The problem of "brake dust" on human health and air quality has been known for a long time (https://phys.org/news/2020-01-air-pollution-effects-immune-c...) before that there were also issues with asbestos in brakes, but thankfully those haven't been used since the 90s as far as I know. This is the first I'm hearing about electrically charged particles though.
The bottom line is that proximity to traffic is horrible for your health and your air quality. Electric cars can help with some of the problems but don't solve all of them. The people with the least amount of money end up having to move to apartments near highways and so they often suffer the worst impacts, but I've seen very nice and expensive apartments and houses very close to (or directly on) busy streets. Noise is usually the obvious and immediate consideration, and I doubt many people are aware of the risks they expose themselves and their families to just by opening a window in the summer.
If you looked nationally at wealth vs proximity to traffic, I would wager the "people with the least amount of money" are not the closest to traffic; are you suggesting otherwise? If only because of all the wealth that has come to cities in the last 20-25 yrs. Within that already wealthy urban demo I would agree, yes, the poorer wealthy are nearer to urban highways and thoroughfare than the wealthier wealthy.
"In the United States, it is widely accepted that economically disadvantaged and minority populations share a disproportionate burden of air pollution exposure and risk (26,27). A growing body of evidence demonstrates that minority populations and persons of lower socioeconomic status experience higher residential exposure to traffic and traffic-related air pollution than nonminorities and persons of higher socioeconomic status (5,28–31). Two recent studies have confirmed that these racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities also exist on a national scale (32,33)."
It's not surprising that minorities would be exposed to more traffic given the proportion that live in urban areas, but that doesn't rule out that the poorest in the country (minorities and whites) are not the most exposed. I guess my basic question is, are the poorest people still living in city centers? In my city the central, densest areas became some of the wealthiest, the quieter outlying areas the poorest.
> …that doesn't rule out that the poorest in the country (minorities and whites) are not the most exposed.
Setting aside race, to me it seems like "economically disadvantaged populations share a disproportionate burden of traffic-related air pollution exposure" makes this pretty clear. <shrug>
It's not 1950, everyone on this site has a 1+ GFLOP machine so there's no need to squash a bunch of independent variables down to one dimension or as you call it "set aside race." Unless you're not a hacker, that is.
Even into the 1960s wealthy black people were prevented from buying and living in the 'good' parts of even northern US cities.
Care to enlighten us as to the second paragraph? I only found some misc stuff, nothing appearing to be systemic or enshrined in law. In fact I see laws against such things being enforced more than lamented in searches.
Why do you assume that fine particulate is at the highest in city centers? It's often higher than average, but the highest is frequently outside of the city center, where highways have been constructed through pre-existing, poorer neighborhoods. The South Bronx is the famous example of this[1].
In Seattle, in the densest parts of the city are glass towers that certainly have filtered HVAC, and the poorest parts of the city are relatively low-density areas near the port (particulates from diesel trucks and ships), the cement plant, the nucor steel plant, the highly polluted duwamish river, and boeing field.
> I guess my basic question is, are the poorest people still living in city centers?
I suppose that there likely are small numbers of people living far outside of cities and away from traffic, like up in the mountains of Appalachia or living off the grid in tents or in communes deep in forests, who are poorer than people you'd typically find in urban areas, but it's still the poor in the US who are dealing with the worst of the harms traffic causes compared to the better off/wealthy. They're also the least able to mitigate those harms or deal with the fallout caused by them.
> EVs unfortunately pollute more with tire particles (thanks to both higher torque - especially from 0 - and higher average mass).
I wonder how much the higher torque of EVs is a real issue? Although they have the potential to do more aggressive acceleration and produce more tyre pollution, the Teslas I see leaving traffic stops seem to be accelerating the same as ICEs.
Indeed I wonder at “normal” speeds (not racing say) does torque matter or is wear dominated by total miles driven? If I zoom to my destination do my tyres wear substantially more than if I take a more sedate approach?
(Certainly when I was young and dumb my clutch wore more when I went dashing about).
In my experience, someone who is new to EVs will tend to do a lot of short, fast accelerations to explore how the vehicle performance. That happens mostly in the early stages of using an EV and after a while they settle in to a more normal (ICEV similar) acceleration pattern.
Do you have hard numbers on the tire particle claim?
We have anecdotes of Tesla owners saying they go through tires more often. But I’ve also heard car fleet owners with both EVs and ICE saying they see no difference between them.
So I’m inclined to think this is entirely dependent on the specific EV. You can get an EV without significantly more weight than an equivalent ICE, and you can drive them in ECO mode where the torque curve is extremely gentle. I don’t see any reason why you’d have more tire particles in that scenario.
I think there are pathways to have less tire wear on EVs than with today’s ICE vehicles. Batteries with higher energy density would obviously help, but I think there are things you could do with the accurate control you have over the torque on the wheels, or making true all wheel drive with torque vectoring more common.
I've seen adverts for Chinese luxury apartments touting the built-in HEPA filtration systems. Seems to be a must-have if the air outside is polluted. Nobody seems to even think about this in building codes in the West. Especially, as you say, for apartments near major roads.
Filtration is a very good idea. HEPA filtration for residential use is dumb.
A HEPA filter must remove at least 99.97% of aerosols 0.3μm in diameter. A filter which removed 99% and blows air 1% faster will remove just as much, or one which removes 50% and blows air twice as fast.
For recirculating air, all of those accomplish the same thing. Some of those have much higher noise, running costs, and general upkeep than others.
HEPA makes 100% sense for something where 100% of air passes through it. If you want an exhaust on a facility which handles biohazards, a vacuum cleaner kicking up dust, etc., sealed HEPA 100% is the way to go.
That's not what happens in a residential building, though. For that application, it's just bad engineering.
Going by the look of the images on it's wikipedia page, most of the people next to that road aren't at/near ground level. I don't how many stories up you'd have to get before the pollution and noise aren't a problem, but I'm guessing the air only gets fresher the higher you go.
Some of the reason why poor areas in the US are around highways and busy streets have to do with the history of redlining (https://phys.org/news/2024-02-highways-historically-redlined...). Even today when a city wants to build a loud/smelly/polluting highway or a factory or a landfill or a sewer treatment plant it's the poorest areas that are the least able to fight back, and putting them in the areas where poor people are will mean the least amount of inconvenience for the wealthy who often live far away from those neighborhoods. After a source of pollution is in place, very few people want to move in right next to it, so any houses there tend to be inexpensive and may be the only housing poor people can afford which further concentrates them into those areas.
As someone that lives in Dubai, this isn’t accurate. No one wants to live right by Sheik Zayed road. People want to live by the sea on the Palm for example, JBR, or perhaps in the Marina area.
Driving up SZ road, all you see are tons of shitty retailers and car dealerships. Trust me, wealthy people especially are not living next to it.
Please take a look at the high-rise along sheik zayed in business bay, around down town and World Trade Center and explain to me how those are low end living. It’s all 4 and 5 star hotels with significant portions dedicated to long term (yearly) contracts.
It’s only Al Quoz that is car dealerships. But on both sides of Al Quoz you find high-end, high rise
> before that there were also issues with asbestos in brakes, but thankfully those haven't been used since the 90s as far as I know
I’d be careful with assuming that. A lot of consumables are imported directly from China, and the cost of car maintenance can be eye-watering, so it’s exactly the type of part I’d expect to be procured as cheaply as possible.
People care about the brand of tyres on their car, I don’t even know of any brake pad brands.
...but I've seen very nice and expensive apartments and houses very close to (or directly on) busy streets.
Some of the most expensive houses in my neighbourhood are the closest to the highway. I just tried to check, but none of them are for sale right now. Traffic only decreases four hours at night but it never really stops. Only the noise is a big no-no.
What you're saying is completely true for tire particulates, but if you drive an electric car normally you're almost never engaging the brakes. Since almost all normal amount of braking is in the envelope of where your regeneration braking can take all of the power.
This counts even for hybrids though. A friend of mine had to replace his brakes after over 10 years and 180,000km on his Prius for the first time. Not because the brake pads were used up, but because the brake rotors started to rust too much from not being used.
Of course if you're one of those people that floor it and hard brake at every stop light, this doesn't work, but for most cars it works really well.
ICE cars can use engine braking, and here in Sweden it get focused as part of the driving license and associated training. I recall even getting the recommendation to "exercise" the breaks once in a while in order to assert that they actually do work when you needed, since breaks that don't get used enough can get rust buildup.
Of course, this is also part of driver training in Germany. But the engine braking on EVs makes brakes only necessary for emergency braking if you're not driving like a maniac. With ICE engines you still need the brakes a lot more. Especially downhill.
I don’t think this is a 1:1 comparison though. Electric cars can utilize regenerative braking, which can significantly slow them down before needing to use friction from brake pads in order to stop.
You can engine brake with a lot of automatic vehicles as well, since they’ll still have semi-automatic modes. I drive a car with a CVT and I’m able to “down-shift” for engine braking by using fake gears at specific ratios.
I feel like the distinction here is that you have to go out of your way to do this with ICE vehicles? Maybe I’m in the minority then, but I never do this with my car (which has CVT).
I tried it a few times, thought it was a gimmick and now I just use gas or brake.
It's a shame this is used as an excuse to keep the heavy ICE SUVs and trucks. There are many EVs lighter than an average pickup truck.
If people really cared about this, they'd demand train-based public transport instead (no tires! fully electric! self-driving too!), or at very least limits on car weight regardless of the engine.
Trains also have brakes which produce large quantities of fine particles.
This is especially a problem in enclosed spaces with limited ventilation: on parts of the London Underground, air pollution in the tunnels can be many times worse than on the streets above.
Trains are also way more efficient than cars at transporting people. If everyone taking the train was driving instead you can bet air quality would be way worse.
Why do you think that was an excuse for ICE vehicles? That’s your own biases showing. I’m anti-car in general, and very pro public transit.
EVs aren’t going to be the savior of climate change. They do some things better than ICE cars, but do some things worse. Denying those worse things is just putting your fingers in your ears.
Unfortunately buses and trains are only viable above a certain density, and many communities exist configured in such a way that they are intentionally low density. While metal mining might have an environmental impact, abandoning millions of existing homes and building new ones in cities not only also has a large environmental impact (concrete also isn't great for the environment), but it is also politically, economically, and practically unviable.
A mix of solutions will be needed to fix the variety of different and unique problems that exist.
Busses are viable as long as you make them viable. If you have a busstation at a 1 km distance you can make it viable in most places even with the mega sprawl of the US. The economical incentives of a car economy is perverse it is the tradgedy of the commons distilled.
Most of the US has single digit numbers of people per square km. And the average daily commute is 61 km. And suburban sprawl had led to the decline in city centers. Low density, high distance, and poor directionality are very significant challenges for planning a bus line.
Have you used bus systems in the US? Even in cities that have made a large investment in bus service, it can be a challenge.
I know it sucks living in the US without a car, I do think it is important to know that it can be done. You are going to have to prioritize though. I've lived carless in some of the most car dependent places of the earth, including the US so I know what makes that a great deal.
I closely know people who have lived in extreme rural areas of the US without a car. You are right that it is possible. But it certainly presented significant challenges. There's a reason why people buy cars in the US.
I personally loved taking busses and trains when I lived in the city. I didn't go far but with a pass I'd take them all the time. I now live in a suburban sprawl and I can never convince my wife to bus it. She usually has a point: it's pretty inconvenient to get from our home to a bus/train stop. I live by a train but would love it if they were electric though that'd do nothing to reduce brake dust.
They're ugly but I'd love them if I had them. Why the hate for hydrogen? Mark my words, we're being forced to upgrade our HVAC systems to be "green" the use TONS of electricity when in 20-40 years, we're going to do it all over again to move on to hydrogen. I'm already spending $300 a month on electricity using "green" tech. The second I can produce my own hydrogen, I will.
Majority don't buy their electricity from green suppliers and don't care where their batteries come from. Cobalt mines are hell. Either way, I stand by what I said. Spending 40k+ on a 10 year product that will cost 20k+ to refurbish isn't green. My 12 yo EV battery cost more than the car to replace.
In some places it’s fairly hard to get power that isn’t generated by renewables. In New Zealand the grid is 80%+ renewable and my supplier is 100% renewable.
In IL there are no green providers but 3rd parties provide it somehow from TX. I'm not sure how it works but it's quite expensive. I did it for a few years but stopped. Now, with my increase in energy usage due to moving away from gas, it's hard to justify. In the United States, we want to move everything to electric and I believe that's a mistake. Not without nuclear power to subsidize costs. I'd imagine my monthly costs would be closer to $400, which I believe to be insane.
This is true about EVs, but it all just depends on how hard you are on your brakes. I routinely go 70k+ miles in ICE cars with the same brake pads. My mom on the other hand had to change hers about every 30k miles. YMMV.
I haven't really had to engage the friction brakes on my EV in the past 30,000mi, other than intentionally having a few hard stops to scrape rust off the rotors from not using them for so long.
I should add a little bit of honesty here. I did replace my brakes but only because they were rusting from not being used enough! So I bought stainless steel pads and those look great.
This depends on your driving style. I was listening to a person from a lease company on the fully charged podcast recently who literally runs the numbers on their fleet of EVs calling this out as largely a myth (one of several). At scale, they are not really seeing a difference relative to ICE cars. And they'd know because with a lease car, replacing tires is their problem.
Some people of course drive their EVs aggressively and wear out the tires faster. But that's true if you have a muscle car too. Doing donuts in the parking lot just wears out your tires. And if you are in Germany and like seeing how fast your car can go regularly that also wears out your tires. The driving style is a much bigger factor than the weight of the car.
But otherwise the numbers are about the same for ice cars and evs in terms of frequency of needing tire replacements. For most people the novelty of abusing their tires wears of quickly.
And because most EVs use regenerative braking, the main issue with the brakes in EVs is that they are used so infrequently that they need to be replaced because of corrosion issues. You actually need to use the brakes once in a while to keep them clean and functioning apparently.
Yep. Pretty much any kind of wear and tear part that is on an EV wears worse compared to a similarly powerful ICE. It's probably a wash or better because they don't use petroleum products for propulsion, but it is definitely a thing that needs to be considered. EV's are not some kind of panacea.
Except brakes, since they are rarely used due to regenerative braking. Tires, on the other hand, do wear faster than a lighter ICE car. My EV has almost 30,000 miles now and will need tires soon, but other than washer fluid, it has had no other consumables or wear items replaced.
Though to be fair, the tires on my previous ICE vehicle only lasted about 30,000 miles before they needed to be replaced, OEM car tires are often not long lasting. Brake fluid is due to be flushed next year, but not due to use of the brakes, just due to time.
Tire life also depends on where you live. In Atlanta, GA, I specifically haven’t made it more than 20K miles on a set of tires be it wear or road hazard. The issue with nails here is so bad there’s a guy on a bike picking them up with magnets.
That 20K set of tires had a slow leak from a nail that was patched incompletely. On the new set I had to replace two using the hazard insurance I purchased after three months and two thousand miles. I expect to use the insurance again.
I now have an EV with sport summer tires. They’re at 5K miles and have a screw embedded in one tire since about 400 miles. That tire was deemed to be safe and best left alone as it’s presumed to be running through a rubber block only. I’m just running it until it goes flat assuming it doesn’t manage to survive its whole expected life span.
Realistically I’ll end up running something else over this spring once construction gets into full swing.
> Yep. Pretty much any kind of wear and tear part that is on an EV wears worse compared to a similarly powerful ICE.
Probably accurate if you exclude the brakes and ignore the fact that removing an ICE engine from consideration also removes nearly all the tricky bits that wear out on an ICE car.
Just want to point out that most electric and hybrid vehicles use regenerative braking most of the time and only use real brakes at very slow speeds or in emergencies. So it might be totally misleading to say that electric vehicles are the problem, when they are probably the solution.
Not only does regenerative braking itself reduce PM emissions, the reduced demand on friction brakes is enabling some EVs, such as the Volkswagen ID3 and ID4, to switch to drum brakes.
Due to their enclosed nature, drum brakes greatly reduce PM emissions compared to disc brakes.
That seems like the ID.4 has drum brakes on the rear only and disc brakes on the front (which is not unique to it; some lower end gasoline cars still have rear drums as well).
And the brakes are only employed if needed. So even if you had disc brakes and has a good Regen design, you'd only use them in aggressive /emergency situations.
The other benefit of EVs is that the feedback on regeneration and efficiency tends to make you less aggressive and a better driver. Which also leads to less brake use.
The article has weird reasoning. If we remove tailpipe emissions, which are by far the largest, then brake/tire wear emissions become visible and are next in the list to deal with. But we won't deal with the latter before the former is dealt with.
> our brakes and tires isn’t benign, either. Tests by Emissions Analytics, an engineering consulting company based in England, found tires produce about 2,000 times more particle pollution by mass than tailpipes.
> tires produce about 2,000 times more particle pollution by mass than tailpipes.
(emphasis mine)
The fact that the majority of tailpipe pollution is not particulate means that tailpipe pollution can be the biggest problem we need to fix, even if it isn't the biggest particle pollution problem.
This is by mass, which is a weasel metric that discounts all gaseous emissions, and the smallest particulates that stay in the air.
Impact on health is not linearly proportional to the mass.
It's almost the opposite - the smallest particles can linger in the air and get absorbed.
You could eat a chunk of a tire without a significant health effect, but breathing the same mass of almost any gas would kill you.
Absolutely right. I had to change brake pads on my electric car at about 120 k miles. My previous gasoline cars usually had their brake pads last about the advertised 30K miles. Some people are complaining that the rear brake rotors of their teslas are rusting and looking bad. That is how little they are used.
Furthermore, it is entirely possible and probably desirable that some electric cars actually remove the brakes altogether (with the exception of an emergency brake that is only used in case of total system failure). Theoretically, electric motors should completely capable of doing all necessary braking. Of course there would have to be more emphasis on the reliability of the power electronics but it is doable.
Regen has limitations in how quickly the power can be stored which limits the braking rate. Also, when the battery is fully charged there is no place to put the electricity which also limits regen braking.
Most EVs blend regen into the brakes so that when you press on the brake pedal it uses regen for normal braking down to about 10mph at which point the friction brakes take over. At low speeds regen is ineffective. That low speed use of friction brakes produces very little wear and very little particulate output.
Those EVs doing blending will also switch entirely to friction braking if you really stomp on the brake pedal in an emergency stop as you can stop more quickly than any regen system. In those cases the priority is stopping quickly regardless of energy efficiency or particulates.
I don’t see a likely hood that EVs will completely get rid of friction brakes using current/near term technology.
I didn't really see them picking on EVs terribly in the article but maybe I missed it? Agree that a lot of EVs have regenerative braking so they should in theory produce less charged particles from the brake and caliper interaction, which they mentioned.
Inspection station in my state made comment to me that EVs are failing inspection for rusted brake components because of their heavy use of regen. Add to cost of ownership.
My 2021 EV simply favors mechanical braking over regen for a short period at the start of each trip, specifically to avoid this. (Seems a trivial software feature once you have hybrid braking at all...)
I own a 2010 Prius and I've had to replace the brake pads more often than a regular car because of this, around every two years or 20k miles. I've had to replace the brake rotors twice over 80k miles, as the pads rusted and then wore it down unevenly.
Below 5mph the brakes are used, but it doesn't seem to be enough. Compared to my ICE car they always look a lot worse, and after parked for a day when it's damp have surface rust.
As another comment says, it seems like a software change could fix it by using the physical brakes more. I believe the issue is they get wet, and then don't get hot enough to dry out before parking.
> Inspection station in my state made comment to me that EVs are failing inspection for rusted brake components because of their heavy use of regen.
Are you suggesting some metal brake components have unusual rust because of disuse, where they aren't being used regularly enough for friction to "clean" their surfaces?
Otherwise I don't see how regenerative breaking could cause rust, since the braking force is supplied by electrical fields.
>>Are you suggesting some metal brake components have unusual rust because of disuse
Yes, the brake disks, especially if you drive some place where they salt the roads during the winter. I had to change the rear disks on my hybrid after two years because they started to fall apart from rust, now I have learned to do some heavy braking at the end of trips to clean and dry the disks
A startup I worked for years ago initially had a temporary office in a coworking space that catered to artists and craftspeople, in a renovated warehouse near the freeway loop downtown.
They didn't have air conditioning, which isn't particularly strange in the PNW, but we did learn opening the windows for breeze was a very bad idea. The amount of tire and brake dust/soot that would pile up in a single afternoon was disturbing.
We were only in there temporarily for a few months, but boy did it underscore to me how much of an unappreciated health and pollution hazard freeways are.
In Wilmington, CA, the pollution from refineries and the port of LA is often so intense that you can smell it within your car as well as see the brown tinge that hangs thick and low in the air driving southbound into the area. Its amazing that people still have to live under that today in this state of supposed environmental leaders both public and private. I guess the port makes too much money for the economy for anyone to care about the health outcomes of the people who are saddled with living near it.
If you are within a mile down wind or so of a highway the increase of pollution is really significant. The same is true for very busy roads which unfortunately often means most of an entire urban area is at risk for health problems from pollution due to busy roads.
> All you would need to do is to collect them with an electrostatic precipitator – a device that exposes the charged particles to an electric field and efficiently sweeps them away.”
How do they propose to do this? A little device mounted near each brake pad? A skim of the paper doesn't appear to show an opinion from them beyond citing this prior study [1]. The conclusion of the cited paper appears to show a progression towards a target:
> This study is our first step to install dust collectors in actual vehicles, in order to reduce the brake wear PM emissions. In this study, we evaluated the collection efficiencies of an inertial separator, an ESP, and a hybrid precipitator, independently. In the next stage, we will design a suction system that considers the structure and space of the brake system; then, the full dust collector system setup will be installed on a vehicle. At the final stage, the actual collection efficiency of the dust collector will be measured under various on-road driving conditions.
Too complicated, why not use a magnetic brake instead? The electric motor on hybrids essentially operates like a magnetic brake during regen. Works in 80% of the scenarios and for the rest of 20% we can just use the regular brakes.
Or run the motor in reverse in the final stage of braking.
I drive a hybrid and, when parking, switch between drive and reverse even while still rolling the opposite direction as it's easy for the motor to deal with such loads.
The credibility and purpose of the article was shot down when they said the problem would be getting WORSE with EV's. Firstly, the problem becomes less of an issue with EV's and they shared no evidence to support that moving to EV's would increase non-exhaust based pollution. Lastly, there have been plenty of studies over the last two decades which show charged particles from car brakes.
You cannot infer that just because a car is ~50% heavier that it means it spews out more brake particles. EV's use regenerative braking similar to that of engine braking in your car and this accounts for limited use of the brake pads in comparison to combustion engines.
Those numbers you present are a little inflated when it comes to like for like currently. Furthermore, there are combustion engine vehicles which are far far heavier than EV 4wd's.
Acceleration is not performed under braking either so I don't see your latest point.
And ICE use engine braking, I can drive with almost no use of the brakes, is it how most people drive? Certainly not. Most teslas I see use the gas and brake pedal as on/off switches.
ICE engine braking in a normal car requires the driver to engage lower gears to slow down. EV's do this automatically, which is why you get regenerative braking in that regard. It's quite different.
Many EV's whilst engine braking is applied, also apply the brake lights.
Quote from Tesla's website for Low and Standard regenerative braking "Standard: Provides the maximum amount of regenerative braking. When you release the accelerator, Model Y slows down, reducing the need to use the brakes."
The effect of regenerative braking in an EV is much greater than that of an ICE under engine braking.
I’m pretty sure they grease the rails in some spots, particularly the curvy bits that are often near platforms so it would get stuck to the rails and such. Cars would put out massively more pollution but it’s more free to blow around in the wind.
I had some boxes stored in a storage cage in my apartment car park and after 6 months sitting there, they were all coated in a thick black dust. Since there was no wind or rain to move it around, it just settles and builds up.
They don't grease the cross beams on ceilings though, and those things are nasty in train stations. Same stuff you see creeping up the walls around the tracks in the subway tunnel. Not a competition though, the pollution is bad and we're all so used to it.
It is quite important to discuss exactly where the top sources of pollution are through so we can cut back on the worst sources of them to have the most impact.
If you've ever worked on a vehicle with drum brakes, you would see the foolishness in your statement. Brake dust goes everywhere, whether it be drums or disc brakes. Older drum brakes were even more hazardous because the brake linings were built with asbestos, at least until the 1990s for US-made brake products. Aftermarket and foreign-made brake pads apparently still have asbestos in them.
I'm not too worried about this. It's an engineering problem and now that is been raised, we can find solutions.
Drum brakes that I've worked on often have a lot of dust in the drum. Which is a good thing because all of that dust is not in the air. But of course they are not anywhere close to being sealed.
All wheeled ground transportation sources that use brakes. Legged vehicles and ground effect vehicles would not suffer from this problem, and we shouldn't necessarily assume the wheel will be the forever solution, we should not fail to dream.
Only very small piston airplanes, and the need fuel is being phased out. Areas immediately surrounding heavily used ga airports are occasionally seeing elevated levels but it's not a particularly potent source for the public. The issue is mostly employees at the airport being exposed while fueling and performing maintenance.
They want a perfect changeover where new fuel can run in old engines. Problem is general aviation is stick in the 1950s, and dont want to have to replave their valve seats with hardened ones.
It is known problem. May be most researched is "brake dust" in tube, where it is literally seen with naked eye. Other place where "brake dust" seen but nobody care, in airplanes, may be because airplane brakes are not just emit dust, but literally smoke :)
I didn't see an explanation of the effects that charged particles have on my health. This research and finding seems important but including some effects other than "pollution" would be great. Anyone have specifics?
Break use on my EV is about once per trip. I have to stop after backing up and that seems to need the breaks. Honestly not sure if that's just a bad habit at this point or of regen doesn't work in reverse.
It was especially terrible before 2006, which is when NASCAR's exemption to the lead ban finally expired, creating a perfect natural experiment to answer the question: how much did the health of people downwind of NASCAR arenas improve after the ban, and conversely, what was the dollar cost of the health externality of lead. Spoiler alert: more than $1000 / gram (approx. 1 tank of fuel).
In car brakes you can have slightly different designs/materials for pads which cause the balance of noise<->dust<->temperature performance to differ. For instance if you want to reduce dust emission, generally you get brakes that are much louder in my experience until they warm up but they are much "cleaner".
air filtration isn't expensive nor hard... last generation cleaned water, perhaps we should clean the air. start small, indoors and transportation, reduce exposure simple stuff and just gotta do it.
The problem is that all the bad stuff from cars by definition is OUTIDE, where it's essentially impossible to filter besides wearing a properly fitting respirator.
Air filtration is a really great idea, but it doesn't help if you want to spend time in your own yard or open a window. Thankfully we haven't yet reached the point where we're all forced to live in hermetically sealed houses with filtered air pumped in, or where we need to wear a hazmat suit outdoors. I'd prefer to clean up the air and avoid excessively or needlessly polluting it further so that we can enjoy it rather than having to living in a bubble.
We can't filter our way out of this problem. If we can build cars better to reduce their harms and there are ways to place particle collectors near streets and houses to reduce the environment impacts of traffic I'm all for it.
Electric vehicles are heavier, which means they must spend more brake pads to stop. But they also use regenerative breaking, which reduces pad wear. So I'm not sure if they make it worse or not.
* I'm hard on brakes in general, but have over 70k miles on the original pads. Regen braking reduces brake use a LOT.
* Regen does NOT bring the car to a complete stop, the brakes are blended in below something like 5 MPH. The rotors are not going to rust away, they see action every time you drive. (Some surface rust is fine and normal, EV or no.)
* EVs can be heavier than ICE cars, and most are. There are many things I dislike about Tesla, but the Model 3 is a feather weight in the category. A comparison I like to make is to the AWS Dodge Charger, which is heavier by a couple hundred pounds. I won't even talk about trucks and SUVs.
Are you talking about the hold mode they introduced a couple years back? It will bring the car to a stop but (as compared to the previous mode where you had to press the break yourself below ~4-5 mph), but I'll be good money it's using the brakes to do so. Particularly when it's activated on an incline.
I drive an EV6, and I’m almost confident it uses (or can use) regenerative braking to come to a complete stop.
If I use the ePedal or the brake paddle, the stop is super gradual and you never feel the “grab” that you feel when using the brake. Also, I can sometimes feel/see it slightly rolling (so it’s not even truly a complete stop).
I’ve seen some people swear that the EV6 always uses friction braking at stops, but again, I’m pretty sure this just isn’t true.
> * Regen does NOT bring the car to a complete stop, the brakes are blended in below something like 5 MPH. The rotors are not going to rust away, they see action every time you drive. (Some surface rust is fine and normal, EV or no.)
A Gen2 Leaf (2018+) with "e-Pedal" mode absolutely does stop the car fully with regen.
They’ve unkilled it last I heard. I got an email a few months ago from Chevrolet saying they decided to keep making Bolts due to their popularity, and to keep an eye out for the next model in 2024 or 2025 (can’t remember which year).
Same here with my Bolt EUV. The only time I use the brakes are when I occasionally misjudge how quickly I’m coming up on a turn and one-pedal braking isn’t slowing me down fast enough; or when I first leave home, the car is fully charged, and one-pedal braking can’t regenerate the battery any further so it won’t brake for me.
Tires are somewhere near the top for distributing microplastics and heavier cars cause more tire wear, so yea we should get on that. I live next to a main road and we run filters in our house and have to wash the surfaces at least once a week to get off the oil and rubber dust. You can't just dust that stuff either, you have to wash it with soap. I almost regret buying this place, but where else would I have bought in this economy!?
I've never driven an EV. How do you approach stop signs and red lights other than braking? Is "engine braking" (regenerative braking?) strong enough to handle that big a fraction of slowing down in city traffic?
Based on my experience (electric motorbike), the regenerative breaks are super strong indeed.
You can tweak their « force », but usually, the strongest level is the most comfortable - that you eventually keep all day long.
It will cause you to full stop even on the steepest slopes.
Once you’re used to it, you dose your deceleration by focusing on how much you release the throttle.
And the only situations where you have to hit the breaks are the unexpected events - e.g., a car coming at the last moment and which you should give priority to.
You just let off the accelerator. They have tuneable deceleration curves for the regenerative braking.
Think of it like playing a console game. When you hold the right trigger, your car goes faster. When you let off of it, it naturally slows down. Unless you opt in to harder difficulties, most racing games don’t make you brake much.
Driving an EV is just like that. You only really brake for an immediate stop.
I have a Prius hybrid. It has an indicator when the brake pads are used. It's easy to slow down and stop without using the brakes about 95% of the time
It depends. On new EVs (which formally designed as EV from scratch), motors and charger are usually powerful enough to exceed brakes.
On conversed, usual practice to limit torque of motor to be less than on ICE original, because of regulations (which exactly state, electric motor should not exceed ICE torque), and this mean, they are just not powerful enough for 100% regenerative braking.
From technical view, modern electric engine could easy exceed brakes.
I'm member of Ukrainian EV activists group, and we there mostly talk about conversions. Unfortunately, conversions are not so cool as new EVs, but to be honest I don't know details of other countries regulations, they could be less restrictive.
Some EVs also tie in the same detection devices used for adaptive cruise control to adjust regenerative braking. It can be configured to 'coast' in a manner similar to old-school automatic transmissions, but will apply regen braking when other vehicles are detected ahead. This lets me drive it sort of like a regular automatic when on the highway but get the added return of wattage when traffic gets heavier.
There's also one-pedal operation, akin to driving a golf cart. Where you feather the accelerator pedal to slow, and it will engage much more aggressive regen braking if you let off the accelerator pedal. Some folks like this. I do not. I still drive other ICE vehicles and find the transition between them too jarring for my liking.
In city traffic, I rarely have to break. It's basically running the motor backwards (putting a load on it) and dumping the energy back into the batteries. It's limited by how fast the batteries can accept a change, so it doesn't always work when it's very cold out. I'll have to brake when a light catches me by surprise, and I brake when backing down my steep driveway. (The car does stop before getting into the street, but it's going faster than I'm comfortable with when approaching the sidewalk.)
The regenerative breaking is applied as you let off the "gas" pedal. It's kind of like driving a stick, but slows you down faster.
From what I know, there are several settings of regenerative braking you can choose. The higher levels will bring the vehicle to a stop, while the lower ones won't. So it's user-configurable to a degree.
Recently had to learn how to force a Prius to use the brakes, as the rotors were rusting up & starting to pit!
I could not get my partner to brake hard enough to really engage the brakes. They just would not do it, would not brake hard enough to actually use the real brakes, no matter the prompting & even knowing how critical it was that we start to de-rust these rotors.
What I found out is: if you put the car in neutral, there won't be regenerative braking, & the car will use the actual brakes. That's the only way I could get my partner to use the actual brakes.
I would have expected cars that have both conventional and regenerative brakes to keep track of how often the conventional brakes are being used and to automatically increase the use of the conventional brakes if they aren't being used enough to keep them in good shape.
The polestar 2 does the simpler thing of biasing towards mechanical brakes for a little while at the start of every trip. (I suspect this has the advantage of detecting brake failure in more controlled circumstances as well, but that's not specifically documented.)
I'm sometimes convinced Tesla's cameras identifies the stop line and stops itself exactly there. All I do is release the throttle pedal and it coasts there where it needs to be.
Generally, yes. Usually there are settings for how much regen you want, but the term 1 pedal usually inies a regenerative brake strong enough to stop at stop signs or when exiting freeways.
"1 pedal" just refers to vehicles that perform a high degree of regen when the throttle is lifted. Other designs that require the user to press the brake pedal are not necessarily engaging the brake pads when you do so, many of them are also slowing the vehicle with regen when you press the brake pedal.
When you press the brakes on an EVs or hybrid, they typically use regenerative braking up to the limits of the motor and charging system, and only apply the brake pads after those technical limits are met. There are many "two pedal" vehicles that can come to a complete stop, or close to it, with regen.
The control scheme has nothing to do with the efficiency of the car. Whether one pedal or two, it’s going to use the same power for the same acceleration/cruise/deceleration profile.
Unless you’re concerned about the energy usage in your ankle when maintaining pressure on the gas with your foot?
Controlling the car’s speed is the driver’s primary job. One pedal or two you need to use your right foot to maintain the speed you want.
Coasting with no acceleration or deceleration except that provided by rolling resistance and the road gradient is so unlikely to be the exact acceleration you actually want - there’s no particular value in privileging ‘zero motor power’ as needing to be an easy state to achieve.
There is a decent sized gap between 0 acceleration and 0 regen equal to the amount of energy required for the vehicle to maintain speed against rolling resistance and air resistance. Anywhere inside that gap, you're not using regenerative braking at all, you're just decelerating from not supplying enough power to maintain speed.
"Just letting the car roll" results in deceleration, but at a rate chosen by physics rather than you. If deceleration is not what you want, you have to continuously apply power. If it is what you want, it's still almost never going to be at the rate you want, so you still either have to apply some power or apply some braking. In the former case, you're pressing down on the pedal enough that no regenerative braking is happening. In the latter case, regenerative braking is obviously more efficient than friction braking, because the latter has 100% losses to heat.
If you’re lifting off the throttle enough to activate regen braking, you would be applying the friction brakes in a car as well. Maintaining a steady speed is more efficient than varying speed, but if you have to vary speed then one pedal driving is superior in every way.
If your one pedal driving doesn’t save power, then I would suggest a driver mod.
You don’t have to use one pedal driving to use regenerative braking in most EVs. They use regenerative braking to effect control inputs on the brake pedal too.
Are there any cars that "cruise" (by which I assume you mean maintain velocity without applying a pedal)? Non-EVs mostly sort of do so, they still slow down gradually. I'd be interested in trying a car that cruises indefinitely. Sort of an automatic, always on cruise control.
Well cursing in an EV is the equivalent of putting an ICE car in neutral. Modern ICE do that as well. To answer your question it still slows down due to wind resistance and friction.
If you put a modern ICE car in neutral while moving, you’ll use as much gas as you would while sitting in a parking lot idling.
However if you just coast in gear with the engine braking slowing you down, a modern car will turn off the fuel to the engine, so zero gas is used.
Then you trade greater pumping losses (reducing kinetic energy of the car) in exchange for lesser potential energy (gasoline) usage. It's not a free lunch.
Yes, but driving a vehicle is not a steady state problem. When a driver lifts the throttle, the next action is typically an intentional demand for a loss of potential energy (i.e. the driver is moving their foot to the brake)
On mine it's a driver preference setting - there are a couple of settings like that which I set to "make the drive more ICE-like because I still drive ICE cars occasionally and don't want to be betrayed by developing EV-specific habits" (even though EV "style" driving features, like 1-pedal, are generally more comfortable/relaxing.)
The kia I drive still roll at a couple of km/h when accelerator is fully released and will not hit 0 unless you use a paddle by the steering wheel (or use the breaks).
Good to see dozens of replies to this. Means EVs are popular.
Anyway, they're right. Brakes on EVs are normally just for emergency use. Regenerative braking (lifting up on the accelerator pedal) is all you need about 98% of the time. Traffic lights, stop signs, parking, and other such planned stops are all handled by releasing the accelerator which brings the car to a gentle stop while feeding the kinetic energy back into the battery. That's what they mean by "regenerative braking".
Regen braking in most EVs is significant enough that the brake lights come on when you lift off the throttle pedal (which is what engages the regen). Tesla has said their brake pads are potentially lifetime. And for good reason. You barely use them; so much less than a normal car it’s not even close. I have a friend with a 3 approaching 100k miles and isn’t even through half a set of pads. My EV, you couldn’t even bother me to check. I already know it’s pointless.
There is a lot of variance EV to EV. Some have strong regen, some not so much. Some use 1 pedal driving, some don’t.
For instance the Porsche taycan brake pedal is setup such that the first part of the travel uses exclusively regen braking, and as you push harder it blends in more and more friction braking too. Don’t expect this to become common though, as this primarily just benefits real performance driving. Trail braking is very hard/frustrating without this kind of feature, but driving that way on the street is certainly dumb, and probably illegal (could fall under exhibition of speed?).
Not 100%, because there are nasty emissions associated with the generation of your electricity however you charge. For the record I have an EV(model Y) and drive that preferably over my other cars.
The same thing happens to ICE vehicles while parked. It usually isn't a big deal because the area most prone to rust is the rotor surface. And modern brake pads don't usually have any issues rubbing surface rust away very quickly.
No. I do fine when I end up in a rental ICE. In my EV, I still use the brake when I need more stopping. If I zone out and forget I don't have regen, at some point, I'll notice I'm not slowing enough, and hit the brake, just like I would normally.
EVs indeed have regenerative braking. Which means they use their actual brakes so infrequently that they commonly need to be replaced because of corrosion issues on some models. If you use your brakes, the corrosion comes off in the form of brake dust. When you don't use them, it builds up and reduces the effectiveness of the brakes to the point where it becomes a safety risk.
> New York City was a crowded mess: no one could figure out what to do with all the horse manure, urine, and rotting horse carcasses on the streets spreading disease. New York had over 100,000 horses producing over 2.5 million pounds of manure every day. Fossil fuel powered trains, electric streetcars and internal combustion vehicles were seen as the clean-energy alternative.
Fatality rates for riders, passengers, and pedestrians from horses in the early 20th century were actually comparable to those for cars in the in the late 20th century.
I doubt the rates would be as high now if we went back to horses, because a lot of injuries that would have been fatal around 1900 would be survivable today, but I bet a lot of people would be surprised by how high the rates would be.
I do indeed mean a stable! I don't imagine the particulates coming out of stables are going to be all that great. Also, my car doesn't get sick if I park it next to somebody's beater.
There are classes of parking garages too. I’m not parking my hypothetical dream Ferrari next to some poor person’s beat up Honda civic from the 90’s to get dinged and the windows broken. The underground parking garage at Apple must be astounding.
if enough people on horses fall off and die, the average could still win over the population. I don't have the original statistic I saw in front of me, but that's how I interpreted it.
and in agricultural times in the US, I'd say most people were on horses.
I wonder if this is more a wild west pulp fiction meme, than actual reality. A lot of people today are collateral damage of cars, getting maimed, mutilated, crippled, killed, it's pretty indiscriminatory, drivers and bystanders alike suffer its consequences. It's hard to believe horses had the same blast radius proportionally speaking.
Why would that happen? EVs use their brakes much less often. when I read the article it occurred to me that this could eventually used to justify policy that would subsidize EVs more than they are.
> The new study reveals a problem that may grow as electric cars become more and more common over the next several decades. Electric cars, Smith explained, are not truly zero-emission vehicles, so municipalities need to think about strategies to reduce emissions from brake use as well as tailpipes.
The first sentence of the abstract also shows a technically correct statement easily used for disingenuous framings:
“The coming decades promise a transition from internal combustion engines to electric, and with it a greater relative contribution of nonexhaust sources to urban air pollution.”
And while setting up cities to go from car-centric cities to something that's walkable and/or easily accessibly by bus/train/bike for the majority of able-bodied people is something I agree with, that's a change that will take decades to roll out. In the meantime, the cars are here to stay, so we might as well push to get cleaner ones.
Ok, again another discussion about how cool EVs are because they're gonna save the world and blablaba.
Why dont we talk about the size, weight and pollution produced by the process of building a battery and how many houses can be energized by the electric consumption of just one of this machines?
Indeed, to replace a brake you must remove it first; and better brake pads there are. Oerlikon of Switzerland has brake pad technology that has near zero emissions and does not need replacing. It’s not in production due to pressure for revenue from service shops.
The lifetime of most cars a mere hundred thousand miles. If you consider that the current top-end for brakes is ~60k miles and an improvement of ~30% is possible, we're already at ~78k miles -- and this area has scarcely been invested and researched. I'll let you find sources, I've already given you the name of one of the major R&D firms.
Something about this story doesn't add up. Service shops aren't even vaguely a cartel, if Bob's Brakes won't install the magic brake pads which never wear out, then Alan's Excellent Brakes shop will.
If, on the other hand, a company has a vaporware product, that's a great excuse to offer the public.
> If, on the other hand, a company has a vaporware product, that's a great excuse to offer the public.
I explained a bit more in a sister comment. The stuff ain't vaporware and Oerlikon no vaporware producer either - they're in the brake business for many, many decades, with a rich history especially in train brakes.
> Oerlikon of Switzerland has brake pad technology that has near zero emissions and does not need replacing. It’s not in production due to pressure for revenue from service shops.
You're likely referring to DiscCover [1], a relatively recent development - at least Volvo Trucks has an agreement to use that technology [2].
The problem is that the car industry is notorious for long product development cycles. New inventions (unless you're Tesla, obviously) tend to take many years before they go from after-market / high performance tuning shops to mainstream models. It's not as bad as in aeronautics (if you want examples, look at GA still using leaded fuel and engine/airframe designs from the 70s or earlier), but still, there's no need to suggest conspiracies.
> Take for example our DiscCover coating solution: authorities worldwide have introduced stringent limits for exhaust emissions — including NOX, CO2 and particulate matter. Increasingly, regulators are turning their attention to fine dust emissions from brake wear. On average, 31% of passenger- vehicle-related emissions are caused by brake wear. This results in more than 90 000 metric tons of fine dust per year in the OECD countries alone. The DiscCover solutions from Oerlikon Balzers and Oerlikon Metco significantly reduce fine dust from brake discs so that our customers are equipped to comply with stricter regulations as they improve their environmental footprint.
and elsewhere [1]
> We can help brake system manufacturers and designers prepare for stricter regulations by significantly reducing fine dust and extending disk life
Reducing fine dust is great, but (1) this seems to only be about brake discs, not brake pads, and (2) there's no support in Oerlikon marketing materials for GP's claim that this magically means brake pads don't need replacing.
> Oerlikon of Switzerland has brake pad technology that has near zero emissions and does not need replacing
This seems not unlike the stories that go around about how someone was sold a 200mpg prototype car by accident but then the car company took it back because they don't want people to have them.
So? There would only be one "brake pad salesman" left, who would sell indestructible brake pads to car manufacturers, and all the others would go bust.
Right. It's not like they can form a cartel and collectively decide how long a brake pad should last, just like the incandescent light bulb cartel [1] of the early 20th century or the NAND flash memory cartel of the 21st century.
Mate you're far too naive to believe what you're saying.
A theoretical cartel can do precisely nothing, since it's a mere mental construct. It takes an actual cartel to fix prices (ignoring as a distraction the fact that the link you provide gives several good reasons to think that planned obsolescence was not the primary factor in the lifetime of incandescent bulbs).
There is no brake pad cartel. If there is, demonstrate it. If not, again, an imaginary cartel can only do imaginary things. It can't do real things.
Translation: you have no coherent response to what I said, and don't like that, so you figured a bit of snark might recover some dignity. It's better to simply not reply.
I gave you my argument in detail above with sources that companies routinely collude in anti-consumer ways, but you decided to strick your fingers in your ears and sing "lalala I don't believe you".
Therefore I have no more replies for you to protect my sanity. Feel free to believe whatever you want to believe, just leve me be, i have no duty to waste my time to change your opinion of something you're fixated on.
The link that says "although there is vigorous disagreement about whether 1000 days was a good technical standard or a case of planned obsolescence, a cartel did exist, and there are sources which say it was to use planned obsolescence to sell more bulbs". Inconveniently, longer-lasting bulbs emit less light, and more heat. If you remember the heat of a 100W incandescent bulb, perhaps you might see the fire hazard in encouraging bulb companies to compete on the basis of bulb life. But no matter.
This definitely demonstrates that there's a brake pad cartel, right now, doing the same thing. By implication, you see.
If you think incandescant lightbulbs could last forever, and no one would break ranks to cash in on this universally better product, that's fine of course. It just sounds unlikely.
Nice hot take. Did you read the article? Their proposed solution--using the charge to facilitate removing the particles from the air--seems more helpful.
Clickbait. "The toxicity and health effects of brake wear particles are largely unknown". Is there any real harm found? What's the concentration of them close to the dangerous road? What's effect of them comparing to pm10 or pm2.5?
Well I meant other particles treated in the regular study of them. Because effect of pm10 and pm2.5 is studied. Do break pad particles somehow worse than usual.
Do you really need an independent peer-reviewed study to know if inhaling brake dust is bad for you or not?
At some point, it's important to trust your instincts. I don't think you need a medical degree to understand that inhaling tiny particles made of nasty stuff leads to bad health outcomes.
Instincts often cheat you. I'm not saying that it's healthy but Does it really have any effect at all? What's the concentration of particles? How harful is it comparing to cooking or peeling onions? Do we need to care about it at all?
The bottom line is that proximity to traffic is horrible for your health and your air quality. Electric cars can help with some of the problems but don't solve all of them. The people with the least amount of money end up having to move to apartments near highways and so they often suffer the worst impacts, but I've seen very nice and expensive apartments and houses very close to (or directly on) busy streets. Noise is usually the obvious and immediate consideration, and I doubt many people are aware of the risks they expose themselves and their families to just by opening a window in the summer.