California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year
grist.org
grist.org
When you shop for tires, manufacturers will try to make this eminently clear in the marketing - you pay a premium for tires that maximize on one or two of these features.
The changes that California is proposing basically means you are going to have to choose between traction and tire wear when shopping. Either super slippery tires, or tires that wear out quickly (hence why manufacturers are potentially behind the proposal).
> The rule also comes with exemptions including snow tires and those used in competition. All-weather tires are also excluded, but the state will track them, as that growing segment may be regulated in the future.
All-Weathers are excluded! Realistically this is a program that would only be effective in California.
It's easy to imagine the manufacturer reps are playing games with the lawmakers. "Oh no, this is going to be really hard on us! It's going to cost us so much money! But I guess we can comply if we have to."
And even if this was originated by an eco lobbiest group, tire manufactures would love regulation that forces everyone to buy more expensive tires.
DOTs are intercepting trucks with drones and measuring wheel temperatures and other metrics to do targeted enforcement rather than pulling over every truck. There’s also pilots of road sensors that can weigh trucks and perhaps other metrics.
How are they easily gamed, without being able to shift the load as you roll over the scale?
And, at least in California, the scales are placed so that, to avoid them, you have to add a bunch of time to most routes.
Yes, they stated that in the second half, and I addressed it. What's the first half?
Once you understand this the whole system makes sense.
I'm curious, do they actually check that you buy gas in the US before letting you get those services?
After 15,000 km, they haven't worn down by 2 mm. And that's despite being an EV. I think it really depends on how you drive.
Well everyone says they are a good driver, and probably they are not. But I like to drive in a way that I rarely if ever have to engage the breaks. I also try to spread the regen distance if that makes sense, so it doesn't do a hard stop but slows down... gently over a longer distance. And when it comes to curves I try to follow the late apex line approach.
I was also lucky with my car though, it came with an excellent wheel alignment which isn't always the case.
I test drove the weird Mazda MX-30 and while it was too gutless and low-range to buy, one thing that impressed the hell out of me was the use of flappy-paddles behind the steering wheel to control regen strength. Felt like downshifting an automatic; you could set it to give you max regen without engaging the mechanical brakes, or total freewheeling. Made for some interesting hypermiling potential. Hopefully they ship a more complete EV one day!
I had a set of these low-rolling-resistance tires stock on an early FWD EV I had a few years ago and they were not only trash in terms of getting grip whenever there was even a hint of rain, but they also had awful stopping distance. Swapping them out for a set of all-weathers vastly improved everything about the car.
Consider the carbon footprint impact of a vehicle accident that totals both cars (never mind the human impact of this!). Probably cancels out hundreds of cars worth of carbon savings from using these shitty tires. Avoiding vehicle accidents has to be job one and tires are the single greatest factor in your stopping distance that you can simply buy an upgrade on. Combined with automatic braking technology - a great addition - you can seriously change the course of your life with a set that's only a couple hundred bucks more (in the sense that your life will be hella changed if you have an accident and end up with chronic pain).
Every car has powerful enough brakes, braking upgrades are mostly just for racing needs; but stock tires are still very often just total garbage and the first thing you should replace.
This is auto consumers carbon footprint; not just you but you too.
There is little value to physical reality segmenting rhetorically between "rich and poor" or "consumers and businesses". The carbon footprint is due to human activity full stop.
Trying to live in rhetorical bubbles is trying to maintain social moats; stick to the script and you're off the hook!
Politically correct weasel wordy terms you like to deploy are just evidence the propaganda worked on you; letting yourself off the hook for your existence as if Jesus paid for your sins
A number of wannabe intelligent people who stick to the script and ignore the externalities of their own existence are disingenuous and self aggrandizing tools.
So sick of social media tools wasting resources spreading their self absorbed rage bait about idiots in government; random idiots themselves with pseudonyms and no reason to believe they give a crap really (look at reality itself lately; why believe the shit people say?)
Log off and let the open web joke die. Tech scene adjacent people are just turning into little more than religiously dogmatic old Boomers; can't move on.
I know that, no need to be patronizing, if you read what I said, I clearly want a lower carbon footprint all around. Sorry if you read weasel words into my statement. Wasn't the intention.
There's a lot of tires that are poorly made and just bad tires. For example, one tire got 2/5 for rolling resistance, tested to 55,000 miles for tread, and 2/5 and 3/5 ratings for the traction categories like wet braking, snow traction, ice braking.
I'm not arguing that there aren't trade-offs, but tire companies have been working to make better tires that minimize the trade-offs and produce better tires on all three.
> The rule is “designed to ensure that replacement tires sold in the state are at least as energy efficient, on average, as tires sold in the state as original equipment.”
It sounds like the rule isn't exactly that strict. This (combined with the fact that all season tires aren't covered) presents a very low bar. But there are tires that are just garbage - they're bad at all three. It doesn't sound like this rule would impact good tires that have very long tread life and amazing traction. It sounds like it'd impact the tires that are a pile of garbage.
There's a difference between a tire that trades off a small portion of rolling resistance for traction and tire wear and tires that are poorly made and are trading off a huge amount of one or two of those categories because they're just bad tires.
But you're not wrong in general. There are a lot of garbage tires. And that's not even considering the intentionally "bad" tires like the knobby off-road treads that also have the side effect of massively increasing road noise and reducing engine life.
But like a lot of the California rules, they have carved out so many exceptions and have no real enforcement mechanism (the worst offending tires are being imported directly from China). So the reality is that there is not going to be a lot of juice for the squeeze.
Sounds like the only reasonable solution to the problem you raise is that the part of our government that's responsible for defense should be put under the seperate part that is responsible for protecting our environment instead of being exempt. I can't see any other real way of resolving that issue can you?
You think people are going to tread-peek?!
I agree with you, but we’re both going to be disappointed.
there is another metric at play with Michelin, they're consistently one of the most expensive options in every segment.
In their class, but not in general.
They are all-season tires. They don't perform as well as winter tires in the winter, and they don't perform as well as summer tires in the summer.
They're also a terribly mushy tire. They feel like you're floating around on the road and wallowing through the turns. This doesn't matter in the slightest to someone commuting to work in their 15 year old Honda Accord with blown struts, but if you enjoy driving they're on the list of tires to avoid.
Everything is a tradeoff. Some tires do a better job of optimizing within their class, but the Michelin CC2 is assuredly not the best traction tires in general.
A lot of people don't live in climates where winter tires are even sold; particularly California, Texas, Florida, three of the most populous states. Many people in those states aren't even aware "winter tires" are even a product category. That's like complaining the Walmart in Anchorage, Alaska doesn't carry SPF 50 sunscreen.
> A lot of people don't live in climates where winter tires are even sold
The CrossClimate 2 tire we're talking about is an all-weather tire with the 3-peak snow designator. If you're trying to call me out for talking about winter tires in comparison to a tire designed for winter weather, I think you don't understand what we're talking about.
> Many people in those states aren't even aware "winter tires" are even a product category
Again, the CrossClimate 2 is a tire with a winter designation. California also has a lot of snowy locations.
> That's like complaining the Walmart in Anchorage, Alaska doesn't carry SPF 50 sunscreen.
Not only do stores in Anchorage carry SPF 50, but you're going to need it in the summer. When the sun is out for 20 hours a day, it adds up.
For reference, I used to daily a Honda S2000 (not with CC2s, obviously).
They are not great in that regard. Casual drivers won't usually care, but anyone who pays attention to handling usually hates them.
That is incredible. My front ones are toast after only 15 000 miles / 25 000 km ( Continental Sport Contact 3 / N0 rating) and two years. 95 000 miles and I'd need to change them not because of wear but because they'd be legally too old.
At some point I'll buy a reasonable car.
I have a lighter sports car making similar power, on Michelin Pilot 4S summer tires. That car just grips and goes with barely a squeal. Good summer tires also have far better wet performance than CC2s, and they provide better feedback.. you feel more planted and in control.
I am impressed overall with the CC2's ability to be a true all-rounder that is usable in snow, but it is still an exercise in trade-offs and it'll never be as good as any purpose-built tire is at its purpose.
I believe I spent $1200 on my last set only to lose two of them in the first six months due to road debris. Perhaps this is down stream of living in a boom state with constant construction but I’m nearly replacing cracked windshields and at least partial tires annually as of late.
Is it really not possible to get moderately-slippery tires that wear out moderately quickly, or is this just the hyperbolic writing style that infests the internet?
Michelin Defenders are warrantied for minimum 80,000 miles and are relatively low noise, good economy, good performance all around but especially good in rain. They cost $185/tire for a Honda Civic, which is a pretty normal price) (range for Honda Civic tires at Costco are $160-235, at TireRack $185/ea puts these about $25/tire over the median tire price for Honda Civic's)
That's like double the price of random import stuff.
California is a large market. Tire manufacturers probably won't make many California-specific tires. They're going to try to adjust their tires to meet the California guidelines. The most populous areas of California aren't known for demanding a lot of rain tires.
So if you live somewhere with a lot of rain, your tire choices are about to get worse to appease regulations in a state you don't live in.
So apparently, design and compound can cater for a lot.
Unfortunately, snow performance on my front drive car is worse than my XC90 has in AWD mode with summer tires. (
The easiest way to increase rolling resistance is to reduce the tread depth. Less deformation of the rubber leads to less rolling resistance.
So to improve rolling resistance, the designers can reduce tread depth and move to a harder compound, which trades off grip.
Modern tires are good, but everything is tradeoffs.
I'm not sure the tires matter all that much if you don't alter your driving at all.
We are inventing better and better compounds though, which just plain better at all three.
Formula 1 has to artificially nerf their tire compounds just to force racing teams to actually change tires at all - compounds are good enough that they can get all the grip they need while also lasting the entire race. But that's not as fun for the sport so they specific to the tire vendor that the tires must wear out halfway through the race -- but that reduced life doesn't yield increased grip.
The Michelin Defender tires are pretty all-around great in all conditions while still lasting 80,000 miles. For most people who buy a new car, that would be the only set of tires they ever buy (stock tires for 20k miles or so and then this one set until 100k and sell the used vehicle before they need to buy a second set)
But of course, the EU is over-regulated, let's laugh at the EU :-)
:)
...“designed to ensure that replacement tires sold in the state are at least as energy efficient, on average, as tires sold in the state as original equipment.”
That being said, the quoted figures do sound good. Maybe less compelling in someplace like Texas with very low gas prices:
The energy commission calculated that more efficient tires cost between $6 and $26 more per set, but that increase is more than offset by reduced fuel consumption. It put net savings at $85 to $153 over the lifetime of the tire when gasoline is $4.60 a gallon, though the savings could be 25 percent higher with this year’s price spikes.OEMs do the opposite already because their official MPG ratings are calculated using the OE tires. OE tires are sometimes criticized as prioritizing fuel economy too much at the expense of longevity and performance.
I don’t see a reason that a car manufacturer would be incentivized to help tire manufacturers sell the cheapest tires on the market
Some manufacturers even source tires that have lower tread depths than typical replacement tires, in order to decrease noise and increase MPG at the direct detriment to tread life. Tesla is one of the manufacturers that does this, which is one exacerbating factor for their notoriously poor tire life. They literally come with less tire!
They won't want to do that because it'll hurt their advertised mileage/range.
This is aimed at the different incentives between selling tires to manufacturers (make sure mileage is good, balance that against raw cost) vs direct to consumers (up front cost is king).
There are doubtless still some potential loopholes that will be explored, though some of the most obvious (like reducing tread depth, mentioned here, appear to have been considered already: https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a71509031/california-tire-... ). It doesn't appear to be that naive.
It's also something that's hard to find info on when shopping for tires, so more transparency should help consumers.
They already do. They mostly do it for handling and NVH though. And tire makers compete pretty seriously to be the OEM tire on a given car because it's a guaranteed-ish number of sales plus subsequent sales from all the people who just buy the same thing because clearly those work fine why think about it.
Another 20 years and maybe the government will finally address that.
On the tires topic, I'm fine with this as long as they don't ban the sale of anything. Let the consumer decide.
The problem is landlords and normal people just go to home depot so every time I move it's a giant replace bulbs fiasco (or even replacing fixtures).
No. They are illegal.
LEDs are universally better. They use way less energy and last way, way longer. The end result is you save a shit ton of money.
Pricey but they are flicker free
They use more electricity, but I don't really care. If we're going to build ten thousand gigawatt datacenters for every corporation on earth to stuff AI up my ass I will do as I please with the lighting in my own home and I rest easy about it, because of the very pleasant, warm, full spectrum glow that incandescents give off when dimmed.
Coffee specifically used require Prop65 warning because it releases acrylamide during roasting process, but after a lenghty legal battle coffee got an exeption.
You post numbers that this will save $1B in fuel. Tons of co2 equal to taking 400,000 cars off the road.
Unquestionably good for society, immensely good for future generations, but you ridicule it because it doesn’t benefit YOU enough right now.
This is why the US doesn’t have nice things. You really can’t see past yourself.
For example, CA has very strict environment protection laws and many people hate it.
But it's also the reason we get beautiful sky and nature all year round. When I was first landing on US soil in LA in 2015, I saw a layer of light gray smog out of the window. These days it's non-existent.
But that doesn't make the tire efficiency rules, as stated, a good idea, as I pointed out above. Less grippy tires -> more car crashes and more human deaths.
Depends on how many more accidents worse-gripping tires cause that result in more totaled vehicles that require replacement and what people replace them with.
Depends on how much faster people have to replace these tires due to wear resulting in more baseline tire production.
Depends on how many more one-off flat tires people get that require getting a whole new set of 4 matched tires so their diffs aren’t destroyed.
Depends on whether slightly more efficient tires induce people to drive more on net because they feel like they’re using less gas.
Depends on this does or doesn’t affect how much tire material ends up in the environment and landfills.
There are so many levers one can pull on the “put less CO2 into the atmosphere” problem that it’s not at all clear that this one specific policy is worth it.
There’s also plenty of ways to make your point without stereotyping.
Especially "how many more accidents worse-gripping tires cause that result in more totaled vehicles". Forget about the totaled vehicles.
Worse-gripping tires are guaranteed to cause more deaths, all else equal.
So either the manufacturer-supplied originals are more dangerous than replacement tires, or your argument is missing something.
The rest of your quasi-questions all would need to be evaluated to see if they are true or not... and one would hope that at least some of them were evaluated when creating the policy. You seem to be assuming they were not, without any real evidence one way or the other.
There's 3 main components to tire performance: efficiency, grip and longevity. OEM tires optimize for the first. They can compromise on grip and longevity. Most often I've experienced is the latter. So yes, OEM tires are "worse" in some aspects as replacements.
Generally speaking, with tires you are trading off wear, grip, efficiency, and cost, among other things (like off-road durability which is irrelevant here). When you make a tire roll more efficiently, it tends to make it perform worse at gripping the road in all sorts of conditions, especially adverse conditions like rain and snow. I am speaking in generalities because there are thousands of tires from dozens of manufacturers and this is not a law of physics, but it is generally true in practice. Tires today are worlds better than tires of 50 years ago but this is still true to a first approximation.
So yes, I am making that assumption.
> So either the manufacturer-supplied originals are more dangerous than replacement tires, or your argument is missing something.
The tires that come on your car from the factory are optimized for one thing and one thing only: for the OEM to sell you the car.
OEM tires are famously (infamously?) often worse in terms of wear and grip than the equivalent tire available aftermarket because they are cheaper to produce (bringing down sticker price), roll more efficiently (helping them hit EPA fuel economy numbers), and quieter on test drives. Having a cheaper tire that is quieter on test drives and hits EPA numbers that are competitive with comparable models helps sell the car.
Higher treadwear doesn't help the OEM sell the car because your test drive isn't long enough to drive the car for 60,000 miles let alone 600. Higher grip doesn't either, as average buyers won't notice tire grip on a 15 minute drive on dry pavement and enthusiasts will replace the tires anyway. With the exception of certain enthusiast vehicles, if running a cheaper tire from the factory gets the price of the car from $40,000 to $39,950, the OEM will do it, even if the buyer has to replace the tire 20,000 miles sooner and it doesn't grip as well on dry pavement or in rain or snow.
> The rest of your quasi-questions all would need to be evaluated to see if they are true or not... and one would hope that at least some of them were evaluated when creating the policy. You seem to be assuming they were not, without any real evidence one way or the other.
I'm not sure what makes my questions "quasi", I'm just having a friendly conversation about tires on the internet.
There's almost nothing in human history with a worse record of causing unintended consequences than government regulation, even well-intentioned (cookie banners?), so I think I say charitably with some basis in historical fact that governments have a spotty record when it comes to understanding and predicting the second-order effects of the regulations they make. I ask my questions with that understanding. And I say all this as someone who is broadly sympathetic to and often in favor of many government regulations that reduce CO2 emissions and make cars more efficient. I enjoy clean air as much as the next person.
but:
> Depends on how many more accidents worse-gripping tires cause
The US has an unusually high number of road deaths: https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/media/releases/2016/p070... and a lot of them are preventable. 1% less traction (or what ever it might be) is unlikely to be as bad compared to drink driving or not using seatbelts.
You’re not wrong, but you’re arguing against yourself. The article is EXACTLY the kind of action that comes from research with the goal of improving the status quo, and you don’t like it.
So you actually don’t want any effort to improve things, you just want to poo poo any efforts.
Many of those as alternative tires will wear out faster, causing increased particulate pollution and wasting people's money.
Many of those tires will cost more money than they save in gas. The limited options on less common sizes will make tires really expensive for some unfortunate folks.
Some of those tires will have less grip than what people otherwise would have bought, causing some additional number of car accidents. That's money and resources wasted on wrecked cars, not to mention injuries, and potentially even deaths.
But it could save people $3/month on gas according to the optimistic numbers the lobbyists calculated, so consequences be damned, you think everyone who doesn't want this is a selfish jerk.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
100% of leaded gasoline became illegal. Outcome? Huge health benefits.
100% of lead paint became illegal. Outcome? Huge health benefits.
100% of new vehicles without catalytic converters, air bags, backup cameras , abs, reaction control became illegal. Outcome? Massive health and safety benefits.
The whole point of making the old way of doing something illegal is to force the better way. This is good.
A study was done, and they have clear data to make this decision.
As time moves forward, new studies can be done addressing your concerns, and decisions can be made about addressing those.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.
But then, you likely are fully aware of that eh?
I think particulate pollution would be an acceptable outcome if the tires themselves were biodegradable over 10+ years. But to my understanding the vulcanisation process that's employed makes it impossible.
May I introduce you to the steel wheel rolling on a steel rail?
The closest thing to a standard is that most either operate in the 315 MHz band (which is mostly older ones in North America and Asia) or the 433 MHz band (there are restriction in Europe with the 315 MHz band). Most worldwide are now in the 433 MHz band. Tesla switched to using BLE, and others are starting to support that.
For the 433 MHz (and I'd guess 315 MHz) there is pretty much no standard beyond that. It is a lot like the situation in wireless weather sensors and other non-WiFi/non-Bluetooth IoT devices.
Different manufacturers use different modulation (AM or FM), different ways to encode bits, and different packet structures.
These can definitely be tracked. I have an RPi with an RTL-SDR dongle that runs rtl_433 and logs the output. I pick up TPMS sensors from cars other than my own that are at least 18 meters away. This was using the small antenna that comes with many RTL-SDRs. I've now got a much better antenna that is picking up many more things on 433 MHz so probably am getting cars farther away now.
There was a study that explored this [1]. They put a network of 433 MHz sensors along roads and in parking lots. They captured 6 million packets from 20k cars. They found groups of IDs that came and went at the same time to fingerprint individual cars and were able to map out driver's daily routines and commute schedules.
Note that unlike cameras and automatic license plate readers this requires no line of sight, so is much less bothered by heavy rain or fog or dirty plates.
Use a good antenna and you should be able to make this work at up to maybe 100 meters or if the cars are in concrete parking structure.
[1] https://networks.imdea.org/your-cars-tire-sensors-could-be-u...
Better still, have rules about maintenance for both roads as well as vehicles, use regular (yearly, past-the-winter-season for roads) inspections and deal with those who do not abide by the rules by (for vehicles) denying road access until problems have been mitigated or (for roads) deductions in road taxes or something similar, something to make it costly for the state to evade their responsibility. Fines don't work here since they'll just increase taxes to pay them, they need to lose funds to at least the amount of what it would have cost to fix the problems.
I didn't use the word "fine" - as in "$500 fine for littering". I said "bill you". If a DoT has to stop and collect a strip of retread then he should bill a proper rate for his time and resources. If a stack of tires is abandoned in the desert, they should be collected, disposed of properly, and send the bill to the owner. A uuid embedded in the tread would facilitate that.
It should be cost prohibitive to use trucks for anything but local deliveries. Before you say "this will increase costs for consumers," recognize consumers are already paying for these roads.
Given a fixed per-gallon gas tax, if you assume a 3000lb, 2 axle vehicle that gets 30mpg is paying enough road tax to cover its usage, then an 80,000lb, 5 axle vehicle would need to consume 320 gallons per mile to be paying gas tax proportionate to its road usage.
They don't (thankfully), so it's not. Trucks are massively subsidized by everyone else.
You wanna stop people littering tires, make it easy/cheap to get rid of them the right way. Pretty much all the problems in the municipal solid waste industry trace back to some shortsighted "environmentalists" trying to financially punish people for not behaving how they prefer, distorting the market and thereby keeping various types of waste from getting into the hands of the relevant disposal industries.
Tires are not car-specific. This sounds like you couldn't just go out and buy some random tires, you could only buy tires that are designated for your specific vehicle. And that owners of two vehicles with the same size tires would have different allowed tire choices, depending on what their OEM tires were.
Put another way, is this saying you can't buy wider than OEM tires, and that you can't buy all-terrain tires for something that came with street tires?
And what are they gonna do if you just go to the tire store and say I want X tires? So of course none of this will be enforced. It's just to provide the little leaf indicator.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
> A complicated 2011 mathematical formula was replaced starting in 2012 with a simpler inverse-linear formula with cutoff values.[10] CAFE footprint requirements are set up such that a vehicle with a larger footprint has a lower fuel economy requirement than a vehicle with a smaller footprint.
This program claims 2 MMT reduction per year, but that assumes 100% adoption , after they move past the voluntary restrictions , into mandatory restrictions, and will eventually require on-road tread enforcement.
Are you okay with being pulled over for the wrong tread? it's annoying enough to face snow chains enforcement.
The only way to reach 100% adoption is with highway tread enforcement. Like we do for highway emissions enforcement.
What do you think they will use the Flock cameras for?
Never fear, California is also talking about shifting to a mileage baded road tax because EVs (which they heavily incentivized) saving money on gas can't go untaxed.
Gas as a proxy for mileage breaks down with widespread EV usage, so even though they are a benefit for many reasons with incentivizing, they still require expensive road upkeep so should not be immune from usage taxation.
And, they won't be repealing the gas tax. They'll be adding a mileage tax on top of the gas tax.
If that incentivizes more people to buy EVs and drop their gas vehicles, that's great. And I say this as a driver of a gas-powered car with not-the-best MPG.
Of course, the problem with this is that new EVs are expensive, and the kinds of people who drive older, inefficient ICE cars are the kinds of people who probably can't afford a new EV. (Not sure what the used market is looking like, though.)
EVs in CA have a special $121 tax to make up for "don't pay gas tax."
The mileage-based road tax is for other reasons.
Of course you can't tell if they were driving on public roads, or just driving around in a circle in their backyard for hours... but that uncertainty exists for the gas tax too.
Maybe single occupancy personal vehicles are wasteful and mass transportation should be invested in rather than shaming individual into token behaviors compared to large-scale waste and consumption sources elsewhere in the economy?
no amount of shaming will make me not consider my family's safety. mass transit in CA (eg: https://www.opportunitynowsv.org/blog/nobody-feels-comfortab...) is not safe due to lack of serious policing. my family is prohibited from taking mass transit in usa. It is ok in japan and singapore.
"my family is prohibited" christ almighty
> "my family is prohibited" christ almighty
Yes, I take their safety seriously.
Non-OEM tires are usually louder, because they trade in efficiency for noise.
OTOH I had a car that came with Michelin Super Ports and it was a much better ride on Michelin PS4S.
>California’s New Tire Rule Could Wipe Out 70% of What’s on the Shelf — And Sacramento Sat on the Law for 23 Years
https://theautowire.com/2026/08/18/californias-new-tire-rule...
Anyway, saying how it will save money is not right way how to promote this (it is really hard to predict all 2nd order effects this might cause - including increase of accidents, noise pollution, market forces (less choice), and similar).
So what is the right way then?
2. There are many other ways to help salmon and their habitat. If the goal is to help them, California’s massive budget could be applied in many more targeted and effective ways to helping the fish.
3. There’s no evidence that this specific piece of regulation will help salmon in any way.
I eventually switched to a midsize truck, because I need to do some light towing sometimes, and my first thought was, it feels so much safer in the rain.
> Reducing the rolling resistance of a tire isn’t technically that difficult, said Fadie. Incorporating more silica, for example, improves not only efficiency but traction as well. Rubber chemistry and tread designs can also lead to gains
and the quoted opposition never mentions this fact either, which you'd think they would.
But it is not about saving but it is about environment. And this where I get a little weary about: if they are willing to stretch truths here where else are they doing that. Requiring ID to browse internet? Flock cameras?
Of course they will use left vs right argument but I doubt this is all about saving environment.
This is a labelling law, not a "You can't buy the bumpy tires" law.
This improves the quality of my choice here, because I already look for the little snowflake on tires when buying them for the 3 weekends I drive in the snow.
I'd be revolting too if they banned all season tires over this, because I am not swapping winter tires for thanksgiving weekend, Xmas and ski week.
Also efficient tires don't mean driving becomes boring, a GT86 is on skinnies and that makes it more fun at 35mph in a tight corner than a BMW with pilot sports.
I think they're only calling out cost, because the skinny tires cost more money overall, but there is a net payoff period on bills.
No, the labeling part seems to be mostly secondary:
FTA
"designed to ensure that replacement tires sold in the state are at least as energy efficient, on average, as tires sold in the state as original equipment"
Context: a car magazine simulates a car swerving around a fatal obstacle in lane and then quickly getting back to their lane to avoid a head-on collision. Taller, narrower cars tip over; poor suspension/ESC rip off tires from their rims (debeading); slippery tires send it skidding. Its a great rabbit hole in Youtube.
Undoubtably, consumers will quickly adopt tires in an exempt category like "Specialty tires, including certain off-road tires, low-speed tires, deep-tread tires, winter snow tires, space-saver tires, and temporary-use tires" and the unintended consequence will be that vehicle energy efficiency as a whole will decline.
We need a better argument than that.
HN are obsessed with the 'unintended consequences' argument against regulation, a very general idea applied to an actual situation, and as if people can't and don't anticipate and make effective plans.
The world turns, things work, regulations work - not everything in the world, but we accomplish a lot. My roads, medications, air traffic, etc. etc. work; people's planning and ideas succeeded.
I'm not arguing for or against this consumer information regulation. It would not surprise me if most tire industry folks support it since a acknowledged standard increases consumer trust in the claims of a premium product. Good regulation creates wins for both consumers and producers.
Bad regulation typically tries to nudge either consumers or producers in a direction contrary to the prevailing culture and/or economics. To the extent that CA will attempt to reduce consumer choice, different methods will exploit the regulation's leaks, like which tires it does not cover.
A direct corollary is US fuel economy standards leading to the rise of the SUV as an vehicle format. People may disagree on causes, but "[t]here is some evidence that this happened with an increase in market share of lower fuel economy light trucks and SUVs and decline in passenger car sales, as a percentage of total fleet sales, as car buying trends changed during the 1990s. . ." [0]
Another fun example is the development of "trunking." I'm not a CA teen so lack direct experience, and things are undoubtably overhyped, but enough people started doing it for a law to be passed specifically criminalizing the practice. Why would anyone ride in the trunk of a car? Because CA outlawed passengers in cars driven by teens.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
1. https://www.ocregister.com/2007/01/03/trunking-law-for-the-d...
> Bad regulation typically tries to nudge either consumers or producers in a direction contrary to the prevailing culture and/or economics
We wouldn't need regulation if the prevailing culture / economics was to already do that thing.
Look for low rolling resistance. chat gpt helps with this a lot
An energy efficient tire for a Honda is just a mid priced tire for a Honda, and probably cheaper to install because they likely use just a $0.50 rubber valve stem too.
Same thing with ebike tires vs normal bike tires
2. Yours probably have foam for silent operation
3. They also have higher load spec, lower rolling resistance, stronger sidewall
4. Most importantly, they are likely much wider than normal car tyre, since Tesla's are quite high performing.
This is a primarily a labeling law it seems so people don’t get accidentally screwed. Seems like a good idea to me.
Those will be exempt from testing/labelling.
Why in the hell should the government be regulating this?
Your second statement is a question worth investigating: why should the government be involved here? The simple answer is that the market has not moved for the problem of tire efficiency. There is a quote in the article that goes to the heart of this: “It’s very difficult or impossible for consumers to know how energy efficient their tires are going to be, as a result, many people unknowingly buy tires that cost them more money than necessary”. Large imbalances (like this) in information are one of the things markets do not work well in.
So the solution here is to (gradually) put a floor under how inefficient tires can be. This is one way to solve the market inefficiency (since it treated this as an externality).
I would rather have had them use an approach more like the EnergyStar system, where it requires a simple rating for the efficiency, including average savings and where this sits in comparison with competitors (in that range). I would even add to that a green/yellow/red system that would be allowed to slide the ranges over time to reflect what the market can currently produce.
Like all types of laws like this, the "$1B" claim will never be reviewed or judged to see how accurate it is. (It's not, at all)
Isn’t it doing both?
And don't be shocked if a bunch of California government officials bought a bunch of Goodyear stock right before this.
"why can't California just ban the sale of them" -- because that infringes freedom too much? There are probably lots of special machines with tires (e.g. in construction, farming, mining) that absolutely need "bad tyres". Because only they work, e.g. due to construction form or physical properties like maximum pressure.
If some armchair person now goes here and outright bans all tyres that don't match some efficiency numbers ... then all of the users of such equipment will be punished. THAT would be an overreaching government action.
However, having some labels that indicate to those customers that care (and can care, because they don't have to consider other constraints) is actually something that enlarges freedom. You get the info, you can act on it, but you're still free to NOT act on it should the circumstances for that be okay. And ultimately it's you that decides this, not some government authority.
If a large number of consumers actually cared about their tires drag coefficient we wouldn't be having this conversation, because a large number of consumers already cared about their tires drag coefficient. But nobody does and this law will not change anything.
What possible argument is there against that?
Do you really think most consumers didn’t care? Or do you think most consumers don’t even know? Cause I’m willing to bet it’s number two.
And no, most consumers do not care. Do you know how many people buy used tires because they can't afford new ones?
Sure, the information is more readily available. But what do you think the overlap is of people who care about very, very, very small improvements to tire efficiency and those who can't spend 10 seconds to look up the information themselves?