Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars • Hacker News Board

Re: Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars

#761

Post by Tagbert » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 3:32 PM UTC

thmsths wrote: post #571

eftpotrm wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BMW tried that with the i3, it wasn't particularly popular. An engine, fuel system and a generator are all relatively complex additions compared to just putting the same cost and vehicle space into more batteries, and the public charging networks are definitely up to the task by now (having been EV-only for almost 5 years now).

I've ridden in one and this was basically a case of "you get the worst of both worlds". The engine was small and running at a constant RPM, leading to an annoying noise in the cabin. The range extension was not particularly huge. Worse, when we did eventually run out of battery on one trip, the range extender was unable to recharge the battery after refueling the car, forcing us to scramble to find an available charg…

Yes, the Volt was a better balanced version of that. It had a longer EV range and the range extender was larger. It was much less likely to need the range extender and when it did, the larger (1.4l) engine was no more noisy than any gas engine.

Re: Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars

#762

Post by frollogaston » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 3:35 PM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #748

beau_g wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen an interesting A-B test with this seeing the difference in clutch wear between the Ferrari F1 transmission in the 599 and 612 and the DuoSelect transmission which is essentially the same box in the Quattroporte. The shifting strategy and technique is more of a controlled variable here because the shifting is automatic though it's a somewhat traditional manual gearbox with hydraulic actuation. The QP is a bi…

Everything on the QPs was always breaking. I've never driven an automatic Ferrari or paddle shifted Ferrari to compare, but the QP that I drove (Ferrari V-8, I think that it even said Ferrari on the valve covers maybe) didn't have anything outstanding about the transmission that I remember. I thought it was a regular hydraulic automatic with a torque converter, so they really did tune it nicely. The robotic Toyotas I…

Only the 2004-2006 and maybe some 2007 QPs came in automated manual. Anything after was regular automatic w/ torque converter.

Re: Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars

#763

Post by 1234letshaveatw » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

p_j_w wrote: post #728

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that these "do better" suggestions always feel like an attempt to shut discussion down. Being anti-car does not make you some moral authority

"You want everyone to live in a prison cell and eat nothing but bugs" is not discussion.

It is though. Do better

Re: Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars

#764

Post by 1234letshaveatw » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #745

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your own mental health, you need to take a breath and try and not take alternative viewpoints as personal attacks. The post I responded to referenced "efforts to try to reduce the number of cars on the roads instead of just replacing them 1:1 and calling it a day." i.e. reducing personal car ownership. Don't ignore the fact that people do extremely useful things with their cars- lifesaving activities. You obvious…

> For your own mental health, you need to take a breath and try and not take alternative viewpoints as personal attacks Like jumping to prison cells and bug juice at the hint of reducing the amount of cars on the roads?

Like taking the logical leap to the conclusion that I identify myself with cars?? Pot meet kettle

Re: Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars

#765

Post by sofixa » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #764

sofixa wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For your own mental health, you need to take a breath and try and not take alternative viewpoints as personal attacks Like jumping to prison cells and bug juice at the hint of reducing the amount of cars on the roads?

Like taking the logical leap to the conclusion that I identify myself with cars?? Pot meet kettle

After you jumped to bug juice, yes, obviously cars make a big part of your identity.

Re: Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars

#766

Post by Mawr » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 4:55 PM UTC

pmg101 wrote: post #349

mort96 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, you can make much lighter and lower range electric cars without all those heavy batteries, and boost the range with diesel when needed. Very attractive in principle. Most cars are not using their full range all the time, for a lot of people a 50 mile range car would be more than enough 98% of the time, but that remaining 2% means that people end up buying 200 mile range cars instead. But then, do you end up remo…

I thought about PHEV but in the end went full EV simply because it seemed to me with two whole power trains that's 2x the components to go wrong/need maintenance.

You're right in principle, but it's important to remember that tradeoffs exist. You can very much trade off engineering effort and time to improve reliability.

Commercial aviation is a great example of taming extreme inherent unsafety of aircraft by applying a lot of resources to the engineering side. Another is space programs.

And car power trains have nothing on those ;) As Toyota has shown, it's totally possible to make reliable hybrid cars with enough engineering thrown at the problem.

So if all things were equal, you'd absolutely expect an EV to be more reliable than a hybrid, but all things are rarely equal.

Re: Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars

#767

Post by madaxe_again » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 6:23 PM UTC

relaxing wrote: post #721

madaxe_again wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you can see interleave that’s a good reason to change your tyres. My stock tyres on a model Y lasted 11,000km - but my daily drive is a tortured ribbon of tarmac with nothing but corners.

I don’t know what interleave means in your country but the way to measure tire wear is replace when tread depth gets below 1.6 mm. Next time get tires with a 50k mile warranty, like Pirelli Scorpions.

Interleave is the woven metal below the rubber.

Re: Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars

#768

Post by h14h » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 12:34 AM UTC

How does brake dust compare to tire dust in terms of quantity? My understanding was that most of the black soot that accumulates near roadways is mostly tire particulate.

Re: Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars

#769

Post by tzs » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 1:20 AM UTC

graemep wrote: post #382

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curb weight of a Tesla Model (Long Range) is only 9% over a comparable BMW 3 Series. That's nothing compared to all the savings (tail pipes emissions, break dust, noise, ICE maintenance issues…). And we're just getting started with battery chemistries and renewables energy. This can only get better.

> Curb weight of a Tesla Model (Long Range) is only 9% over a comparable BMW 3 Series. Which means 40% more road maintenance. > And we're just getting started with battery chemistries and renewables energy. This can only get better. Which implies it is better to delay switching until we have better batteries

> Which means 40% more road maintenance.

Nope. You've overlooked two things, one possibly minor and one major.

The minor one is that road maintenance is not just due to the need to repair damage caused by vehicles. Roads are also damaged by things as daily and seasonal temperature variation, UV from sunlight, oxygen, erosion and soil instability, and others.

An increase in damage from vehicles would might shorten the intervals between needed maintenance, but would not be a simple X% more vehicle damage means X% more maintenance.

The major one is that ICE cars need gas. Let's imagine a city where everyone drives an ICE and then switches to an EV and math this. To make things as comparable as possible let's say all the ICE cars were Hyundai Kona SELs, and they all switch to the Hyundai Kona Electric SEL.

The ICE Kona SEL weighs 3240 pounds and gets 28 mpg. The Kona Electric SEL is 3759 pounds, which is 16% more, so would be 80% more damage. Let's use the amount of damage caused by the ICE driving 1 mile as our unit of damage, so the EV causes 1.8 damage per mile.

Let's say that gas is delivered to the city's gas stations by a 5000 gallon tanker truck. The gas is loaded onto the tankers at a distribution center that is 5 miles from the city. It arrives at the distribution center by rail.

A 5000 gallon tanker will weigh somewhere in the 10000-15000 pound range when empty. 5000 gallons of gas is about 30000 pounds, so when the tanker leaves the distribution center it will weigh 40000-45000 points. Let's go with the low number. That's 12.346 as much as an ICE Kona SEL weighs, so that tanker will do 23000 units of road damager per mile. That's ~116000 units of road damage on the 5 mile trip to the city. As it goes around unloading the damage per mile goes down to 90 units per mile when the tanker is empty.

When that 5000 gallons of gas is later sold to the ICE Kona SEL drivers that will result in 140000 miles of driving and so 140000 units of damage.

If everyone switched to Kona Electric SEL that same 140000 miles would result in 252000 units of road damage, which is 112000 units more but it would also eliminate the need for 5000 gallons of gasoline delivery, saving 116000 units of road damage from the tanker. (Actually more because I'm ignoring the tanker damage once it gets to the first gas station and starts deliveries).

These numbers are going to depend a lot on what ICE and EV you compare, and how far the gas travels by tanker, but the above numbers illustrate that you definitely need to take into account the reduced need for gas delivery when estimating what a switch to EVs will do to the roads.

Re: Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars

#770

Post by formerly_proven » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 10:03 AM UTC

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #612

Toutouxc wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My cheap EV gets 200+ km of range (124 mi) from 20 minutes of charging. Again, why the hell are you talking about two hours. Why are you saying that 20 minutes gets you "home". Why are you talking about charging from 0 to 100 % when that's NOT how you charge an EV, ever. Sounds like you've never driven one.

No. It doesn’t. Your display says that. And your display is bullshit. I work with the people that make the displays man. There are entire groups dedicated to deciding what is indefensible lies, and what “could be true under the right circumstances so we’re allowed to say/show that” > Why are you talking about charging from 0 to 100 % when that's NOT how you charge an EV, lol, go to a charging station sometime and see…

fwiw this just depends a lot on the OEM. All OEMs have a non-trivial mapping of assumed energy content to shown percentage, in part because that's just not trivial to do, in part psychology. (The same is true for fuel gauges). Some brands manipulate the consumption numbers a lot (iirc - Tesla fudges the numbers the most e.g. they don't count energy consumption when not moving).

For most the consumption of an EV is shown rather accurately and is really just (energy drawn from the HV battery as measured by the BMS, which is generally very accurate for safety reasons) divided by (kilometers driven in the current interval).

As far as I know nobody includes charging losses in the readout. Personally I think this is correct for range estimation purposes. If you're swinging at a cost perspective, this of course means you're going to always miss around 3-20% depending on charging method, temperatures, car model etc. (there are fairly significant differences in OBC efficiency across models and also across AC power, low power charging gets inefficient quickly, while 7-11 kW often gets you north of 90%. DCFC is usually more efficient accounting-wise, because fast chargers bill for DC energy, not AC energy, so DC conversion losses aren't on the bill in the first place, though I assume DC chargers are also more efficient at power conversion than OBCs in general).