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Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%

electrek.co

121–130 of 188 posts

Re: Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%

#121
post #66
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars are a 20th century fix for the lack of easily available, comfortable, and fast public transportation. It's a shame the USA got stuck in the mid-20th century on that front.

Yep. Transit was invented to help move workers from massive factories into living areas. Definitely a 20-th century thing. And EVs are from the 21-st century. They are here to fix the utter inhumanity of dense cities, and eventually throw them into a dustbin of history.

> Transit was invented to help move workers from massive factories into living areas. Definitely a 20-th century thing.

Early 19th century thing.

Re: Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%

#122
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe has plenty of massive white vans.

And how many of those are used by people who don’t need a massive white van?

Why does it matter whether you think someone "needs" a pickup or not?

Align their crash ratings and NCAP values with every other car and the problem will take care of itself.

Personally I have the huge white vans because they reduce visibility when driving as well as while parked. I live in a big city and its difficult to drive when there's a wall parked at every other intersection.

Re: Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%

#123
post #119
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the roads are also being worn at a much faster rate due to the weight of the cars. Are they actually being worn out at a much faster rate because of more EVs? Do we have any data?

It is amazing how much concern trolling there is about EVs on a site like this.

One has to wonder who creates a fresh account just to troll against EVs. Fossil bots perhaps.

Re: Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%

#124
post #23

Audi had an interesting proposition regarding making electric cars actually clean the air as opposed to just avoiding emissions: https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/press-releases/audi-urba... ICE cars already do that in a way, as they suck a significant amount of air through their intake filters (CADR = displacement x RPM). Audi's filter was supposed to have been more fine-grained to catch brake dust and tire partic…

Wouldn't an electric car with good filtration bringing cabin air in from the outside do this inherently?

The figures are sufficient, but only when the blowers are at full throttle. A room air purifier does around 300m3/h, while the blowers eat through around 150m3/h at max speed. Problem is that hardly anyone uses them like that, considering the noise.

Meanwhile a car with a 1.5l engine turning at an average of 1500RPM will suck through 135m3/h.

There's no data available for Audi's system, but at this size they could easily go way beyond 300m3/h.

Re: Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVs (or many of them) teach you this behavior - because you get regeneration back into the battery, there's a little incentive to taking your foot off the accelerator earlier and letting the car recover energy. There's a reason people are talking about this for electric vehicles and not for anything else.

Yes, but you can do that with an ICE too. I achieve 60mpg//4l/100km with my diesel, also with highway driving. It's doable, but if you let your car roll for a red light, everyone is pissed at you. The main difference is as you say: EVs brake way more when you are not pressing the throttle, before even needing to touch the brakes. It also helps with mileage.

"Can do" isn't really that relevant when you are talking about populations. People can be vegan. They can buy carbon credits. They can live in smaller apartments to reduce their consumption. None of that is relevant, only what they actually do at population scale.

Re: Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%

#126
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't an electric car with good filtration bringing cabin air in from the outside do this inherently?

The figures are sufficient, but only when the blowers are at full throttle. A room air purifier does around 300m3/h, while the blowers eat through around 150m3/h at max speed. Problem is that hardly anyone uses them like that, considering the noise. Meanwhile a car with a 1.5l engine turning at an average of 1500RPM will suck through 135m3/h. There's no data available for Audi's system, but at this size they could ea…

Sure, so maybe an order of magnitude lower impact than a room air purifier. But it sounds like they could conceivably be a net benefit already. Or perhaps once we change tire formulations to be less toxic.

Re: Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%

#127

To those wondering about tire wear: "Despite the slightly higher levels of tire wear from EVs, brake dust was found to be more unhealthy, as brake dust is much more likely to become airborne (>40%) than tire wear is (1-5%). So EVs create a lot less of the worse thing, and a little more of the less-bad thing."

So putting this aside, the elephant in the room is still the weight of the EVs, tire wear is one thing but the roads are also being worn at a much faster rate due to the weight of the cars. When EVs do have to brake and regenerative is not enough it needs to stop more inertia due to this high weight.

> the elephant in the room is still the weight of the EVs

The elephant in the room for road wear are trucks [1]. Cars are almost negligible.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

Re: Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%

#128
post #123
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is amazing how much concern trolling there is about EVs on a site like this.

One has to wonder who creates a fresh account just to troll against EVs. Fossil bots perhaps.

Can't rule out automated manipulation and bots on any social media site these days.

Re: Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%

#129

> As it has become more and more untenable for anti-EV propagandists to deny the air quality benefits of EVs, a common refrain from them has become “but tailpipe emissions aren’t everything, what about brakes and tires, huh?!” What is this website? Tell me about the story, don't argue with imaginary haters and trolls. The writing is so poor there.

There are plenty of these sorts of comments here on this post.

So that nonsense didn't even help? Great.

Re: Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop it with the tyre nonsense. The world is burning. Hundreds of millions people are going to die. We have a solution… and you won’t let us use it because it increases the rubber levels in people who lick tyres. As if that matters. So what if there are more rubber particles in their mouths? We can eliminate vehicle pollution!

Rubber particles from tires are one of the main sources of microplastics.

I think the point of the person you replied to is that this stuff is comparably unimportant. Micro plastics are as far as I know not even known to be particularly harmful. It's more of a "this is probably bad" type of thing. And I'm not really sure what we're supposed to do about it, we already have huge plastic islands floating around.

On the other hand, carbon emissions are known to cause global warming which will literally be the end of the world if we don't fix it fast. From what I've read it may already be too late, we may already be on course for runaway climate change that we may not be able to fix.

To me that's a much more pressing matter.

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