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Isn't road wear scale with the 4th power of vehicle weight? EV vehicle weight definitely moves some needles in the wrong direction. A Toyota Corolla weighs ab
by patmorgan23 2y ago
Isn't road wear scale with the 4th power of vehicle weight?
EV vehicle weight definitely moves some needles in the wrong direction.
A Toyota Corolla weighs about 3,000, the Tesla model 3 weighs 3,500-4,000 depending on which model you buy. So a 16-33% increase in vehicle weight.
A Corolla will do 8.1 x 10^13 'damage points'
A light model 3, 1.5 x10^14 'damage points'
And a heavy model 3, 2.6x10^14
So moving to EV vehicles would move the damage done by the average commuter by an order of magnitude.
There are of course much heavier vehicles on the road as well, such as a standard empty garbage truck weights around 33k pounds and will do 1.2 x 10^18 damage points. So significantly more wear per mile traveled, but there are also far more vehicle miles traveled by those lighter class vehicles as well.
EV are probably still a net positive, but the real solution is to stop designing our cities and transportation systems exclusively around low occupancy vehicles. Walking, biking, and transit, also need to.be options for getting around.
- malfist 2y agoGarbage trucks aren't exactly a good comparison here. Your typical empty semi truck weighs 35k pounds, and a lot more when loaded. There's also more miles driven by semi trucks than passenger vehicles