Also worth noting that with modern emissions standards (and transition to EVs), over 50% of handful particulates come from tires, brakes, road surface wear, and resuspended dust:
I don't think there's any healthy level of private cars coexisting with humans in a city, without even considering the more immediate harms from crashes, etc.
It seems that there has been fundamental mistakes and overstatements in the amount of particles from brakes in much of the secondary research in the last decades.
EVs have very low brake wear because you simply aren’t using the friction brakes at all most of the time.
A lot of EVs even have smart “blended” brake pedals that preferentially apply regen braking when you press the pedal. Only in particularly hard stops will the friction brakes get used.
An easy way to test/observe this is simply to check for wear on the brake pads of EVs compared to combustion vehicles of similar mileage.
Tires, on the other hand, do tend to wear out quicker in an EV. Partly due to weight and also due to higher performance/acceleration compared to combustion models.
This little friction break usage is actually something which manufacture need to consider. They need to activate once in a while to stop rust and other problems.
They almost certainly do. For example, our Chevy Volt (EV + gasoline engine range booster) puts the engine through a maintenance phase if you haven’t used the engine in a few weeks, and will force the engine to consume any fuel left in the tank if it hasn’t been refilled in several months.
But I know at least one EV maker that has a manually selected mode that guides you through driving with the brakes engaged for surface treatment, as rust buildup will be the main issue.
They're not inherently heavier. They're only heavier if you put a long-range battery in them, even then it's not by very much, and even that may not persist as higher energy density batteries are developed.
Or to put it another way, the difference between a small car and a large SUV is far greater than the difference between an electric car and a gasoline car.
A Tesla Model Y is 30% heavier than a Honda CRV. They have alot of other advantages, and are about the same weight as a three-row SUV and lighter than a Tahoe on a truck frame.
We shouldn’t be singling out EVs if we suddenly care about tire wear… it’s pretty ridiculous.
The lightest current Tesla Model Y is ~25% heavier than the lightest current Honda CR-V. The heaviest current Model Y is ~12% heavier than the heaviest current CR-V (hybrid). A Jeep Grand Wagoneer is ~280% heavier than a Nissan Versa.
Again, bike-shedding stats on EVs is a waste of time if you care about pollution from tire wear.
If we want to reduce particulate pollution, we’d have regulations to govern acceleration on EVs, make tire monitoring more annoying, and have manufacturers certify tires and make compliance required during state emissions inspections, and get aggressive about the motor carrier overweight enforcement.
If Tesla or other EVs have a problem here, it’s that they are putting inappropriate tires on the cars.
There’s a great deal possible that could reduce pollution that has nothing to do with tires. Outlawing non hybrid gas / diesel cars for example would be a significant step forward. As would favoring rail over big rig trucking etc.
Instead the topic is almost exclusively brought up as an attack without any real world studies supporting the ideas presented. Because actual studies show EV’s improve air quality over ICE engines.
I think we violently agree with respect to EVs… it’s just whataboutism.
But I do think tires are a significant environmental problem, especially in urban areas and when combined with diesel soot. We’re also poisoning soil by allowing shredded tires to be used as mulch, which is gross in many levels. Shredded tires are also used as aggregate for roads, so road wear also contributes to particulate pollution from tires.
Those are wildly different crossovers. That glass roof on the Y adds a lot of weight, it’s kind of silly how popular such an impractical feature became.
The other common issue with EV’s is many don’t integrate the batteries casing as a structural element. Skipping the lead acid battery would also be useful, but that’s a different issue.
But the fact that EV brakes don't wear at nearly the same rate as ICE brakes still stands.
My EV6 (pretty heavy car) manual explicitly says "you should probably do some hard breaking from moderate speed to prevent corrosion on the brake discs".
Because 90+% of the time when you press the brake pedal the friction brakes aren't being used at all, it's all regen.
It's true they are not that much heavier in terms of pure numbers. But road wear is a proportional to the difference in axle weight to the fourth power.
> we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles. Compared with regulated exhaust emission limits of 4.5 milligrams per kilometer, the completely unregulated tyre wear emission is higher by a factor of over 1,000.
They took plastic shedded by a gas car on non-EV tires, and compared it by weight to safety limits for gaseous emissions. This makes as much sense as saying that a lump of coal has 1,000 times more carbon than the safety limits for carbon monoxide.
That doesn't pass a sniff test; emitting 5 grams of tyre rubber per kilometer, a 12Kg tyre would be completely vanished in 3000km but really they can last 60,000km with only the tread worn down beyond safe levels and the bulk of the tyre still there.
In the US, the average car weight and the average EV weight are basically identical. (4300 pounds vs 4400 pounds). When you compare similarly sized models the EV tends to be about 10% heavier, but gasoline cars tend to be larger than EV's.
In the EU an average car is 1400 kg (3000 lbs), with most vehicles probably in the 1000-1200 kg range. We don't really want the average here, but the median - and we don't want to compare to the average EV, but to the equivalent EV - comparing an F150 to, say, a model 3 isn't right.
A BYD Dolphin, roughly sized like a VW Polo, is some 400kg heavier than the polo. A Polestar 2 is roughly 500 kg heavier than equivalent sized cars. In other words, something like 33% heavier.
FWIW I learned semi recently that cars get heavier and heavier because it improves their “ecology” rating… the ratings consider that moving 50% more weight with only 33% more gas is better than moving 0% extra weight with 0% more gas. And so a heavier car that uses a little more gas gets a better energy rating.
It’s moronic. But that’s how it works and why cars are getting bigger and bigger.
The VW Golf Mk8 might be a better comparison with an unloaded curb weight of 1255 kg, which reduces the gap from 543kg to 403kg.
(Note that for the gasoline and diesel cars, lighter trims give longer range, whereas it is opposite for electric cars, and that a fully loaded 45L tank of a polo weighs less than 40kg, especially if gasoline)
The lower battery trim is not available in all markets, and only does 300km on a charge which is below average. As such the minimum weight will have to be the 1658 kg value.
The BYD is taller to offset the battery, making the size misleading. However, the golf is not particularly a particularly good or space efficient car - others will do better at similar or lower weight.
250kg seems like a fair minimum weight increase, roughly 20%. The larger the car, the larger the gap though, as the rocket equation catches up - see a Skoda Octavia vs. a Polestar 2.
EVs are still way more efficient, but that doesn't mean we should turn our blind eye to making an already bad tire problem worse.
Same tier EVs are always more powerful than gasoline cars as they are generally just battery limited, not motor limited.
EVs are just a better tech in that regard, and buyers are not buying a Dolphin or golf based on torque or max HP. They're compacts in the same space. Someone looking at a dolphin would more likely be looking at the lighter eco motors.
This is true in other tiers too, e.g. a performance tier gasoline car might be 250-350 HP, while the same tier EV might start at 450-550hp just because they can.
The difference within a tier, simply based on the fact you're replacing at best a lightweight 100kg engine with 400-500kg worth of battery, can't be as small as you suggest.
With larger EVs, the battery weight is much greater, increasing the impact. Rocket equation and all.
It doesn't matter though? Less braking material used equals less particles emitted. So if we accept that brakes on EVs last longer (and are otherwise similar in size), then they pollute less.
My Volvo XC60 T8 is not even a full EV but after 5 years of ownership the brakes on this 2200kg, 400bhp SUV are only 10% worn - it's all thanks to regenerative braking with the EV motor. It definitely makes a massive impact on how quickly the brakes wear out(as in - much much much less than in a normal car).
If you want to go into the details of this, for all the things people hve mentioned, you have to calculate the road wear done by trucks carrying fuels to stations every day. Electricity does not need the same regular road wear as ICE vehicles do.
Sure. Because windmills and photovoltaics grow naturally from seeds. You need quite a bit of an equipment to put up one windmill. They are usually built in some distance from an existing road. So you need special service roads. Those need to be wide and take heavy load because the equipment like cranes need space and are themselves heavy. Then you need special transport because main components like propellers are oversize load. Then you need to transport them hundreds for kilometres…, and then you need the rest of the infrastructure to distribute generated electricity. Yes, let’s compare apples to apples.
Yes and what's the service life for that windmill or solar panel? What's the service life of the distribution system?
And what was the cost to build out and constantly repair the refinery?
The problem you have with your talking points is that solar and wind both have decades of service in them whereas fossil fuels are single use product. Further, once the infrastructure is created large portions of it can be reused when solar and wind hit their end of life. You only need new lines and roads for new installations.
All energy collection will have some environmental impact. It just so happens that fossil fuels have an outsized impact for the energy they create.
I'm not an absolutist about crude oil. It'll likely have a place in society for a long time.
With that said, it's a matter of degree and where it should be deployed.
If, for example, burning 1 gallon of gas sets up a power generation which produces the equivalent of 20 gallons of gas without emissions, that's a worthy trade off.
As it turns out, that's roughly the energy trade-off for new solar/wind installations assuming a pure fossil fuel grid.
What you are saying isn't a gotcha. The entire cycle of CO2 released for fossil fuel use is not comparable to the CO2 released installing renewables. That some is released is meaningless.
It is in fact straightforward to assume EVs create way, way less brake dust, because of how much less often they need brake replacements than ICE vehicles with the exact same brakes.
Interesting. Looks like it the line isn't able to take the energy (I'm guessing voltage is already too high) they dump the energy into a resistive heater.
Makes sense, it's just going to be heat anyways. I wonder how often that happens vs the energy getting dumped into the line.
Greens seem to deceive in the same way as green-washing except with greener deceptions (whereas green-washing is capitalists pretending to be green).
Example: a report on the cost-benefit of using bicycles, that comes out with a fantastic positive number for introducing a cycle lane. Except the number depends on a monetary estimate of the benefits to society for health improvements. I'm sure the health improvements exist, and it wouldn't surprise me that the health benefits to society were well estimated. The problem is that by cherry-picking benefits you can simply ignore all monetary benefits of cars (no benefits for cars were mentioned as I recall).
I've seen it in other articles which talk sacharrinely about the benefit of some green tech. But ignoring real costs and certainly not being balanced. The ultra-idealistic greenies are not helping their cause when rubbish is repeated.
It would be great if you could cite the report you're talking about, so we can judge for ourselves whether you're steel-manning or straw-manning its methodology.
" Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the Degree of
Bachelor of Arts with
Honours in Economics
Acadia University, 2013" biased and poorly balanced.
As far as can be determined, no cost-benefit analyses of bicycle facilities have been carried out for locations in Canada.
Maybe says more about the searching skills author than the state of cost-benefit analysis in Canada - but it sounds bad.
The daily benefits from one person switching from car travel to bicycle travel for commuting are estimated to be $2.14.
Most of that 2.14 "savings" is car ownership and maintenance costs, which is bullshit because they say elsewhere you need a car for the days your can't cycle. Nice double counting eh?
Plus the internal+external "health ben." added up to be about equal to vehicle ownership costs.
See the "analysis" bias?
Perhaps an Acadia University Honours in Economics is toilet paper.
> "example: a report on the cost-benefit of using bicycles, that comes out with a fantastic positive number for introducing a cycle lane."
Rubber-stamp a multi-billion dollar highway widening project that won't reduce traffic*, no problem, doesn't deserve any comment. Bike lane? Scrutiny with a fine-tooth comb, subject it to years of studies, complain about the cost, complain about why anyone would want a bike lane - they must be up to something! The slider is jammed 98% over towards 'cars' and still the car drivers are like "Won't someone PLEASE think about the cars?!".
"No benefits for cars were mentioned as I recall" - seriously, you think everyone might have forgotten that cars exist in the twenty seconds between when they last saw one, or heard one, or had to wait to cross a road, or used one, or heard someone talk about one, or saw an advert for one? A study on bike benefits didn't say that cars were great, do you want a study on wheelchair accessibility to talk about the benefits of being able bodied?
> "I'm sure the health improvements exist, and it wouldn't surprise me that the health benefits to society were well estimated"
"Worldwide, we estimate that physical inactivity causes 6% (ranging from 3·2% in southeast Asia to 7·8% in the eastern Mediterranean region) of the burden of disease from coronary heart disease, 7% (3·9–9·6) of type 2 diabetes, 10% (5·6–14·1) of breast cancer, and 10% (5·7–13·8) of colon cancer. Inactivity causes 9% (range 5·1–12·5) of premature mortality, or more than 5·3 million of the 57 million deaths that occurred worldwide in 2008. If inactivity were not eliminated, but decreased instead by 10% or 25%, more than 533 000 and more than 1·3 million deaths, respectively, could be averted every year." - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
*roads are wider than they used to be; if adding lanes reduced traffic, there wouldn't be any traffic these days.
Yeah: I'm totally not a fan of biased car shit either. Some of your examples seem like strawmen to me.
> complain about the cost
Bike lanes in my country are mostly paid for by taxes on cars and petrol. The costs/benefits are often justified by cherry-picked benefits (e.g. reduced car congestion, or reduced pollution). The congestion arguments anecdotally appear to be lies: low usage priority cycle lanes seem to cause extra congestion (through phasing of lights and islands and other traffic controlling features).
Try and fairly point out that the numbers are juggled and you'll get skewered by cyclist ideologues. Read my sister comment where I reference the thesis that was the basis for my original comment.
I have an acquaintance working in our council on improving bike lanes.
I'm not against bikes. I'm against badly biased reports : towards/against both cyclists or cars.
The benefits of getting more of the population to cycle are so beneficial that it's a joke to even try comparing the return on investment of cycle lanes versus car infrastructure and of course, when there's lots of cars, it pretty much pushes out other forms of transport due to the size/weight/danger/pollution of the cars.
Here's a somewhat biased look at the economics of cycling:
> "Bike lanes in my country are mostly paid for by taxes on cars and petrol"
Governments get money in, and they spend money. There's no real sense in which "bike lanes are paid for by petrol taxes", nobody can prove it either way by measuring anything - that's a matter of where they write the numbers in a spreadsheet - it's not the same money, as long as all of it balances. It's an arbitrary accounting choice and you're choosing to raise it as a talking point because it makes car drivers mad, not because it has real world consequences.
> "The costs/benefits are often justified by cherry-picked benefits (e.g. reduced car congestion, or reduced pollution)."
The fact that you default to "the current level of car pollution with tens of millions of cars everywhere is the default" is a bias. That you think "reducing pollution" is cherry picking is a car-bias. That people have to argue for being able to breathe without getting lung cancer as a "nice to have" against a default of cars-for-everything is a massive bias.
> "The congestion arguments anecdotally appear to be lies: low usage priority cycle lanes seem to cause extra congestion (through phasing of lights and islands and other traffic controlling features)."
Public transport (which I will include bike lanes, pavements, sidewalks, L-trains) need to go from where people are, to where people want to go. It's a very car-biased talking point that a city put a bike lane from nowhere to nowhere, and look! The cars are inconvenienced and hardly anybody is using the bikelane, so bike lanes must be the problem, get rid of it. You can't just slap a bike lane in London, decide nobody is using it, and get rid of it. You need enough bike lanes that people can get from where they are, to where they want to go, safely - feeling safe, well lit, clear of mud and snow and muggers and not along a main road - and enough of those safe journeys for long enough that people can change their behaviour. Several rounds of New Year's Resolutions to get fit, months of seeing family and coworkers gradually cycling, increasing numbers of cyclists (or walkers) normalising it, seeing "normal people like me" bringing a bike to work or to the shops not just lycra clad idealists - for large numbers of people to move from car to (foot/bike/bus/tram). Amsterdam started changing towards encouraging cycling in the 1970s and it didn't get a reputation as a bike city for decades. Cars have a hundred and twenty years of being entrenched, multiple generations of people who think cycling is for children and the roads are too dangerous to cycle (they are!) which needs pushing back against.
> "Try and fairly point out that the numbers are juggled and you'll get skewered by cyclist ideologues."
I don't know if you can justify "existing without breathing car exhaust" in economic terms. I don't think one should have to. I don't think one should justify bike lanes in terms of reducing traffic congestion - moving people around effectively needs city planning overviews, zoning changes, joined up public transport where the schedules line up, until it overall becomes convenient to move around without driving. Bike lanes and cycling can be part of it, but you can't justify one bike lane or project in terms of reducing congestion. If one demands that bike lanes be justified in the framework of "good for car drivers" and then rejects the numbers because they've been juggled to fit in terms of "good for car drivers" when that really isn't the point at all, that's not balanced or unbiased.
> "I'm not against bikes. I'm against badly biased reports : towards/against both cyclists or cars."
It's just convenient that dismissing badly biased reports towards bikes means nothing changes, and dismissing badly biased reports in favour of cars means nothing changes, and that continues car dominance, which is nice.
Even starting the sentence "I'm not against bikes" is a bias. Cars parked up and down both sides of every side-road. Solid slow moving car traffic for multiple hours in the morning and evening every weekday. Billions spent on multi-lane motorways moving massive cars with a single person in them. Young drivers revving the bollocks off their engines at midnight, motorbike riders with exhaust volume increasers, pollution, road accidents, burden of cost on car owners, and you start with "I'm not against bikes". It's the millionaire saying "I'm not against helping the homeless, I just don't like the way they're asking for help. I'm just being unbiased and fair".
> "Balanced discussion seems so difficult."
It isn't a balanced world, it's a car-dependent, car-dominated, world, deliberately, by car advertising, governments subsidising car manufacturing, car company lobbying, car company bribing, and capitalism framing everything in terms of profit and having nothing in terms of community, quality of life, wellbeing, welfare, health. It's not an accident that the available land has been dedicated to cars, and that makes cars very convenient. It isn't because cars are inherently convenient it's that we have spent unthinkable amounts of effort carving through hills, flattening rocks, stabilising mud, to make cars convenient. Because cars are expensive so it's good for car companies if lots of people buy them. One can't take an unbiased "fair" position, one must make choices - one can't sit on the fence between "it's important that people can get to home/social/work/shops in many ways" and "it's fine if cars are the only way and if that's a problem for some, tough".
Heavy particles and gaseous emissions are not comparable in such a simplistic way. If you take a dump on the street it doesn't mean you caused 50 million times more emissions than the EPA limits for ICE car exhaust.
For example, iron from brakes is heavy but ecologically pretty harmless. OTOH NO₂ weighs almost nothing, but is toxic. You can eat 30mg of iron per day to stay healthy (just don't lick it off the asphalt directly), but a similar amount of NO₂ would be lethal.
Heavy particles don't stay in the air for long, and don't get easily absorbed into organisms. OTOH gaseous emissions and small particulates from combustion can linger in the air, and can get absorbed into the lungs and the bloodsteam.
Yeah, but brakes are not not made from pure iron and you won't have atomic erosion. Silly argument, really. Notoriously, you could still find brake pads with asbestos not too long ago. Pretty much any fine dust is very unhealthy to inhale, but brakes and tires are made from material mixes you really don't want to breath in. Even the "inert" fraction we find as microplastics in everything, the rain, fish and newborn, and we're only beginning to understand their biological reactivity and long term health consequences.
the break pad and tire particles in question are not so large they precipitate immediately. They aren't iron but rather real/synthetic rubber and other organics. There is research on them being bad for human health.
50% number of particulates might not amount to 50% of the health risk.
Not all particles are the same. Diesel exhaust particulates are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, i.e. pure carcinogen. Whereas I really doubt tire and brake dust has the same health risk "per particle".
Granted it may even be higher! But comparing two different things by simply "number of particles" isn't helpful.
I flipped through the summary of that report, and I would think there is almost surely no way this is true, unless focusing on worst case assumptions like aggressive driving styles and very poorly maintained vehicles.
Your conclusion that there is not “any healthy level of private cars coexisting” is heavy handed. There is a balance, but I suspect it’s more of a jealousy/equality issue. Heavily taxed and high quality requirements can surely lead to a healthy coexisting. Limiting trips to when they are truly worth the cost is an equation to be solved.
If EVs don’t emit tailpipe emissions then 100% of their emissions will be those things. They’re also heavier and so have more tire wear. It seems not unintuitive to me that their emissions might push the boundaries of strict modern emissions standards.
For taxing cars, you’re still leaving so much car infrastructure out there. It swallows the world. Six months ago for the first time ever I got a job where I could bike to work. The world is so much different from a bike. It becomes clear how dangerous cars are to humans, and how they chop up our cities in to little rectangles. I’m constantly at risk of being hit by cars that don’t stop. I love being on my bike. I feel like I’m part of the world. I ride rain or shine thanks to nice gear. We give up so much to have a world with cars. We could move our road budgets to trains and bike paths and have so much more space and health and life.
Cycling to work is nice. But if you are young, sitting all day in a warm office.
Think of blue collar workers that are hungry, exhausted and also people getting older.
Its fucking annoying to wait for the bus that does not show up, the stupid beeps whenever the doors open and the slow movement in general.
Lucky i am at home in half an hour, laws now require you to commute to work in up to 1.5hrs if you cant afford a car or should use public transportation.
Electric bikes are no solution, the minerals and energy must be produced to transport people like me.
I will buy a motor driven classic Vespa, fuel consumption is 2l for 80 mls and i am at home without dispruption and waiting.
Plus i got a new nice hobby to maintain it.
No new vehicle was produced, no rare earth was needed.
Fuel is produced every day for the plastics of the EV and for many other things like pharmacy and so on.
No new bike needed to be shipped from china where all that stuff is made.
Sure you are right with vegan biking, but not all folks can do it.
If you like repairing the vintage Vespa, great project and that sounds fun. That’s worth a lot!
But I will curse at the stink of the exhaust from the crappy old motor when you ride by. Try an e-bike (you can get one built more locally surely), or an e-Vespa (or hell, make that your project to convert the vintage Vespa into a silent sleeper Vespa with crazy performance!). Electric is so, so much more fun.
Worrying about that small amount of “critical minerals” needed for a bike/Vespa is a conspiracy to distract you from the fact that oil is also extracted and has negative externalities, we just live with those already.
Not all folks can do it, but here in Oakland there are plenty of folks who could do it if we had better paths, but don’t because the roads are very dangerous for bikes and we have poor bike paths. This means we can get more people on bikes. Also I’m in favor of changing more than just bike paths - we could improve housing affordability so that people don’t have a 1.5 hour commute to their work. Also I have three bikes that are 15 years old. Buying a used bike uses even less resources than a used Vespa. I do have a newer ebike though. They’re really nice when you have more stuff to carry or longer distances to travel!
There aren't many jobs that physically exhaust you to the point of not being able to walk (biking is no harder than walking). Especially since leg muscles are super hard to tire out.
> people getting older
Pretty much the same as above. If anything, the elderly prefer biking to walking, it's easier on the joints.
> Its fucking annoying to wait for the bus that does not show up
Less or more annoying than waiting when your car breaks down?
> Electric bikes are no solution, the minerals and energy must be produced to transport people like me.
Right, manufacturing a 30kg bike has costs, unlike manufacturing a 1500kg car.
> No new vehicle was produced, no rare earth was needed.
That's not how the economy works. Also, buying used is better than buying new if everything else is equal (it's not in this case), but whatever vehicle you bought was produced at some point.
> Fuel is produced every day for the plastics of the EV and for many other things like pharmacy and so on.
Er, what? I guess you think your vehicle is made out of grass and runs on water or something?
> Sure you are right with vegan biking, but not all folks can do it.
Not all folks can do it, so let's stick with 99% of people using cars to get around :)
It's not "jealousy"... I've lived in a city where having a car was virtually mandatory, and I've lived in a city where you could safely bike everywhere. There's NO QUESTION which one I prefer.
Even my most reactionary and car-loving extended family members had this opinion when they visited :)
My desire not to inhale brake & tire particulate, not to be killed while walking to the store, and not to subsidize others expensive lifestyles, is not rooted in jealousy.
I owned a car once, it was sometimes convenient, interesting & fun, but it was also often infuriating, terrifying and expensive. If I can pull it off, I'd prefer to never own one again. I don't really care if anyone else owns them, I just don't want to subsidize them or have their externalities imposed on me.
An alternative to outright bans is to make some good faith attempt at estimating externalities and internalizing them, and reducing subsidies such as free, or below market rate public land for private vehicle operation & storage. But this is difficult and it's not clear the politics of it would be much better than an outright bans. If a good faith effort determined that operating a car while not being subsidized and not inflicting externalities on others, cost a significant amount of money, then the whole effort would be castigated as limiting driving to the very rich, and probably wouldn't go very far. So it feels like we end up with either "everyone drives everywhere all the time for everything and it's the govt's job to shovel public funds & land at it" or outright bans in popular areas.
Cars, oil, and the internal combustion engine, are all tremendously useful, and we would be foolish to pretend otherwise. But all tools have their ideal uses and all tools can be misused & overused to bad ends, both for the tool user and for others.
A world of 100% gasoline car ownership where the car was simply a fun toy for kick ass weekend road trips, and cities had never been bulldozed to make room for them as substitutes for our legs, would be a pretty great world, even if it involved a bit more pollution/externalities/subsidies than some utopian car free world.
Four bicycle wheels, as many batteries as you can safely put on something supported by four bicycle wheels, an aerodynamic CFRP bubble for the driver etc?
I think such a vehicle can be better than one thinks, with acceptable range, acceptable particle emissions, acceptable noise levels; and I think they could easily get to 80 km/h safely.
For a little while in the 80s (remnants of the fuel crisis of the 70s) this was the trend. Go light and then efficiency is guaranteed. Combine with a small efficient engine and that's the optimal solution. A CRX HF from 1988 could do 44 MPG, with an engine that compared to current fuel injection technology is very crude and inefficient.
I want to buy a car that is basically this CRX HF but with 25+ years of engine and materials improvements. It could easily be a 1500lb car getting 60MPG.
But, no. Manufacturers (to some extent forced by terrible government rules) have gone heavier and heavier and heavier and heavier. Which is worse in every possible way.
Colin Chapman had it right: simplify, then add lightness.
Now that I see it in real life I don't know how I feel about it. It doesn't feel safe when I see a Twizy, but when I see these cars in my mind I see them on Swedish bicycle roads.
The whole thing would probably require a total transformation of city travel.
The regulatory regime will take a minute to figure out, but with tiny vehicles like this + good transit + closing streets to regular big cars, we'll figure it out.
The basic ones (and things like the Citroën Ami) are more A-traktor than bicycle – there’s an A-traktor registered Ami in the next village along from me – but that’s typically a software limit. The Twizy could be bought in an 80km/h variant, and there are “remaps” that will take that version up to 110km/h.[1] I’ve seen them doing near that on riksvägar here.
This is certainly a possibility for city cars. In the Netherlands there are a lot more 45kph mini cars driving around now. They were a thing in the past with moped engines but with electric drive trains all these solutions become much more viable. With the low speeds crashes are also less dangerous so everything becomes lighter.
A similar thing is happening with electric bikes and scooters. This was all possible with gasoline but with the lower mechanical complexity this is really taking off.
This results in a wider range for bike like vehicles which replaces a lot of car trips.
The real hurdle to people getting rid of their mostly stationary cars (not everyday for work drivers) is that renting a car is a horrible experience and car shares are also bad mostly. But as the space for personal cars shrinks I suspect this will improve over time.
Aptera is shooting for 2,200 lbs with enough performance to handle highway speeds with two people and some cargo. It has three wheels and extreme aerodynamics.
A really light car would either have to be limited to a very low speed or be terribly unsafe in case of a crash. Since lightness implies small size, it would also not have other desirable properties of cars, like their ability to carry passengers and cargo.
> I don't think there's any healthy level of private cars coexisting with humans in a city
Concentrating humans together into a small locality, which is what a city is, will inherently have a significant environmental impact. Cities before private cars were still quite polluted, because transportation still has to take place just to keep the city running. Electric vehicles are the best-case scenario for truck deliveries, construction vehicles, and everything else you need to keep a city running on a day-to-day basis.
Moreover, you have to consider all cities in this analysis, not just posh, post-industrial cities like those in the US and Western Europe. Manufacturing has to take place somewhere, and logistics considerations imply that most manufacturing will be located next to transportation infrastructure. Just like any other economic activity, manufacturing benefits from talent clusters (a major reason cities exist), so manufacturing will tend to concentrate in cities as well, or at least the suburbs, which you can easily observe in China.
If you really hate air pollution, move to the country and be willing to sacrifice the advantages of cities.
Are they bad for human health compared to other ways of living like rural or suburbs? iirc rural people get the least amount of exercise because you just sit inside all day.
when we lived in the suburbs my family and i spent way more time inside than we do now in a rural setting. i think maybe you got mixed up. rural people are generally very active.
> If you really hate air pollution, move to the country and be willing to sacrifice the advantages of cities.
i really do hate air pollution! it drove me away from idaho, where 2-3 months of the year massive forest fires would choke the air and force everyone inside (gave my kids asthma).
we recently moved away from a suburb near two highways, out to a rural area where we are half a mile from the nearest paved road.
besides the lowered air pollution, the lower noise pollution is a huge benefit. hearing birds instead of traffic is amazing. and my kids don’t choke in their sleep any more!
There are lots of things in cities that are unhealthy for both ourselves and others but we allow them. It's possible to make big improvements while still enjoying a certain amount of the benefit of something.
For example - if you use the London Underground the air you breathe in is significantly worse than the air above ground in busy traffic. Significantly.
Lighter cars, really, that's it. Make vehicles that match the transportation case in question instead of palaces on wheels that carry battery sized for solving some once in a year use case.
This is a stupid idea because you’d have to make fasteners and high voltage interfaces that can survive an order of magnitude more cycles than they have to for a fixed pack. It would also be significantly more difficult to use the pack as a stressed member of the car structure. It’s better to just have less batteries and use them more efficiently through weight savings.
Do you realize that one of the reasons for the swappable batteries on various Thinkpads is so that you can hot swap batteries without powering down or rebooting?
I've never had an issue with the connectors for the batteries of the ThinkPad, and being able to swap in a spare fully charged battery has been very helpful many times when out doing field working all day long. What is an issue are the little plastic tabs on the batteries that break off over time. However, usually the batteries have already lost a lot of their lifespan by the time that happens, and since the batteries are removable they can be replaced without opening up the system or melting glue with heat as is the case on most modern cell phones. Seems like a win to me!
My point is that hot swappable battery packs have benefits that outweigh the cost of the connectors for the people that have a use case that needs them, as the grandparent referred to in Thinkpads. Not everyone fits in the constraints of design space chosen for a given product. There's a reason virtually every modern computer has a means of adding expansion devices.
Making a high voltage connector is well understood problem space. Every electrical engineer knows how to deal with ramping up current when a power supply is plugged in or turned on (inrush current specifications are most definitely a thing), and the entire electric grid is based on sizing, insulating, spacing and switching conductors appropriately for the voltage and current being used. Moreover, high voltage battery packs tend to have switches / contactors on the battery pack that keep the high voltage off until the connection is securely made and enabled, hence why even Telsas require a functioning low voltage battery to start the system.
There are also certain use-cases that are likely best served by putting battery packs in a trailer. Take the trucking industry: going by the charging requirements of a Tesla semi (1MW for 30 minutes), replicating your typical truck stop turns into a huge problem for the grid -- you'd need upwards of 50MW of charging capacity to replicate the flow of diesel coming out of a bank of 10 fuel pumps (sorry, I ran the thought experiment on that one back when specs were first released). Having a battery pack attached to the trailer that gets charged at a more leisurely rate at the warehouse while it is unloaded and re-loaded over a couple of hours is far more scalable than charging the truck in a few minutes at a truck stop. Charging overnight while the driver sleeps is fine, but getting the 8-12 hours of runtime for a workday in a semi is a heck of a lot of battery.
The dangers can be mitigated -- that's the entire raison d'etre of the electrical engineering discipline! Otherwise you wouldn't be able to safely charge an electric car at a 350kW rate these days at charging stations all over the world with a connector that is deemed safe to be handled by random humans. It's not like the software industry where we throw half baked shit at the wall and see what sticks when users encounter it by running an A / B test in production....
> Moreover, high voltage battery packs tend to have switches / contactors on the battery pack that keep the high voltage off until the connection is securely made and enabled, hence why even Telsas require a functioning low voltage battery to start the system.
These are little bit different than than what a swappable system would entail, aren't they?
> Otherwise you wouldn't be able to safely charge an electric car at a 350kW rate these days at charging stations all over the world with a connector that is deemed safe to be handled by random humans.
Okay maybe I miss read the initial premise but I took it as a home user swapping in-and-out modules themselves.
That would appear to me to be a significantly different engineering challenge and safety issue than what's currently deployed in consumer market EVs...
I'm not even sure the small upside here would justify the added costs and complexity either.
> These are little bit different than than what a swappable system would entail, aren't they?
From an electrical point of view, swapping batteries is fundamentally the same general problem regardless of whether they are large or small: you want to avoid arcing when the connector is plugged in, and you need to avoid exposing the user to stray voltage. Sure, there's added complexity to achieve that in a safe and cost effective manner when high voltages are involved, but it's a solved problem as the charge port does exactly this today.
> Okay maybe I miss read the initial premise but I took it as a home user swapping in-and-out modules themselves.
Current EVs on the market suffer from decreased maintainability compared to traditional ICE vehicles. The battery swapping skill set needs to be more widely available so that we don't see EV owners being dinged $40k for a battery swap. There are videos on Youtube showing people doing a battery swap themselves, and while it is challenging, it's not all that hard to do safely when the battery is not damaged given that the battery packs don't expose high voltage on the connectors when not enabled. Of course a damaged battery pack means that all bets are off on the safety front depending on the nature of the damage.
> That would appear to me to be a significantly different engineering challenge and safety issue than what's currently deployed in consumer market EVs...
> I'm not even sure the small upside here would justify the added costs and complexity either.
It a solved problem!!! Just put the charge port at the back of the vehicle and then use it for the add-on battery pack like the existing signal light connectors for trailers. You're done. The only added design constraints on the EV are on the location of the port and verification that it works while the vehicle is being driven. The F150 Lightning fails this today since the charge port is just in front of the driver side door, but relocating the charge port is not exactly rocket science.
Many EVs have already taken the step of making the charge port bidirectional so that the expensive battery in an EV can be used to provide power during an outage or to balance the load on the grid, and that is a far, far more complicated problem than accepting power from an external battery pack through the charge port while the vehicle is operating.
> From an electrical point of view, swapping batteries is fundamentally the same general problem regardless of whether they are large or small: you want to avoid arcing when the connector is plugged in, and you need to avoid exposing the user to stray voltage. Sure, there's added complexity to achieve that in a safe and cost effective manner when high voltages are involved, but it's a solved problem as the charge port does exactly this today.
The arcing is the problem AND generally when handling battery packs/modules requires high voltage safety equipment and precautions.
The charge port uses a low-voltage connection to "handshake" as I understand it before the high voltage is being supplied.
You can't, without a good bit more complexity to the battery module itself do that as the batteries terminals will just have the voltage of the battery itself (depends on their state of charge).
Plus the bus bar the module is connecting to also will have a voltage if there's existing modules connected to it.
You're down to having contactors and BDUs at every individual module.
> Current EVs on the market suffer from decreased maintainability compared to traditional ICE vehicles. The battery swapping skill set needs to be more widely available so that we don't see EV owners being dinged $40k for a battery swap. There are videos on Youtube showing people doing a battery swap themselves, and while it is challenging, it's not all that hard to do safely when the battery is not damaged given that the battery packs don't expose high voltage on the connectors when not enabled. Of course a damaged battery pack means that all bets are off on the safety front depending on the nature of the damage.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I am saying it's harder to make it actually safe for the average normal consumer to do as simply as plugging a battery into a power drill for example. In part because of the higher voltages involved.
> It a solved problem!!! Just put the charge port at the back of the vehicle and then use it for the add-on battery pack like the existing signal light connectors for trailers. You're done. The only added design constraints on the EV are on the location of the port and verification that it works while the vehicle is being driven. The F150 Lightning fails this today since the charge port is just in front of the driver side door, but relocating the charge port is not exactly rocket science.
This is a different concept than adding/swapping individual modules in the vehicle itself.
But regarding the concept of a trailer, I suspect that the high cost for the product for the minimum gain it not justifiable for the average consumer. That is you're trying to solve a problem in an inefficient and not profitable manner. (Who wants a trailer of batteries parked in their garage 99% of the time just to have a slightly lighter car?)
> Many EVs have already taken the step of making the charge port bidirectional so that the expensive battery in an EV can be used to provide power during an outage or to balance the load on the grid, and that is a far, far more complicated problem than accepting power from an external battery pack through the charge port while the vehicle is operating.
I understand that, but either you want a trailer or you want internal swappable/addable modules which both economically in my opinion seem of little benefit over engineering better cars with newer/better battery technology and stronger/lighter material.
Additionally, I didn't even mention the annoyance of engineering integrating the heating & cooling system for the modules themselves.
Better energy density batteries & better materials (or smarter manufacturing) make more sense to me than trying to make individual modules for a car swappable or asking people to drive around with a trailer they would use so infrequently that it would not justify the cost to them (not to mention most people don't know how to drive with one properly anyways).
Speed limits for towing smaller trailers mostly derive from safety concerns about overloaded or imbalanced trailers being unstable at high speeds. A battery-only trailer with little or no cargo space, designed and certified in conjunction with specific tow vehicles, could easily be safe enough to operate at highway speeds.
I think the main reason why we don't see anyone seriously pursuing the battery trailer idea is that it would be an expensive niche product. It would have to be mostly a rental-only product, and offer few advantages over simply renting a more suitable vehicle.
Obviously a trailer would not be a clever idea, but Nio already has cars with swappable batteries, for short distances you could just install a battery pack which is maybe 20% battery and 80% empty space
It’s enough of a pain in the ass to swap summer and winter tires, and that’s something that (some) people only do twice a year. I can’t imagine people wanting to swap battery packs (either themself or by making an appointment at a service center) before and after every long trip.
Ideally they could just come to my home or workplace and swap the batteries out there while I am doing something else (if it is going to take longer than 30 mins)
Both upthread replies seem to evidence approximately the same level of effort to me; "It won't be faster" isn't wildly less effort than "what if it will be faster?"
Nio has fewer Nio battery swap stations operating in the entire world than just the state of New Jersey has filling stations (not dispensers, entire stations).
Nothing in the video above made me think "oh wow, that looks like that process will be a lot faster than filling up!" and several segments made it seem like there would be more time involved in just getting the car into and out of the battery replacement service bay than filling up takes. (Nio's claim of a 2.5-3 minute battery swap seems to be measuring only the swap time while the car is stopped in the bay.)
That's all before we consider the travel time to one of the stations (which is unlikely to be as close to your trip as a typical filling station because of the rarity of stations), time waiting for the car [or cars] in front of you to complete their swap (which if Nios ever became popular would likely be longer than waiting for one of the typically eight or more dispensers to free up at a filling station), nor to account for the "all long range batteries are out of stock at this location, because it's the Friday before Christmas and everyone is road tripping to visit family" NACKs that are liable to occur in a Nio-only battery swap system.
For me the killer line in the video that will make it hard for Nio to solve all of these is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w&t=270s : "Building these stations is incredibly expensive and it's no secret that Nio is losing a staggering amount of money right now..."
My point is, it may be interesting if it’s faster than filing up. Now, is it likely? Not at the moment, as you correctly pointed out.
Can I guarantee it will never happen? No. Hence my comment. It was not about stating what will happen or not, I don’t feel this type of prediction has any reliability. Millions of people smarter than me get it wrong every day, especially the very long term ones are almost always wrong.
Having done a long trip in an EV, in a very inhospitable location (the USA, without access to Tesla chargers), I'm not convinced there is an EV range/charge time problem. I think it's mostly in the minds of the public. Hence I'm skeptical that the changeable battery pack is a solution to any problem.
My experience was that you end up stopping to charge a bit more often than you'd stop to fill up gas, but factoring in stops for bathroom and food, it's really not a significant difference. There just needs to be more chargers (to avoid queuing for an open one), and chargers that are more closely spaced (every 50 miles like gas stations instead of every 100+ miles). Then today's EVs will be just fine for long trips. Not completely perfect, but perfectly adequate, to the point that it won't be worthwhile buying an ICE vehicle just to have it for long trips.
It surprises me how much people are determined to use the "car" form factor when it's clearly not a good design for weight reduction and efficient transport.
If instead people consider EVs that are non-car-shaped then we get things like e-bikes and e-scooters. Both can feature easily swappable batteries as the batteries are so much smaller due to the reduced weight of the vehicle. Also, the problems around congestion can pretty much disappear when you get enough people to use an e-bike/e-scooter instead of a car. The tyre wear/pollution is minimised due to the reduction in weight and similarly the brakes.
I imagine semiautonomous trailers that would just tag along in the slipstream within cable range for distances beyond your daily. With computer-fast reaction to brake and steering inputs of the lead car. Those would universally be rentals that you change like the horses in pre-rail post networks.
NIO does battery swaps in minutes, in China and Europe. I believe you can also perhaps get different ranges but if not, would be great to swap between a 50kwh pack for normal use and say 100+kwh for your road trip.
Then again battery charging/weight tech is getting pretty good pretty fast.
It would be incredible if somebody invented a light car, that would transport one or two people and some groceries. Maybe with two wheels instead of four to take up less space. Hmmm why has nobody invented this?
There's also plenty of other, more practical / affordable microcars [1] on the road around where I live, they're considered equivalent to mopeds in terms of legality / requirements but you don't need a helmet, they seat two people and some groceries, etc. They used to be mainly popular for elderly people but they seem to catch on to other people too. Great for local traffic.
+1 for Cargo bikes, but otherwise if your bike infrastructure sorta sucks, the Citroën Ami and counterparts from Fiat etc are pretty common in European cities… easy to park too.
While bicycles are quite convenient for commuting, I am not sure if there is a way for transporting groceries for an entire week for multiple people. Is there such a way? The only solution I see is doing groceries every day.
Groceries every day (or every few days) becomes viable and common in cities like Paris. It’s a lot easier to do when you don’t have to take a car, and the culture then shifts too to fresher food.
Why does it need to be either/or? I make do almost the entire week without a car. Schools within walking distance, then mass transit to work.
So what if I own and use a small family car, to go shopping and take the kids places?
Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
My neighborhood is a real life 15min city, and most people of all ages choose to walk. We don't need to prevent families from owning a car and taking it grocery shopping once a week.
Plenty of Europeans have cargo bikes and make do with 2-3 supermarket trips per week for families of 4-5 peeps.
Only bulk drinks (crates of beer/soda/...) are challenging. But for those, very often delivery systems are in place that surely are more efficient than individual trips anyways.
I regularly carry four cases of water (48 cans) on my standard bicycle without a problem.
Whenever I go grocery shopping I mount a milk crate to my rear rack (this takes about six seconds) and put the cases in vertically. I can also carry a 4L jug of milk in the handlebar-mounted basket.
My mom used to this year round, in every weather and temperature (incl. -20C), when I was a kid several decades ago.
Honestly I don't know how she did it, but she did. It helped that we had separated bike lanes pretty much everywhere. It is entirely possible if the infrastructure supports it.
This sort of thing is why I'm personally a big fan of the 15-minute city concept.
In London we had multiple supermarket options within 10 mins walk. And even more within 10 minutes cycling distance.
Usually we’d just stop on the way home from work or whatever to do small, quick shops for whatever we needed.
But on the rare occasion where we did need to do a “big shop”, we just ordered groceries online for delivery the next day. All the major UK supermarkets offer this, with free or very cheap delivery, delivered by environmentally-friendly electric trucks.
Cargo bikes or bike trailers are two of many solutions to this dilemma that immediately sprung to mind. In the Netherlands I have seen grocery stores deliver large deliveries in big tricycles.
There are billions of people that manage their shopping without a car. Millions of them live in North America. Surely, some of them have solved this problem for a family without having to go shopping daily.
We can do it, but it's going to be two trips. However, there's like half a dozen grocery stores within a 10 minute bike radius where I live (modern suburb). Others who live out in the countryside will need to travel further, but that's generally the tradeoff; more comfortable / quiet living in exchange for longer distance to amenities.
It is common for electric cars to use harder rubber compounds in their tires. Not because of particulates, but because tire noise is particularly noticeable in an otherwise quiet electric car, and because tire life is a concern for EV drivers.
Luckily, both reduced noise and increased life are fairly well correlated with reduced particulate emission.
I don’t know about tires, but for brakes we already know how to make lower dust brakes - use drum brakes instead of disc brakes. The friction material is enclosed on drum brakes so much less of it just flies away.
There's also EVs that generally do most of their braking on the regenerative whatsit, which causes no wear on the brake pads. A lot of it can be prevented by education / driving style, and improving road designs to allow for smooth driving.
If you look at what cars of this type are produced and who drives them, it quickly becomes clear where the road is heading.
Huge off-road vehicles, albeit with electric drive, are missing the mark.
These things are advertised with sporty performance, comfort and so on.
In my opinion, energy is being thrown out the window to satisfy the ego of the buyer.
These people are buying themselves a clear conscience.
Even if the cars are electric, where can they be charged?
Not everyone lives in the houses you see in the advertisements.
Not everyone can just go into debt for something like this.
I drive an economical petrol car with 200k kilometers on the clock.
I don't need to produce anything new or use any rare earths or energy.
Even with electric cars, the plastic for the door panels has to be made from crude oil.
The cost of installing all the electronics is also high.
I drive this car until I can't drive any more, I mostly use public transport, but sometimes I have to use the car for the weekly shop.
I'm also staying in the city because I'm getting older and I'm dependent on doctors and markets, at the moment I work outside the city, like many others, and people just need a car to park here.
Not everyone has the same life as others.
Pretty much every EV does regenerative baking, because it (greatly) extends range. Even hybrids have done this since the very earliest mass-market models (the 1997 Prius has it). EV brakes see a lot less wear and tear than ICE brakes.
Drum brakes are way more prone to fail, the heat cant be transported away, the dust still is produced and the brake power, the law requires, is way to little.
If we switch fully to trams and buses, they produce the dust amount of lets say 100 cars. If the public transportation should be capable of all inhabitants of a city, we would have up to 200 trams running every day and night.
Who should be a tram driver? Most of the younger folks dont want to work shift or at weekends and night.
My town has drivers with grey beards, between 50-60 years old. There are no younger applicants for that job so they drive even if retired to keep up the demand.
They got paid extra which making tickets more expensive.
Most European cars already have engine braking. EV regenerative braking just maintains the behavior that folks only used to automatics forgot about. Automatics I think are still not super common in Europe.
But spews forth more rubber (and plastic, since that's what tyres are made from these days), which is an ongoing problem for Tesla EVs when owners discover their tyres don't last nearly as long because they're transmitting power both when starting and stopping, not just when starting.
I don’t understand this concept. I would expect an ICE and an EV vehicle with the same weight, speed, deceleration, tires, etc to have the same wear on tires. The difference being the energy to stop an ICE being transferred to the brake pads and rotors, rather than recharging the EV’s battery.
What am I missing? Why wouldn’t the tires experience the same forces in both scenarios?
It's because it's wrong. If you decelerate the same vehicle at the same rate, the tires can't even tell whether the deceleration is from regenerative braking or friction braking, so the only difference is less brake dust with regenerative braking.
If anything it's the opposite because regenerative braking is more effective when braking is gradual, giving the driver a direct convenience and financial incentive to brake less aggressively (better range, buy less gas or charging), which generates less tire wear.
Because it's completely wrong. The tires indeed experience the same force and don't care where the energy is dumped. As other posters wrote, the increased tire pollution from EVs is because they tend to be heavier, and because their considerable extra torque is likely to be (ab)used by their drivers. Yours truly included, guilty as charged, though I do practice restraint... often.
You're only considering braking, and for that case you're right. You're not considering acceleration, where EVs supply near maximum torque instantly when you press the accelerator pedal. This causes increased wear in tires, I've seen estimates of 20%.
Which can easily be sorted with a more gentle throttle curve.
My EV has three modes - Eco, Normal and Sport. In Sport you get shoved back in your seat from the instant torque, and the fast 0-60 times. In Eco you take off like in a normal car.
You also need to remember that traction control is inherrently easier and faster in an EV as the ECU has fine grained control of how much power to send to the tyres and can effect it near instantly.
It's due to the regenerative braking, which transmits more power via the wheels when decelerating. Most ICE cards don't have regenerative braking; hybrids tend to.
This doesn't make sense. Energy in the system is conserved. On an ICE car, brakes convert the energy to heat. On an EV, motors convert the energy to electricity. The tires experience the same net force.
EVs wear tires more quickly, in general, because they are very heavy and produce more torque (and drivers are more likely to request that torque, also).
I'd guess an ICE transmission provides some deceleration too. But right on, apples-to-apples you would need to compare a Tesla to a Mercedes or etc and not a Corolla. They are sold as a luxury/performance car.
Fundamental misunderstanding of physics. Slowing 2,500lbs from 60-0MPH in 4 seconds (for example) puts just as much wear on a tire if it's with friction brakes or with regenerative braking or engine braking.
“They weigh more” is something I kinda have a problem with. People act like EVs are these behemoths, but your typical EV is hardly an outlier. The Tesla Model 3, for example, weighs as much as a Honda CRV. Yes, that’s a different car class; but nobody looks at a CRV and complains about its weight and the environmental impact of that weight on air quality nearly the same way.
You don't even have to go to a different class. A Model 3 weighs about as much as a BMW 3 series and both weigh slightly less than the average new car.
A lot of this is modern safety features. Crumple zones and stronger roofs add weight, more weight implies bigger engines, bigger engines require stronger frames, soon the average car is two tons. Volvo S60, Mercedes C class and Audi S4 are also a similar size and weight. The makes from the US and Japan are a little lighter but not dramatically lighter and their safety ratings are also a little worse.
It’s also a testament to the improved efficiency of engines. Once your engine can deliver a few extra MPG, it’s easier for companies to pack more weight on.
People who care about the externalities of unnecessarily large and heavy vehicles do complain about compact utility vehicles, aka “I want to sit higher up”.
A model Y would be the comparison to a CRV (model Y is 400 pounds / 10% heavier).
I mean, I totally get the criticisms that you see of people having unnecessarily large SUVs, like really who needs an Escalade. But a CRV? Like a Model Y with one passenger weighs the same as a CRV with 3.
Regenerative braking helps with brake dust, but is probably offset by extra tyre wear on EVs. I
go weeks without using the brakes and usually don’t even touch the brake pedal.
Normal car designers who aren't drug-addicted sociopaths have already more than solved this problem. If you put hard, narrow, high-lifetime tires on small diameter wheels you get a car that it more efficient, quieter, cheaper to operate, and pollutes less in terms of particulate matter. If you are Elon Musk you sell a car with totally inappropriate summer racing tires on 20-inch wheels and the owners have to replace the whole set every year.
We need to start taxing vehicles based on the damage they are responsible for.
The 4th Power Law is a principle in road engineering that states that the damage a vehicle causes to a road surface is proportional to the fourth power of its axle load. This means that even small increases in axle load can cause exponentially greater damage to the road.
A Prius causes about 50,000 times more damage than a bicycle.
A truck causes 16 billion times more damage than a bicycle.
A truck causes 31,000 times more damage than a Prius.
The solution is to tax trucks 31,000 times more than cars. Improve walking/biking/trains/public transportation. Private cars should be a luxury which is made a necessity with zoning laws.
"The solution is to tax trucks 31,000 times more than cars."
OK, so what about consequences of that solution? With such taxes, I would expect the count of trucks to drop to ~ zero. Which, for many places in the world, means an abrupt cessation of any large-scale logistics.
Maybe big trucks could be replaced by a huge fleet of smaller trucks, but that also means 20x as many parking spots, drivers (there is a shortage of professional drivers almost everywhere) and much more congestion on the highways.
There aren't that many places that could shift their entire logistics onto rail. Even here in Czechia, where the rail network is about the densest in the world, we don't have much free capacity left on the main railway lines, and existing trains are chronically delayed.
Not necessarily. EVs have also an almost perfect traction control due to immediate torque control by the electric motor, so it’s very difficult to spin wheels in situations of low traction, which reduces tire wear and emissions.
On ICE cars, it’s much slower with way higher latency due to the mechanical inertias.
Just not true. I favor EVs, but it is incredibly misleading to say 98% comes from other sources. In many places, natural gas and coal are still used to generate the electricity needed. That must be accounted for in your life cycle analysis. In fact, once you remove the Musk propaganda, Tesla's EVs are by no way greener (draw a boundary around his other company SpaceX, and the rocket fuel it uses, and you immediately see what I mean. Worse than Exxon I would bet)
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/non-exhaust-particulate...
I don't think there's any healthy level of private cars coexisting with humans in a city, without even considering the more immediate harms from crashes, etc.