Electric Vehicle Thread!

So EVs don't emit GHG which makes climate change worse nor tailpipe emissions which contribute to other ills like asthma and even premature deaths.

But it's believed that they produce greater particulates from brakes and tires, owing to the greater weight and acceleration capabilities of high torque at low RPMs.

There doesn't seem to be any studies attempting to quantify the marginal increase in PM2.5 produced by EVs compared to ICE cars.

Legitimately, EV critics could make that accusation, though they're not usually anti-pollution advocates.
 
So EVs don't emit GHG which makes climate change worse nor tailpipe emissions which contribute to other ills like asthma and even premature deaths.

But it's believed that they produce greater particulates from brakes and tires, owing to the greater weight and acceleration capabilities of high torque at low RPMs.

There doesn't seem to be any studies attempting to quantify the marginal increase in PM2.5 produced by EVs compared to ICE cars.

Legitimately, EV critics could make that accusation, though they're not usually anti-pollution advocates.

I am not expert here but considering that people don't really change brakes or tires very frequently, the material loss from them must be relatively small, compare to burning fuel, which to many people are "replaced" on a weekly basis.
It can be argued that the PM2.5 produced from fuel are much easier to filter than from tires and brakes, but I think the order of magnitude must be vastly different to actually matter.
 
I forgot to mention that regenerative braking could mitigate the wear down of brake pads.

But it's wildly inconsistent. My Prologue who I coast doesn't seem to be recovering much, at least as indicated on the dashboard.

It has one-pedal driving and taking your foot off the gas pedal is suppose to have greater regenerative braking than regular driving mode.

However, at speeds under 50 MPH, driving in city, in one-pedal mode, if I take my foot off the gas or disengage the cruise control, the car comes almost to an abrupt stop.

If I see a signal turn red, say 50-100 meters from the intersection, I take my foot off the gas, in normal mode it costs but slows down faster than ICE cars I've driven. In one-pedal mode, it would stop the car almost immediately and I'd have to push the gas just to get the car to near the intersection, waiting for the light to turn green again.
 
But it's believed that they produce greater particulates from brakes and tires, owing to the greater weight and acceleration capabilities of high torque at low RPMs.

Some brands have been close to parity with ICE. My gac aion y plus is 1600kg.

Some brands like chery also offer custom acceleration curve for some of their models.
 
ICE cars use significantly more brake pads than EVs, thanks to regenerative brakimg -- as was correctly pointed out above. I'd argue the overwhelming majority of EVs won't even go through a single set of brake pads in their life, because they're essentially only used in emergencies or to hold the car after it's already stopped. Earlier EV's actually had problems with the brakes being so underutilized that they would sometimes seize up -- modern EVs solve this problem by "exercising" the brake calipers every so often.

ICE cars may use less tire, maybe, however it's not a given. Not every EV is a tire-burning horsepower monster, and nearly all EVs use fully digital traction control systems which are radically more advanced than what can be deployed in an ICE car. The fact that a inductive DC motor can adjust torque output just about as fast as you can modulate the power feed (thousands of times per second, if you wanted) means they are significantly less likely to "burn rubber" in both decel and accel. We can get into the heavier means more tire wear conversation, however that assumes tire compositions are also equivalent -- and there are now (and have been for several years) special EV tires with different compound formulations for far better management of wear.

Now let's compare to all the badly running ICE cars on the planet. When a BEV car is worn out, the result is diminished range and diminished power output. A worn out ICE car has bad belts, bad hoses, leaking radiators, leaking injectors, poor fuel economy from old leaking or stuck injectors, the inability to manage fuel properly thanks to dead O2 sensors, bad exhuast quality when the catalytic converter inevitably dies, direct gasoline fumes thanks to EVAP purge systems that get stuck, an EGR system that welds itself shut with what amounts to the asphault coming out of your exhaust being recirculated back into the intake plenum, and of course hundreds of gallons of various oils and lubricants collected over years of (hopefully?) regular maintenance.

EVs still come out way ahead of the environmental rolling catastrophe that is an ICE-driven automobile over the course of an expected lifecycle of the car.
 
I read an interview a year or so ago with some high-up at Continental, the tyre company. Her take was that the excess weight was a red herring spread by the anti-EV brigade, and that almost all of the "excess" tyre wear in EVs is due to drivers hot-footing it because they like the acceleration characteristics of their new shiny.

Now obviously that's coming from someone who works for a tyre company - so take with a pinch of salt - she wasn't denying that there was a difference in wear but kind of saying that it can be minimised by drivers acting like adults.
 
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