Having lived next to a semi-main street through a smallish California coastal city without much rain it is pretty eye opening how much black dirt and junk just coat everything next to the road.
Walk down the street and touch a bush or any plant leaf and get a nice black hand in the process. The plants are covered, parked cars get covered and the inside of my apartment was covered.
It wasn’t until I moved out that I saw the extent of the problem. I only lived there a few years but every surface of my apartment had a coating of the same black dust. I’m now very worried my short time there considerably affected my health.
I once lived in a building between a very busy railway line (mixture of electric and diesel trains, passengers and freight) and an average road (cars and one bus route).
The windows facing the railway would get coated in a black grit. Slightly oily particles, just sticky enough to stick to the glass.
The windows facing the road would get coated in a dark brown slime.
According to the air quality maps of the city, the road is slightly more polluting than the railway, although the railway is carrying 100,000 passengers a day.
> Having lived next to a semi-main street through a smallish California coastal city without much rain it is pretty eye opening how much black dirt and junk just coat everything next to the road.
One day I made the mistake of leaning against the wall in a TTC subway station while in a white shirt. I didn't realize how much oil, brake dust, and other mechanical grime there was until that moment.
I think some research group did measurements of the AQI in the TTC stations and found the average air quality in the winter was actually comparable with the smog in LA or Beijing.
and people still look at me funny when I wear a mask in there
I wonder what platform doors will do: the stations depend on piston effect for ventilation, but walling off the tube from the station might keep it more in the tube?
EVs can be pretty bad for tire wear, not just due to vehicle weight, but the amount of torque available (and consistently available) that leaves most ICE vehicles in the dust.
Emissions standards have been deleted. Finally. I'm convinced they were going to greatly increase the environmental issues. After having improved emissions for decades they had no where else to improve and started building really complex engines with extreme maintenance requirements and very low reliability compared to the late 1990s. Modern trucks are throw aways compared to mid-1990s Ford and late 1990s GM. Nissan went out of business and Toyota isn't much of a player for towing capacity and value. Stellantis products have been a joke for years except for maybe the Charger and Wrangler for a time. Lots of high dollar junk being foisted on consumers right now.
I don't quite understand... you're saying it's a good thing if car manufacturers are allowed to pollute as much as they want in a race to the bottom? You prefer reliability in your vehicles over your children's health?
The comment you replied to mentioned EV tire wear, not brake dust. The heavy weight of EVs due to the batteries is always going to cause more tire pollution.
E.g., Ford F-150 Ford Lightning has a curb weight of up to 6,500 lbs, which compares to the regular F-150's curb weight that ranges from anywhere between 4,021 lbs and 5,014 lbs. The Rivian R1T is 7,148 lbs.
Well yes, but even the Renault Zoe at 3,236lbs is much heavier than the Renault Clio (2,161–2,361lbs) it is based on.
Heavier weight alone however doesn't necessarily cause more tire wear though. The Toyota Prius came with hard-compound tires (good for low fuel consumption and high mileage, not for racing).
FWIW, I took my EV in for a maintenance interval (waste of money BTW - this thing is indestructable), and the mechanic remarked that the brakes looked new. It's 1.5 years old, with factory brakes.
Single-pedal mode does the rest. Not only does this make the car easier to drive, but you can hit a sweet spot where you never really use the brakes.
Also regenerative breaking exerts force which leads to particle emissions from the tires. Breaking earlier and slower also helps when you otherwise would have stayed in the range where you can break regeneratively.
They do. But if you brake too agressively, they switch to friction brakes. It pays off to avoid this: more mileage, marginally lower charging expense, lower cost on brake maintenance and fewer complaints from passengers.
Apparently you need to use the friction brakes now and then so they don’t degrade early, which could be a safety issue. I think as long as you’re using the car frequently it’s incredibly unlikely to be a problem though.
Not sure about all EVs and hybrids, but for Prius the friction brakes were used below a given speed as then regeneration becomes inefficient (as does stopping power). If you pay close attention, you might notice the transition.
Yup. I only use my car infrequently and it sits there with the handbrake on, when I do take it out often the rotors have rusted just slightly, meaning I get a "thunk thunk thunk" until I brake hard a couple times.
I think it's fine, in an EV just give your physical brakes a good test/try out when starting a journey in the car, especially if it has been sat for a while.
"It pays off to avoid this: more mileage, marginally lower charging expense, lower cost on brake maintenance and fewer complaints from passengers."
Regen braking wears the hell out of your battery. That few hundred you saved on brake changes just cost you a tens of thousands of dollars on a premature battery replacement.
It's an added charge cycle on the battery. A guy in San Diego does full EIS and more for EV cells. His data shows multiple shorter recharge cycles wear the battery down faster, no matter what range you try restricting the recharging to. Same data shows that the batteries are better when conditioned harder on their first charge, gaining much better cycle performance and count, at a minimal sacrifice of capacity.
And this exact same thing coincides DIRECTLY with my lithium-powered portable lighting, so I'm pretty up-to-date on very top-level research, because I hire this same person.
His name is Luke. You'll see him all over the globe doing lithium EV research and testing.
A charge cycle is a charge cycle, regardless. The wear and tear that occurs during is cumulative and doesn't just magically disappear when restricted to a certain level of battery depletion.
No experience with EVs, but Toyota hybrids use regenerative braking a lot. They also teach me to accelerate gently. Quite the opposite of Tesla with their "ludicrous mode" encouraging extreme acceleration. But I have no idea how well those brake.
I doubt that this is really the case (brake lights will be connected to brake pedal, regardless of mode).
For motorcycles (not using regenerative braking, but engine braking which is quite effective there) this however is a problem. Every once in a while I woke a sleepy tailgater with that. Fortunately all sleepy tailgaters did wake up in time.
Leaf would've been decent if not battery health issue and crazy charging port. Cleary Nissan doesn't want it so succeed. I nearly bought one as my spare EV for short trips nearby (they can be had for 1.5k NZD here). But minivan is just more useful for short trips, and doesn't break a bank either.
Ionizers make small particles plate-out on surfaces instead of floating in the air. It makes the air itself cleaner to breathe etc, but I suppose it could make surfaces dirtier than they otherwise would be with these especially fine particles. Usually an air purifier with ionizer will have the ionization at the filter outlet, so only the very smallest particles are affected by this process.
But if the ionizer can make particles stick to surfaces, wouldn't that mean it can also make them stick to the lungs? Because, in that case it's not so clear it's a win is it?
The particles affected by the ionizer are already floating in the air that is being inhaled into the lungs. For the sake of this discussion (i.e. disregarding accidental generation of ozone), wouldn't it be better if those particles are taken out of the air, stuck to surfaces, so they're no longer being inhaled?
the particles stick via static electricity, which doesn't work well on wet surfaces like your lungs. the bigger issue is that ionizers can mix with VOCs from cleaning products and generate ozone and formaldehyde as byproducts - i suspect this combination made me really sick at one point because im allergic to formaldehyde
I used to live on a major three lane one direction artery in the city and was right at the intersection so cars constantly braking and idling. So much black dust on everything.
I used to joke someday I was going to be diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and the Doctor would ask me how many packs a day I smoked and I'd tell him none and he wouldn't believe me.
The Yale article and the paper both highlight the fact that EVs use regenerative braking and produce less dust.
I was worried that this was a rehash of the astroturf campaign from a few years ago focusing on EV weight and how that was so bad for the environment because of tire and road wear. Unfortunately you need to read through the whole thing (instead of the headline and a few paragraphs) to see that information.
Granted, I would still rather them designed for lighter weight. But that’s a separate issue w suv culture which is bad for society and environment in general. Totally would buy a 3000 pound EV around the size of a euro hatch.
My Citroën C-Zero (Mitsubishi i-MiEV clone) is a quirky fun car to drive. Surprisingly big on the inside. Very plain old skool car. Just turn the key and go. No dumb computers/dashboard in it trying to smart. I bought it for 4000 euros second hand. Only down side it had an original range of ~120km and it has 120000km on the clock. The battery is down to 60km range, after those ~1500 cycles... But aftermarket batteries with for the original range are now available for "just" 11000,-
If they would build a modern version of it, I would buy it.
I believe that cars of this size should be the most common vehicles on the road. They efficiently meet the transportation needs of most people while consuming significantly fewer resources than larger cars. However, for decades, American consumers have been influenced by marketing campaigns promoting larger vehicles. This trend began when Ford and GM sought to protect their market share from smaller, more fuel-efficient Japanese imports..
I'm not convinced of the "safety". SUVs (and larger cars in general) have higher risk of roll over. Not to mention you're a bigger target on the road; how often are accidents head-on collisions compared to a corner clip that sends the other spinning. Don't majority of "accidents" happen in parking lots?
Last year I was driving a lot of different cars for work. I was really excited once when I got a RAV4 because I've lived most Toyotas I've driven and I've never tried any of their SUVs. The car doesn't come with blindspots mirrors and it is actually impossible to see a car sitting in your blindspots.
I would prefer to live in a world where all the cars are small.
Taking your example of a corner clip, the larger car would fare better; the smaller car will spin more. There is no better description than "arms race." I understand there are edge cases with rollover, etc. but the first rule is mass.
I suppose the second rule is where between the two cars the force is absorbed. Ideally bumper-to-bumper. Modified lifted trucks ought to be banned as far as I'm concerned; it defeats the factory design that had to comply with laws.
I recently just sold on my old car, as I'm getting a company one. Figured it'd be some estate or coupe with good motorway mileage. Nope. Instead it's an SUV, which I've routinely given people shit for, for the last few years. The things are a plague that are starting to infest even corporate motor pools, and this is in the UK of all places, where the country roads are more often than not the width of a small hatchback.
I think someone eventually pointed out that a typical bus weighs around 10x that of a car while having maybe twice the tyre surface area in contact with the ground.
According to the 4th power law that translates to 625x the road (and thus also tyre) wear, meaning even a fully loaded bus should produce significantly more particulates than the equivalent in cars with just one occupant each.
The brakes on my VW lasted so long that I called all the shops I’d been to see if they had a record of me buying new pads. The last guy said they were aftermarket, so I don't know if there’s a shop I forgot or may have accidentally gotten new pads because someone read a work order wrong.
But they still last a long time because the DSGs of that era used engine braking and lots of gears to get better gas mileage than the manual version. Which was rare up to that point. Manual almost always got you better mileage than the automatic.
Engine braking saves you a ton because the brakes wear out faster the harder you brake. I don’t recall if it’s just the pressure or if it’s the heat.
Now he did tell me the aftermarket’s don’t have copper sinters in them, which is how he clocked them as replacements. Sometime after I bought my car they banned copper in brake pads due to metal pollution.
Just a note. If the manufacturers can get solid state batteries to the point where they are economic then EV's will be as heavy or perhaps lighter than gas cars. Actually a 50% increase in energy density is enough. And solid state batteries have twice the energy density. So likely lighter.
Jevons paradox says cheap EV's are maybe not so great. Consider if a cheap car cost a $100k most people wouldn't own cars. They'd walk or take the bus or subway. You wouldn't usually have to walk far, buses and subways would come often.
Many people live in locations where walking, the bus, or subway are never going to be practical and/or do regular activities that need personal transportation. If a car cost $100K I'd almost certainly still own one.
These locations are probably not financially sustainable. I would also say it's not impossible to make them urban friendly.
For example, I think of stroad as opportunities to implement public transportation by getting of a lane or two. It is also easier to add bike lanes since you aren't constrained by how wide the streets are.
I am talking about taxation and being able to provide essential services. Not everything need to turn a 'profit' but government budgets are not unlimited.
Commuting doesn't have to be by cars, nor should factories and warehouse should be prohibited out of hand from being located inside cities. It really depends.
Even then, it still makes sense to aggregate industrial concerns within a given area to benefit from colocation of related industrial facilities and make it easier to commute via public transit.
Farms on the other hand should be subsidized. This is also where cars usually makes the most sense.
I don't live on a stroad. It's a two-lane (albeit pretty busy) country road.
It's actually a fairly busy connecting artery between fairly rural towns (that also leads to a small city). It's also not something effectively served by public transit.
Those locations also include things like not having a subway in a short walk. There’s just no money to give everyone a train going to every wish and want in life a few steps away at all times.
Yeah, but Geary St. is close to downtown in a fairly large city. At that point, you can argue about whether you'd still want to own a car for casual trips outside the city. But you could survive without one.
But I can't walk anywhere from where I live (well, except down to the river in the woods) and there's no real transit system at all. If I couldn't drive, I'd have to relocate.
It was part of the astroturf effort to convince people that they are massively heavier, and you see it was successful with comments like this where it is claimed that they are “much greater” in weight with nothing quantified. Of course the hummer was heavier, but not everyone has the hummer.
> full electric versions are only around 10% to 15% heavier than their direct ICE equivalent.
Road wear? Not really. Tire wear? In the strictest sense, yes. But keep in mind, a lot of those studies measured "ev" tire wear by throwing a bunch of weight into the trunk of a gas car. Not exactly the same thing.
Holistically, particle emissions from EVs are lower than gas powered cars due to reduced breaking (even above hybrids) and reduced exhaust.
At the end of the day, the vast vast vast majority of road wear and particle emissions are semi trucks. Not only do they weigh a heck of a lot more, but they also wear their tires until they disintegrate, when was the last time you saw an exploded tire remains on the side of the road and it wasn't from a semi?
Isn't road wear scale with the 4th power of vehicle weight?
EV vehicle weight definitely moves some needles in the wrong direction.
A Toyota Corolla weighs about 3,000, the Tesla model 3 weighs 3,500-4,000 depending on which model you buy. So a 16-33% increase in vehicle weight.
A Corolla will do 8.1 x 10^13 'damage points'
A light model 3, 1.5 x10^14 'damage points'
And a heavy model 3, 2.6x10^14
So moving to EV vehicles would move the damage done by the average commuter by an order of magnitude.
There are of course much heavier vehicles on the road as well, such as a standard empty garbage truck weights around 33k pounds and will do 1.2 x 10^18 damage points. So significantly more wear per mile traveled, but there are also far more vehicle miles traveled by those lighter class vehicles as well.
EV are probably still a net positive, but the real solution is to stop designing our cities and transportation systems exclusively around low occupancy vehicles. Walking, biking, and transit, also need to.be options for getting around.
People also nearly always forget to account for the traction control of EVs vs. ICEs.
EVs have a faster electronic traction control system that results in less tyre spin, which results in less wear on both the tyre and, in the case of winter, the road itself, as studded tyres eat away at the asphalt.
Has someone actually measured that tradeoff (weight versus regenerative braking) to determine where it is an even tradeoff? And surely regenerative braking has its own shedding of particles from all the moving parts.
Because there is less extreme (and earlier) braking and less weight shift (drive motors on the rear or all), regenerative braking should lead to less overall tire degradation than comparable friction brakes for even a significantly increased weight.
Though this is contraindicated by Tesla drivers in the extreme Regen mode that induce motion sickness in their passengers and / or are replacing their tires very often (though conflated with rapid acceleration)
From what I understand, Ford did some really significant work on lightening the F150 maybe 5+ years ago, I was surprised at how light they are. Looks like a Tesla Model S for comparison is $4,300-5,000lbs.
Owning a hybrid with regenerative braking vs a non-hybrid of the same class of vehicle, there is a noticeable reduction in brake wear and replacement with regenerative braking.
surely regenerative braking has its own shedding of particles from all the moving parts.
It adds tire wear, but no more than traditional friction braking. I can't see how there would be any measurable wear from any other moving parts, since it's just using a magnetic field for resistance. There are moving parts that touch, but modern, sealed bearings last a ridiculously long time.
Regenerative braking has much less tire wear than traditional braking because it's done much more slowly and smoothly.
Also, none of these discussions use up-to-date information on EV tires. Consumers aren't willing to replace their tires much more often for an EV except at the high end of the market, tire manufacturers are already making tires last much longer for EV purposes. New designs are already shedding less dust per unit mass of the vehicle than they were a few years ago.
Plus, some manufacturers are now working to reduce the toxicity of their formulas. This will eliminate the issues a lot more.
That’s nothing compared to an i3: I don’t even get 10K miles per set. Some people report getting as many as 12K with conservative driving.
Part of the problem is the instant torque, but the narrow geometry is a bigger issue. Also, they did something to the formulation that achieves less rolling resistance for increased wear.
I also don’t think the weight is the main issue. The i3 is a bit under 3000 lbs. That’s the same as a Volvo station wagon, and they didn’t have this problem. (If I remember right, you could get 50K mile Michelins for them.)
My model 3 is 5 years old and I'm still on my original set of tires (though in recent years I do put on winter tires for a few months a year). I don't usually drive like crazy (and it's an SR+ which is the least powerful model).
True, and you can do engine breaking and do milder acceleration curves in ICE car and that will significantly reduce the pad/tire wear. But if you drive like, I would speculate, most people do, Tesla will go through tires like a track car (half joking)
Agreed, the only thing I would say here is that electrics kind of give you this torque/weight combo for an every day car so I would guess in the real world electric cars end up being worse on dust production. Hopefully tires can get optimized for this as well.
I could be wrong and be using outdated information, but aren't Tesla's stock tires also low rolling resistance tires? Which does mean less road friction and less wear, but also means lower maximum traction which is a tradeoff most anybody could make if they wanted.
As a Tesla owner, I'm 33k in on a set of all seasons and still in the green on two. You can't move the goalposts like that - the same is true on an ICE sports car.
Regenerative braking has much less tire wear than traditional braking because it's done much more slowly and smoothly.
Absent any evidence, I don't believe that claim. Unless you're skidding, I don't see how braking slowly and smoothly over a longer period causes any less tire wear than braking more rapidly for a shorter time.
Additionally, since this is intrinsically tied to EVs, they weigh more and thus increase tire wear in all conditions.
That seems plausible to me. Tires are made from rubber. If friction forces exceed how strong the rubber particles stick to each other, they get pulled loose. And road surfaces aren’t perfectly smooth, so when you’re accelerating, some rubber particles will experience more force than others.
It seems believable that hard braking, even without leaving skid marks, could pull more rubber off a tire than gradual braking.
The same exact reason that accelerating quickly causes far more tire wear than accelerating slowly, only in reverse. By applying more torque to brake/accelerate, you cause more lateral force on the tires (think, smearing the rubber itself) which is what causes tire wear. With more force the rubber is stretched further, which fatigues it and breaks off pieces of it over time.
Slower braking is generally accepted to cause less brake pad wear. I was only able to find this article, but I'm sure more convincing evidence can be found if you do more research than the quick ddg and clicking on the first result I did.
Hard Braking: Less experienced drivers often react late to situations, slamming on the brakes instead of slowing down gradually. This creates more friction and heat, reducing pad lifespan.
Weight shift is a good reason, rear and all wheel drive Regen should result in 2+x as much contact patch, versus friction brakes typically favor the front 70/30, applying 70% of braking to only 2 tires.
Acceleration and deceleration is calculated the same way: m/s^2. If you decelerate faster you put more stress on the system in a non-linear way - the square of it actually. This is why sport and race cars have huge brakes. The tire friction will also augment non-linearly - it will hold a certain acceleration and then quickly give up (slipping point), but the energy has to be transferred and partly absorbed all the time.
> they weigh more and thus increase tire wear in all conditions
Then get a lighter one if that is your concern. Defaulting to ICE is the wrong idea because they have much more externalities (like one ton of fuel per year that needs actually around 1.5 if you include the extraction and transport).
There are EV's which have drum-brakes. That's only possible because the regenerative braking takes most of the load. Also, there are stories of brake-discs rusting out on EV's. Both point to less (friction)-brake use on an EV compared to an ICE.
I suspect drum brakes were chosen by the electron pinching EV engineers. They're the only brakes that are friction-free when not applied. Disc brakes rub (and slow the car) even when not applied.
They use drum brakes because drum brakes are protected better from the environment while brake discs are not and will quickly get covered in rust and dirt when not used for awhile and then be less effective when they are actually needed for an emergency braking situation.
We only ever really went to disc brakes because they were slightly cheaper and easier to manufacture and since racing vehicles used disc brakes (because they benefit from the extra cooling capacity that commuters don't need) it was easy to convince customers that they were "better" and they became standard.
There was also a time when they didn't figure out traction control very well using brake drums while they did manage it with brake discs, but part of that could be just because brake drums were out of fashion in racing where traction and stability control were invented and implemented first and nobody bothered improving drum brakes to take advantage of that tech until decades later.
Now that EV drivers can go weeks without touching their actual brakes and just rely on regen braking, disc brakes have become a liability since they aren't worn down smooth and cleaned whenever someone stops at the end of their driveway.
I've used drum brakes in older cars and motorcycles, and their stopping power is terrible, fade is terrible, and they are horrible in the rain.
The only recent cars I've had with drum brakes used them for the parking brake. They tended to corrode and not work well. Also, as an emergency brake even with a pedal you could push hard on, they were beyond terrible, even dangerously ineffective.
Seems like EV manufacturers should set their cars to use the friction brakes for the first few stops of each trip, both to clean off the rust & dirt, and also to test whether they still work.
An electric motor is really good at arresting high rpm movement while charging, not so great at bringing low rpm movement to a stop. EVs blend together Regen and friction at slow speeds.
> An electric motor is really good at arresting high rpm movement
I don't think any EV that I've heard of has full-range electric brakes.
There are two interesting kinds of things that I think EVs could use...
brake resistors - if the battery can't absorb the full power of regenerative braking, maybe giant resistors can take the dissipate the rest of the energy.
eddy currents - it might be cool to use eddy currents to brake.
Not significantly. Otherwise they’d get hot and work less well. Pads ride very closely to the disc so that road stuff can’t get wedged between the surfaces, and so that you don’t waste break pedal travel just getting the pads close to the surface. Well adjusted drum brakes should be arranged almost exactly the same way.
Are you familiar with how disk brakes on a car operate? They’re essentially a hydraulic piston clamping the brake pads against the rotor. When you let off the brake pedal, the pressure is removed, but there’s not a “retraction” of any kind. So there’s no pressure but nothing is actually making that gap. That article was articulating basically that the piston, when not compressing the brake pads, should not be too far out, because that’s just unnecessary travel of the pedal, but it does not mean that the brake pads are somehow gapped away from the rotors.
Drum brakes by contrast have springs that retract the pads from the braking surface, so the OP has a very valid point.
I'm very familiar, having changed many sets over the years. If there's no air in the system, pulling fluid away from a hydraulic piston must retract it. It can't just sit there unless there's an air bubble to expand or so much negative pressure that it forms a vacuum somewhere. Even then, pressure on the atmosphere-facing side would push the piston back toward wherever the vacuum or air bubble is.
The rotors push the pads away from the surface if the slides and spring clip seats are maintained. I have seen many unbalanced brake systems with uneven pad wear of all kinds due to rust/dust/heat impacting the system.
Something makes them retract slightly - how they’re seated in the caliper retaining clip maybe I’m not sure because trivially you can take the wheel off and press the brake and see it.
It’s even easier to see on a bicycle with hydraulic discs.
> When you let off the brake pedal, the pressure is removed, but there’s not a “retraction” of any kind. So there’s no pressure but nothing is actually making that gap.
Technically there is a slight amount of rubber spring back for a fraction of a millimeter and the air traveling with the rotor surface puts a small amount of pressure back on the pad and pushes it imperceptibly backwards. Of course that is only really effective if your rotors are perfectly flat and warp free, which most peoples are not because rotors never get resurfaced any more and 95% of them are super cheaply casted and turned which leads to warpage extremely quickly.
The default for drum is less friction (gap increases, takes more pedal) over service life whereas pads default to more friction (slides gunk up and spring clip faces rust and swell) from failing to retract as well.
Yeah, my VE id.3 has drums on the back and disks on the front. Apparently the brake pads are effectively life-of-the-vehicle items under normal driving conditions.
I’ve only had to change them one time on any car newer than 1990, after ~200k miles/10 years of use. For most people that qualifies as life of the vehicle, but there was plenty of life left.
Anecdotally, it’s very dependent on driving cycle and driving style, but EVs use their brakes much less in general. It would be interesting to measure the total mass of brake pads sold per vehicle mile for different vehicles, though this would likely be more challenging than it seems.
My Chevy volt has 199k miles and it's original brake pads and rotors are definitely almost new looking, but I'd say to be conservative they are 60%.
My cheap Chinese Walmart tires have lasted me 50k miles and are due to be replaced soon, but I spend zero attention to driving smoothly or in an eco mindset.
I heard from someone working at a big car producer that they force EV’s to use the mechanical brakes every now and then because if not, they rust away.
> researchers grew human lung cells in a lab and exposed them to dust from car brakes and from diesel tailpipes, finding that brake dust caused greater injury to the cells.
I couldn’t tell if the study found that car brakes are more harmful than exhausts, or that car brake chemicals are more harmful than exhaust fumes - but that may not be significant because they are produced in less quantities.
> I couldn’t tell if the study found that car brakes are more harmful than exhausts, or that car brake chemicals are more harmful than exhaust fumes
None of these.
The actual linked study found that the presence of specific metal particulates (copper, zinc and iron), which are found in modern brake dust, correlates with increase risk of asthma and allergy in kids.
I'm personally wondering if the article linked the wrong article? Because the article describes the study as "researchers grew human lung cells in a lab and exposed them to dust from car brakes and from diesel tailpipes", but the linked study is a cohort study of correlation, that doesn't involve any experimental manipulation.
I suspect it's even more complicated; if the particulate matter is different in size, the relative amount delivered to a human lung might depend on the distance.
So if you want to model somebody being 10 meters away from the street, you might need to use different ratios than for somebody being 100m away.
One other point is that brake dust is probably larger in size than particulate pollution from exhausts, and thus the nasal and breathing passage leading up to the lungs would do a better job at filtering them over more fine-sized particulate matter.
Every study I've seen concurs that EVs chew through tires faster than their equivalent ICE vehicle, and generate more tire particulate matter accordingly. The reasons (torque and weight) are unambiguously greater in an equivalent EV vs ICE.
EVs do generate lower brake particulate matter, by virtue of not using them as much (otherwise they'd also be prone to generating more in a (faulty) per-engagement direct comparison).
I agrée with this and have ripped claims about the pollution here on HN before, but there is SOME pollution, and it is necessarily worse for EVs vs ICE for the reasons above.
EV specific tires have basically eliminated the difference in tread loss already. And because there's public pressure on this, the toxicity of the materials and tires is decreasing rapidly.
Every study I've seen from people pushing on this uses very old information about tires, proving there's a problem really requires updated work taking these things into consideration.
Grip is proportional to downforce times the coefficients of friction. Since downforce comes mostly from vehicle weight the maximum available acceleration/deceleration (grip) is nearly identical across lighter and heavier vehicles for a given tire compound and tread pattern.
The complexity comes from things like sidewall stiffness (controls available grip near the lateral limit of traction, must be designed for vehicle mass), suspension geometry (tire camber affects maximum grip), tire width (affects contact patch size relative to mass of the vehicle, tire pressure, camber, and sidewall stiffness), and suspension spring rate and dampening (wheel hop, changing camber angle from body roll).
"Since downforce comes mostly from vehicle weight the maximum available acceleration/deceleration (grip) is nearly identical across lighter and heavier vehicles for a given tire compound and tread pattern."
It's literally just physics. Couloumb (static, or dry) friction is F_f = μF_n where F_f is the frictional force (grip) of tires in this case and F_n is the normal force between the ground and the tires due to the mass of the vehicle. μ ranges from 0.8 to 1 or more in modern tires.
Since F=ma and F_n is 9.8 N/kg due to gravity, F_f = μ * 9.81 * m and a = F/m = μ * 9.81 * m / m, and finally a = μ * 9.81 m/s^2.
Can you share them? Because physics says that damage to roads scales quadratically with weight. Not sure why tires would not experience a similar increase.
At the very least, these tires are subject to higher forces due to the heavier weights of EVs. Intuitively, consistently applying higher friction forces to an object would cause higher wear.
The weights aren’t really that much higher than ICE cars, but I don’t think anyone who has owned an EV would say they don’t go through tires faster. They do. How much due to weight, how much due to better acceleration, I don’t know, but they definitely are harder on tires.
Some factors I think are involved, but I don't see mentioned - EVs produce more readily available torque in general, and also tire choice heavily factors in EV range (low rolling resistance), which has a negative impact on tread life
Unfortunately Nissan did not put such a tire on my Ariya. Good range and very quiet but very soft and only 9/32 from factory means lots of people have to replace em after 15 to 20k.
I’m replacing earlier given poor snow and rain performance. They can have em back when my lease is up.
I would imagine it's just tire formulation choices. Tractor trailers get extremely high mileage from their tires, but there is lots more weight on each tire. And train wheels... what is the load and mileage on those?
I wonder about the larger context here, though. No matter what academic studies discover or examine, the rise of anti-intellectual culture suggests that we as a species are going to need to pivot to documentary efforts, in a hope that what we learn in isolation now survives to be acted on in a future, more exploratory, generation.
We could also try to fix the anti-intellectual culture instead of just griping about it and/or retreating. It didn't emerge out of thin air, it emerged as a reaction to a mostly-accurate sense among non-intellectuals (i.e., the people who make most of the world actually work) of being constantly condescended to by the intellectual class.
What we need isn't to go all prepper for some kind of dark age, what we need is a new breed of intellectual that actually makes an effort to understand what life is like for the 65% of the population without a 4-year degree and then attempts to bridge the gap rather than trying to run the world from within a filter bubble.
We are fundamentally at a loss here because of the dynamics of propaganda. Simply put more money is spent misinforming than informing and since this will always be the case due the the powerful incentives of population control, there will always be some degree of idiocracy happening. Short of probably redistributing all resources equally and eliminating the money and economic system we have that lead to these incentive structures.
I'm pretty immersed in the anti-intellectual movement just by virtue of where I live, and while I won't deny that there's some room for propaganda in the explanation, the bulk of the cause is simple:
The average American has correctly identified that intellectuals despise them.
That's it. Propaganda is a useful scapegoat, but the actual problem is that the average American has caught on to the sneers and derision and doesn't like being treated that way.
Redistributing resources won't help because those plans are always put forward from a place of condescension towards the less educated, and the condescension is the problem!
Not gonna happen with lobbyists and shareholder corps benefitting from an intellectually stunted populace. The unregulated economic system incentivizes this.
You know nothing about me or where I come from. You're not making the point you think you are.
You can lead a horse to water. It's not my job to encourage intellectual rigor. It's political leadership's. Pushing that burden onto imaginary everyday philosophers you've conjured up is futile.
Said "imaginary everyday philosophers" created the anti-intellectual backlash by, among other things, saying things like what you're saying here. Asking them to either shut up or actually make an effort to bridge the divide isn't futile, it's our only hope.
I mean step 1 would be raising wages at all levels, something that a capitalist economy is going to oppose at every step of the way as it limits capital acquisition and reduces investment returns.
To me it seems pretty obvious why someone making $40,000 a year doing some trade and/or taking off 1-2 decades of their lifespan and quality of life is pissed and opposed to the status quo when they see investors and capital owners and politicians making consistently brain dead decisions yet still raking in millions. Watching corporations buy out and legislate away small businesses and replacing them with corporate versions that cost more money while reducing their service capabilities and competence.
Its the luddite situation repeating over and over again. Groups of smart individuals working together build something greater, but someone at the top of the capital pile claims or buys all the credit while firing and replacing, or offshoring now, all the individuals who actually did the work and actual innovation, and economic imbalance results in turmoil and rage until it finally boils over and people start destroying looms. Because instead of all the auto-looms they built benefiting everyone, it mostly only benefits a handful of individuals who claimed ownership, while pushing everyone else in a race to the bottom as their old small business models get crushed by the legal and financial departments of the big cats.
Maybe, but that still isn’t solving the root of the problem. There are a ton of ways in which cars harm us — exhaust, brake dust, tire dust, etc. The only actual solution is to reduce car usage.
Because it's less invasive (from their point of view) than sitting on a train with, eww, other people
I'm genuinely thinking of a particular person in my family who was one of the first to have a regenerative brake (for financial reasons, probably a tax reduction by going hybrid idk) but will also be among the last to do anything for the greater good
Cylinder deactivation is for reducing losses when coasting, not braking. You want more losses if you actually intent to slow down. Some trucks have retarder that open valves at TDC, so it dumps energy from compression instead of pushing piston back down.
That is significantly more involved (and for most people less comfortable) than regen braking, which just... happens. Many (most?) EVs will also do blended braking when using the braking pedal, so even when you brake "manually" you're still not using physical brakes unless you really step on it.
This is available on CVT vehicles too. My Civic Sport Touring has paddle shifters that you can use to simulate gear changes, which is also convenient for winter driving.
On the latest model year, which is a hybrid, the paddles control regenerative braking instead.
>Traffic-related resuspended dust is particulate matter, previously deposited on the surface of roadways that becomes resuspended into the air by the movement of traffic.
>Results show that the inclusion of resuspended dust in the emission and dispersion modeling chain increases prediction of near-road PM2.5 concentrations by up to 74%.
The weight, speed, and volume of traffic, are therefore considerable factors even beyond the pollutants the vehicles leave behind.
I'm conflicted about declaring something as "more harmful" in such a narrow context.
The article says that human cells react worse to dust from modern brakes than to exhaust or even dust from asbestos brakes. But this ignores the impact of exhaust on city pollution, or the hazards of asbestos production process, etc.
I guess this only tells us that dust from modern brakes can be dangerous and we should keep an eye on it. Which is valuable information, even if not as sensational.
I think the article linked the wrong article? Because the article describes the linked study as "researchers grew human lung cells in a lab and exposed them to dust from car brakes and from diesel tailpipes", but the linked study is a cohort study of correlation, that doesn't involve any experimental manipulation and is nothing like that description (at least as presented in the abstract I have access to.)
I think this is missing out on the big issue - tyre pollution which contains really nasty chemicals that inevitably get washed into rivers and waterways.
Also, car-shaped EVs often use regenerative braking which will reduce the amount of brake dust pollution, but with their increased weight and powerful torque, they produce a lot more tyre pollution than ICE vehicles.
Interesting that nobody every talked about tyre/brake dust until it became clear that cars aren't going away as we phase out fossil fuels, they're just going electric. Is this a serious environmental concern compared to the climate/emissions issue, or just the 'r/fuckcars mentality'?
Meanwhile, here in the UK, one of the more interesting alternatives - personal light EVs (ebikes/scooters) are being utterly demonized, and are never likely to be legal on the roads beyond the very limited 250W/15mph pedelec class of e-bikes. Wouldn't be surprised if even that is banned before long, too.
I looked into this in detail a while ago [1]. Electric cars produce much less brake pollution than traditional cars due to regenerative braking. They do probably create more tire pollution, simply because batteries are heavy. And, current emission standards for gasoline engines are so strict (and engines so well designed) that the engines themselves probably do create a negligible fraction of the overall particulate pollution. So it's plausible that with current technology, hybrid cars might create the least total particulate pollution. But all electric cars are probably better than all-gasoline cars.
That said, I'd think we could probably do lots more to reduce the tire pollution. And, obviously, electric cars have other advantages!
It’s also the reward of increased regulations on tailpipe emissions. We now have a new target to clean up. It’s not as if this is new, it just used to be we had lead fuel, poorly burned fuel, tire dust, asbestos in brakes, and many other problematic forms of pollution. We’re just going down the list.
Also, what you’re looking at is an overweighted responsibility on people/consumers to own the solutions to pollution. No matter what car you buy today it is emitting less pollution than ten, twenty, and especially thirty to fifty years ago. Meanwhile we still burn bunker oil (the leftovers from petroleum distillation) in shipping. It’s as if we swore off doing anything better for the planet if it inconveniences a large company.
> No matter what car you buy today it is emitting less pollution than ten, twenty, and especially thirty to fifty years ago.
Sure, but a single bus would emit way less than the 60-150 cars (yes, large buses here have a total capacity of about 150 people [1]) it replaces. And if you have a bikable city like about every city in the Netherlands is, there's zero emissions.
> Meanwhile we still burn bunker oil (the leftovers from petroleum distillation) in shipping. It’s as if we swore off doing anything better for the planet if it inconveniences a large company.
We do, but even there there is progress! In fact, the regulations on sulphur content going into effect showed that this actually had climate impacts on the scale of an ultra-large geoengineering project [2]. On top of that, bunker fuel is banned in many countries' 12-mile-zone or at the very least near ports, ships have to burn diesel there.
> In fact, the regulations on sulphur content going into effect showed that this actually had climate impacts on the scale of an ultra-large geoengineering project...
... but not in the desired direction. Sulfur dioxide emissions from shipping appear to have actually been slowing (!!) global warming by seeding clouds which reflected sunlight.
Tell that to a 90s honda with a 5 speed and 50mpg from technique over any hybrid technology that it pollutes more than a car that doesn’t achieve that mpg and hasn’t paid for its production carbon footprint in hundreds of thousands of miles driven yet.
Also in the UK and I certainly subscribe to r/fuckcars as I'm a keen cyclist and never got around to learning to drive.
I find it annoying that media outlets (BBC - I'm looking mainly at you!) will refer to EVs as being car-shaped and then, as you said, demonise e-bikes by lumping them in with the illegal e-motorbikes (see the recent Panorama program for a clear case of not making clear the distinction between e-motorbikes and e-bikes).
As I see it, the biggest problems with cars are their size and weight. With electric propulsion, the weight is a problem as they have to propel the vehicle and the batteries which obviously means even more weight (though they're typically only slightly more than ICE cars). This also leads to the problem of the vehicles taking longer to recharge and thus requiring upgraded infrastructure to allow people to charge them quickly.
However, if we get as many people to use e-bikes or e-scooters, then the size and weight issues pretty much disappear. It's often feasible to have removable batteries, so the vehicle can be "recharged" instantly by swapping the battery (I believe this is very popular in some countries for food delivery riders). This also means that the battery recharging can be performed using a normal power socket without requiring upgraded infrastructure although it may be wise to keep an eye on the batteries whilst charging to prevent house fires.
Incidentally, Mrs ndsipa_pomu recently bought a good quality e-bike (i.e. not one of the duck-taped conversions) and absolutely loves commuting on it as she sails past the traffic that she was previously trapped in. Though it's limited to assist only up to 15.5mph, she finds it powerful enough to cope with the hills.
> However, if we get as many people to use e-bikes or e-scooters, then the size and weight issues pretty much disappear.
I still don't understand how they expect to solve the occupant safety issue though. Cars travel at high speeds but have crumple zones and airbags. E-bikes travel at the same speeds but if you crash, you die. And 2-wheeled vehicles are easier to crash.
The fatality rate for motorcycles is astonishingly bad and changing the propulsion type wouldn't really affect that.
Some measures can be taken such as reducing urban speed limits to something like 20mph and increasing traffic enforcement so that riders/drivers have an incentive to take sufficient care.
There's also the possibility of creating separated infrastructure to allow the smaller/lighter vehicle riders (e.g. two/three wheelers) to not have to tangle with car and lorry drivers. However that requires political will and infrastructure investment.
Speed limits are set for the conditions, e.g. they're lower in an area with high pedestrian traffic than on the highway. But that's just dodging the issue; what do you do about the highway? Traveling at higher speeds on the appropriate roads is good and people want to continue to do that. You want plumbers and firefighters to be able to travel quickly from one side of the city to the other. So then you've got a highway, but if you put two-wheeled vehicles on it then people die, and if you disallow two-wheeled vehicles on it then people buy cars instead.
Ironically, the somewhat obvious solution to this would be smaller/lighter cars (e.g. one- or two-seaters), but they can't pass the safety standards required for cars even though they would still be dramatically safer than two-wheeled vehicles.
Plumbers and firefighters have stuff to haul and long distances to cover. They need to do 40/50/60mph on the freeway, and 15/20mph on local surface access roads where they're mixed in with light vehicles.
The whole light-vehicle thing is predicated on low speeds and relatively short distances (up to about 15 miles). Most urban areas, even fairly sprawling ones, that's enough to cover a pretty substantial % of trips.
It's about using 1/10th the weight and 1/50th the power to cover a big % of the same tasks. Personally I'd say the bike/scooter/golf-buggy, and then either an owned or shared car for the last 10% of trips where you need to use the freeway is a better optimum than high-speed light vehicles, because as soon as you get to about 25-30mph you need impact protection, and the design constraints quickly escalate to "absolutely no smaller than a Fiat 500".
There's also ofc the option of mass transit for some of the longer distance stuff, at least in cities that are able to build it.
> as soon as you get to about 25-30mph you need impact protection, and the design constraints quickly escalate to "absolutely no smaller than a Fiat 500".
The real problem here is that as soon as you need impact protection, you get four wheels, and then it's classified as a car instead of a motorcycle and the government safety standards for cars de facto require "absolutely no smaller than a Fiat 500".
What would be interesting is to change the definition of "motorcycle" from "has fewer than 4 wheels" to "has fewer than 3 seats" and see what happens.
This is the case in France & some other EU countries (light quadricycles - Renault, Citroen and so on) and Japan (Kei Cars).
The problem seems to be that for most people who can legally drive a full-scale car (i.e. they're not too young or too old) getting a do-everything vehicle on finance is more attractive at that point.
They're somewhat popular with youngsters in rural areas (cheap to insure, minimum driver age is 14 I think, whereas for cars in France it's 17) and with frailer, older people who can't walk or cycle very far and don't have the stamina for longer drives, they just want an inexpensive little runabout to get to the village shops, nearby friends and appointments.
But they're expensive enough (about $10k) that you're unlikely to buy one in addition to your regular do-it-all car, where you might buy an ebike, pedal bike or motorcycle. Maybe as a second vehicle in a childless couple where one partner does almost all the driving, but unless heavier vehicles are highly taxed or restricted (city low emission & congestion zones), there's not enough advantage in one of these for mass adoption.
Furthermore, when I've eaten at the sidewalk area of a restaurant near a theater I go to in the summer, the protected bike lane has truly terrifying combinations of traffic outside of cars including what I guess are electric motorcycles. And, because it's a "bike" lane, a ton of users basically just blow through the red lights.
The safety is a function of the speed you are going. Legal ebikes in the UK are limited to 15mph which is normally survivable unlike say a 125cc scooter doing 60mph.
I've got an ebike in central london and find it quite practical on the whole. For local journeys <2miles it's faster than anything else and you can go down mostly traffic restricted roads. For intercity you can put the bike on a train. Rain is a bit of a pain.
Yeah. It's quite interesting watching it develop in London. Basically all the Deliveroo guys use ebikes, often converted mountain bikes. A fair number of commuters use the Lime bikes, though far less than who use the tube. We are also starting to see some ebike delievery van hybrids like the DPD ones here https://ebiketips.road.cc/content/advice/features/alternativ...
that could be a win for the environment and I guess they replace normal vans. And I just saw a two seater ebike taxi with a roof.
> I still don't understand how they expect to solve the occupant safety issue though.
What issue? I would regularly go 50km/h down hills on my road bike. That was completely my choice and if I came off I'd suffer the consequences.
The problem isn't the occupants. Nobody is forced to travel at high speeds (except on motorways). The problem is the people around and the environment. I definitely would not ever go that fast in town, even down a hill, because it's generally not safe for the people around me.
The problem with cars is the huge imbalance of power. Every car has the capability of killing or disabling you. But you can't disable them. As far as I know, carrying a portable EMP device is neither practical nor legal. Two wheeled vehicles don't exhibit this imbalance of power, not even motorbikes. I believe this is the most important reason to get rid of cars from towns.
> I definitely would not ever go that fast in town, even down a hill, because it's generally not safe for the people around me.
If you're on a bike, then you should also prioritise your own safety as you're likely to come off worse even when colliding with a pedestrian.
Anecdata time: my brother (over 60 years old and a very experienced cyclist) was heading down a hill, presumably at some speed and a young boy stepped out in front of him. They collided and my brother came off and ended up with a broken collar bone, broken rib, collapsed lung and minor concussion (he's fully recovered now). The kid received no damage apart from bruising AFAIK.
Yes, and cyclists generally do, as do motorcyclists. It's kinda natural by the time you get up adulthood to assess your risk and behave accordingly (ie. lower speed, don't walk close to the edge etc) The difference with cars is they are not at risk and they can't even see/hear/feel the speed and impact they are having on others so their judgement is completely screwed. Many of them have never even experienced the road outside of a car.
> However, if we get as many people to use e-bikes or e-scooters
Replacing cars with bikes/scooters is unrealistic and unreasonable. You're either ignoring or unaware of the actual dependence on cars that exists and that cannot be dismissed.
I cycled for like 30 years before we had kids and needed a car.
The ebikes that the post refers to are a menace and should be banned. Both as a cyclist and a driver.
I've almost been plowed over by some idiot sitting on what should be a motorcycle but riding on the bike path. And I've almost had my kids run over.
Also, as a driver you just don't expect someone to be going so crazy fast in the bike lane. I've had people at insane speeds just appear from behind parked cars.
I'm all for pedal assist! But there should be strict speed limits.
I also find that people just don't take these electric motorcycles seriously. They zone out because they aren't doing anything. That's also very dangerous.
You've got to distinguish the legal ebikes limited to 15mph from the illegal ones. Sure the illegal ones should be illegal and sometimes the police do actually pull them over and then the bike is usually crushed.
I find it hard to take the debate seriously because the default stance of everyone against electric 2-wheelers is not manual bikes, its cars.
And, cars are multiple orders of magnitude more dangerous than anything on 2-wheels.
I’m sure you’re right that theres room for improvement, but instead of building infrastructure (we literally shaped cities for cars after all)- we would rather ensure that cars are incumbent forever despite the harm we see them causing.
We don't ban cars or motorbikes because they're unsafe. We require a license and insurance then ban those who repeatedly break the rules of the road.
We need to find a sensible way to regulate these bikes, which may involve some sort of license, insurance, and mandatory helmets. But it needs to be less costly/more convenient than getting a petrol motorbike (or car) if we want people choosing the more eco-friendly option.
Cycling enthusiasts don't tend to consider those who are far less fit/healthy/young when they push the pure-human-powered option.
I think the parent is talking about banning them specifically in pedestrians and cycling lanes. We currently ban motorcycles and cars from using them, presumably because it’s dangerous to pedestrians.
I’d appreciate it if there was an attempt to actually engage here, this is hardly the gotcha you might think.
Most fatalities of motorcycles are due to collisions with cars, not other bikes nor pedestrians.
Diligence won’t save you if a driver unexpectedly swerves into you.
Undoubtedly there are stupid people and people who are more likely to take more risks will be more likely to engage in motorcycle riding; creating an additional selection bias.
But, we’re talking about electric scooters, e-bikes and so on, the core issue remains to be that mixed use-infrastructure will have a loser. Letting cars drive on pavements isn’t permitted for the same reason e-bikes shouldn’t be in traffic (or on the pavement).
> Diligence won’t save you if a driver unexpectedly swerves into you.
That's the point. Diligence won't save you but crumple zones might have.
It's also not obvious that most collisions being with cars isn't just because most other vehicles are cars. If two motorcycles collide with each other at high speed, the damage they do to each other isn't your problem, it's the resulting loss of control and the damage to your body when you impact the pavement.
> Letting cars drive on pavements isn’t permitted for the same reason e-bikes shouldn’t be in traffic (or on the pavement).
But then you're stuck between three bad options: You have separate roads specifically for e-bikes (implausible), you put high speed e-bikes in pedestrian zones, or you limit the top speed of e-bikes to something safe for pedestrians and then people go back to buying cars because e-bikes are too slow.
My point is cars don’t necessarily deserve the deference society affords them, they’re utility vehicles, needed by fewer people than we think (but still needed). The paths we reserve for car use should be diminished.
If every person was driving an articulated truck then there would be more deaths, caused not just by collisions and poor driving but by emissions too. We’d need bigger roads too- its unnecessary for everyone to do this.
The general problem is that it's not that fewer people need them, it's that most people need them on fewer occasions, but they're not going to buy, register and insure separate vehicles for different uses. So they get one that does everything and use it for everything, and then they're driving an SUV even when they're traveling alone with no cargo.
To get away from this you'd have to completely redesign US cities to have people living in them instead of significant numbers commuting in from the suburbs. To begin with you'd need a massive amount of new higher density housing, the construction of which is currently inhibited by building codes where not outright prohibited by zoning. Trying to solve the rest of it before you do that is going to face massive opposition, because you'll be trying to make it harder to have a car to people who still can't realistically avoid having a car.
I used to be an EMT in the US. I also was an avid motorcycle rider for many, many years. And an avid bicycle rider for even longer.
It is dramatically easier to screw yourself up on bicycles
and motorcycles than cars. It’s frankly shocking how stupid someone can be in a modern car and survive.
It doesn’t require another car to kill someone on a motorcycle or bicycle, but the squids tend to filter themselves out pretty quickly. Many of them actively collide with cars due to their own recklessness and/or stupidity, making the statistics somewhat hard to interpret.
Was the 80 year old driving the RV ‘the cause’ of the head on collision, or the 22 year old with the 1.5l super bike illegally passing over a double yellow at 50 over the speed limit around a corner?
I can provide graphic details of who ended up winning in that situation, regardless.
If everyone had to ride instead of drive (including drunks, soccer moms, burnt out graveyard shift workers, medical workers on their second 24 hour shift, retirees, etc), you’d see a lot more dead folks overall.
Because even though cars are also more dangerous to other people, for the most part, those other people are in cars in the US, and the danger still generally cancels out.
Even head on collisions at highway speeds are more survivable than anyone should reasonably be able to expect.
Vehicle vs ped calls are still the worst though.
Protip: don’t get out of your car after an accident on the highway unless you’re reallyreally sure you can see all other traffic. Chances are you can’t, especially at night. Especially when the drunk coming the wrong way on the highway never turned on their headlights. Wait for the firefighters to physically block the road with their rigs first. That was a gnarly call.
> If everyone had to ride instead of drive (including drunks, soccer moms, burnt out graveyard shift workers, medical workers on their second 24 hour shift, retirees, etc), you’d see a lot more dead folks overall.
That's rubbish as cyclists/bikers are not the cause of most collisions. Once you remove the majority of car drivers, the number of collisions will plummet along with the severity of those collisions.
(Sedentary disease such as heart disease and type II diabetes will also reduce if more people are using active travel - not so much if they're motorbiking).
my perspective is someone where the city has been largely built for cycling, which leads to less deaths overall.
Population of Malmo is actually higher than Orlando, FL for example.
Yet, for Skåne (the region where Malmo is; pop: 1,421,781), 25 traffic deaths were recorded in the year 2019[0].
173 road deaths were recorded in Orange County (where Orlando is; pop: 1,429,908), during the same period.[1]
That’s a difference of 7x, and Skåne is one of the largest regions in the country, many places are car dependent - yet the major change is that urban areas are sufficiently dense so can be cycled (even during cold climates) and that there’s dedicated infrastructure for doing so, which eases the traffic burden too.
Arguably the conditions are better for personal electric vehicles and bicycles in Florida (than the comparatively frigid and rainy conditions of Sweden).
Even the topography is flat[0][1], it's literally the perfect place for cycling, but the US has chosen something else.
So, yes, if things are different they are different: comparable populations, a better climate and an equally flat topography and somehow 7x the amount of deaths; and the only difference is the approach to infrastructure by the county.
It also has the opposite problem in terms of temperature. There are days when the wet bulb temperature in Florida requires humans to be in an air conditioned environment because they would otherwise literally die from the heat.
Only in developed countries. The age of a typical car in my region is over 15 years. Basically, most of what you bought in 2005-2010, drove for a decade or more, and then sold for scrap eventually ends up in countries like mine. Moreover, most people take catalytic converters off their cars and sell them for $80-100 for platinum recycling.
I think most "developing" countries have the same problem. So the world at large hasn't really solved it and won't solve it any time soon.
Firstly, this is another positive for EVs. They do have brakes but most have regenerative braking too, which is clean.
Secondly, ebikes are rampantly misused in pedestrian areas, often used without helmets, often upclocked, many used for delivering, or kids. And because they're not a regulated vehicle, nobody has third party insurance.
There are legal ebikes and nobody has any more of a problem with them than normal bicycles when used in the right places.
However, even illegal e-bikes (or unregistered e-motorbikes to be more accurate) are preferable in my view to the problems associated with car traffic. At least when an e-bike rider does something stupid and crashes, they will typically end up hurting themselves which can be an important learning moment. Car drivers don't have the same "skin-in-the-game" to ensure that they're paying attention.
It's harm reduction - let's encourage the most irresponsible car drivers to be irresponsible e-bike (legal or not) riders and we should end up with far less congestion, pollution and collisions.
In the US at least, I'm not sure what "regular liability insurance" means. Might be something on a homeowner's policy and something on auto insurance but it's probably not something the average person necessarily has.
> very limited 250W/15mph pedelec class of e-bikes
Meanwhile in the Wild West (a.k.a. the United States) we have children hurling 100+ lb 750W throttle-controlled motorcycles (I'm sorry, "e-bikes") at up to 28 mph on mixed-use pedestrian trails. The best we can do is put up plastic signs on the trail begging them to slow down and be careful around other people.
And yet, despite the wild west regulatory situation you claim, bicycles kill and injure way fewer people than cars, and don't require insurance because it's nearly impossible to cause the level of damage with a bike as even a minor fender bender in a car. And, even considering how "dangerous" bicycles are, studies have repeatedly shown them to increase life expectancy of the rider. Meanwhile cars are among the highest cause of accidental death of children of nearly all ages in the US.
Your argument is actually a strong one in favor of bicycle-favoring transportation policy: despite limited existing regulation they're still incredibly safe, and we can always tweak policy to handle the worst case exceptions as needed if they end up causing significant problems as bicycle share grows.
We are just barely beginning to investigate the harms from PM2.5 particles.
It seems like every month we discover some new and harmful effect, or that it was worse than initially estimated from smaller sample sizes, etc.
I don't think it's a conspiracy, just the way that discovery happens.
We also have a tendency to completely oversight the harm of new tech in comparison to older tech. People get super worked up about the supposedly super toxic lithium ion batteries, but have little concern for the far greater amount of mining necessary to build the frame of a car.
So it's good to have a baseline of the amount of harm done with current tech to compare to and center our reactions to these large population scale effects.
> Is this a serious environmental concern compared to the climate/emissions issue, or just the 'r/fuckcars mentality'?
It’s a minor issue in terms of impact. I see it over amplified because it is a tool for the anti car crowd. It’s not like we are measuring or discussing all the environmental issues from everything else people do in their lives. It’s a lopsided focus on everything related to cars, and there’s a reason why.
This is fake news. The backing study for this claim did all sorts of wonky unrealistic testing to come to this conclusion. If you own an EV, you viscerally know it's BS given that you're the one paying for the actual tire replacements on your real-world driven vehicle.
To add to this, (from what I remember reading the study at the time) it was basically racing a car around a track (think lots of tyre squealing around corners), and found that the tyre wear was very high. I haven't seen a study which actually simulates somewhat "normal" driving (presumably because the wear is so low driving like that it's difficult to measure). Also didn't factor in a bunch of different stuff - tyres are effected by lots of things; compound, temperature, pressure, surface abrasion, etc. There might be an effect! But this study was very bad.
A normal driving test was (famously [1]) done to measure the effect of axle load (vehicle weight per axle) on road wear. This is where we got the “fourth power law” of road wear.
I think as a starting point, I would expect that tire wear should remain roughly in proportion to road wear, given the same tires on each vehicle. From this, I would expect car makers to use larger, thicker, heavier tires on heavier vehicles in order to compensate.
Thus I think we shouldn’t accept claims about the replacement lifecycle of tires without knowing these details of their construction. If an electric car is twice the mass of an older ICE car then the fourth power rule would predict a 16-fold increase in road wear. I would then expect the tires on the EV to have 16 times more rubber in order to last the same duration, unless they’re made of some newer compounds which are more durable.
> I think as a starting point, I would expect that tire wear should remain roughly in proportion to road wear
IMO this would be a suspect assumption to make w/o data to back it up. You've got two dissimilar materials interacting (in very different modes). E.g. rolling a metal ball bearing on a wood surface would obviously cause the wood to degrade far more than the ball bearing, (and even a wooden ball rolling on a wood surface would wear substantially less due to the mode difference).
(If I had to guess the road has a higher wear as the surface has a tensile stress around the contact patch of the tyre, causing most of the damage, but this is just armchair engineering at this stage).
The point I was after to make is that you can't assume that road wear scales the same way as tyre wear (I was assuming same material fwiw, just different loads). They are being worn under very different modes/scenarios.
Given that roads and tires experience the same forces under driving conditions (Newton’s Third Law guarantees this) I think it’s a reasonable prior assumption to start from. There are of course other environmental factors that accelerate road wear (rain and water erosion, freeze thaw expansion) but those conditions were not included in the study that produced the Fourth Power Law.
This assumes that road wear and tyre wear are caused by the same mechanism, but tyre wear is presumably caused predominantly by friction, whereas road wear is at least in part (and perhaps predominantly) caused by compression, creating pot holes by causing the earth underneath to move.
It's quite noticeable (to me at least) that the areas with highest wear are usually places that have heavy vehicles (buses and lorries) braking and accelerating. Traffic lights and bus stops will often have bumps/dips that seem to demonstrate a shearing force between the road surface layers.
I have always assumed it was just due to the uneven distribution of weight by vehicles often being stationary in the same spot, so those points are subject to more compression forces than the surrounding road surface.
If it were acceleration and deceleration I’d have expected the effect to be less localised, as breaking and accelerating happens over a much longer distance.
But, I have no actual idea. It’s just probably not friction…
I'm surprised there isn't more info available to compare vehicles/tyre wear. There's plenty of real-world driving going on, so you'd think someone would have measured tyre replacement frequencies.
Tires and driving styles vary a lot, so it would be really hard to come up with some aggregate numbers. Maybe you could compare the same very popular tire on different cars that still have enough data points to average out differing factors?
I reckon that the different driving styles could be partially dealt with by considering different classes of car. E
G. Fast "prestige" cars will tend to share certain driving styles and be quite different to cheaper run-arounds.
Ideally, it'd be great if insurance companies made a big push to get some kind of standardised "black box" that drivers could fit. As well as providing extra stats, I think they'd be great for detecting illnesses. A simple driving ability stat could be produced from the typical acceleration/braking timings - smoother is better as it shows good anticipation by the driver. If their stat starts decreasing more than expected due to aging etc. then the driver could be alerted that they should consult a doctor as it could cognitive decline, eye problems etc.
Maybe, but the average Tesla tire lasts half as long as my tires typically do, and the extra weight from the battery combined with the high onset torque are likely culprits (the former of which you can't fix with current battery technology when comparing otherwise apples-to-apples ICEs vs EVs if the EVs have non-negligible range, and the latter of which would require artificial limiting on the electric motor (which companies don't want to do because it's a selling point)).
For some rough numbers under normal/factory configurations to consider:
- A semi truck converts around 0.9 milliliters of tire to dust per kilometer.
- A Tesla Model Y clocks in at 0.3 ml/km
- A Honda Fit clocks in at 0.1 ml/km
Even with an overestimate of semis being responsible for 10% of total miles driven in the US, if everyone drove a Model Y then passenger cars would be responsible for 3x more tire dust than semis, and if everyone drove a Honda Fit then you'd be down to 1x.
Are there bigger concerns out there? Probably. Is the solution to bias toward ICE instead of EV? Probably not. It's not worth burying our heads in the sand when making those decisions though.
The weight difference between a Model 3 and the average new car sold in the US is a negative number. The Model 3 is slightly lighter than the average new car. So the difference comes entirely from torque.
The difference also comes from the grippier tires on the Model 3, the total tread volume on those tires compared to a smaller car, and that the Model 3 compared to the average car isn't apples to apples if you're looking at tire wear for ICE vs EV (to be fair, my car's too light to be apples to apples either, but if you look at comparably sized cars the Model 3 is heavier).
Electric cars don't have electric car-specific tires.
If you look at comparably sized cars the Model 3 is about the same. It's roughly the same size and weight as a BMW 3 series. And they're both around the size and weight of the average new car.
It's small electric cars that typically weigh more, because making the car smaller isn't the main way to make the battery smaller; reducing the range is. So then nobody really makes a small full electric car with a short range, because that market is served by plug-in hybrids that solve the range problem with a gas engine while still allowing you to do a few dozen miles a day as an electric car.
What specific tires do you have on those vehicles? Performance motorcycle tires wear much faster than non-performance (or your average car tire). Sportier car tires generally have softer compounds that wear faster. How you drive your vehicle also has an impact. Tire pressure.
You have a 4500+ lb car with 0-60 acceleration of 2.x to 4.x seconds and crazy torque, if you drive EVs like a teenager you will eat your tires after 10-12k miles.
There's nothing categorical about EVs that make them eat tires. The aggregate data about average EV tire life is skewed by the relative popularity of and poor choices made by Tesla.
EVs are heavier but it may not be that dramatic, M3: ~3500-3800lbs, Honda Civic: ~3000lbs
The torque is real, though, but I think this is what the earlier commenter was getting at regarding bad choices made by Tesla: there is no reason "chill mode" isn't the default, which makes a Tesla drive more like an ICE vehicle. Most other EVs I've driven don't go full torque by default, so seem to have made a better choice there.
In personal experience, I went about ~45k miles on 4 new tires in my Model S before I replaced them. A bit sooner than I would have in my Prius but not much.
I also don't take off from a green light as if I were in a drag race, which probably helps.
Torque and pedal response are just choices made in software. The weight is not as important, given the example of the Bolt EUV that weighs ~1700kg and has normal tire life.
> Torque and pedal response are just choices made in software
Yes which is due to the flexibility of EVs. The problem then is that customers are going to prefer buying vehicles with greater torque and manufacturers have little incentive to not provide EVs with high torque.
A lot of it is based on driver behaviour as it's quite feasible for ICE vehicles to be driven to burn rubber or make donuts.
If you include e-bikes and e-scooters as EVs, sure. If you mean cars and trucks, the F150 Lightning, the EV6, the Ioniq 5, the EX30, and every other vehicle is heavier than its ICE counterpart. The motors are inherently torquier too.
disclaimer: I drive an electric car but would sell it in a heartbeat if I could use transit or bikes to safely and efficiently get to work, the grocery, and the doctor.
It's Lenz's Law, friend. It's as much a design point as a=F/m. Because of it, induction motors and magnet synchronous motors generate more torque at 0RPM than any combustion engine I've heard of.
You could have software limiters, but you'd need regulatory mandates for that. Actually, I support that. 3+ ton trucks with a sub 4s 0-60 shouldn't be street legal. Or they should at least require a special license and liability insurance.
All EVs already use limiters because, as you correctly noted, just shorting the battery across the motor will rip the axles off and set the battery on fire. The question of whether an EV should put down grip-limited amounts of torque, or should limit itself to .5g at most, is a question of tuning.
So there’s not much in it. EVs do tend to be 10-15% heavier for the same model in EV vs ICE but the point is brought up constantly as if they are twice as heavy, or at least significantly heavier. In reality picking a model 3 would for your next car would bring the average weight of US new cars down which I think is interesting, no?
I mean... yes/no? EVs are on AS slicks, the tyre itself has less tread on it than something like CrossClimate 2. Overall they are replaced quicker and eat tread quicker. Its ~50% difference. I have both ICE and EV.
The new tyres that are coming out like Pirelli P Zero, promise a longer life span, but that remains to be seen.
This is why a move to natural latex rubber tires is necessary. Companies have experimented with them[1][2] but a world-wide switchover should be in the works.
"Natural" isn't really the main thing. Whether you make something synthetically or extract it from a plant doesn't tell you if it's toxic or not. There are plenty of non-toxic synthetic substances and toxic plants. And synthetic things are usually cheaper to make.
Personally I would love to see a world of 100% transit, bicycles, walking, etc., but let’s be realistic. As long as we’ve got cars, we might as well try to do as much as we can to reduce the amount of pollution they generate.
It's hard to imagine supply scaling with demand, or the tires providing as much grip and safety. I'm supportive, but I see no world where this is adopted.
Seeing as these two cars are similar in size, capacity, and performance (0-60 mph in 4.2 s), it is nice to see that the electric option weighs about the same as an ICE car of similar specs.
I think the key is to make a class of light-weight EVs with smaller, lighter batteries for life around town. Most of us rarely drive more than a few dozen miles a day.
That's a great idea. And since it'll be limited to in town use, something narrower might be useful - maybe give it two wheels instead of four? That'd be huge for reducing weight and increasing range. And for suitable geographic areas, it might even be possible to make one light enough that it could be powered by the rider, no external power source required!
Then, with the reduction in width required for these futuristic two wheeled eco-machines, we could utilize some of the road space freed up for an even more efficient way to move people around a semi densely populated area. If only we could invent a way to allow multiple people traveling on similar routes to share a common vehicle, then we'd be able to split the capital and ongoing usage costs among many different people, reducing costs for everyone.
It's a shame, really. If only we had the technology...
Or by people who are disabled/elderly. I have MS, cycling isn't really going to work on a regular basis because between heat intolerance and cold making my leg spasticity worse, I'm not going to have a good time. I can drive just fine, though.
While yes, a lot of the elderly continue to cycle in countries where the infrastructure exists (e.g. the Netherlands), those places also have universal healthcare. You can't just throw your average 60 year old American office worker on a bike.
Or for people with small children who need to be able to transport them. Or their groceries for a family of more than 2, particularly since American cities and towns aren't usually accommodating of the 'stop every day/every other day for food' method of food shopping that's more common in some European countries. A bike isn't really a great option for someone with a 20 month old and a 4/5 year old.
In cities such as Copenhagen, it's very common to see parents transporting small children (and a large number of pets from what I saw) using cargo-bikes.
Not having universal healthcare seems like a strange argument against active travel as it's well known that active travel can drastically improve people's health and reduce the need for healthcare - it would seem more important to choose to look after your health if you can't rely on healthcare being available if you lose your job etc.
Your disability point is perfectly valid, although some disabilities make it easier to cycle than to walk. However, if we can get as many able-bodied people to use active travel when feasible, it'll clear vehicles from the roads and make it easier for the people that rely on their cars for mobility.
Small children and 2 weeks of groceries for a family of 4-5? For 10ish miles one way? On the low end?
The healthcare point is because it means that a lot of elderly Americans have medical conditions that are unattended to, injuries that never healed properly, etc. It's common, particularly in the working class, to have your body be functionally wrecked by the time you're 55 (particularly for men). If we want the elderly to be active, we need the infrastructure to allow that rather than declaring that any health condition that won't kill you in the next two weeks is fine for the poor to deal with, actually. Heart conditions are really common, diabetes, COPD, poorly healed injuries for those who at one time worked blue collar professions, etc. Someone who lost their foot to diabetes isn't going to be cycling and sure, if they'd been more active 30 years ago that might not have happened, but it's the reality now.
I support public transit and biking infrastructure and totally agree it's great for disabled people as well - one thing I found interesting when I lived in a city with decent transit + universal healthcare is how many more physically disabled/elderly people I saw out and about going about their business.
I just find that the idea that we can just get rid of cars/that everybody who uses them just doesn't know any better overlooks a substantial amount of the population and their needs, and you need to address the needs first if you actually want to move away from the car. It has big 'everybody is a single, able bodied 25 year old man without dependents who lives in CA or the PNW' energy to assume those of us in cars are just not educated enough to know better. Like now even when I travel I don't like taking public transit because I'm immunocompromised and being jammed in with that many people is a health hazard. I'm not stupid. Neither is the exhausted mom with 2-3 kids and one hour to get across town to buy food for the week.
> I just find that the idea that we can just get rid of cars/that everybody who uses them just doesn't know any better overlooks a substantial amount of the population and their needs, and you need to address the needs first if you actually want to move away from the car.
I think the opposite tactic is better. Make it easier for young, fit, able-bodied people to get around without cars first and allow the increasing numbers of cyclists etc. to bolster improving the infrastructure. When you make it easier for the fit people to cycle, it also becomes easier for older/disabled people to cycle. The more people we got onto bikes, the less people we have driving and increasing congestion.
Ultimately, the U.S. has gone all-in on personal cars and designed cities around them. This pretty much excludes other forms of transport and increases the distances between homes/shops/healthcare etc.
Only the most rural americans live 10 miles from a grocery store. They are distributed like every two miles in the suburbs. Every half mile in the city.
You are an edge case though. Feel free to continue driving. If we get the common case on a bike for a few trips out of the week however, that saves a lot of carbon. When people worked from home in the peak of the pandemic in socal the air was never cleaner; 50mile crystal clear visibility.
You should check out electric Bakfiets, they solve a lot of the problems you’re talking about for having kids and hauling groceries. I’ve even made trips to Costco with mine.
Warm is not the same as comfortable. Listen, I'm from alaska and have several family members who routinely ride bicycles to work and around town in the winter. Except when it's storming. Except when their hip hurts. Except when it's breakup. Except when they need to get groceries or run an errand across town at the end of a workday. Except ad nauseam. You still have to own a car to make life in alaska livable in the winter, and snide remarks by able-bodied dipshits about just using the trike referenced above deserve derision.
you're misreading me: I'm coming at you like you think a drive-by-link-drop to a niche product is giving a good answer to GPs valid criticism that winter biking is not very comfortable during common winter occurrences. I think you should consider a wider perspective, and when I see such behavior online I like to give a little snark back.
You have a weird dream of how people should use transportation. People like what they like. They like individual cars with 4 wheels. They don't want to share transportation with random people.
The train v car debate is for losers - cars won and will always win. Privacy and freedom will always be more important. Use trains to ship goods around, not people.
For the weekend trips you could put in an engine with a power splitter
Oh what's this, turns out the ideal car was already invented twenty years ago, it's the Toyota Prius
Casually gets 50 mpg city and highway
Small, lightweight battery
Not a super expensive status symbol
The plugin models use very little gas for the daily commute, but you can always drive it like a pure ice car if you need to flee the country on zero notice
Prius is just doing what a 90s civic did but with more onerous maintenance due to complex powerplant over dead simple 4 banger and manual transmission.
A fair number of people do own bikes. But almost certainly the majority of people don't want to own a second vehicle--focused on transportation, rather than recreation--when they need/want a primary, probably ICE, vehicle anyway.
On a motorcycle, I need to wear special clothes and a helmet and it's still rather unsafe.
This thing I just can get in and out like with a car. I can throw my normal backpack in there. I don't need to worry about rain. Very importantly, I at least have some material around me if someone hits me.
What stops me from biking is cars. I simply don't feel safe on a bike next to a giant pickup truck where I gotta pray the driver sees me, isn't on the phone or otherwise distracted.
E-bikes are unusable at this time of year. It needs to stand stably on it's own to not kill me the instant some ice appears (so, four wheels) and have an enclosed cabin to stop frostbite.
Dress warm, studded tires. People are so averse to any non ideal weather for cycling. Texas, Arizona and Nevada people say it's too hot, West coasters say too much rain, other places say snow and ice. All excuses that can be solved by better personal preparation mixed with safer better maintained cycling infrastructure. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Infrastructure and prep can do a lot for cold and ice. But unless we're installing locker rooms everywhere, it's less helpful for rain and not at all helpful for sweating in the heat.
You do you, I personally would never bike on roads I would hesitate to drive on, which is what we have here in the winter, especially not an ebike that is going as fast as a car but without any of the protections, in traffic with cars and trucks that will run right over me if I wipe out on some ice.
It's also ignoring the apparent purpose of the study: It appears to have been designed to make the case for removing copper from brake pads. Only one type of copper-containing brake pads was actually worse than exhaust, and that is also the type with the worst braking performance. Even the other types of pads they tested also contained copper and the copper was the main source of the pollution. But there are already brake pads with low or no copper in them.
That is still talking about particulate counts, not health effects (the article does one study linking a particular constituent to salmon health effects.)
These are two distinct issues. Tyre pollution is threatening the wastewater but at least in urban areas where the most pollution occurs thanks to stop'n'go can be counteracted by expanding water treatment (we have to do so anyway to get rid of pharmaceuticals).
Brake dust however is a massive threat for anyone living near a highly congested road.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
This is the regular current taboo. Micro-dust from tires and brakes contributes to half of an ICE vehicle’s pollution, with the other half coming from exhaust emissions. The amount of this micro-dust scales with a power of the vehicle’s weight, typically between the square and cube for cars, and up to the fourth power for heavy trucks. EVs are 30–60% heavier than their ICE counterparts. Assuming all other factors remain constant, EVs thus generate more particulate pollution than ICE vehicles. This does NOT even include the environmental impact of battery production and electricity generation.
"Assuming all other factors remain constant" is doing a lot of (largely unjustified) work there. Regen braking massively reduces the amount of friction-brake usage in EVs, to the point where brakes will need to be repaired due to under use.
EVs are heavier than similar ICE vehicles, but they also have regenerative braking, which greatly reduces wear on the brake pads. I suspect EVs produce much less particulate pollution from brake pads, but somewhat more from their tires.
My EV does not brake, redirects the power to a motor to act as a dynamo. In exceptional cases you can brake but for emergency braking and such.
What you say is a lie, not sure if by ignorance or malice.
> This does NOT even include the environmental impact of battery production and electricity generation
Okay so if we're veering off particulates here anyway, why ignore that electricity generation is actually a whole lot cleaner than burning contemporary fuels?
Maybe better not to rehash the obvious, I just wanted to point out that there's more to it than downsides
If you are consistent then, your solution should be to move to another transportation, or to help policy transition. Because bikes, trains and bus are undiscutably better.
> For the study, published in Particle and Fibre Toxicology, researchers grew human lung cells in a lab and exposed them to dust from car brakes and from diesel tailpipes, finding that brake dust caused greater injury to the cells.
That seems like an overly narrow way of defining harm.
E.g. what if brake dust is bad for your lungs but your lungs can repair the damage, but diesel fumes are harmful to your brain and the damage is permanent?
I'm not saying that's the case (I have no idea), just that studying lung cells in a lab doesn't tell you anything about the full-body harmful effects.
One solution could be to require ceramic brakes which produce far less dust and may be more environmentally friendly, and even has greater performance which EVs will need for their extra torque.
EVs on public roads must still obey the same speed limits and common sense behavior. Having more torque doesn't mean drivers have to slam brakes like on a race track.
In normal driving regenerative braking takes away most of the energy, leaving very little work for the friction brakes. Sometimes EVs even have the opposite problem — brakes rust due to very low use.
This sounds similar to claims that cancer rates are increasing.
Which is to say that it may be true but it’s a symptom of improvements. Cancer rates are increasing because people are living longer and dying less of other things. Similarly, a huge amount of work has been done to reduce the harms from car exhaust, and modern vehicles burn really cleanly. It’s no surprise that other factors start to become relatively more important.
Cancer rates are increasing in younger people in many types of cancer, likely due to increasing pollution. Some types of cancer are being seen in increasing numbers due to more people living longer.
I wonder whether washing streets, especially in summer when it doesn't rain as often, would solve two problems at the same time: urban heat islands (through evaporation) and dust spreading around the streets (washed away).
When I hear someone's brake's squealing, I try and avoid them at all cost. I've been behind an old car that when it braked, I was coughing for hours afterwards.
This article is flat out wrong. The study they cite does not state the things the article says it states. And the study they cite certainly does not compare the harm from brakes to the harm from exhaust.
The study simply says that brake dust can cause asthma and hay fever in children. There is no comparison made to the harm from exhaust.
Exhaust is certainly more harmful than brakedust in the quantities one may encounter in the real world. Exhaust contains many chemicals that are actual poisons. Iron is not poisonous and copper can only be poisonous in large amounts. It is true that they can cause sensitivity and autoimmune diseases in the lungs especially in children, but this is much more remote harm than the actual poison in exhaust.
Nobody kills themselves by sniffing brakes but many people have done it by closing themselves in a garage with a running car engine. (They say that is harder now with catalytic converters but it still happens).
Anecdote related to last paragraph...20 or so years ago I drove a then 20 year old truck some guy had cobbled together. It was a real hunk o junk, rusty, the speedometer didn't work, etc. But it did have a new engine and carb, but it had no cat. It had several exhaust leaks (judging by noise). I was lucky it even had mufflers.
Went through a taco bell drive thru one night that had a weird tunnel portion. It was a slow line, and even sitting in that tunnel a couple minutes, my friend and I got lightheaded and a bit teary eyed. It's scary we didn't even realize it til we got through the tunnel.
That was the moment for me of realizing how awful these things are for the environment. If we have to be enclosed with our own emissions it will literally kill us, but we just blow it away in the open air as 'not my problem anymore.'
I'm glad emissions are better now, and that electric has a viable path forward. Shame we weren't at this point a few decades ago.
Environmentalism really is just a slippery slope ideology. We have electric cars that don’t pollute and are an amazing experience… but oopsy woopsy they have tires so I guess we need to ban them too. Might as well just keep people burning diesel because the electric cars aren’t ideologically pure enough.
How about we just solve the actual problem first? The planet is burning. People used to burn coal indoors for heating, that’s way more fucking harmful than 1 micron of brake dust.
Cars on roads are like 10% of all vehicle emissions. Most comes from vehicles not on roads, like industrial, farming and mining vehicles.
Of those emissions, the emissions from tires and brakes have the most impact.
But it is imperative that you should buy an EV and charge it with electricity from the power grid, and then take a destination trip that involves burning a giant amount of jet fuel.
I wonder how much more. And if the increase is offset by the reduced exhaust, brake dust, oil leaks, and pollution from oil and gas production and distribution.
You don't even need a huge battery pack for dynamic braking. It's the architecture of hybrid cars that allows them to regeneratively brake, even if the battery is full, by using the engine as a pump. Although this doesn't arise in practice, hybrids could dynamically brake down a grade of any length, which BEVs can't guarantee.
I rarely use the brakes on my 6600lb CT because I'm usually using regenerative braking. I assume it's similar for the 7100lb Rivian. Now, if you're constantly launching at traffic lights, that's going to be some extra tire dust compared to slower ICEs.
How many kilograms of brake dust does the average IC car produce in a year, versus gasoline burned?
March of Dimes Syndrome here.
We're entering the end of the gasoline car era. Anti-car activists need something else in order to continue kvetching, so it's down to tire and brake dusts, battery recycling and whatnot.
When that is solved, it will be about the harms of exterior paint, and inhaling the "new car smell".
Transportation that is not powered by one's own muscles can never be virtuous.
> Transportation that is not powered by one's own muscles can never be virtuous.
... unless said transportation puts users in close physical proximity to strangers, some of whom are loud or dangerous. Such transportation is very virtuous: the more numerous, dangerous, or annoying the strangers, the more virtuous the transportation. This exception is not applicable to transportation that flies or floats.
This seems to be mostly a US problem, I only really see people from the US worried about this...
As someone from the UK who travels on two trains and a bus both ways (6 journeys total) most weekdays to university, I never had any problems with other passengers, I guess very occasionally there might be a loud baby or something but then you can just put headphones in, and the worst thing that ever happened to my property is my bag got accidentally handed into lost property when I wasn't paying attention because I got on really early and the staff assumed it was left there from the last trip
So you're better off flagrantly breaking traffic laws and possibly getting T-boned than having someone potentially break into your car? That seems like some combination of nonsense and there maybe being some places you should just avoid.
Walk down the street and touch a bush or any plant leaf and get a nice black hand in the process. The plants are covered, parked cars get covered and the inside of my apartment was covered.
It wasn’t until I moved out that I saw the extent of the problem. I only lived there a few years but every surface of my apartment had a coating of the same black dust. I’m now very worried my short time there considerably affected my health.