in a few litres at a time, but doing it with an EV is so simple and easy, and you can go do something else while it's happening. Picking up some groceries, getting a coffee, bio break etc - perfect time for a top up

Only a tiny fraction of EV chargers are 100+ kW. Most are 10-20 kW. These are great for office parking garages or shopping malls, but stopping at one for 15 minutes gets you nowhere.

Well if you have a Tesla, I believe you can sit in it and it offers games to play on its iPad to kill the time.

Everytime I fill my truck up, I’m at the gas station thinking “man, I wish I could just hang out here for two hours!!”

I’m keeping my Tacoma forever

Used vehicles are about to be where it is at.

The tracking, the module security lockdown, and that in a couple years particulate filter systems like DEF for diesel that everyone just loves… is coming to petrol by regulation.

More like 20 minutes, but ok, not everyone likes that.

what happens when there's more people that need 20 minutes? it takes me less than five to pull up, fill up, and go. when the gas station is packed, i might have to wait 4-5 minutes for my turn.

Now quadruple this.

"super extra 1gigawatt charging" isn't coming to my area, potentially ever. Afaik there's two "super chargers" in my metro area, both at dealerships. i've actually never seen a Tesla charger in person.

With home charging, I'm almost never charging anywhere else. Maybe a few times a year when doing a longer trip. I just drive, and plug the charger in some times when I get home. I literally never think about range or having to drive a detour to fill it up.

But you have to do that probably weekly. And then also spend a lot of money while doing it. It seems you believe those driving EVs are "suckers", but do you realize you probably spend hours and hours more in a year going to the station and pump compared to most EV owners never having to do that in their daily life?

what about people who live in apartment buildings or houses where they have to park on the street?

Why is your civic infrastructure so crippled? I'm not sure if I'd trust driving over bridges or drinking water in a municipality which is incapable of installing electric plugs.

Not everywhere on the planet is huge metros with millions of people.

for instance, my nearest gas station is 2 miles away. The nearest place to actually buy fresh food is a 36 mile round trip.

furthermore calling the gigawatt charging stations "electric plugs" is real disingenuous.

20 minutes to get you home if there is a free charger, ok.

Zero to a hundred, you know that isn’t even remotely true.

My cheap EV gets 200+ km of range (124 mi) from 20 minutes of charging. Again, why the hell are you talking about two hours. Why are you saying that 20 minutes gets you "home". Why are you talking about charging from 0 to 100 % when that's NOT how you charge an EV, ever. Sounds like you've never driven one.

No. It doesn’t.

Your display says that. And your display is bullshit.

I work with the people that make the displays man. There are entire groups dedicated to deciding what is indefensible lies, and what “could be true under the right circumstances so we’re allowed to say/show that”

> Why are you talking about charging from 0 to 100 % when that's NOT how you charge an EV,

lol, go to a charging station sometime and see the people sleeping or watching tv. If it’s your primary vehicle and you want to go somewhere, you are going from 0 to 100.

> Your display says that. And your display is bullshit.

I don't know what to tell you. I drive a MG4 with a 64 kWh battery. My average consumption is usually between 14-15 kWh/100 km (I don't drive very fast on freeways), which means that a full battery gets me a bit over 400 km, which is the actual range I can get fro the car. It charges at 135 kW for a large part of the battery capacity and 20 minutes of charging gives me more than 50 % of the capacity, hence more than 200 km.

> lol, go to a charging station sometime and see the people sleeping or watching tv

I live in Prague, Czech Republic, in Europe. I don't see people sleeping or watching TV at charging stations, because there's a ton of them and they're in convenient places. I have never waited for an empty spot, not a single minute. I park my car on the street, I'm entirely reliant on public infrastructure and it works well.

> If it’s your primary vehicle and you want to go somewhere, you are going from 0 to 100.

My EV is my only vehicle and I only charge it to 100 % when I need the battery to balance (which my car only does at 100 %), i.e once every month or so. Again, with a working charging network and a reasonably modern EV, you can just start driving and charge when necessary (for 15 minutes or so).

fwiw this just depends a lot on the OEM. All OEMs have a non-trivial mapping of assumed energy content to shown percentage, in part because that's just not trivial to do, in part psychology. (The same is true for fuel gauges). Some brands manipulate the consumption numbers a lot (iirc - Tesla fudges the numbers the most e.g. they don't count energy consumption when not moving).

For most the consumption of an EV is shown rather accurately and is really just (energy drawn from the HV battery as measured by the BMS, which is generally very accurate for safety reasons) divided by (kilometers driven in the current interval).

As far as I know nobody includes charging losses in the readout. Personally I think this is correct for range estimation purposes. If you're swinging at a cost perspective, this of course means you're going to always miss around 3-20% depending on charging method, temperatures, car model etc. (there are fairly significant differences in OBC efficiency across models and also across AC power, low power charging gets inefficient quickly, while 7-11 kW often gets you north of 90%. DCFC is usually more efficient accounting-wise, because fast chargers bill for DC energy, not AC energy, so DC conversion losses aren't on the bill in the first place, though I assume DC chargers are also more efficient at power conversion than OBCs in general).

Your Tesla has an iPad? Or you're saying someone sitting in a car can play on an iPad if they have one?

You could possibly have come to an arrangement about getting a 50 Amp (think dryer plug) hookup in the garage and provided your own charger. Also depending on your driving patterns a trickle charger in a 20 Amp socket may have worked for you as well. Mine takes about 48 hours for a full charge on the trickle charger.

There's no garage, and the only driveway-facing outlet is at the front door - opposite where my parking spot is allocated (an extension cord would have to go under/through the landlord's cars.) I have to drive 60km to work every day.

Only laws (accommodate EVs and/or WFH) or spending time sitting at a gas station will help me here. No landlord is interested in accommodating an EV unless it's a net benefit to them (and thus a net negative to me, who already spends 40% income just to have a place to work.)

... to live, not work. I can't edit comments from Harmonic.

Sorry to hear that.

Maybe it's possible to rent a cheap parking spot with charger elsewhere and take a tram/metro/bus/bicycle/scooter for the last ten minutes of distance as you get deeper into the city?

Having a car right out one's door is a real luxury though, no more than two steps through any weather. I can see the appeal, just not sure if the collective downsides are worth it compared to arranging good transport inside of, and between, cities. Outside of populated areas, yeah, whatcha gonna do, but at least inside of major settlements we ought to be able to get this done (in many cities it's already okay to not have a car, but imo the facilities to get to the countryside are relatively annoying and needlessly expensive)

I’m in the same situation, but I did go electric. I’m in a bigger city in Europe and the public infrastructure here is adequate and reliable. I rarely have to wait for the car to finish charging, it mostly fits my usage.

Why renters? I own but I still wouldn't have any place to charge if i owned an EV...

If you own a house, generally you can do things like install charging points (also backup batteries, solar panels, better insulation, all kinds of fun things) that renters can't.

I'm sure there are some homeowners who can't - maybe listed buildings, or these weird HOA rules I hear about from Americans.

Yes, especially on the 6th floor :)

Well, that's an apartment. We're talking about house owners.

No the OP was talking about owners without qualifiers.

Make EVs chargeable for those who choose to live in the urban jungle and then talk about their merits.

So not the city. Can’t wait till we ban ice vehicles from the suburbs.

In the UK, in London at least, they're starting to put in more and more ~4-5KW chargers on the electric street lamps/lamp posts.

So far its like 1 or 2 a street (and not all streets either), but hopefully one day it will basically be all of them in every street so you don't need to worry.

So if you need to park overnight on the street anyway, park next to a lamp post that has the socket. Its "slow" charging at 4 to 5 KW, but if you're parked for 8-12 hours (while you are asleep), that is quite a considerable top-up in the 40-50KWh range.

The same way you fix parking problems and lots of other problems. You have regulations that require landlords to provide certain amenities.

One option may be to ask your work to electrify a parking spot for you? Depending on the type of company there can be big enough subsidies and tax-write-off capital investments in adding more electric parking spaces that they might do it just for that. (It can be fun to use accounting games in your personal favor.) For other types of companies they may see that as a possible "captive audience" revenue source, with nickel and dime-ing electric charge fees on top of existing parking fees to be a a fun game to play with their own employees whose cars are stuck in the same place for many hours at a time because they "must" be in the office.

Either of those two common types of companies you can possibly "win" an easy way to charge your daily commute.

> How do we solve the renters-that-cant-charge-their-cars problem?

By solving the renters-think-they-need-to-own-a-car problem.

We don’t have a housing problem. We have a people think they need a room with a window problem.

Lacking windows is incompatible with high quality housing. Cars are incompatible with high quality transportation.

Yeah maybe starting with what they’re doing in places in Europe where gradually emission requirements become more strict.

Excluding the worst polluters makes a surprisingly big difference, yes.

It’s still been a problem in several places though, because it forced poor people with old cars to either upgrade or stop driving. An equitable alternative would have included a way to get a new car free or at least cheap.

Sure, first we spend a trillion dollars for over capacity electrical distribution grids and generation plants.

B100 is almost carbon neutral, and has the energy density necessary for commercial logistics. Finding responsible manufacturing methods is far more feasible.

EV only make sense with distributed generation like home solar. =3

Biodiesel doesn't solve the pollution problem. It's also very expensive, and often produced in an unsustainable way.

I like the company looking at a genetically engineered solution, and waste organic matter conversion.

It is cleaner from a sulfur content and long-term carbon cycle perspective, but is very similar to regular fuels.

The dilemma is whether B100 it more difficult to scale than trying to retool our entire global energy infrastructure with finite rare earth metals. =3

If all of us renters were forced to convert to electric there’d never be an open charger in any city again for the next five years, because no landlord will voluntarily afford that cost, and no municipal region can pass a ballot measure to afford that cost. California’s impending ban of combustion car sales hinges wholly on a magical DC-charging network that doesn’t exist in U.S. cities yet (i.e. at parking meters), only at U.S. personal dwellings.

I would love to switch to electric but at current charging times and absolutely horrendously incompetent grid deployments, there’s no way all of the thousand people in my building could, much less the million other renters in the city. (And certainly transit can’t cope with us either, given the continued homeowner hostility to paying taxes for such things.)

What city has charging available for an average of greater than one spot per five hundred multifamily-housing residents? What parking garages anywhere in the U.S. have 25 or more electric vehicle chargers per 100 daytime and/or overnight and/or reserved parking spots, in order to diffuse the grid cost through trickle charging? What funding model is proposed to ensure that’s built whether corporate garage owners like it or not? How will states who depend on fuel tax to keep roads in repair avoid cutting off city services to suburban outregions when their asphalt budgets crater?

Technology has downstream effects, and it’s not as simple as “buy a Prius” when you consider U.S. non-homeowners. (I assume the prospect for India electric conversions would be much worse, too.) “Ban combustion vehicles” is a lofty goal, but until the charging grid problem is solved, it’s an unattainable one.

Level 1 charging overnight on a standard 120V outlet, while not ideal, is surprisingly adequate. Granted, many people rely on street parking or otherwise don't have a parking spot that is right beside their dwelling, but for rented houses or complexes with private garages/parking areas the size of the lift isn't necessarily "get upgraded service and a bunch of 240V EVSE put in".

I'll second this. We got a Chevy Bolt a couple of years ago, and I assumed we'd need to install a 240 V EVSE, but it turns out that regular 120 V 12 A charging is totally fine for us. I think there's been one time in the 2.5 years we've had it when we had to go to a nearby fast charger because the battery was getting low.

Of course if you're commuting 2 hours every day, things will be different. But for us, it's been great.

Yeah I’m charging an EV (with a huge battery) at home on 120v and it’s fine 9 out of 10 days.

None of the apartments I've lived at had a 120V outlet near my parking spot that I could use.

There are no renter-accessible power outlets anywhere in the 300-spot parking garage for my current complex, nor the 300-spot parking garage for my past complex, nor the 12-spot covered parking for my previous complex, etc. (The one prior to all those, I parked directly outside my bedroom window, but we were expressly prohibited from using A/Cs — and so one can safely assume electric vehicles — because the supply run for the property's buildings was so badly underprovisioned that we risked melting it and twice blew the entire property circuit altogether.)

Same here. Got an EV before we got the proper 7KW charger installed in our house. We had an outdoor socket that the gardeners use for whatever and just have a "granny charger" hooked up to that which I think charges at perhaps 2KW (10A on a 240v UK plug).

We use perhaps 5% battery of our VW ID.3 on a typical day (school run, shops, visiting friends or whatever) so we just do an over-night top-up back to 80% maybe once a week when we get down to ~50%. Working surprisingly well - I am not sure I can be bothered to get the proper charger installed (which is annoying as I have already bought it and the cable for about £800 and its just sitting in my shed!)

Certainly that's a factor — but, with quantity 300 parking spaces, it's not exactly the main attraction. Very approximately:

Assuming a 120V / 20A = 2400W circuit (more or less standard in a garage):

100 parking spots = 200A / 24000W; 300 parking spots = 600A / 72000W.

So a distribution line can carry 72kW readily enough — that seems to be about where they are anyways — but if it's carrying that load, it cannot carry any other load, which means that each high-capacity parking garage will need a dedicated line from the nearest substation is.

Then, that parking garage will need to distribute that current to 300 parking spot chargers. Even at 120V/20A, that's 300 new circuit taps; 300 wires, initially. You can use three-phase to reduce that to 100 wires @ 120/20A or equivalent each, which is a lot. Or you can reduce that to 3 wires @ 120V/200A or equivalent, at which point you now have the safety considerations of an outdoor distribution wire in a small enclosed fire-prone space, and you're facing the christmas light problem of "one blown bulb" versus one third of your garage.

Then you need to confront "the chargers need to support burst-mode" so that people can push a button to get a temporary fast-charge ignoring all other concerns — but also "the chargers need to default to trickle-mode", while also considering that trickle-mode should run faster when fewer cars are plugged in (or else tenants will take offense that the chargers aren't using provisioned and available capacity), and that Time-of-Day concerns should cap trickle-mode during peak so that the grid doesn't fail. And that electric vehicles are foreseen as a component of localized grid storage, so garages might need to support backfeeding from cars.

And this all has to be coordinated across three hundred chargers and who knows how many feeder circuits, between one three-phase and three-hundred one-phase, assuming that 72kW (120V/600A) is provisioned to trickle-charge the entire garage each evening at 15A per car max (have to leave some headroom for the burst needs, for momentary overdraw before a charger fuses out a defective vehicle, etc).

This is all doable, but it is logistically expensive, and I would estimate that cost at perhaps tens of millions of dollars at that scale. Doing this for my old 12-apartment complex would merely require 2.4kW of new power delivery, taps, and distribution under the pavement (there's no room for overhead poles to be introduced), without sinking the property into the riverbed it's built on, and without breaking the local emergency services grid that it's drawing from when the creek next door floods every few years.

Retrofit costs are estimated at $5000-$15000 per single parking spot (new buildings are wired more efficiently so halve that cost for anything built since the Model S came out). California at one point was offering a 30% subsidy on retrofits; so, for my example, 300 spots * $5000-$15000 = ~2-4 million dollars (napkin rounded) for a single apartment complex. At local 1-bedroom housing prices, that's around 1000 rent-months of capital investment with no future gain — and that's the most critical part here. The complex cannot recoup that investment through maintenance and usage fees, because those will have to be paid out in actual maintenance and kilowatt-hours — and tenants, in this economy, cannot afford to subsidize the buildout cost.

So until retrofits are either state-funded or state-mandated, landlords have little to no reason to invest their money into the future of electric cars, because they'll get pennies on the dollar at best from their investment. And, given their tendency to collude via RealPage, no one will be the first to build out a 100% EV charging garage because that will not only long-term devalue their other properties without increasing the short-term value of the one improved, but also will start a race to the bottom that they are already colluding to try and prevent.

Yes, trickle-charging is electrically feasible — it's compelling the profitless capital investment that is not.

Car based transportation is just not scalable.

Other countries have figured this out. Norway in particular. Working transportation models exist and this country has the funds to make it happen. However because of American Exceptionalism, we have very limited options.

I'll add another country with even better public transport (especially trains) - Switzerland. A small, dense and very wealthy country that has train station at the heart of every city and many villages, and the rest is covered by buses.

Yet every single morning and evening there is huge traffic jam around every city. Every single year highways are more full, more issue with parking.

If it can't be solved in such ideal country for public transport, I am not holding breath for rest of the world, and just wishing something ain't gonna make it real. There are many reasons why situation is as it is (it costs a lot, even such transport doesn't cover many people's cases well enough and nobody wants to spend 120 mins every day commuting via public transport when its say 60 with cars).

What I can imagine actually working - uber style shared robo (meaning cheap) taxis/minibuses. Big enough network that one can even switch a car in some 'taxi station' for more efficient trip that would take just marginally longer than driving oneself. This solves a lot of parking issues in cities and would reduce traffic to maybe half or a bit less.

This. This, this, this. I cannot stress enough how critical this point is. Either we invest a trillion dollars in electrifying parking spots or we invest that in building out transit and bicycling systems. None of them will ever be profitable over the long-run, so we continue with gas vehicles. I would so much prefer not to have to drive to the grocery store when I don't have 2 hours round-trip to spare on four intersecting transit schedules, or to risk life and limb every time I want to try and bicycle those 2.5 deadly miles across four highway on/offramps where vehicles ignore every "no turn on red" sign in the region and police that don't enforce.

Banning gasoline vehicles is the goal. In the U.S., all known solutions require capital investments that corporations can't extract a 'growth in profit growth over time' from, while disadvantaging the vehicle owners caste. Solve that, and you'll solve a lot more than just gasoline vehicles.

> Car based transportation is just not scalable.

We have scaled it! We're a country of 330 million people where almost everyone drives.

> However because of American Exceptionalism, we have very limited options.

It's only "American Exceptionalism" insofar as Americans are rich compared to Europeans. Upper middle class people across Europe also live in suburbs and drive to places. American wealth/land space simply enables middle and lower middle class people to do the same thing.

> We have scaled it!

said the man, 37 trillion dollars in debt. Go team!

> If all of us renters were forced to convert to electric there’d never be an open charger in any city again for the next five years, because no landlord will voluntarily afford that cost, and no municipal region can pass a ballot measure to afford that cost.

Landlords can charge tenants over the price of electricity.

> What city has charging available for an average of greater than one spot per five hundred multifamily-housing residents?

Shanghai: https://english.shanghai.gov.cn/en-Latest-WhatsNew/20240508/...

The difficult is not electricity prices; those can simply be tariff'd for overhead-slash-profit as all U.S. chargers do already. The difficulty is building out hundreds of chargers within a single city block's worth of the city's x,y grid. That level of power density is generally only seen in heavy industrial zones, and residential distribution grids can barely cope with air conditioners, much less with electric vehicles on top of that, before the prospect of upgrading every multifamily residential zone from low-density power to high-density power.

Napkin math time. Assuming that Shanghai has ~1% of China's 420 million vehicles, given that Shanghai has ~2% of China's population (~8 million) and assuming a car ownership rate of 0.5; then Shanghai can be estimated to have 4 million vehicles, while only having 0.8 million charging locations (as the article indicates). 20% certainly does exceed 0.2%, and they're ahead of the game with ~2 charging locations per EV today — but that also means that they've only converted ~10% of Shanghai's gasoline vehicle population and are only provisioned to support 20% conversion right now.

However, I think that China has a significant advantage versus the U.S. — they are primarily selling very small vehicles for intra-city use. So, their charger capacities can be significantly lower per vehicle than in the U.S., which reduces their difficulty of electric conversations probably by a full order of magnitude from ours.

> I think that China has a significant advantage versus the U.S. — they are primarily selling very small vehicles for intra-city use

This does not match what I’ve seen in China at all. Nor does it match up with any data I’ve seen about the best selling cars in China. Do you have any data on this?

Nope, but I have a pile of napkins here covered in scribbles. Appreciate the correction.

> However, I think that China has a significant advantage versus the U.S. — they are primarily selling very small vehicles for intra-city use

This doesn't really matter that much. The average car commute in the US is less than 40 miles per day. Even if we assume that everyone gets a fairly giant Model X, that's still around 12kWh of energy per day.

You can get that much power from a regular 120V wall plug within 8 hours.

I’ve got an EV in a flat with a terrace in London. There’s 4 22kw charging car parks within a few min walk, and a lot more further, plus a few more expensive fast chargers. Works well.

Where you park, are there lights? Then there's electricity. It's something that's fixable, we just have to have the will to do it. It's worth it.

That’s just not how it works. There might be electricity there, but only enough to charge one car at a time. Works for my home garage, but would not work for apartment complex.

It's really not as big of deal anymore. My co-worker got an electric car and has his own house with a garage and never ended up installing a wall box. He simply charges at work or while buying groceries.

How many chargers per hundred spots do his work or grocery store have?

Typical car density for my nearest three grocery stores is 25-100 vehicles fluctuating during three or four peak hours. The highest number of chargers at any of those stores is 8, followed by 2 and 0; of those, 8 have been out of service for the past 60 days because someone is playing negotiation hardball with the charging services provider.

When the chargers were working, they were nearly at capacity for the entire day, at current (low) levels of electric car fraction of the population; there's no way they're prepared to cope with a full conversion, at which point the same power density and distribution problem that impacts multifamily parking garages instead (or as well!) affects grocery stores.

Also a problem in the UK, not just for renters, not for anyone who does not have off street parking.

There are smaller and more practical changes that would have huge benefits. More public transport, pedestrianised areas, encouraging people to drive smaller cars (lots of ways to do that - e.g. reserve some parking for small cars, tax vehicles on weight) would all have huge benefits.

I have an electric Leaf and I've never, ever, used a "fast" charger. I've been plugging it in my 10A garden socket and it's perfect for overnight charging, it goes from 10% to 80% from dusk until dawn.

Annoyingly, I've already invested in a 11kW charger (with 22kW infrastructure) which I've never used!

You don't need "magical DC-charging" to go EV.

Demand induces supply. Probably don't ban it _all at once_, but a gradual phasing out will give plenty of time for chargers to get built. They won't be _free_, but they will be available.

Demand induces higher prices which induces supply. So yes this is 100% solvable by normal market forces, but that doesn't change the fact that it would be very expensive for everyone involved.

That's a good point! I hadn't thought about that. The benefit of EVs seem highest in the city,[1] but the charging infrastructure isn't there in urban areas.

[1] My wife, being from the west coast, used to walk around NYC in flip flops, and would come home with her feet black from brake dust and soot and god knows what else.

I never have to wait in line or had issues with supplying power while charging my electric vehicle in my bedroom. The problem is thinking gas car and electric car are your two options.

Yep, sell your ICE and buy a jet plane instead.

I’m against a ban. That sort of pollution is an externality and we could price it in.

The externalities are all the costs of medical problems and deaths due to pollution, as well as reduced property values due to polluted areas being less desirable. For the former I’d say a ban is appropriate, unless you’re suggesting to somehow literally clean the polluted air and pay for it with a gas automobile tax.

I mean even campfires and smoking in public have negative externalities which cause cancer. The marginal cost of each is tiny and probably hard to price, but it has a price. Adding this price would slightly offset the cost but more importantly act as a disincentive for buying a polluting vehicle.

Smoking in public is widely banned. Campfires in populated areas are usually limited to very specific recreational areas. Home wood fires in populated areas are often banned and should be as long as there are reasonable alternatives.

Yeah, because that's worked so well in other sectors.

You know how Tesla makes a fuckton of money? Selling their carbon credits to industry so they can pollute. So all the pollution reduction caused by people driving Teslas enables industry to pollute instead of controlling their emissions, reducing energy waste, decarbonizing, etc.

Isn't that exactly how carbon credits are supposed to work?

Then we go to price it in people will say it’s anti-free market.

Based on the long history of trying to price in externalities, bans are probably more effective. Just look at how many games are played with carbon "credits", and how little real impact they've had.

> Just look at how many games are played with carbon "credits", and how little real impact they've had.

Credits are indeed a scam but they are not a mandatory component of a carbon externality tax.

On the other hand China didn't ban petrol but has heavy incentives for electric and is now at about 50% EVs, similarly Norway is at about 90%. Not exactly pricing the externalities but it kind of works. Like in China I think if you want a vehicle you need a permit and can get one straight away for EVs but have to wait 8 years for petrol or something like that.

Wow.

Well, I like that the people that think like this also probably live I places where you are actually driving a coal powered car.

Like the clowns in Hawaii that have extra subsidies for EVs… their power comes directly from burning crude oil.

I’m an automotive EE, and and the truth about EVs is in a rush to push them out the door, the media and politicians have set the tech back at least a decade by pretending it is something it’s not.

EVs for most people outside of California. Make a great town vehicle or second vehicle.

A ban on ICE… wow.

I don't agree with a ban, but burning crude oil (are you sure about that, it's usually refined at least a little?) can have centralised carbon capture and filtration, whereas cars pretty much just pump it straight out. Luckily they made the smoke invisible so it's ok, almost like it's not even there!

They don’t even unload it from the tankers. Absolute crude. Seen it with my own two.

Exactly, as long as no one sees it, it isn’t happening. Same with them burning plastic and trash.

> Well, I like that the people that think like this also probably live I places where you are actually driving a coal powered car.

That's still an improvement for both global and local emissions.

There are more benefits to EV conversion in a community than the use of renewable energy, noise and roadside air quality being pretty big ones. Also... how do you know there aren't Hawaiians charging their EVs using rooftop solar? I hear they're known for being in the sun sometimes.

> Also... how do you know there aren't Hawaiians charging their EVs using rooftop solar?

Because of math.

A 6 kW house, to charge a 60 kW battery… so long as everyone with an electric vehicle is charging them at their house for 10 sunny hours to charge from empty, you’re right and I’m wrong.

Some people could get by, but it leaves the solar for nothing else. If you leave the house while the sun is up you better get back because you’re losing daylight!

If you don't use your solar, it is pushed to the grid (or batteries, if you have them), so really its about the collective solar that exists in the grid and not a house specific view. As solar rollout increases, the greenness of your EV increases even if you don't charge from your rooftop.

Dude...we are talking about Hawaii. The largest of the islands is just over 4000 square miles. None of the others are over 750 square miles. People drive a lot less in Hawaii than in most of the rest of the country.

The average is 8900 miles per year which is a little under 24 miles per day and a little under 750 miles a month.

If you can charge with solar at 6 kW on a typical EV that will give you about 20 miles per hour of charging. If you can do a little over an hour a day you will be covered.

If you find plugging in for an hour a day to much of a hassle it is under 9 hours a week or 37 hours a month.

Dude, literally every single EV-related number you’ve mentioned around here is so insanely off. Two hours at a charger, 20 minutes of charge just to get home, charging an EV 0 to 100 % and now again, charging a 60 kW battery every day. I don’t know what kind of terrible EVs you’ve seen, but they weren’t what normal people drive. Either get some real world experience with EVs or just stop posting about them.

Interesting… so, for reference I’m an automotive engineer and have worked one at least three EV platforms for big4.

Good to know how wrong I am on this topic. Let me guess, you own an EV? Well, that certain explains it everything.

You received some better corrections in earlier replies, which you've chosen to ignore... That's your prerogative of course, but there's no need to resort to "I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals"-style reverse ad hominem to make an argument.

You made some basic mistakes in your previous reply, such as confusing power (kW) and energy (kWh) and assuming that a typical driver in HI commutes something like 250mi each day. This isn't even typical for drivers on the mainland, where plenty of EV+solar owners manage to replenish most or all of their EV usage using rooftop solar generation just fine.

(If you're going to answer "well, I never said I was considering the median distance/day case - I was talking about the most extreme scenarios!" then I'd suggest at least bumping up the hypothetical solar installation to 10kW instead of going with the median.)

While I think there is some merit to what you're saying, you're forgetting two major diferences between driving am ICE car and an EV charged on fossil fuel electricity.

First, EV engines are far, far more energy efficient than ICEs. Secondly, fossil fuel power plants are far more efficient at converting fossil fuels to energy than ICEs are (since the energy efficiency of a thermal engine is proportional to its volume).

The result is that the EV car mileage you'll get by burning 1t of oil in an oil power plant is much, much higher than the mileage you'll get from that same 1t of oil in ICE cars. I'm not 100% sure if this holds true for coal based power plants, but those should be getting relatively rarer.

Not to mention, fossil fuel power plants can have much better filters and some CO2/CH4 capture technologies, so the mileage you get per ton of greenhouse gas emissions is even better than the energy per ton of fossil fuels.

I'll add that Hawaii currently generates 20%+ of their electricity from non-fossil fuels. Plus they are actively reducing fossil generation with a view to removing it completely.

Changes on this scale take time. But to make the islands much less dependent on fossil fuels, a two-pronged strategy is in play. Reduce fossil fuel generation, but also reduce the dependence on fossil fuel in transport.

As a long-term strategy, reducing the cost of importing all that fuel, over vast distances, seems to be a huge win for the islands. In every way (politically, economically, socially, environmentally) generating their own energy is a win.

Yes. Only 80% crude oil they pull a tanker up, fuel the plant directly on the tanker and roll another one right in.

Literally the most unrefined and dirty way to create power, as long as the tourists don’t see it, and the EV owners that think they’re making a different don’t know, g2g.

The choice is between EVs (20% green + 80% oil with extreme energy efficiency, pollution concentrated in industrial zone) vs ICEs (100% oil, extremely energy inefficient, pollution directly where people live).

Seems a pretty simple choice from my point of view.

Well, most of us don't have a plan B if the Earth is wrecked by pollution, but I guess if you beg Musk hard enough, he might invite you to Mars.

We can either do drastic things now, or desperate things later.

Hyperbole like that doesn't help anyone.

Pollution and environmental destruction are big problems, but there are no remotely likely scenarios where the Earth "is wrecked by pollution" and a HN reader would need to question the viability of remaining on the planet.

I'm using sarcasm here, not hyperbole.

> Like the clowns in Hawaii that have extra subsidies for EVs… their power comes directly from burning crude oil.

If all their electricity comes from burning crude oil than they'd get about the same amount of miles in an ICE by refining that oil to gasoline for the cars and an EV by burning the crude oil for electricity, distributing that over the grid to drivers to charge their EVs.

However, about 22% of Hawaii's electricity comes from solar, so the EVs will come out ahead.

Even if we ignore solar and assume the EVs only use electricity from burning crude oil, the crude oil fueled generators should be cleaner than ICE engines, so there would be a significant reduction in total green house gases and particulates.

Automotive EE engineer? I'm sure everyone here would love your explanation of EV efficiencies vs ICE in different situations.

No they wouldn’t.

The all people here shitting on reality - are doing so because they’re defending their purchases.

Most people with EV as a primary vehicle were fooled into marketing that does not accurately reflect the product, and they don’t want to hear otherwise.

I don't think banning combustion engines is fighting the right battle, but incentivizing the alternatives (e..g lowering or removing sales tax) is a good idea.

We don't actually want to scrap working cars unless they have reached the end of their life or passed an air quality threshold (UK tests every car over 3 years old, every year, called an MOT). Reduce, reuse, recycle etc.

Requiring LPG would be a better option. (~10x less CO)

Ban _all_ cars, bud.

Make streets narrower. Reduce parking. Return road infrastructure in favor of walkability, green areas, and reducing urban heat islands.

Just don't do as we did in Norway. Sure, we've seen great adoption to electric, but with the insane amount of money spent and subsidies, we've could instead have improved public transit and reduced car dependence.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23939076/norway-electric-...

I can think of many. The list should start with coal power plants (hello, green Germany), then two-stroke engines (both mopeds and leaf blowers / lawn mowers), then diesel engines, especially diesel buses and trucks. None of that is in place.

Modern gasoline and hybrid cars are fine, banning them at this point in time would mean a drop in quality of life for negligible gain.

Diesel transport trucks and busses are getting a lot of work done per gallon. How much worse are their emissions?

Hybrid cars might be good enough, but banning pure combustion cars from cities sounds perfectly reasonable to me. No real quality of life impact.

And how are we going to charge all those EV's? the grid is already overloaded in many places. Here we are requested to not charge our cars during certain times to reduce load.

And how will all the people that are buying 500€ second hand cars afford electric?

Don't get me wrong, I think there is merit in a ICE free future, especially in urban areas, but the practicalities.. And I am not convinced the long term impacts of EV are fully appreciated necessarily.

Realistically this is what's happening in the UK with "low emission zones", the worst of the emitters are banned. Although public buses of course get an exemption until they can manage a changeover.

Meant German cities have electric or natural gas buses. Electric local delivery vans are becoming more common.

I live in a city and I don't have a car. There are very few places to charge it, and many of the lamppost charges are seemingly permanently broken. Charging at home is not an option as I would have to park it on the street. If I needed a car I would definitely go ICE or hybrid, thankfully I don't.

A well known fact by Brembo, one of the biggest brakes producers in the world, which has been working for years to find new products and new markets, preparing for the time when a lot more EVs will be on the road.

I'd think they'd make more money on the bigger brakes needed for evs with higher weights than they'd lose on the brake pad replacements.

It feels like we are still trying to convince ourselves that EVs are a good idea. Progress is too slow and too painful.

Why wouldn’t they obviously be?

Because some people stand to lose boatloads of money if they are.

(To be clear I quite happen to like EVs)

And those people who would lose money are the EV manufacturers. AFAIK in the US EV manufacturers are barely making money even with gov’t subsidies (baring Tesla). They can’t charge what would be necessary without subsidies because most people simply wouldn’t want or couldn’t afford such a product at that price point.

I've been looking for a place to talk about this. Seemingly through a potent combination of government subsidies, willingness to embrace the technology, and general STEM competence, China has exploded with quality EV manufacturers. The ICE manufacturers are doomed regardless of what type of car they try to sell.

It makes me wonder about this from a policy perspective. China, more than any other country, has the power to dump products at a net loss to the country for the sake of a long term victory. That's tough to combat.

I believe OP is lamenting the fact that we still need to have the "EV/hybrids's are better the ICE vehicles" discussion in 2025. That there's a segment of the population that needs a mountain of such overwhelming evidence to be convinced of the value.

Ah yes. Sorry I read that comment and replied with mine soon after waking. My brain wasn’t fully on yet :)

The best thing I saw was some Kia beating a Ferrari on a race test on instagram. What was great about it was the the commentary. The comments were all about how beautiful a ferrari was and no longer about its exceptional performance (which is the original raison d'etre) - and a lot of nostalgia complaining about how EVs are going to be the death of beautifully engineered cars.

Yes I know the KIA is only faster during acceleration and theres more to cars than acceleration/top speed that ... but the commentary was too funny. It made ferrari look like a car from the past.

There are some technical issues in terms of changing over in a hurry due to providing charging infrastructure and the like.

> The EIT Urban Mobility report also refers to the bigger picture: moving commuters out of private cars and into public transport, cycling, or walking can achieve up to five times more reduction in non-exhaust emissions than individual electrification.

And this is just one the many nuisances produce by cars.

Electric cars do not massively reduce almost any of the pollution produced by cars.

We have to reduce the automobile fleet by at least 95% to solve all the nuisances produces by cars.

This is cool. I have a VW EV and use the B-mode for the "gas" pedal. It it not full one-pedal driving but IIUC exclusively uses regen. You can't decelerate rapidly, but most driving can be accomplished without touching the brake pedal except when down to a walking pace, where thanks to that square law relationship of speed to kinetic energy there's hardly any energy left to recover anyhow.

After a bit you learn how much you can slow down with it and (for me at least) it becomes a bit of a game to see if you can avoid using the mechanical brakes by choosing early enough to lift your foot.

As a result, the mechanical brakes get squeezed on every trip, but nearly all uses are during low speed maneuvering. If a light changes at the last moment or someone pulls out in front of me I will then have to make a substantial use of the mechanical brakes but that doesn't happen on every trip.

I never have to ride the brakes down a long hill, and it was really satisfying the one time I went down a hill long enough to see the battery state of charge increase by a percent or two.

You can get similar results with proper deceleration, engine braking and downshifting. I’ve had brake pads last 110k miles (with room for 20k+ more), even though I lived in moderate hilly area. That’s probably 1/3 the brake dust, and comparable to an EV .

If you are getting lower MPG than the EPA rating, you are also burning up your brakes from heavy deceleration. Improve your MPG to 15% over EPA and your brakes will last a lot longer.

Also their studies were in European markets with tiny EVs and low speeds. Americans are favoring 7k-9k lb EVs (Hummer, Rivian), with massive brake rotors and PADs— at highway speeds 75mph+. A good driver of a 3k lb vehicle will produce less brake dust than a typical driver of a 9k EV.

Studies like this are helpful, but they are not comprehensive. Similar to the marketing that home LEDs would have 10-20 year longevity, yet in practice they burn out after a few years. The full supply and application chain has to align for the ideal results in practice.

Upvoted for making sense of basic physics.

Another factor is speed.

tried to capture that via EPA MPG ratings. if people reduce acceleration & top speed they can save a lot of brake wear

But in a manual transmission car, downshifting and engine braking produces clutch dust instead of brake dust (basically the same thing).

In a modern car, or if you adequately rev match, the clutch wear is extremely small. Only if you are aggressively down shifting will that be a problem. It’s also only wear at that point in time, not the entire time through engine braking.

exactly!

Well, that's just not true at all now is it?

Anecdotally, every car I've been in where the driver talks about engine braking is rode hard and put up wet. Humans seem pretty bad at downshifting/engine braking outside of vehicles designed for that purpose like big rigs. Cars have much fewer gears so it's harder to align the downshift.

Of course there's little use in having this conversation since we all think ourselves above average drivers. I've had acquaintances reply "I don't even need a clutch I can shift so smooth!" (Do not attempt.)

automatic transmissions engine brake as well. most drivers don't use it, a shame. I can smell the ozone on long descents. if they downshifted their automatic, hardly any braking would be needed would be needed.

Mine engine brakes, but it's true that it wouldn't be smart enough to engine brake going downhill. This is my first automatic after a couple decades of manual. It would be really nice improvement for automatics.

There are _moments_ where I would like to exercise more control, like the long downhill example or maybe staying in a low gear in bad weather.

But, I'm still unconvinced that engine braking on a manual transmission in a consumer sedan for every stoplight is helpful. Cars weigh a lot, simply let off the gas a few seconds earlier.

yeah i agree stoplight clutch braking is unnecessary wear.

not quite. Think of a 2 mile descent. The clutch is only engaged for a fraction of a second. rest of the 2 miles is engine braking.

When done properly , clutch wear is minimal. My clutch lasted > 150k miles and still going

> If you are getting lower MPG than the EPA rating, you are also burning up your brakes from heavy deceleration. Improve your MPG to 15% over EPA and your brakes will last a lot longer.

100%.

People need to understand that the brake pedal is an evil device that converts your cash into brake dust and heat, so use it as little as possible.

Stop accelerating so much in stop-and-go traffic. Drop the "You have to tailgate or else people get in front of you" nonsense attitude. Release the gas sooner when approaching a red light. And for fuck's sake, stop hitting the brakes when you're only trying to shave off a couple mph, especially when going up hill.

I've gotten better-than-EPA mileage on every car I've owned, and I don't even drive slow. Always at or slightly above the speed limit. Economy is all about speed management, not absolute speed, until you're going 75+ mph.

well said

brake wear is also an indicator of overall abuse on the vehicle. If you drive chill, your car will last longer.

I broke an engine mount from heavy acceleration (and hitting a huge pothole) . A lot of strain is put on the chassis from gassing and braking.

Does this apply to fixies then as well? I might reignite my use of one in a city vs traditional bike if so ...!

Fixed-gear bicycles, is apparently what a "fixie" is for anyone else wondering

I dream of a future where societes manage to price in all externalities into the objects they produce. This of course requires us to be(come) more honest about the hidden costs to society each and every objects and its usage brings with itself.

What we do with that knowledge is another question, but right now my feeling is a lot of bad actors skew the picture to make themselves look good while regular people are left to breath the dust.

Tricky to do accurately though. Like a car driven occasionally in the countryside may cause little damage from brake dust, a cab in a city center a lot.

Not necessarily: You get a mix of average representative driving profiles, drive that with a vehicle and measure how much particles are emitted. This is how exhaust emissions are already measured.

In practise the biggest danger is that manufacturers game that system like VW did by recognizing a test environment and adjusting accordingly.

the brake needs a brand new design for EV... as of now it's used so little I kind of fear when I need it it's not going to be performant. It's not simply not engineered for current EV use case where it's touched every once in a while, I think it can go weeks without being used. However manufacturers don't have any incentive to blend it with regen from time to time, as to get it up to temperature requires a LOT of braking, which reduces the mileage/efficiency. Even Volvo recently had a recall[1] over regen braking bug, it looks like brake-by-wire system where software have control over blending brake, and decides in this case to not engage physical brakes at all even when user input suggests more braking. We just need a new brake system that can stay performant without being used at all for a long time and won't rust or jam [1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a65464238/volvo-brake-fail...

That is actually one reason some companies are trying to move back to all drum brakes for EVs. The drum protects the brakes from water, rust, and debri fairly well and is far more reliable when not used as often. The only real obstacle is car companies having spent the last few decades focusing all their braking and traction control features on disc brakes so they need to be reimplemented for use in drums. And really most consumer vehicles never should have stopped using drum brakes, they are better for everything except high performance racing/heat dissipation, but disc brakes were used for sales/marketing because race cars use them, and most all the improvements for brake systems started with racing so were initially and primarily designed for use with discs.

This comment comes across a lot like the fanboys screeching about how their 1985 or 91 Toyota had a "nice" interior as if the most rattle prone 2009 GM work truck interior isn't better in every way just as a result of sheer cumulative progress. Like if you actually put A beside B and look at them without the rose tinted veneer of nostalgia it's not even a comparison.

Rusty rarely exercised drum brakes have a ton of failure modes that result in severely degraded or nonexistent performance that the average motorist probably wouldn't care about until they really need the brakes and they don't all work well enough.

The heat capacity of drums is pretty easily made noticeable, not "exceeded" to the point of substantially reduced capacity, but noticeable from the driver's seat in just a few good stops in high ambient temps (think like stop and go light to light in somewhere like DC or Miami) or one decent hill. Yeah you can polish the turd with fancy fins and materials and airflow, etc. but discs are just so much better per dollar and per pound.

Most of the problems discs have are NVH and rotor problems that are easily solved for intermittent/lesser use with the simple use of better alloys (Dexter even makes stainless for boat trailers, which are probably the ultimate example of extreme intermittent usage, so it's not like this is groundbreaking). Dominant slider pin designs these days are highly optimized for performance/NVH at the expense of longevity but there's an entire catalog of historical designs that one could easily conclude have better tradeoffs for less demanding usage.

Rusted rarely exercised drum brakes are already known to be far more reliable than rusted rarely exercised disc brakes, that is why many vehicles still or had until recently kept drum brakes in the rear where they get far less usage and get 1/10th the attention as front brakes. Or in trailers brakes that are utilized far less often.

But people already had this entire debate decades ago when disc brakes were first implemented. If you are racing or using a lot of braking power, discs are obviously better, they have better heat dissipation, they are quicker to repair and replace, more predictable for analog/dumb traction and stability control systems, and getting them rusty and dirty isn't a concern because you are racing and/or using the shit out of them. And most of the disadvantages became of little concern to consumers because when the consumer market moved towards automatic transmissions and smaller displacement engines people stopped engine braking constantly and were instead clearing their brakes off at literally every stop so dirty disc brakes stopped being a common concern. But the downsides still exist and is why disc brakes haven't taken over all applications.

Like yeah, drums have less heat capacity and worse cooling, but the entire point of regenerative braking is that you don't use them as much and so heat issues don't matter, only a small fraction of your braking force will use the physical brakes. Ideally in an EV your physical brakes are 100% a safety item, not a common usage item, and so reliability should be the top concern.

>Rusted rarely exercised drum brakes are already known to be far more reliable than rusted rarely exercised disc brakes, that is why many vehicles still or had until recently kept drum brakes in the rear where they get far less usage and get 1/10th the attention as front brakes.

My ass. They might be "trouble free" in that you don't notice them not doing anything whereas a well rusted rotor will be very clearly cranky and/or felt in the brake pedal or steering wheel and perhaps the driver will elect to take it to the shop.

>Or in trailers brakes that are utilized far less often.

And which have a pretty strong reputation for always being in some degraded state or otherwise not working to full capacity.

>Ideally in an EV your physical brakes are 100% a safety item, not a common usage item, and so reliability should be the top concern

In which case a disk is far more likely to work, if poorly and loudly whereas a drum is much more likely to be completely out to lunch for some huge fraction of the cylinder's travel from a long ago seized adjuster or whatever.

Yeah, drum brakes "can" be made to work. I bet wagon style friction brakes "can" be made to work. But discs are just soooo much easier. Throw an 80s style stainless slider arrangement on it so pins aren't a concern and pony up for a galvanized or stainless rotor and it becomes a basically a "good for the life of the car" item if you don't go through the pads.

  > The health effect is especially critical for urban disadvantaged groups, where exposure to partical matter has been shown to be related to increased asthma rates, cardiovascular disease, and other respiratory conditions.

Why would the health effect be more critical for disadvantaged groups than for other urban groups?

perhaps the disadvantage is that, over time, living nearest to traffic _is_ the disadvantage, as it means living most immediately near pollution concentration.

Sincere reply assuming sincere question, the implication is that they are statistically much more likely to live near interstates and highways. Since historically land owned by poor 'disadvantaged groups' has been easier for state and federal governments to get their hands on.

The sentence, while poorly written, isn't saying that "health impacts don't matter for 'non-disadvantaged people'". A reading that is disingenuous.

I see. In the areas familiar to the authors, disadvantaged groups typically live closer to the source of the pollution.

Makes sense now. Thanks.

Also disadvantaged groups might consume less healthcare and might be less aware of air quality, etc. and so may be more likely to have bad health outcomes for given environmental inputs.

> alluding to the black discolorations on alloy wheels

There are ceramic brakes that produce very little particulate matter by comparison to semi-metallic. The only downside is performance can degrade more in extreme driving conditions (sustained racing with heavy braking). For a daily driver, it's a quieter and cleaner material.

Related recent HN discussion:

58 days ago: "Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%" (103 points | 184 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44113256

But they burn through tires much faster due to the battery packs. All that tire friction has to go somewhere right?

They mention that in the article. It’s not enough to offset the higher break wear.

This can also be offset by better traction control. EV engines respond to it much faster.

EVs don't burn through tires quickly, they just kept you burn through tires quickly.

Tire wear is an extremely strong function of torque. If you accelerate and decelerate calmly then the stiff tires they put on EVs will last a long time.

A lot of people drive EVs extremely aggressively because the motor provides a ton of instant torque and they find it fun.

Idk, the thought of 40k miles per tire being the *high end* (maybe my figures are wrong) signals that vehicle weight despite controlled acceleration is the problem

Ban the stop and go hell of rush hour. Cars rolling at freeway speed without stopping pollute way less than drivers stuck behind idiots who can't just go forward down the road at the speed limit.

The human suffering and ecological impact reduced if only there would be a focus on enforcing speed minimums...

Even if everyone drove optimally, every road is going to reach a capacity where its physically impossible to maintain a certain speed. It's similar to network congestion. Mandating that everyone drive faster won't solve anything.

It would reduce the duration of rush hour... once the least skilled drivers were improved or removed from the pool. I do agree it wouldn't solve a complete lack of capacity, civic planning, transportation infrastructure. Including lack of busses that travel frequently enough and where people want to go.

> once the least skilled drivers were improved or removed from the pool.

Let me guess this straight, the plan would be that:

1. in a global environment (the following steps are done everywhere around the world)

2. where maximum speeds, though:

- clearly marked everywhere

- mentioned during driving lessons and driving codes/books

- part of the written driving exam every driver has to pass

- enforced by police, cameras, a myriad of automated systems etc

3. are still ignored by, say, 40%+ of drivers

... so, the plan would be that in this environment, mandating minimum speeds would actually improve anything? :-)))

I'd be super happy to read the study proving this. Where by study, I mean actual physical trial.

>It would reduce the duration of rush hour... I do agree it wouldn't solve a complete lack of capacity,

Exactly. Rush hour is like dumping 5gal bucket into a sink. You'll always be bottlenecked by the drain but a better drain will mean all the drops get where they're going faster and with less waiting around.

I think if find a way to fix the worst of the worst it'd probably up the throughputs and speeds a lot in the same way that quashing TCP retrans problems does.

It isn't just slow or distracted drivers. It is congestion. It is too many cars, and the impossible task of making them all "go" at the same time.

What we need is fewer cars and better shared transportation.

Heck, we should replace ALL cars with busses, and then they could go super fast with all the other buses. Make 'em small, so it's maybe 20 people per bus. That's 20 cars off the road, right there.

I assume by that you mean provide good and cheap public transportation so people no longer have to drive.

It's just traffic. The arrogance of thinking everyone else is the problem is kinda weird. You're just as responsible for the congestion and pollution.

Quality of operation absolutely is a factor in the equation. The overall results seem to get dragged down to the lowest common denominator. Something like a park-and-ride lot after an arrival cleans out way faster/better than a school despite both more than saturating whatever their entry onto the main road is.

What causes stop and go is actually pressure waves that propagate backwards through traffic once density hits a critical point.

When everyone is following at a reasonable distance (ie, there's a couple of car lengths between cars), if someone has to hit the brakes for some reason (sun in their eyes, car cuts them off, etc), then the car behind can slow instead of stopping, and it doesn't propagate. Notably, the person who triggered the wave doesn't even need to stop. If the person behind them is following close enough, just slowing down a little bit will cause the person behind to slow _more_, and the person behind them to stop.

Once everyone is stacked on top of each other, any interruption in the flow of traffic propogates backwards. That's why when you get to the "end" of the traffic congestion it looks like people stopped for "no reason". But you've just hit the front of a pressure wave. You'll probably hit another one in a little while if density doesn't ease up ahead of you.

The only way to eliminate stop and go traffic is to stop people from entering onto the freeway after it hits a certain density.

Very urban focused of course given the site and there's nothing wrong with an urban focus for EVs.

EVs as they are being pushed on us are made for cities. Outside of a dense urban area, EVs without a gas/diesel powered charger (aka hybrid) are much less useful, but I do not want to see charging stations everywhere either.

Kinetic recovery is great, but as there are orders of magnitude less braking required driving outside of cities, the recovered energy is also much less, and the brake dust generated is also much less. Also there are far fewer cars per mile of road (let alone size of the area) and any brake dust pollution is spread over a much wider area.

Many of the negative pollution issues associated with cars are due to excessive density in urban areas, the added amount of braking, the added idling, and the extra acceleration repeatedly required in a city with a stop light every block.

How does brake dust compare to tire dust in terms of quantity? My understanding was that most of the black soot that accumulates near roadways is mostly tire particulate.

My DIY e-bike has regenerate braking. It makes no meaningful difference for the battery charge. But in terms of brake pad life, they do seem to last about twice as long as before.

I have an electric unicycle and it also has regenerative braking and it seems to make a huge difference in consumption when riding in hilly areas.

Due to regenerative braking. Also, obviously.

55k miles on my Leaf. Not even halfway through the first set of brake pads. I cannot say the same thing about the tires.

Who knew that a vehicle with two brake systems would use the traditional one less than vehicles with only that type!?

You'd be surprised at what people don't know.

Yes this is why EV brake pads last 2-3 times more miles. They aren’t being used due to the regen braking.

I wonder how does this compare with engine braking. Many people in the comment section are surprised that their EV's pads are lasting up to 4 years yet as someone who always drove manual cars and who leverages engine braking this sound like a normal length.

Not sure but very few cars are sold with manuals anymore especially in US. Most people here under 40 or even 50 don’t know how to drive one.

Less brake dust but more tire dust for cars of similar size due to the greater weight.

87k miles on my Leaf and it still has lots of brake pad left on the original pads.

Brake pads are small parts that last for years. It is nothing compared to the number of tankfuls of gas that an ICE car goes through over the lifetime of its brakes.

This is like the March of Dimes syndrome. We got rid of exhaust with electric cars, but the cars-are-bad activists continue to exist and need something to gripe about.

On a meta note, I come to HN for the typically more informed and sometimes expert takes on the issues and articles that surface here, especially for tech related news. It's interesting how even this site is not insulated from some absolutely insane misinformation about EV's that starts to show up in the comments whenever they are brought up. I mean, just look at how many comments this article about brake dust has generated.

I quite rarely actually use my brakes. Regen for the win!

On my non EV car I seldom use the break unless in an emergency or I have to come to a full stop.

I always use the cruise control to decelerate and accelerate. Anyone else has that habit?

… how do you think the cruise control decelerates you? Is this a troll post?

Regen

Maybe this is different on cars newer than 2015 but I've never felt cruise control apply brakes.

At most, I've felt it shift down (on an automatic, obviously) to use engine braking while it was trying to reduce speed going downhill.

Any other time, it's only slowed down by coasting.

It lets off the accelerator to reduce speed to the new setting, just like a human would.

At least on the cars I had over the years, it does not apply the brakes. Depending on how far it is from the target, it lets of the trottle and it uses engine breaking.

EVs tend to be heavier that ICE vehicles, I’m skeptical of this conclusion.

I’m not sure how you get more tire wear but less brake dust.

Regenerative braking (i.e. magnets), as mentioned in the top comments? I'm not sure I understand the question

lol no shit sherlock.

I've owned a Pirus (hybrid), Camry Hybrid and now a Rav4 Hybrid plus a MG4 EV.

The rav and MG4 are too new to count, but the other two I owned for about 10-13 years each.. we NEVER needed to change the brake pads.

Not once.

If you're having to change the brake pads on a car like this, you're a leadfoot with no core strength issues :-P

I really wish Biden had not banned cheap EVs

I think it would have radically improved air-quality around roads and highways

Every runner and cyclist would have greatly appreciated it

continuation of EV propaganda, which are much heavier cars.

They'll get lighter as battery tech progresses.

The first Li-Ion battery revolution has already happened, it's just not evenly distributed.

https://www.androidpolice.com/what-are-silicon-carbon-batter...

And that's before we get into stuff like solid state batteries.

10 years from now we'll probably have battery packs which are at least 20% lighter, available in some mid-range vehicles.

Curb weight of a Tesla Model (Long Range) is only 9% over a comparable BMW 3 Series.

That's nothing compared to all the savings (tail pipes emissions, break dust, noise, ICE maintenance issues…). And we're just getting started with battery chemistries and renewables energy. This can only get better.

> Curb weight of a Tesla Model (Long Range) is only 9% over a comparable BMW 3 Series.

Which means 40% more road maintenance.

> And we're just getting started with battery chemistries and renewables energy. This can only get better.

Which implies it is better to delay switching until we have better batteries

>Which implies it is better to delay switching until we have better batteries

Let's discard everything but road maintenance?

No thanks. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-15c

> Let's discard everything but road maintenance?

not what I said. The points were:

1. its not all good.

2. if we buy cars with battery chemistries that will soon be replaced with better ones there is a good argument for delaying purchases. Not having to replace the cars again, for example.

> Which means 40% more road maintenance.

Nope. You've overlooked two things, one possibly minor and one major.

The minor one is that road maintenance is not just due to the need to repair damage caused by vehicles. Roads are also damaged by things as daily and seasonal temperature variation, UV from sunlight, oxygen, erosion and soil instability, and others.

An increase in damage from vehicles would might shorten the intervals between needed maintenance, but would not be a simple X% more vehicle damage means X% more maintenance.

The major one is that ICE cars need gas. Let's imagine a city where everyone drives an ICE and then switches to an EV and math this. To make things as comparable as possible let's say all the ICE cars were Hyundai Kona SELs, and they all switch to the Hyundai Kona Electric SEL.

The ICE Kona SEL weighs 3240 pounds and gets 28 mpg. The Kona Electric SEL is 3759 pounds, which is 16% more, so would be 80% more damage. Let's use the amount of damage caused by the ICE driving 1 mile as our unit of damage, so the EV causes 1.8 damage per mile.

Let's say that gas is delivered to the city's gas stations by a 5000 gallon tanker truck. The gas is loaded onto the tankers at a distribution center that is 5 miles from the city. It arrives at the distribution center by rail.

A 5000 gallon tanker will weigh somewhere in the 10000-15000 pound range when empty. 5000 gallons of gas is about 30000 pounds, so when the tanker leaves the distribution center it will weigh 40000-45000 points. Let's go with the low number. That's 12.346 as much as an ICE Kona SEL weighs, so that tanker will do 23000 units of road damager per mile. That's ~116000 units of road damage on the 5 mile trip to the city. As it goes around unloading the damage per mile goes down to 90 units per mile when the tanker is empty.

When that 5000 gallons of gas is later sold to the ICE Kona SEL drivers that will result in 140000 miles of driving and so 140000 units of damage.

If everyone switched to Kona Electric SEL that same 140000 miles would result in 252000 units of road damage, which is 112000 units more but it would also eliminate the need for 5000 gallons of gasoline delivery, saving 116000 units of road damage from the tanker. (Actually more because I'm ignoring the tanker damage once it gets to the first gas station and starts deliveries).

These numbers are going to depend a lot on what ICE and EV you compare, and how far the gas travels by tanker, but the above numbers illustrate that you definitely need to take into account the reduced need for gas delivery when estimating what a switch to EVs will do to the roads.

Electrons are lighter than crude oil.

So let's make cleaner brakes for combustion-engine cars.

Heavier cars with more torque at the wheels means more tyre dust.

I went to get new tires on my truck last month. 3 of the 5 bays at the tire shop had teslas getting new shoes. I asked the shop owner and he said EVs eat tires. Like 9-12 months max lifespan, great for business. I couldn't believe it but I've always heard there's exponential wear on tires relative to weight.

Depends how you drive - I change my teslas tires every 50k miles, it takes that long to wear out.

Have heard the same that Teslas eat tires like crazy. But why is that where their weight is comparable to a regular minivan. Is it due to the fast acceleration. If so can tire life be extended if the user is gentle on the accelerometer from zero.

Acceleration combined with the style many EV manufacturers chose. Lots of “sporty” looks leaning on large rims with low profile tires.

Almost all tire wear comes from accelerating and decelerating. Some from turning and cornering. Basically anytime you are asking them to stick to the road when the car's velocity is changing. Just coasting in a straight line does not cause any significant wear, regardless of weight. (Unless the tires are grossly under-inflated.)

EVs eat tires when people drive them like they're on a race track, which is most of the time.

This doesn't make sense. A Tesla weighs about as much as an SUV. We don't hear about SUVs eating tires.

If Teslas specifically are in the tire shop more, perhaps it's that Teslas ship with shitty tires. I've heard of a number of car makes that ship with really fragile OEM tires as a way to get you back into the shop for service.

EVs can accelerate much faster than an SUV. I imagine that could explain part of the difference.

It's a combination of the weight of the vehicle and the torque that the electric motors produce.

That makes more sense, but if that's true, you can avoid the extra tire wear by driving like a granny (which reportedly works, according to one of the other comments here).

Well, if you can convince my wife of that, you're more than welcome to try. I just crossed 100k miles on my Model 3 and I think I'm on my 5th set of tires.

Tesla also has faulty camber/toe settings out of the factory that concentrates tyre wear on where it's weak:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1kdxm5cKfA

My last two sets of tires on a Model 3 last for 30000 miles.

Our bz4x has 16,000 miles and the tires are like new. And it’s 400 pounds heavier than a Model 3.

How are you finding the bz4x? I've read some negative things (possibly just seen negative headlines) about Toyota's commitment to electric cars and that the bz4x is a bit of a wet fish attempt at an electric.

Interested in the FUD level going on.

As an owner of a (2014 model) Nissan Leaf, which my wife and I both love, it does seem that Nissan somehow dropped the ball on electric given how good the Leaf still is (11 years later) as a suburban commuter vehicle and how it was a very early electric production car.

This might be colored by the fact that we're a Toyota family, but we have a 2024 and love it. It's well-built, trouble-free, and predictable implementation of EV technology that's a cycle or two behind Tesla in terms of range and charging speed. I think the 2023 had some failure modes in cold weather, but the 2024 fixes those. It's fine, not great, on fast charging speeds. We get around 220 miles range, dropping to 190 in January/February when the temperature drops into the 30s here in Maryland. Right now it's reporting 3.7 miles per kWh, which is a tick behind what you'd get in a Model Y.

I get the criticism--why pay Tesla prices to fall 10-20% short of Tesla specs? But the fit and finish is a cut above the Model Ys we drove, the ride is very comfortable, and the electronic features are, while more primitive, more intuitive and predictable. We'll probably get the 2025 to replace our Subaru Forester (which we've been very unhappy with in terms of reliability). I hear the 2025 model squeezes another 30 miles or so out of the battery, which would enable us to make the trip to NYC on a single charge, which is the only complaint we have.

Slow speed turning wears tires hard and unevenly. Like geologic erosion, such wear can promote and accelerate more cutting.

depends on the car, model 3 weighs the same as a M3

> Like 9-12 months max lifespan

It’s easy to spot when people are just making stuff up. Why would he tell you lifespan in months rather than distance?

I pick up a bad screw every year from careless Ute drivers with leaky toolboxes and have to throw 1-2 tyres in the bin.

Tyre wear isn't that important to me.

> and have to throw 1-2 tyres in the bin.

That's your choice.

We jack the car, pull the wheel, extract the screws, and use a tyre plug kit.

Howto repair tubeless tyres with plugs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCwWPlaghfs

Tyres with inner tubes can also be repaired, that's slightly more involved.

depends where the puncture is. too close to the sidewall and you have to bin them. if they've already been plugged once and theu get another puncture its off to the bin.

> if they've already been plugged once and theu get another puncture its off to the bin.

Again, that's your personal choice.

We've got off road and on road tyres we still use with four to five tyre plugs in them that have lasted a few years since their last puncture.

I'm in non urban Australia and have cars actively used with > 500,000 km on the clock. We were raised to maintain gear; be it cars, trucks, aircraft, excavators, bob cats, etc.

It's a choice in so much as I would be gambling against how likely I am to get knocked back at a safety inspection for having plugs on the side wall. I'm in urban NSW and whether I'd get by a safety inspection would be a gamble on how particular the mechanic is. One of the mechanics I go to warned me about a single slightly cloudy headlight for my next inspection, which is comical compared to some of the cars I've seen on the roads in Sydney. I'm sure he'd be a big fan of those tyres.

Understandable if you're rural though.

I didn't advocate sidewall plugs.

What I can say is that properly fitted plugs in the tread can last a long time with little leakage and that three or four plugs in the tyre tread (widely spaced, not all jammed in a big hole) seem to last a fair few years.

Yes, this, it depends. It has to be in the middle 100mm or so of the tyre, and not between the treads, otherwise they won’t plug it.

Annoyingly, plugs are not perfect either: after a tyre has been plugged I’m putting air in it like every 2 months, so anecdotally I guess the plugs leak really slowly.

I plug shoulders in large part because it drives certain people up the wall. I'd say maybe half the time they last the life of the tire. Frequently they're finicky and unreliable. Less often than that they start a tread separation bubble. In either latter case I just trash the tire since that's easy enough.

Yeah a proper internal glue on patch would likely perform better in the shoulder but ain't nobody got time for that, that's like 90% of the work of changing the tire.

Almost entirely unrelated but this comment reminded me of the Mighty Car Mods youtube channel.

A lot of tyre shops offer insurance which might be beneficial for you if you reckon you have a higher-than-average rate of punctures.

That doesn't change the rate at which tires get replaced for damage though, just the payment structure.

Has anyone modeled how much excess cement and asphalt pollution is generated by having a tiny car weigh as much as a giant truck? Or the water usage of increased lithium mining?

EVs are like an inferior product being shoved down everyone's throat when consumer cars don't even account for the most emissions globally.

> Gains, however, are not equitable. Low-income neighborhoods, which often endure the highest pollution impacts, have seen slower EV uptake, demonstrating the necessity of access to clean transport on an equitable basis.

Air quality tier list:

S-tier: African/American/Australasian countries that were never discovered by the West, and have no energy sources (hypothetical)

B-tier: Western countries and similar (e.g. Japan), and those who've had a resource that they've traded for Western advances (e.g. Asia/Middle East) that can afford nuclear and renewables

D-tier: Sub-Saharan African/South American countries that now have energy needs but are burning coal or diesel to meet them

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