Electric cars are not THE solution.
I’ve been saying this for a while. Not only that, but electric cars are substantially heavier than their ICE-powered equivalents, meaning both tires and roads wear out more quickly. Plus, there’s a ton of pollution and other environmental damage caused by battery production that at least partly offsets the lack of tailpipe emissions.
As loathe as I am to admit, because I’m a car enthusiast and I enjoy driving, cars cannot be the default mode of transportation everywhere indefinitely; they will always need to exist, but should mostly be for small centres with no capacity to implement transit infrastructure and last mile type of things.
Plus, there’s a ton of pollution and other environmental damage caused by battery production that at least partly offsets the lack of tailpipe emissions.
The battery production pollution is an issue, however one thing to keep in mind is that once the minerals are out of the ground they can be recycled, unlike drilling for oil. When looked at on a long timeline the battery for an electric vehicle is a lot cleaner than everything needed to power an ICE vehicle.
That said, there’s always room for improvement and we should never get complacent. But we don’t avoid innovation just because it isn’t perfect.
This should be the definition of ‘letting perfect be the enemy of good’ Please stop using false oil lobby talking points to attack the transition to electric cars. Electric cars are an order of magnitude better for the environment than petrol/diesel, stop fighting big oils battle for them. Now let’s talk about how we can reduce road journeys through public transport, and reduce environmental impact of tires.
Is that true about the tires though? Electric car tires are designed to be substantially tougher because of the increase in weight, do they actually shed more material?
There’s no such thing as an “electric car tire.” They just use standard passenger vehicle tires rated for the appropriate weight class.
“Tougher” just means they handle more weight by holding higher air pressure, so they’ll have more layers of steel, kevlar, canvas, etc. The materials that makes contact with the road still wear the same.
There is in fact such a thing as an “electric car tire”.
Fundamentally you are correct that they are in essence just tires rated for the weight class, but there’s more to it than just that.
Electric car tires are usually made with a stiffer rubber than comparable combustion cars, this is mostly to handle the additional weight, but they also stagger the tread pattern, and some have foam inside them, both to improve the noise and acoustics of them. Something that wasn’t a problem when there were a noisy combustion engine running. But in an electric car you don’t have the engine noise, and therefore hear a lot more of the wheel noise.
None of this help with the particle emissions, but there is in fact such a thing as an electric car tire.
Engineering Explained has a great video if you are curious: https://youtu.be/8pM9o2Ifcro
This is what I’d read, this guy specifically states that the tires are much stiffer to counteract the increased wear of a regular tire from the 20-30% increase in car weight. Anyone know of any good studies on this?
You can’t really engineer away the need for friction, and if there’s friction there is going to be wear.
If EV tires were much better than normal tires with the same grip levels and somehow magically less wear, all tires would adopt that technology.
Not that I’m a materials scientist, but EV tires don’t seem much different than other “economy” tires, other than a higher load rating.
There is actually a lot of small details that make EV tires different than regular tires. Nothing that helps with particle emissions, though:
All the EVs I see sold around where I live (Norway) come with the same eco tires as ICE cars. The heavier ones like a Tesla Model X just comes with the same tires rated for higher load. (And the extra foam inside for sound dampening, but that’s an option for most tires) The Model X also happens to be delivered with the same tire they put on the very much not EV Ford Explorer.
I know nothing about the tires on the Teslas or the non EV ford explorer, or even what tires are fitted in Norway. But the Hyundai Ioniq 5 I bought in Denmark last year came fitted with Michelin Primacy 4 tires, which are indeed EV tires.
What makes it EV and not just an eco tire? On Michelins website (Norwegian one) and various tire shop websites it just, an eco tire.
The staggered tread pattern, the stiffer rubber, the profile of the tire, and the sound dampening foam inside the tire. There’s nothing stopping you from mounting these on regular ICE cars though.
Here’s a video explaining more about EV tires:
They use the same materials, they’re usually just thicker. If you get one of those heavy boat luxury cars you’ll put the same tires on them. They shed material at a faster rate, but they have more material to compensate.
Good thing DOGE and the rest of the Trump fueled Republicans are foaming at the mouth to completely eliminate federal funding for the California high speed rail project. Thank God they’re going to save us from affordable transportation for the masses in favor of continuing to murder the planet actively by distributing microplastics into every square millimeter of the Earth.
If we had those flying cars we were promised, this wouldn’t be an issue.
I’m looking forward to all the noise pollution. Drones, drones everywhere
Compared to now: car tyre roar everywhere. It might be better to have a drone taxi go straight up and away from people.
They’re testing them out on the East Coast, won’t be long now.
Source?
Probably referring to the large drones that have been seen in NJ, followed by NY and PA since November.
FBI is looking into them, its… Odd.
Some links to recent articles/Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_New_Jersey_drone_sightings
https://apnews.com/article/fbi-drones-sightings-central-new-jersey-cd8866c9c2568216759007716990decf
We just need to swap all roads out with big orange hot wheels tracks. I don’t know if it’d solve the problem but at least it’s a suggestion and it’d be sick as hell.
Omg can you imagine? Instead of traffic lights we’d have boosters throwing us into loop de loops 😍
Can I yell vrrrrrrrooooommmmmmmm on the loops?
Better than what people are yelling on the road these days, at least.
Does anyone know of another efficient mode of transportation that has near-zero surface friction?
Because that would be a gamechanger
There are some vehicles that go on iron wheels, on a special kind of iron road that are very efficient. Only bad parts are costly initial investment and difficulties to scale up if the existing network gets overloaded (such as the Swedish rail system who has been over “maximum” capacity for a long time which has put needed maintenance on hold at many places)
Maybe there’s some kind of a wheel, like a metal wheel that could just glide across narrow metal surfaces that could follow a set path….
imagine if it had a flange, so around turns the wheels could hook into the the metal surfaces so they wouldn’t go off them, that would sure be neat
Actually the flanges are only an additional safe guard. The train wheels are actually a bit cone shaped which makes then self-centering on their own, even without the flange: https://youtu.be/Nteyw40i9So
Hovercrafts have been around for ages. I’m not sure that the random driver would love using one though.
I somehow doubt they would have less particles from friction. They usually use a cushion which touches the ground.
The imagination of a busy intersection with common people driving hovercrafts is funny, though. Or imagine driving on slopes.
Hyperloop theoretically, practically who knows.
Yet another example of how pretty much every problem is, at its heart, a zoning problem:
- Microplastics? Too much driving, because trip origins and destinations are too far apart to be walkable.
- Greenhouse gas emissions from cars? Too much driving because not enough walkability.
- Greenhouse gas emissions from housing? Poor efficiency because too many single-family homes exposed on all sides instead of high-density housing with shared walls.
- Greenhouse gas emissions from concrete production? Using way more of it than we really need to build huge amounts of unnecessary parking (and much wider streets than we’d need for bikes + transit + only delivery vehicles).
- High housing prices? Not enough housing density.
- Obesity? Sedentary lifestyles, i.e., not enough gym of life.
- Racism? Redlining.
- Wealth inequality? (Among other things), protecting rich landowners from market forces by eliminating competition from multifamily developers that would build out the land to its highest and best use.
See also, this video: The Housing Crisis is the Everything Crisis. He almost gets it, but fails to connect that very last dot, which is that the housing crisis is itself caused by bad, density-restricting zoning!
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You’re not entitled to choose otherwise unless you’re actually willing to pay for it. Zoning laws that force an oversupply of single-family homes are effectively a subsidy of that lifestyle, and it’s high fuckin’ time for that subsidy to end!
In other words, if you own a house in the suburbs, you might think you’re a rugged individualist who bought at fair market value, but you’re actually a damn welfare queen and don’t even realize it.
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There is no alternative suggested. The purpose of this movement is to tax heavy EVs. I think that makes it distraction.
The smaller the EV the more range per kwh, and so smaller batteries are needed which makes them more affordable. It is not unreasonable to tax heavy vehicles, but the punch line that motivates this piece is “EV’s bad”. They could have recommended micromobility for example.
imho we should tax any vehicle that puts an inordinate strain on the roads. ultra-heavy EV’s like cybertrucks and hummers are ridiculous and inefficient, and the purchases knew it when they bought them.
but also the cummins diesel powered pavement princess my colleague drives BY THEMSELVES TO THEIR OFFICE JOB day after day, I think that should have to pay an excise tax.
work vehicles certainly deserve cutouts, but they need to be work appropriate vehicles, not just jacked up asshole haulers.
work vehicles certainly deserve cutouts
That thinking is what got us SUVs. Work vehicles earn income, and so probably don’t need cutouts.
It would be funny though if some environmentalist managed to make the tax properly technology agnostic though. Mostly if you can keep them from being exempted anything that hurts EVs goes double for pickups.
Of course we both know gas cars get exempted whenever this sort of thing passes because it’s never actually about vehicle weight and road wear so much as how can we slow the decline in gasoline demand for a few years, but it’s nice to imagine that silver lining.
Ban tires!
The American auto industry
Lobbyists
Conservatives
The existence of hundreds of thousands of miles of asphalt paid for by the American taxpayer
Oh, right. Well, I’ll just wave my finger once a year and… die, eventually.
whatever happened to the green tire technologies that get announced by the big mfg and then never come to market… like the mushroom based materials
Usually stuff like that is just a distraction so companies can do greenwashing while delaying the implementation of real solutions. I’m going to guess that’s the case but, I haven’t really looked into it.
fuckcars
The other day I was wondering how miraculous tires are - fucking balloons lifting the heaviest vehicles on land.
Who ever said electric cars were the solution?
Helping one problem and not helping them all means it’s better to do nothing according to a lot of people. If you are anti cars that’s one thing, but to specifically aim it at EVs is clearly just targeted propaganda as always.
Yes we put 100 years of research into gas powered cars, 15 years of research (or less by most companies) and the weight isn’t the same yet so they want to toss all advantages of moving to them.
Look at things like the Telos Truck. 4,400 pounds, 4 doors, small and can fit a 8’x4’ sheet of plywood if needed in the bed.
Length of a mini Cooper, so it fits in smaller parking spots, weighs less than the average ICE truck, costs less than the average ICE truck and will have less impact on tires people worry about here, while not shipping oil across oceans and causing cancer to the people in the vicinity.
We need a clever solution to this problem, because our govts are unlikely to solve this through new infrastructure or policy changes.
I’ve been reading about this topic for a while now, and I always thought the tech these guys invented was worth further investment: https://smarttirecompany.com/
Less rubber is good but we really need a rubber replacement that is biodegradable.
Nickel alloys are expensive and require some nasty mining so shape memory tires are a stopgap solution at best.
Material sciences is a difficult field. People spend years researching one small area just to shelve their research as not viable, too cost prohibitive, or impractical for large scale manufacturing.
I haven’t seen any research into durable biodegradable materials that could hold the weight of vehicles unfortunately, so I think investment will be hard to come by. Though I don’t disagree with the premise that something that can degrade over time, but also not harm the environment would be an ideal solution to the problem. I imagine if such a thing were created it would be able to be applied to many other industries, not just transportation.
Michelin and Bridgestone have shown off proof of concept biodegradable tires but nothing to the market yet. It is possible, and will take incremental progress as you say. I’d like to see more work and updates on this.
Is it technically micro plastics? Vulcanized rubber particulates?
Its not only rubber for car tires. There’s a lot of extras to add longevity, and change performance in certain conditions.
Plastic is mostly made from hydrocarbon chains. So are rubber polymers it seems.
Not sure if it matters if the plastic is from a tree or pumped from a really old tree.
There is a significant problem with media-reporting and scientific-studies being vetted for accuracy and peer-reviews.
Plastics are organic polymerized compounds usually I think that fall under Alkyl, isoprenes, monomers ?
Rubbers are organic polymerized compounds usually under elastomers / neoprenes / butadienes ?
We NEED more nuance and not fearmongering,scaremongering and FUD about the man-made pollutants.
Rubber pollution is a thing and plastics pollution is also a thing. How do we deal with each of them may require DIFFERENT strategies and NOT CRAZY-SHIT.
