Will electric cars change the health issues related to living near freeways? I know we are a long way away from replacing most of the vehicles with electric.
As a cyclist my primary concern is diesel trucks with scant emissions controls belching particulate and other combustion byproducts. I see little movement to get these off the road.
For anyone else curious, I googled it and it looks like a delete-pipe, (aka muffler delete, cat delete) is basicly a muffler/catalytic converter bypass device. Some do it for performance, some for the noise, some explicitly to "piss off tree-hugging liberals".
Oh yeah, we get plenty of them out here in the rural parts. Friggin stupid.
We've got a little '81 tractor that's a 3-cyc 1.4L diesel and if the wind blows the wrong way you definitely don't want to inhale too deeply. I'd love to convert it to Tier IV but there just aren't kits made for it.
I've seen one person riding with something that looked like a gas mask. It appeared to have a "bane" like square filter near the mouth. Not just a simple N95 mask.
It's a point I don't think I've ever seen made, for some reason.
In a stylized argument, someone hypes electric cars as eliminating the pollution that comes from gas cars. Then someone points out that the pollution isn't eliminated, it's just moved away from the process of running the car into the process of generating electricity.
But regardless of whether there's less or more pollution after switching to electric cars, it seems like a big win for all the pollution to be off at the power plant instead of hanging over LA.
> Will electric cars change the health issues related to living near freeways?
Electric cars don't emit chemicals, or the atmospheric fine particles born from the condensation "sticky" hydrocarbon chemicals from the car exhaust fumes.
But the fine particles originating from the wear of tires, road surface and brakes will still remain with electric cars. (The utilization of the electric motor in braking could reduce the fine particles originating from brake pad wear, though.)
True, but those risks can be isolated to an area 100 miles away from a major population mass. With fuel burning cars, the risks can't be shuffled outside of the city and the larger your city, the worse it gets.
Yes, some is still coming from coal but the energy mix is changing.
Coal is now more expensive than natural gas, which is why the coal mines are now shutting down.
In addition, even natural gas is going to have to fight the renewable energy sources as the costs will continue to go down for them.
So I'd rather have the system's efficiencies improve in a few places instead of the tens of millions of cars that would have to be changed in the long run.
Yes, electric cars eliminate the vast majority of the concerns mentioned. (Zero tailpipe emissions, significantly less brake pad emissions, significantly less noise, etc).
Brake regeneration is a large part of the braking force for many EVs when the brake pedal is pressed, so the brake pads in some EV cars are actually smaller than their gas siblings.
Brake regeneration also avoids using the brake pedal altogether in many cases because an EV slows down significantly when the gas pedal is released.
With electric power, smaller brake pads, and less need to use them, I'm surprised the article believes there is only a 1% reduction in overall particle pollution for EV's vs. gas cars.
Plus, a typical EV is a small and modern 0-2 year old car compared to the gas vehicles out there, such as a 7-year-old, inefficient, v8 engine SUV.
This small reduction of particle pollution was the result of a very old study. At that time, there was no brake regeneration and the car was very heavy. I guess there is no recent study because the result would be obvious.
"Electric-powered vehicles, of course, have no exhaust emissions. However, because they’re 24 percent heavier on average, the study found that EVs shed more particulate matter from tires and brakes, and also kick up more particulate matter from road surfaces."
If the brake pads are smaller and aren't required to slow down in many cases, the EV should win, especially when the average EV on the street is likely similar in weight compared to an average non-EV vehicle.
As far as kicking up existing particulate matter, EV's shouldn't be penalized for kicking up dust on the road which came from others cars, which are almost entirely non-EV cars and 18-wheelers.
I bet there are other more significant factors to derive impact on pollution from EVs than brake dust, such as the source of electricity used to charge them.
I'll try to look at the study later to see how the 1% difference between road pollution between gas and EV vehicles was calculated.
> "However, because they’re 24 percent heavier on average, the study found that EVs shed more particulate"
That's a pretty misleading statistic too. EV's are 24% heaver than the average subcompact. But most people are already driving cars significantly heavier than the lightest subcompacts.
According to the EPA, the actual average personal vehicle weight was 3,977 pounds in 2012. That is heavier than most EV's -- it's heavier than any Chevy Bolt, Volt, or Nissan Leaf ever sold.
For example, a 2017 Volt is lighter than a similarly-priced 2017 Avalon, even though the Volt has a 18.4kWH battery in it, does 53 miles zero-emission electric, and gets an extra 15mpg when using gasoline.