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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.




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