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Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds

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Re: Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds

#91
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fake as there's plenty of reports that EVs do go through tyres quicker. A quick search brings up many articles on the phenomenon e.g. https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-unexpected-problem-with-evs-t...

There's nothing categorical about EVs that make them eat tires. The aggregate data about average EV tire life is skewed by the relative popularity of and poor choices made by Tesla.

> There's nothing categorical about EVs that make them eat tires

Apart from the increased weight and torque

Re: Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds

#92
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or by people who are disabled/elderly. I have MS, cycling isn't really going to work on a regular basis because between heat intolerance and cold making my leg spasticity worse, I'm not going to have a good time. I can drive just fine, though. While yes, a lot of the elderly continue to cycle in countries where the infrastructure exists (e.g. the Netherlands), those places also have universal healthcare. You can't ju…

In cities such as Copenhagen, it's very common to see parents transporting small children (and a large number of pets from what I saw) using cargo-bikes. Not having universal healthcare seems like a strange argument against active travel as it's well known that active travel can drastically improve people's health and reduce the need for healthcare - it would seem more important to choose to look after your health if…

Small children and 2 weeks of groceries for a family of 4-5? For 10ish miles one way? On the low end?

The healthcare point is because it means that a lot of elderly Americans have medical conditions that are unattended to, injuries that never healed properly, etc. It's common, particularly in the working class, to have your body be functionally wrecked by the time you're 55 (particularly for men). If we want the elderly to be active, we need the infrastructure to allow that rather than declaring that any health condition that won't kill you in the next two weeks is fine for the poor to deal with, actually. Heart conditions are really common, diabetes, COPD, poorly healed injuries for those who at one time worked blue collar professions, etc. Someone who lost their foot to diabetes isn't going to be cycling and sure, if they'd been more active 30 years ago that might not have happened, but it's the reality now.

I support public transit and biking infrastructure and totally agree it's great for disabled people as well - one thing I found interesting when I lived in a city with decent transit + universal healthcare is how many more physically disabled/elderly people I saw out and about going about their business.

I just find that the idea that we can just get rid of cars/that everybody who uses them just doesn't know any better overlooks a substantial amount of the population and their needs, and you need to address the needs first if you actually want to move away from the car. It has big 'everybody is a single, able bodied 25 year old man without dependents who lives in CA or the PNW' energy to assume those of us in cars are just not educated enough to know better. Like now even when I travel I don't like taking public transit because I'm immunocompromised and being jammed in with that many people is a health hazard. I'm not stupid. Neither is the exhausted mom with 2-3 kids and one hour to get across town to buy food for the week.

Re: Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds

#93
post #18

I wonder if this means another advantage for EVs in terms of environmental friendliness.

i feel like only if they make lighter EV's along the line of an i3. A 7-8k lb cybertruck or rivian probably eats brakes like no tomorrow

I rarely use the brakes on my 6600lb CT because I'm usually using regenerative braking. I assume it's similar for the 7100lb Rivian. Now, if you're constantly launching at traffic lights, that's going to be some extra tire dust compared to slower ICEs.

Re: Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds

#94

I think this is missing out on the big issue - tyre pollution which contains really nasty chemicals that inevitably get washed into rivers and waterways. Also, car-shaped EVs often use regenerative braking which will reduce the amount of brake dust pollution, but with their increased weight and powerful torque, they produce a lot more tyre pollution than ICE vehicles. https://earth.org/tyre-pollution/

This is why a move to natural latex rubber tires is necessary. Companies have experimented with them[1][2] but a world-wide switchover should be in the works. [1] https://www.continental-tires.com/about/sustainability/activ... [2] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/04/eco-friendly-tires-brid...

This also solves nothing. Just switching the rubber supply from one plant to another. And recycling some old tires in the process.

The heavy metals and other particles that pollute from tires are all still there.

Re: Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why a move to natural latex rubber tires is necessary. Companies have experimented with them[1][2] but a world-wide switchover should be in the works. [1] https://www.continental-tires.com/about/sustainability/activ... [2] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/04/eco-friendly-tires-brid...

It's hard to imagine supply scaling with demand, or the tires providing as much grip and safety. I'm supportive, but I see no world where this is adopted.

Here is a comment thread on HN from a while back with more info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37727040

It really doesn’t sound all that infeasible, just would require some investment to build momentum.

Re: Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that nobody every talked about tyre/brake dust until it became clear that cars aren't going away as we phase out fossil fuels, they're just going electric. Is this a serious environmental concern compared to the climate/emissions issue, or just the 'r/fuckcars mentality'? Meanwhile, here in the UK, one of the more interesting alternatives - personal light EVs (ebikes/scooters) are being utterly demonized,…

Also in the UK and I certainly subscribe to r/fuckcars as I'm a keen cyclist and never got around to learning to drive. I find it annoying that media outlets (BBC - I'm looking mainly at you!) will refer to EVs as being car-shaped and then, as you said, demonise e-bikes by lumping them in with the illegal e-motorbikes (see the recent Panorama program for a clear case of not making clear the distinction between e-moto…

I cycled for like 30 years before we had kids and needed a car.

The ebikes that the post refers to are a menace and should be banned. Both as a cyclist and a driver.

I've almost been plowed over by some idiot sitting on what should be a motorcycle but riding on the bike path. And I've almost had my kids run over.

Also, as a driver you just don't expect someone to be going so crazy fast in the bike lane. I've had people at insane speeds just appear from behind parked cars.

I'm all for pedal assist! But there should be strict speed limits.

I also find that people just don't take these electric motorcycles seriously. They zone out because they aren't doing anything. That's also very dangerous.

Re: Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds

#97
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing categorical about EVs that make them eat tires. The aggregate data about average EV tire life is skewed by the relative popularity of and poor choices made by Tesla.

> There's nothing categorical about EVs that make them eat tires Apart from the increased weight and torque

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln... how was the play?

Re: Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds

#99
post #58
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, (from what I remember reading the study at the time) it was basically racing a car around a track (think lots of tyre squealing around corners), and found that the tyre wear was very high. I haven't seen a study which actually simulates somewhat "normal" driving (presumably because the wear is so low driving like that it's difficult to measure). Also didn't factor in a bunch of different stuff - tyres…

A normal driving test was (famously [1]) done to measure the effect of axle load (vehicle weight per axle) on road wear. This is where we got the “fourth power law” of road wear. I think as a starting point, I would expect that tire wear should remain roughly in proportion to road wear, given the same tires on each vehicle. From this, I would expect car makers to use larger, thicker, heavier tires on heavier vehicles…

> I think as a starting point, I would expect that tire wear should remain roughly in proportion to road wear

IMO this would be a suspect assumption to make w/o data to back it up. You've got two dissimilar materials interacting (in very different modes). E.g. rolling a metal ball bearing on a wood surface would obviously cause the wood to degrade far more than the ball bearing, (and even a wooden ball rolling on a wood surface would wear substantially less due to the mode difference).

(If I had to guess the road has a higher wear as the surface has a tensile stress around the contact patch of the tyre, causing most of the damage, but this is just armchair engineering at this stage).

Re: Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds

#100

I think this is missing out on the big issue - tyre pollution which contains really nasty chemicals that inevitably get washed into rivers and waterways. Also, car-shaped EVs often use regenerative braking which will reduce the amount of brake dust pollution, but with their increased weight and powerful torque, they produce a lot more tyre pollution than ICE vehicles. https://earth.org/tyre-pollution/

This is fake news. The backing study for this claim did all sorts of wonky unrealistic testing to come to this conclusion. If you own an EV, you viscerally know it's BS given that you're the one paying for the actual tire replacements on your real-world driven vehicle.

I mean... yes/no? EVs are on AS slicks, the tyre itself has less tread on it than something like CrossClimate 2. Overall they are replaced quicker and eat tread quicker. Its ~50% difference. I have both ICE and EV.

The new tyres that are coming out like Pirelli P Zero, promise a longer life span, but that remains to be seen.

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