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Vehicle brakes produce charged particles that may harm public health: study

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Re: Vehicle brakes produce charged particles that may harm public health: study

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 neu…

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.

Are there any that work that way?

Re: Vehicle brakes produce charged particles that may harm public health: study

#82
post #72

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?

I think it's a poorly titled article.

The salient points for me were:

- Braking produces [probably] unhealthy dust.

- Much of that dust is electrically charged, meaning sweeping it out of the air (perhaps before it leaves the wheelwell) is easy.

It would be interesting to know whether inhaling charged particles is more or less harmful than neutral particles, though.

Re: Vehicle brakes produce charged particles that may harm public health: study

#83

> 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 progress…

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.

Re: Vehicle brakes produce charged particles that may harm public health: study

#84
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crusing is much more efficient than one pedal driving. So it does not save power at all.

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.

Re: Vehicle brakes produce charged particles that may harm public health: study

#85
post #75
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crusing is much more efficient than one pedal driving. So it does not save power at all.

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.

Yes of course. These are very theoretical discussions anyways. In reality one pedal driving is quite awesome.

Re: Vehicle brakes produce charged particles that may harm public health: study

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you rarely have to brake an EV though. I’ve had two EV’s over the last 6 years, and I have to remember to occasionally hit the brakes to keep them from rusting. One pedal driving is just money - saves power and is just much smoother over all than old school breaking. IMO.

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?

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.

Re: Vehicle brakes produce charged particles that may harm public health: study

#87
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.

Re: Vehicle brakes produce charged particles that may harm public health: study

#88
post #66
post #19

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?

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.

While the sentiment on that is laudable, it's that kind of assuming that leads all kinds of idiots to jump to entirely ridiculous conclusions.

Re: Vehicle brakes produce charged particles that may harm public health: study

#89
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Vehicle brakes produce charged particles that may harm public health: study

#90
post #6

We need to go back to horseback riding. It's inevitable.

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.

Some articles:

https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/31/cars-and-horse...

https://legallysociable.com/2012/09/07/figures-more-deaths-p...

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