Electric cars are not THE solution.
I’ve been saying this for a while. Not only that, but electric cars are substantially heavier than their ICE-powered equivalents, meaning both tires and roads wear out more quickly. Plus, there’s a ton of pollution and other environmental damage caused by battery production that at least partly offsets the lack of tailpipe emissions.
As loathe as I am to admit, because I’m a car enthusiast and I enjoy driving, cars cannot be the default mode of transportation everywhere indefinitely; they will always need to exist, but should mostly be for small centres with no capacity to implement transit infrastructure and last mile type of things.
Plus, there’s a ton of pollution and other environmental damage caused by battery production that at least partly offsets the lack of tailpipe emissions.
The battery production pollution is an issue, however one thing to keep in mind is that once the minerals are out of the ground they can be recycled, unlike drilling for oil. When looked at on a long timeline the battery for an electric vehicle is a lot cleaner than everything needed to power an ICE vehicle.
That said, there’s always room for improvement and we should never get complacent. But we don’t avoid innovation just because it isn’t perfect.
It’s not just tailpipe emissions, though - there’s an entire supply chain of extraction, shipping, refining, delivery that’s needed to get fuel to your local gas station.
The fossil fuel industry always wants to compare the total environmental damage of an EV with just what comes out of the tailpipe of an internal combustion vehicle. Don’t fall for it.
This should be the definition of ‘letting perfect be the enemy of good’ Please stop using false oil lobby talking points to attack the transition to electric cars. Electric cars are an order of magnitude better for the environment than petrol/diesel, stop fighting big oils battle for them. Now let’s talk about how we can reduce road journeys through public transport, and reduce environmental impact of tires.
Is that true about the tires though? Electric car tires are designed to be substantially tougher because of the increase in weight, do they actually shed more material?
There’s no such thing as an “electric car tire.” They just use standard passenger vehicle tires rated for the appropriate weight class.
“Tougher” just means they handle more weight by holding higher air pressure, so they’ll have more layers of steel, kevlar, canvas, etc. The materials that makes contact with the road still wear the same.
There is in fact such a thing as an “electric car tire”.
Fundamentally you are correct that they are in essence just tires rated for the weight class, but there’s more to it than just that.
Electric car tires are usually made with a stiffer rubber than comparable combustion cars, this is mostly to handle the additional weight, but they also stagger the tread pattern, and some have foam inside them, both to improve the noise and acoustics of them. Something that wasn’t a problem when there were a noisy combustion engine running. But in an electric car you don’t have the engine noise, and therefore hear a lot more of the wheel noise.
None of this help with the particle emissions, but there is in fact such a thing as an electric car tire.
Engineering Explained has a great video if you are curious: https://youtu.be/8pM9o2Ifcro
You can’t really engineer away the need for friction, and if there’s friction there is going to be wear.
If EV tires were much better than normal tires with the same grip levels and somehow magically less wear, all tires would adopt that technology.
Not that I’m a materials scientist, but EV tires don’t seem much different than other “economy” tires, other than a higher load rating.
There is actually a lot of small details that make EV tires different than regular tires. Nothing that helps with particle emissions, though:
You have answered your own question. They are built to be tougher, by using more material.
They still shed a proportional amount of material for the vehicle weight.
Not only that but if they get damaged due to trauma prior to end-of-life (such as a puncture of pothole damage) that is a lot more material that is going to landfill (or tyre “recycling” in countries that have it).
Good thing DOGE and the rest of the Trump fueled Republicans are foaming at the mouth to completely eliminate federal funding for the California high speed rail project. Thank God they’re going to save us from affordable transportation for the masses in favor of continuing to murder the planet actively by distributing microplastics into every square millimeter of the Earth.
We just need to swap all roads out with big orange hot wheels tracks. I don’t know if it’d solve the problem but at least it’s a suggestion and it’d be sick as hell.
Yet another example of how pretty much every problem is, at its heart, a zoning problem:
- Microplastics? Too much driving, because trip origins and destinations are too far apart to be walkable.
- Greenhouse gas emissions from cars? Too much driving because not enough walkability.
- Greenhouse gas emissions from housing? Poor efficiency because too many single-family homes exposed on all sides instead of high-density housing with shared walls.
- Greenhouse gas emissions from concrete production? Using way more of it than we really need to build huge amounts of unnecessary parking (and much wider streets than we’d need for bikes + transit + only delivery vehicles).
- High housing prices? Not enough housing density.
- Obesity? Sedentary lifestyles, i.e., not enough gym of life.
- Racism? Redlining.
- Wealth inequality? (Among other things), protecting rich landowners from market forces by eliminating competition from multifamily developers that would build out the land to its highest and best use.
See also, this video: The Housing Crisis is the Everything Crisis. He almost gets it, but fails to connect that very last dot, which is that the housing crisis is itself caused by bad, density-restricting zoning!
You’re not entitled to choose otherwise unless you’re actually willing to pay for it. Zoning laws that force an oversupply of single-family homes are effectively a subsidy of that lifestyle, and it’s high fuckin’ time for that subsidy to end!
In other words, if you own a house in the suburbs, you might think you’re a rugged individualist who bought at fair market value, but you’re actually a damn welfare queen and don’t even realize it.
If we had those flying cars we were promised, this wouldn’t be an issue.
Given how terrible humans are at driving, I think flying cars are a horrible idea.
I think it’s only a matter of time until we get there with drones.
Not the military kind…the ones with four rotors that can already pilot a course and land themselves when batteries run low.
I’m looking forward to all the noise pollution. Drones, drones everywhere
Probably referring to the large drones that have been seen in NJ, followed by NY and PA since November.
FBI is looking into them, its… Odd.
Some links to recent articles/Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_New_Jersey_drone_sightings
https://apnews.com/article/fbi-drones-sightings-central-new-jersey-cd8866c9c2568216759007716990decf
mention of 9/11
Smaller 9/11s would be happening every day if flying cars were common
Also helicopters already exist and they’re basically flying cars
What I’m envisioning isn’t piloted by the passengers. Set your destination and it navigates following FAA rules and routes over short distances.
It’s pretty trivial to detect humans and scan faces. Until things improve r these are going to be single passenger only so not much opportunity for a large payload.
With self driving cars, it’s only a matter of time before someone makes a self driving car into a delivery system for a bomb.