I think it's absolutely crazy that our society is OK with car drivers polluting the air with carcinogenic particles. I hope more cities around the world implement similar bans soon.
EVs are not the solution for that, brake and tire wear contribute to as much or more PM2.5 and 2-3 times more PM10 pollution than modern ICEs. Also while there will be some improvement it will be possibly partially outweighed by the fact the EVs generally weight more.
Of course we can just ignore that which is not at all crazy...
Edit: I'm certainly not using this as argument to not ban ICE vehicles in city centers. However switching to EVs is not a good longterm solution. e.g. there won't be any incentives for massively increasing investment into public transport because everyone can just drive a "clean" EV.
*I'm not saying that brake and tire wear is that much higher for EVs, rather that if we only look at ICE vehicles tires/breaks are as big a source of PM 2.5 as the engine itself.
Yeah, the obvious solution is to make smaller lighter vehicles. We’ve built EVs in the image of ICE vehicles, so they’re big and heavy.
There are a lot of people who are driving an EV with several hundred miles of range to work less than 20 miles away. That extra order of magnitude of battery capacity is a lot of extra weight. Imagine I’d you could instead rent a battery trailer for those occasional long trips?
I think e-bikes are the way to go, tho perhaps we can define a new and smaller class of vehicles with cabins and/or inherent stability for those unable to ride.
Yes, I wonder which vested interests pushed the whole "range anxiety" and now they benefit from the cars being heavy in that they can point out the pollution.
All cars need to get smaller again, EVs should have automatic charging when parked and when waiting in traffic jams.
This is the funny thing every time hackers discuss vehicles and traffic, always gives me a chuckle.
The smaller and lighter vehicles you all are trying to invent, already exist in the hundreds of millions! And have existed for almost as long as cars. They are cheap to buy, cheap to ride, release very little exhaust, doesn't need decaying batteries or rare-earth minerals to make, won't run over your kids and won't make traffic jams.
Also they can get you to where you're going faster than any EV or SUV.
They're called motorcycles.
Edit: Not to mention that electric motorcycles are great rides.
EVs don't use brakes as much as ICE vehicles because of automatic regenerative braking. This converts your forward momentum back into electricity. ICE vehicles use engine braking or brake pads. Both of those are much worse in more ways than one.
You might want to cross that off your list of things to complain about when talking about EVs.
The instant torque does blow through tires though. Maybe twice as fast as a typical ICE vehicle? The acceleration on a Tesla is like very, very premium ICE cars that few people have (>300HP). This could easily be tuned out, but that would cripple the thrill, i.e., bad for sales.
Powerful ICE cars have this same problem. One of my cars is turbocharged and has a torque spike at 2500 RPMs that with shred the tires even in higher gears if the throttle pedal is to the floor when the engine crosses over that rev band. And my other one has a V8 that will squeal the tires anytime I am remotely aggressive with the throttle.
Car companies can tune the EVs to damp torque spikes, but there's no way around the fundamental fact that hard acceleration uses up tires. EVs accelerate hard, but they don't have to. That just happens to be a major selling point for most of them.
AWD works in their favor here though, since it's distributing the torque across four wheels, and traction control on EVs can be incredibly effective.
I'd be surprised if people in Model 3 Performances went through tires at nearly the rate that I do in similarly powerful ICE cars (~8-10k for driven wheels).
There is absolutely no way that brake wear is higher for EVs. I can practically drive my entire morning commute without braking a single time in my Bolt. Any study that says otherwise is seriously flawed or ignoring one pedal driving.
Electric cars are good for both aggressive driving (lots acceleration and brake use), and also for energy-efficient driving (almost no use of brakes, slow down by converting speed back to electricity). I wonder which one dominates in city driving in practice?
What if EVs (actually, any cars) were programmed for geofencing where acceleration is limited in pedestrian-focused areas based on municipal ordinances? Braking wouldn't be limited (so this is more directly reducing tire particles than brake dust) but I think a lot of city braking would naturally fall off a cliff without excessive acceleration.
You probably don't need to go crazy with stuff like that. Speed cameras seem like effective deterrents. When I drove around the UK, speed cameras were everywhere and people generally all did the speed limit or below.
The USA has a weird cultural obsession with being able to break certain laws. We need to rethink that. If we aren't enforcing laws, then we need to get rid of them, if we don't want to get rid of them, then we need to enforce them.
At city speeds, pollution from tire/brake wear is not a function of speed. It's a function of friction (acceleration/deceleration and vehicle mass), which has no posted limits or camera enforcement. The closest thing would be if a cop happens to hear you burn out and cite reckless driving, but I'm not even talking about that level of acceleration here.
That's probably true if you only look at the cars themselves, but don't forget that getting petrol in cars requires a huge petrochemical industry, from oil wells to refineries, pipelines and pumping stations. Each of those steps also emits all kinds of crap. The same is true for electricity from many sources, but overall I suspect EVs come out somewhat better than petrol cars.
Of course, cars are generally too big, too heavy, and too fast. Addressing those issues would benefit everyone, regardless of fuel source.
Regenerative braking drastically reduces brake pad wear. At full regenerative braking, some EVs can decelerate at ~0.4G using only the engine.
Another (expensive) solution would be carbon ceramic brakes. These used to be for "race cars" but people found that they are too expensive to replace if you track the car, so people use iron brakes on the track, and carbon ceramics on the street. Carbon ceramics will last 100k+ miles under normal street use and they keep the wheels free of brake dust.
This is a common misinformation campaign against EVs. First of all, EVs use far less brake material than gas cars. E.g. Most Teslas run the same pads for 100k+ miles due to strong regenerative braking, for me it was triple the longevity of brake pads on my Audi.
As for the tire emissions, you are likely quoting the worst case scenario that was devised by emissionsanalytics. The reality is, that was a worst case scenario, if you actually saw tire wear that was significantly more polluting than traditional cars you would have tires that go bald in a very short period of time.
For example, the Micheline Pilot Sport all seasons that come on the Tesla Model 3 are rated for 45k miles, but typically get around 35-40k miles depending on driving habits. That is only 13-26% more tread loss depending on driving style. So how is it possible the tires are losing significantly more tread (and as a consequence, polluting more) but also lasting a long time?
> So how is it possible the tires are losing significantly more tread (and as a consequence, polluting more) but also lasting a long time?
Sorry, I probably phrased it in a confusing way, I was comparing the ratio between tire/brake and ICE PM 2.5 emissions for normal cars not saying that EVs are that much worse (the part about weight is just speculation).
EVs use primarily regen for braking, so they contribute almost no brake wear. And that isn't even a problem.
It matters what is emitted. Tire wear particles are relatively large, and don't stay in the air.
Anti-EV disinformation uses the trick of counting pollution by weight, which completely discounts gaseous emissions, which is the real pollution that people breathe in.
Please make your substantive points without internet tropes like "whataboutism" and "disinformation", which are really just forms of name-calling at this point. Your comment would be fine without those bits.
Do you not realize how much of modern society relies on cars and trucks as a mode of transport? It's asinine to think you can just get rid of them in most parts of the world and continue life as usual.
