The order is:
1. brake dust 2. road dust 3. engine emissions 4. tire dust
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
https://electrek.co/2025/05/27/another-way-electric-cars-cle...
That's why your choice of tires on online sites gets so smaller as soon as you tuck the "electric/hybrid vehicle" case!
But they do care about tire wear a lot, they know the acceptable wear life for the class. A couple years ago I bought a set of Pirelli tires that were ~50% off because they were an older version; hoping I’d get some benefit. Unfortunately they had half the life and were a bit worse in every way than the newer tires I had before and after.
If you have something like really high performance tires, I recommend just using them. The grip is always there and you are always paying for it. As long as you aren't losing traction constantly, the difference is negligible in my experience.
If an equivalent car wore down its tires 20% slower, and those tire particles contributed 2x the intensity of pollution than other types of wear-based pollution, than the increase in produced pollution from that source seems like it would be ~16%, not 40%.
If one car drives 100 km and produces 2 units of pollution per km, that would be 200 units. Another car wearing 20% more would produce 240 units, or roughly ~16% more.
This is some Fermat’s Last Theorem shit
There was a "study" going around claiming otherwise, which sampled air captured by passing vehicles with a trash bag on a busy road, claiming EVs did not reduce brake dust, but even my brief summary here makes it extremely obvious how flawed this "measurement" is.
EVs unfortunately do increase tire particulate, as well. Fairly significantly. It's not obvious to me that the decrease in brake dust isn't made up by the increase in tire dust.
The removal of the tailpipe emissions is really where EVs shine from a pollution standpoint. If you turn on your car in your garage, you don't die anymore.
> EVs unfortunately do increase tire particulate, Fairly significantly
In the USA, mass of EV is not significantly different than the alternative choice. EVs do not have increased tire particulate. If in Europe extremely lightweight tiny cars are actually a likely substitution for nicer, heavier EVs, then it seems reasonable that tire wear will increase proportionally. There's a lot riding on that "if" though.
This does not seem correct...
- Air resistance slows the car without putting anything extra through the tyres (the friction is between car and air rather than between tyre and road)
- Regenerative braking channels energy into the battery, and also heat, that would otherwise be dissipated by heating and ablating the brake pads and discs, but regardless or whether it's brakes or the the motor acting as a dynamo that puts resistance on the rolling of the wheels, for a given amount of braking you will have the same forces between the tyres and the road and the same tyre wear.
So I'd expect it's only any additional weight that contributes to increase tyre particulates from electric care. Perhaps a tiny contribution from lower air resistance (on average at least) for electric cars, as there's often quite an effort to reduce the drag coefficient for range reasons, but I wouldn't expect this to be substantial as air resistance is not huge part of braking.
EVs tend to use regenerative braking, thus applying road-tire friction, much more often than an ICE vehicle uses brakes. In an EV if you are going tobfast and let off the accelerator, the regen braking slows you. With tires. In an ICE car, you will coast along and slowly slow down, mainly due to air resistance, unless you actively press the brake.
If regen braking only happened when then EV driver pushes the brake pedal with their foot, your expectations would be correct and weight would be the only differentiator. But the single pedal driving design decision means the tires wear more.
I haven't noticed EVs oscillating between full acceleration and hard braking when out and about. They seem to be driven pretty much the same as any other car.
If I'm not mistaken, this means that tyre wear should be roughly equivalent (for an equivalent vehichle weight). So EVs still have the benefit of reducing brake pad wear.
If you have any friends with motion sickness, ask them if it feels different to be a passenger in an EV.
Alternately go to a tire shop and ask whether EVs wear tires faster.
All this isn't to say EVs aren't better than ICE vehicles. They are, in many ways. It's just that tire wear isn't one of them.
I'm convinced they do, many people noted this. But I always thought it was mainly because the cars are heavier than what most people are used to, and they also have much better acceleration.
Tires apply the braking force to the ground in exactly the same manner on both EVs and ICE vehicles.
Secondly, if you've ridden in an EV, you would know that the drivers/cruise control often apply regent braking in situations where an ICE vehicle would have simply coasted to a stop. Hence more wear.
With the ICE car, if you want to go 55, you might accelerate to 57 and then coast down to 55 without using brakes.
With an EV you might accelerate to 57 and then brake to 55 when you let off the accelerator.
Tire wear is a function of how often you use your tires to slow down the car. With an ICE car that's every time you hit your brakes. With an EV that's both brakes and regen. An EV's time spent braking or regenning is more than the time an ICE car spends braking.
Someone could design an EV that behaves the way you describe, but aggressive regen sells better, so no one does.
If you lack the middle-school-level understanding of physics to understand why, I'm not going to be able to give it to you in an internet comment.
Think hard about why braking and coasting would wear the tires differently. Here's a hint. Where does the energy go? What is doing the work to stop the car in each scenario?
No one with more than a few miles of one-pedal driving would do this; it’d be highly unpleasant.
What actually happens is you remap your pedal inputs: all the way off is braking, somewhere in the middle is coasting. Your brain will do it automatically and OPD is far more pleasant than two-pedal driving after a trivial learning curve.
What actually happens is you wind up decelerating for curves, accelerating on straights more, and otherwise having better control of the car. Holding the pedal in a location where power is neither going to or coming from the motor is very difficult; usually you want power going to the motor anyway to overcome air resistance.
Also, consider that most EVs will automatically regeneratively brake when going downhill with cruise control on. The last ICE car I owned just coasted and would speed up on large downhills with cruise on.
No you don't; in fact you can't. Letting off the accelerator enough to apply regen is going to take far more than 2 mph off your speed.
If you want to drop from 57 to 55 in an EV its done the exact same way you do it in an ICE vehicle: you coast.
And yes, you are right, if you do that you can coast and then your tire wear will be no worse than an ICE vehicle.
Most EV drivers don't do those things.
Certainly not enough to make up the EV tire wear from regen.
An electric car can use its engines to bring a vehicle to a complete stop. It can also use the motor to hold the car in place, even on a fairly steep incline. You can't do either with a standard transmission ICE vehicle.
There are people with electric cars that have their brakes rust out because they're never used. A standard piece of advice to EV owners is "make sure to use your brakes at least once a month".