Posted on 05/24/2023 11:54:22 AM PDT by Robwin
How lovely and clean London’s air will be once that nice Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (Ulez) has been extended across the entire city and the Government’s ban on petrol and diesel cars has taken effect. Well, not quite. In fact, was there ever such a misnomer as a “zero emission vehicle”? Far from cleaning the air there is evidence that in one respect the adoption of electric vehicles could make pollution worse.
Electric vehicles might reduce carbon emissions (though far from eliminating them – indeed their manufacture involves carbon emissions). They might not have exhaust pipes spewing out nitrogen oxides. But growing attention has been paid in recent years to pollution from tiny particulate matter, which can penetrate deep into human lungs. Long-term exposure has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease and lung cancer. Trouble is that a fair amount of these emissions from cars emanate from tyres, not engines, and electric vehicles could possibly emit more because their heavier weight causes greater tyre wear.
While huge attention has been paid to emissions from exhausts, which quite rightly have been cleaned up over the years thanks to progressively tougher regulations, rather less attention has been paid to tyres. The Euro 4 regulations for petrol engines and Euro 6 regulations for diesel engines – on which Ulez is based – take little account of emissions from tyres; they are based on emissions from exhausts. Yet it doesn’t take too much to wonder if a heavy electric car driven around the streets of London could be emitting more tyre pollution than a relatively light petrol car.
Everyone wants clean air and air pollution has fallen dramatically in many respects over the past half century. But regulations which fixate on one form of pollution and ignore others ultimately help no-one.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I guess I should have pointed out that I’m used to getting about 25K miles on tires in my 6-cyl ICE pickup (which weighs a hair more than our EV crossover) and the tires costing $150 each. Since EV’s are supposed to be a lot worse for tires, in my math for whether or not to get an EV for my wife I had budgeted for replacing tires every 12K miles. Thus, tire expense on the EV is one of the things that’s better than I anticipated. (To be fair, there are some one-time expenses for an EV I didn’t anticipate, such as buying a J1772 extension cord for if we stay at a hotel with a Level II charger and another car is blocking the charger.)
The problem is that the market has been subverted by government regulation making ICE vehicles impossible to produce and perverse tax incentives to foist EVs which are an inferior technology on the American populace.
Under these circumstances the market is not likely to reflect consumer preference.
As has been noted elsewhere:
“You are the Carbon they want to reduce”.
My question that no one has ever given me a satisfactory answer for is this. If a tire leaves a very very thin film of rubber with each revolution of the tire, where does all the rubber dust go?
The shoulder lanes of freeways and highways etc. should have 6 foot drifts of the stuff. Yet there is none. So,again, where does it all go?
Most EVs weigh in the 4000-5000lb range, which is comparable to most ICE midsized and larger sedans and crossovers. My Q7 weighs more than any EV with the sole exception of the big Mercedes EQV passenger van (which weighs about the same). This is a non-issue as far as tire particulate pollution, but may well be a “hey wait a minute” moment for the Eco-mentalists in trying to ban *all* cars.
Good thing we don’t have tyre’s in the US.
The tire particles they’re talking about are super-tiny, like flour particles, far too small to settle out and pile up as you describe. They disperse almost immediately into the air and are blown far and wide, hence the warning about inhalation. That said, the same can probably be said for the asphalt or concrete on the road, the paint in the road striping, and all the brake dust being generated constantly. Roads are not very clean places.
>>Humans exhale CO2.<<
Don’t all lung-endowed creatures?
Therefore....abort babies
No, they will reinvent the wooden wheel and call themselves geniuses.
Good question.
I don’t know.
Maybe the particles are bio-degradable and eaten by microbes.
Eat the carbohydrates, burn it in the cells, exhale CO2 and H2O.
Much like an ICE engined vehicle.
Collect all CO2 products, compress and reinject in fossil fuel reservoirs to maintain reservoir pressure.
Tire-wear yields particles too small to even be called dust. You ever feel inside a bag of concrete? These are dry particles but it feels like you have your hand in a liquid. This is what we’re dealing with here. The smaller-than-dust tire residue gets blown around by winds or washed off and away or to settle in with the ditch soil.
If it were possible to have an auto race track or a freeway with no wind blowing about (it’s not), tire-wear residue would eventually coat everything.
“You are the carbon they want to eliminate.”
“Seems like NASCAR drivers...” can’t imagine NASCAR without the rumble of a gas engines. Same thing with Harleys.
The woketards will now want to ban tires.
I quite agree. I’ve been in the infield during restarts and when the field comes around the roar and the actual feeling in your chest of the power is astounding.
But the subject is tire wear and there’s a lot of ICE car tire wear at the race tracks, whether or not repeated exposure is harmful to one’s lungs.
Also EV’s dont carry a spare tire
1. weight of tire and rim is about 75lbs
2. jack adds another 2 lbs
3. What driver could lift a 75 lb tire,,,?
4. Added weight of spare tire and jack reduces mileage range
5....and the kicker.....Jack under the wrong place and puncture the battery compartment.
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