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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
by 10-1-100 1y ago
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:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/non-exhaust-particulate-emissions-from-road-transport_4a4dc6ca-en/full-report.html#section-d1e2753 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.
- azinman2 1y agoWonder if anyone is working on ways for breaks and tires to be less harmful, or polluting?
- dmckeon 1y agoRegenerative braking would tend to reduce particulates from friction braking.
- Swizec 1y agoMost 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.
- trollbridge 1y agoBut 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.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoI 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?
- trollbridge 1y agoIt'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.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoIf the stopping distance is the same (same accel/decel), I don’t understand this statement > because they're transmitting power both when starting and stopping, not just when starting. bri3d’s adjacent post is what my thoughts would be on why EV’s consume more tires.
- bri3d 1y agoThis 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).
- 1y ago
- NightMKoder 1y agoI 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.
- oblio 1y agoCan drum brakes be used for all kinds of vehicles?
- sokoloff 1y agoThey were for many decades… Even if there’s 5% of vehicles that couldn’t use them, it would still be a large decrease in local particulates. (I don’t expect this to happen, of course, absent draconian particulate emissions laws.)
- dharmab 1y agoEver driven a vehicle with drums in the front? Even on a light vehicle they take a long time to stop.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoThere'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.
- cure 1y agoPretty 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.
- tom89999 1y agoIf 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. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
- usrusr 1y agoLighter 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. And/or make them go slower.
- potato3732842 1y agoYou can use harder rubber compounds but that's a non-starter because longer stopping distances.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoIt 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.
- netsharc 1y agoHuh, imagine EVs that have removable add-on batteries that you'd only plug in for the longer trips.. Like the Thinkpads with the "bigger battery" humps: https://sm.pcmag.com/t/pcmag_ap/photo/l/lenovo-thi/lenovo-thinkpad-x250-right-side-with-extended-battery_v2ga.1080.jpg https://sm.pcmag.com/t/pcmag_ap/photo/l/lenovo-thi/lenovo-th...
- jopsen 1y agoA battery trailer might affect the speed limit your allowed to drive. But it would be cool to just rent the extra 500km when needed :)
- netsharc 1y agoObviously 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w
- ZeroGravitas 1y agoEU is introducing limits for this as part of the Euro 7 standard, which is spurring various tech improvements.
- lostlogin 1y agoRegenerative 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.
- FredPret 1y agoI wouldn’t be surprised if we make great strides in this at the rate that materials science is barrelling along
- jeffbee 1y agoNormal 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.
- Tireings 1y ago[dead]
- ethagknight 1y agoI 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.
- SequoiaHope 1y agoIf 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.
- tom89999 1y agoCycling 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.
- stavros 1y agoWith EVs, 100% of particulates are from tires, etc! It's a disaster! Except, you know, the amount remained the same, we just got rid of the other 98% that used to be there.
- aziaziazi 1y agoWell IIRC ev are significantly heavier than ice in average, which has a direct consequence on amount of stress on the tires and brakes pad.
- MPSFounder 1y agoJust 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)
- adonovan 1y agoTrue, but even in Wyoming, where you EV is really a coal-powered vehicle, the coal is not burned in the city.
- timewizard 1y agoAre you sure about that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Wyoming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Wyom...
- ahaucnx 1y agoIt 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. Details: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00792 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00792
- bornfreddy 1y agoOne would also expect that EVs wouldn't emit that many particles from brakes since the brakes typically wear much more slowly than with ICE cars.
- domoritz 1y agoBut they are heavier. Not saying it offsets the effect but it's just not straight forward to assume either way.
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoThey'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.
- rowanG077 1y agoIt'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.
- pornel 1y agoBut this also means that almost all of the wear is from trucks. This whole meme comes from junk science (https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/pollution-tyre-wear-worse-exhaust-emissions https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/pollution-tyre-wear-...) > 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.
- basisword 1y agoThere 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.
- telotortium 1y ago> 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.
- illiac786 1y agoCities have a positive environmental impact when you compare it with spreading the same population in villages across thousands of miles. It would be an insane amount of roads, cabling, water pipes, etc. Cities are bad for human health, but good for the environment.
- hombre_fatal 1y agoAre 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.
- impossiblefork 1y agoWhat if the cars were made really light? 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.
- robin_reala 1y agoSeeing as we’re talking Paris, there are plenty of Twizys around. Not light light, but a third the weight of even a new Renault 5 EV. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy
- impossiblefork 1y agoMm. 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.
- Ericson2314 1y agoThe 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.
- robin_reala 1y agoThe 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. [1] https://en.twizyx.com/ https://en.twizyx.com/
- iknowstuff 1y ago
- HPsquared 1y ago50% 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.
- pornel 1y agoHeavy 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.
- Ericson2314 1y agothe 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.
- jijijijij 1y agoYeah, 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.
- thelastgallon 1y agoWe 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.
- inglor_cz 1y ago"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.